The Liberal Way of War

The Uniparty’s Ukraine obsession

Posted on February 25, 2023February 25, 2023 by Mike

Andrea Widburg has it all figured out. Which only means that, from this day forward, she’d better constantly keep a close check on her six.

The Ukraine War had its first anniversary yesterday. From the get-go, the same leftists who were fanatically anti-war when it came to Iraq and Afghanistan, have been waving the flag for the Ukraine War.

The difference in attitude is understandable if you’re a leftist. Supporting the Iraq and Afghanistan wars required waving the American flag because, even if misguided, they were being fought to benefit America. That’s untenable for the Democrat party. The Ukraine War, however, has at best a dubious benefit for America (more on that in a minute), which means that Democrats get to wave the yellow and blue, instead of the red, white, and blue.

The Democrats’ ideological support for the war is obvious, especially if you throw in the fact that, while completely tolerant of the communist Soviet Union, the Russia hoax has trained them to view Putin’s Russia (a geographically and demographically smaller country than the USSR) as evil incarnate. Forty years after Reagan’s famous anti-communist speech, leftists have finally decided that there’s an “Evil Empire” out there.

But why are the Republicans also on board?

My theory is that, for everyone in D.C., Republicans included, it’s easier and more fun to sing hosannas to Ukraine and write open-ended checks than it is to govern their own struggling country. And cynically, I suspect (admittedly, without proof) that some of them are profiting from those efforts.

The American people, however, are much less happy with what’s taking place in Ukraine. Many have figured out that (a) Ukraine is a deeply corrupt country; (b) Russia is a deeply corrupt country; (c) the NATO countries we’re supposed to be protecting aren’t pulling their weight; (d) China and Russia are now making common cause which is disastrous for America; (e) the war is a bottomless money pit for our money; and (f) the war is inching us towards a nuclear conflict. No wonder, then, that Americans are increasingly unhappy with D.C.’s Ukraine obsessions.

Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky knows what’s happening, so he used a press conference yesterday to thank his American supporters and scold the rest of us. Regarding those thanks, Zelensky knows exactly who in America is propping him up:

I would like to thank the American people. I would like to thank all of the American people who are supporting Ukraine. The Congress, the president, the TV channels, the journalists, and everyone that has been supporting us. (Emphasis mine.)

As for the rest of us, those who fail to appreciate Ukraine’s central importance, Zelensky threatened us:

And that percentage of Americans as you’ve mentioned is increasing, I can tell them only one thing: If they do not change their opinion, if they do not understand us, if they do not support Ukraine, they will lose NATO, they will lose the clout of the United States, they will lose the leadership position that they enjoy in the world, that they enjoy in the world. That they enjoy for a very fair reason.

The arrogance of it all! We don’t need Ukraine to “lose the clout of the United States” and “lose the leadership position that [we’ve] enjoy in the world.” Thanks to Biden’s control over the White House, we’re achieving those unhappy goals just fine without Ukraine. Indeed, it’s likely that the Ukraine war, by empowering China and impoverishing America, is merely more icing on that dismal cake.

Which, one begins to suspect, could well have been the point of this whole farcical exercise all along.

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The results are in: masks and lockdowns are the BUNK

Posted on February 24, 2023February 24, 2023 by Mike

Don Surber’s title really says it all.

Masks worked. They just didn’t stop covid
New York Times columnist Bret Stephens pointed out what was obvious three years ago: masks don’t stop viruses. Nothing short of a hazmat suit does. Viruses make their rounds every few years, eventually deteriorating into a strand of the common cold. They are deadly at first. Indeed, this manmade concoction has killed 1.12 million Americans.

But that is less than 1% of the population; in fact it is 1/3rd of 1% of the population.

And even that “1.12 million Americans” number is the bunk as well, grossly inflated to include as it does deaths by gunshot wound, traffic accident, cancer, flu, random misadventure, and anything else the lying liars of FederalGovCo could misattribute to FauxVid and hope gullible panic-ninnies would gulp down whole.

I was sanguine about the virus. The masks and social distancing were medical theater just as TSA is security theater. Both make the public feel safer, and as an added bonus they give the Karens on the left a reason to feel morally superior to those of us who realize it is all for show.

At the height of the mask hysteria, Kyle D. Killian wrote in Psychology Today, “This week, on social media, I reposted a photo of a white woman carrying a sign that reads ‘I’d Rather Bury My Family From COVID Than See Them Enslaved to the Fear of It.’ Why? I was curious about others’ thoughts on it.”

He wrote, “Highly educated intellectuals—people literally paid to type and talk—must resist the urge to make fun of this person or to lecture down to them about virology, science, etc. What is key, crucial in fact, is not dismissing or mocking this person, but interpreting the signage as an indicator of a fear-based response.

“In this case, masking requirements have been equated in this person’s mind to a fundamental loss of freedom or liberty.”

ANALYSIS: True. Because that is EXACTLY what they were, and ALL that they were. The real problem for Killian and his ilk is that a small handful of us still give a damn about that, rather than being not just willing but eager to surrender essential liberty in exchange for a false sense of security and safety, like the vast majority of gutless pussies here in the Land of the Skeer’d and the Home of the Slave.

…”Fear has clouded this person’s thinking; instead of seeing social distancing and masks as a way of caring for others, putting the Golden Rule into action, or acknowledging that some folks feel just fine but are actually asymptomatic carriers of coronavirus, she sees them as a threat.”

Fuck you and your ersatz Golden Rule all to death, pusnuts. Quite the contrary, in truth: fear has clouded panic-ninny thinking, to the extent that it has made THEM a threat—a credible and serious one, which is going to have be dealt with mercilessly because better men and women than your kind will ever be have permitted you to get away with this creeping paternalistic incrementalism for far too long.

Which brings me to Mister Stephens, who occasionally is an isle of sanity in that Sea of Craziness that calls itself the New York Times. He has taken shots at the Pandemic Panic amid the screeching of the baboons who run that zoo.

On April 24, 2020, barely a month into the two weeks to flatten the curve, he wrote, “America Shouldn’t Have to Play by New York Rules. A national lockdown is bad medicine and worse politics.”

He was half-right on the second line. It was bad medicine, but it was excellent politics for the opponents of Making America Great Again who wanted to get rid of President Trump. Stephens’s heart was in the right place in 2020.

He wrote, “I write this from New York, so it’s an argument against my personal interest. But I don’t see why people living in a Nashville suburb should not be allowed to return to their jobs because people like me choose to live, travel and work in urban sardine cans.”

Okay, then. I’m in no wise a huge fan of Bret Stephens myself, but I do have to admit that last bit was damned well-reasoned and -expressed.

The lesson learned is never trust Washington. The American people can be fooled — but only once. It is time to live the words of General Stark, who fought for the freedoms we have. There are worse things than covid. One is masks. Another is suffering the self-righteousness of the ignoramuses who pushed masks.

Annnnd whoot, there it is. As some of us said from the very beginning of this shameful, endless fiasco, the primary issue was never about masks, (anti-)social distancing, or even public health in general. It was about liberty, no more nor less. And once you’ve traded that priceless jewel away for a mess of “safety” pottage, there’s one and only one way you’ll ever get it back again. However many of their despicable progeny have long since either forgotten, willfully abandoned, or outright rejected that fundamental truth, our Founding Fathers knew it well enough, and some few of us still do today.

So be it, then.

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THIS is Africa

Posted on February 24, 2023 by Mike

And, as African expat Kim DuToit always says: Africa wins again.

Sometime in the late 70s or early 80s, I had the opportunity to work in Senegal for several months. My very first experience in-country was that the rental vehicle wouldn’t start. While the friendly and talkative mechanic repaired the jeep, he inquired if this was my first trip to Africa. “No,” I replied. “Ahhh!” he said, “then I don’t have to explain the meaning of ‘TIA’ to you.”

But I’d never heard that term or what it meant. When I asked, he explained, saying, “This is Africa; nothing works!” Indeed, in my travels, it was much the same in Latin America and other places I have lived, worked, or visited back in the day. When I returned to the U.S. it was a joy to drop a quarter into a payphone and hear a dial tone, or find that the nearest toilet always had toilet paper at hand.

But, in 2023, in Biden’s America, the acronym takes on a whole new meaning. Last week my wife’s car wouldn’t start, and after several return visits to the dealership, the problem remained undiagnosed. The service tech apologized and said, “it’s TIA.” I asked him what that meant, and he said, “This is America; no one knows how to fix things anymore.” Talk about a reflective moment.

Yep. And as I always say: that’s neither accident, nor coincidence, nor happenstance. It’s part of a plan.

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Introductory Shithole Construction 101: If you build it, they will run

Posted on February 19, 2023February 19, 2023 by Mike

As with professional politicians, nobody you’d actually want in the job would be the least bit interested in taking it. In the case of law enforcement specifically, that’s purely intentional, done with malice aforethought—a nefarious plan greatly accelerated by the Ogabe junta’s militarize-the-police program, although its origins date back to well before that.

Why Would Anyone Want to Be a Cop in Los Angeles Today?

Having retired from the Los Angeles Police Department some years ago, I often look at the day’s news and ask, “How can anyone be expected to do that job today?” The latest inspiration for this question came Friday with the news that two Los Angeles city councilmen are trying to make it easier for the LAPD chief to fire officers accused of misconduct.

LAPD chiefs are now selected by the five-member civilian police commission, whose members are selected by the mayor. In recent years, the selection criteria for commissioner would not appear to include any expertise in law enforcement, but rather merely how each member can be said to represent some segment on the all-important “diversity” spectrum. A chief is appointed to a five-year term, with the police commission having the option of reappointing him to a second term if a majority so chooses.

The result is that what LAPD officers have leading their department is a politician in uniform, one who was selected by politicians initially and who is beholden to them for his recent reappointment to the position, for which his total compensation comes to $494,615.05.

So the question arises: What would Michel Moore, or any police chief, be willing to do to maintain that well-paid position? If some police encounter were to arouse the ire of the anti-cop mob, would he be willing to summarily fire a cop or two so as to appease that mob? The prudent bettor says, yes, he would.

And keep in mind that the upper ranks of the LAPD are largely populated by people who achieved their positions by demonstrating their willingness to please the chief and thereby please his political masters. If the Board of Rights system is maintained but returned to the hands of LAPD brass, how many of them would be willing to go against the chief’s expressed desires and acquit an officer, or impose some penalty less than termination on one who has been found guilty? Not many.

Which brings us to the cops on the street, not a single one of whom today goes through his 10- or 12-hour shift without fearing that he, should an arrest go wrong and rouse the mob, will become the next YouTube villain and be put through the kind of Kafka-esque ordeal already endured by others.

The streets of Los Angeles are already in chaos. It will only get worse if the cops are made even more fearful of doing their job.

Gee, second look at perpetually electing and re-electing D卐M☭CRATs and nothing but to every local, county, and/or state-wide office, perchance? Naaaw, that’s just crazy talk right there, you fascist, Ultra-Mega-MAGA™ lunatic, you.

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When you’re Right, you’re right

Posted on February 17, 2023 by Mike

Surber runs down a disturbing list of some of the many, many things we foolish, overly-paranoid Reich-wingers had right all along.

Kang and Kodos on The Simpsons say, “Foolish Earthlings.”

Lefties say foolish right-wingers.

Nik Popli of Time magazine wrote, “This isn’t the first time a culture war has targeted a common household appliance (ie, the ongoing crusade to ban gas stoves—M). Republicans have been venting their frustration over federal energy-efficiency standards for more than two decades — including over the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 that forced U.S. consumers to switch to more energy-efficient light bulbs.”

Conservatives warned at the time that the replacement — Compact Fluorescent Light bulbs — contained mercury.

On July 31, 2007, Dr. John Balbus, Chief Health Officer at Environmental Defense Fund, assured one and all that there was no problem with CFLs.

He wrote, “Despite some alarming news reports, you don’t have much to worry about. If a CFL breaks, some of the mercury that’s contained in the bulb will evaporate into the air. How much? It’s hard to be certain, but one study looking at long tubular fluorescent bulbs found that over a two-week period, only 17% to 40% of the mercury in the bulb evaporated. The rest remained stuck in the bulb. Roughly one-third of the mercury that evaporated did so in the first eight hours after the breakage; the rest seeped out slowly over the remainder of the study period.”

Foolish right-wingers.

15 years later, lighting manufacturer TCP reported, “You’ve seen the headlines. CFL light bulb bans started making their way through state legislatures last year, and California has become the second state to sign one into law. Vermont’s light bulb ban passed in May, forbidding sales of CFLs as of February 2023. California’s phase-out begins in January 2024.”

Gee, why is that?

TCP reported, “Because CFLs and linear fluorescent lamps — aka those long, slender tubes in overhead fixtures — contain the known toxin mercury, the CFL light bulb ban is framed as a protection for both waste workers and the wider environment.”

So we switched over to LEDs. I cannot wait to find out what the flaw is in LED so lefties can ban them as well and replace them with wax cylinders that provide light as they burn down. Remember, the answer to the question what did socialists use before they used candles is electricity.

Foolish right-wingers keep being right.

Hey, it’s right (ahem) there in the name, and there’s a reason for that.

Know thine enemy

Posted on February 14, 2023 by Mike

Our old friend Jeff Goldstein names names.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Annnnd DINGDINGDINGDINGDING we have a winnah, folks!

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

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Of COURSE they did it re-redux

Posted on February 13, 2023 by Mike

As I keep saying: Cherchez le cui bono.

Biden’s Bombing

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Stand down, serfs!

Posted on February 13, 2023February 13, 2023 by Mike

Nobody is coming for your guns gas stoves. Except when they are, that is.

Oregon’s Eugene Council Bans Natural Gas Hookups in New Residences

City says it aims to be free of fossil fuels despite strong public opposition

Wasn’t someone saying something about “for the Greater Good” just a moment ago? Why yes, I believe someone was at that.

After more than two years of debate, the Eugene City Council voted on Feb. 6 to ban natural gas hookups in new residential construction, becoming the first city in Oregon to prohibit new homes from using gas furnaces, water heaters, or appliances.

During a closed meeting, the council first decided to deny a request by opponents to put the issue on the May ballot. According to DHM Research, 70 percent of those surveyed oppose the ban.

The council then voted 5-3 in favor, citing concerns about climate change, and public health, and saying the ban would reduce carbon emissions, and eliminate the air quality hazards of gas stoves.

And thus is it established, beyond all further argument or discussion, that government of the people, by the people, and for the people has indeed perished from the Earth.

It did not die of natural causes, mind; it was murdered, by people who have names and addresses. That ought to be borne in mind, not just by the people of Eugene, but by every last man Jack of us who still like to think of themselves as Americans.

Update! When it comes to the larger issue here, the song remains the same: it’s the Leftism, stupid.

The Power-Mad Utopians

America needs a broad popular front to stop the revolution from above that is transforming the country

What happens in politics when one major party, or a major faction in both parties, commits itself to doomed utopian projects of social and economic engineering and seeks to capture and use government to impose its vision from above? In such cases ordinary political consensus and compromise become irrelevant. What is needed, in such cases, is the broadest possible coalition to defeat the mad and impossible schemes of these utopians.

Which coalition must stand resolved to do violence on behalf of themselves and their stolen liberty—not to merely die for freedom, but to kill for it. Y’know, exactly as our Founding Fathers were, hallowed be their names.

As Buck Throckmorton notes, the above-linked article is a long ‘un. And, as I will note, it suffers from the by-now-obligatory insistence on a purely political solution to problems caused by politics—a misguided, impossible dream truly Quixotic in its gross proportions. Those things stipulated, it’s still worth a look anyhoo.

Free speech: dead as the dodo

Posted on February 11, 2023 by Mike

The incomparable John Hayward’s latest.

A generation after the supposed triumph of classical liberalism at the “end of history,” free speech exists nowhere on Earth as a matter of principle. Every single tech mogul’s commitment to free speech evaporates when powerful authoritarians demand censorship.

Authoritarian foreign regimes know they only need to threaten blockage of Western social media services to make their management comply with censorship demands. Some push back harder than others, but in the end, they all cave. They can’t afford to lose access to growing markets.

Tech moguls rationalize to themselves that they can still do some good in oppressive countries by complying with some censorship demands – it’s better than being silenced completely. Any way you rationalize it, it’s a power calculation that limits the speech of the powerless.

Domestically, we’ve seen government officials using economic leverage and ideological affinity to limit speech in collusion with their Little Partners in the private sector. The ruling left-wing Party has operatives in tech companies that did much of the dirty work.

The power calculations have shifted a little lately, especially after Musk bought Twitter, but they’re still power calculations, not adamant defenses of free speech as a matter of principle. The variables changed, but the equations remain.

A troubling percentage of the free world’s population evidently believes censorship IS free speech – as though speech were a limited resource that must be allocated by the State with an eye toward “justice” and “equity.” Only by silencing some can others be truly free to speak.

“Hate speech is not free speech!” is a pure power calculation: those with power will decide what constitutes “hate speech.” They invariably rule that disagreement with their ideology and political demands is “hateful” and must be silenced.

How utterly convenient for them.

In America That Was, the very place where such forgetfulness was never supposed to happen, we somehow lost sight of the fact that “offensive” speech is the very embodiment of free speech—that once we’ve allowed TPTB to stifle speech they deem “offensive,” the hourglass has been turned over, the countdown to the inevitable loss of yet another Constitutionally-enumerated right has begun. Thus:

Speech is vital to political organization – in the Internet era, they are nearly synonymous. Twitter mobs have a direct pipeline to real political power via lazy, biased legacy media – provided they agree with the ruling Party. That pipeline is tightly shut against dissidents.

“Disinformation” is also a crude political calculation, not a high-minded and principled commitment to protect the population against fraud. We see examples every single day of disinformation that is tolerated, and boosted, when it comes from members of the ruling Party.

As with hate speech, the powerful decide what constitutes actionable “disinformation,” and they cannot resist the temptation of heavily tilting those scales against dissenters and speakers of forbidden truth. Party apparatchiks are never banned or reprimanded for disinformation.

The “end of history” was actually the triumph of authoritarianism, not classical liberalism – political scientists and commentators were just too giddy over the fall of the Soviet Union to see it. Individual rights, beginning with free speech, have steadily eroded since then.

It’s Doc Zero; reading it all isn’t mandatory, but you’re going to want to nonetheless.

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It’s settled

Posted on February 9, 2023 by Mike

The Science™ has spoken.

Fauci: now he tells us

Fauci lied, and now he is admitting it. In writing. In a peer-reviewed journal.

To be clear, Fauci is not claiming that the vaccines were utterly worthless. He still maintains that in certain specific cases–atypical, but the ones that generally kill you–the vaccines serve as a sort of pre-treatment. Not a great one, but a somewhat effective one. But he flat out admits that the claims about the vaccine possibly preventing infection and transmission are simply bogus and always were.

No, I am not exaggerating. He even admits that flu vaccines would never meet the standard to pass muster for use if they were for any other virus. Fascinating. And hardly how they are advertised.

Ace follows up.

Here’s one quote from the paper:

As of 2022, after more than 60 years of experience with influenza vaccines, very little improvement in vaccine prevention of infection has been noted. As pointed out decades ago, and still true today, the rates of effectiveness of our best approved influenza vaccines would be inadequate for licensure for most other vaccine-preventable diseases. Even decades-long efforts to develop better, so-called “universal” influenza vaccines–vaccines that would create more broadly protective immunity, preferably lasting over longer time periods–have not yet resulted in next-generation, broadly protective vaccines, although a large number of experimental vaccines are in preclinical or early clinical development.

He writes that the successful true vaccines for measles, mumps, and rubella gave rise to hope that similar vaccines could be developed for respiratory viruses.

But he then points out that “Science,” represented in his physical body, has long known that respiratory viruses work differently and could never be truly vaccinated against.

But he then points out that “Science,” represented in his physical body, has long known that respiratory viruses work differently and could never be truly vaccinated against.

In stark contrast, the non-systemic respiratory viruses such as influenza viruses, SARS-CoV-2, and RSV tend to have significantly shorter incubation periods (Table 1) and rapid courses of viral replication. They replicate predominantly in local mucosal tissue, without causing viremia, and do not significantly encounter the systemic immune system or the full force of adaptive immune responses, which take at least 5–7 days to mature, usually well after the peak of viral replication and onward transmission to others.

In other words: Because these viruses incubate in the mucosal tissues (nose, lung tissues) and not the bloodstream or the body as a whole, they do not encounter the body’s immuno defense system until after they’ve already begun sporing off out of the mucosal tissues to infect other people.

So: No vaccine injected into the body will ever be of much use in keeping mucosal viruses from spreading person-to-person.

And he always knew this, he says now.

Just another thing he lied and lied and lied about, in his role as Science Personified, to achieve the political objective of Making People Do What a Power-Mad Bureaucrat wants them to do.

Yep, that’s just about the size of it. The Scamdemic was a political maneuver, a bare-nake power grab, right from the very beginning. The only real surprise here, for those of us who realized that sorry fact early on, is that Fauci is actually ‘fessing up now.

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Acts of war

Posted on February 8, 2023February 8, 2023 by Mike

Remember back when some of us, based on the cui bono standard if nothing else, postulated that Russia’s Nordstream I pipeline had been intentionally, actively sabotaged, almost certainly by the US and/or other cat’s-paw nations acting at its behest, and some folks—up to and including various Biden junta hacks, rumpswabs, and flunkies—puffed up indignantly over the patent “impossibility” of pulling off such an operation clandestinely?

Yeah, about all that.

How America Took Out The Nord Stream Pipeline

The New York Times called it a “mystery,” but the United States executed a covert sea operation that was kept secret—until now

The U.S. Navy’s Diving and Salvage Center can be found in a location as obscure as its name—down what was once a country lane in rural Panama City, a now-booming resort city in the southwestern panhandle of Florida, 70 miles south of the Alabama border. The center’s complex is as nondescript as its location—a drab concrete post-World War II structure that has the look of a vocational high school on the west side of Chicago. A coin-operated laundromat and a dance school are across what is now a four-lane road.

The center has been training highly skilled deep-water divers for decades who, once assigned to American military units worldwide, are capable of technical diving to do the good—using C4 explosives to clear harbors and beaches of debris and unexploded ordinance—as well as the bad, like blowing up foreign oil rigs, fouling intake valves for undersea power plants, destroying locks on crucial shipping canals. The Panama City center, which boasts the second largest indoor pool in America, was the perfect place to recruit the best, and most taciturn, graduates of the diving school who successfully did last summer what they had been authorized to do 260 feet under the surface of the Baltic Sea.

Last June, the Navy divers, operating under the cover of a widely publicized mid-summer NATO exercise known as BALTOPS 22, planted the remotely triggered explosives that, three months later, destroyed three of the four Nord Stream pipelines, according to a source with direct knowledge of the operational planning.

Two of the pipelines, which were known collectively as Nord Stream 1, had been providing Germany and much of Western Europe with cheap Russian natural gas for more than a decade. A second pair of pipelines, called Nord Stream 2, had been built but were not yet operational. Now, with Russian troops massing on the Ukrainian border and the bloodiest war in Europe since 1945 looming, President Joseph Biden saw the pipelines as a vehicle for Vladimir Putin to weaponize natural gas for his political and territorial ambitions.

Asked for comment, Adrienne Watson, a White House spokesperson, said in an email, “This is false and complete fiction.” Tammy Thorp, a spokesperson for the Central Intelligence Agency, similarly wrote: “This claim is completely and utterly false.”

Biden’s decision to sabotage the pipelines came after more than nine months of highly secret back and forth debate inside Washington’s national security community about how to best achieve that goal. For much of that time, the issue was not whether to do the mission, but how to get it done with no overt clue as to who was responsible.

There was a vital bureaucratic reason for relying on the graduates of the center’s hardcore diving school in Panama City. The divers were Navy only, and not members of America’s Special Operations Command, whose covert operations must be reported to Congress and briefed in advance to the Senate and House leadership—the so-called Gang of Eight. The Biden Administration was doing everything possible to avoid leaks as the planning took place late in 2021 and into the first months of 2022.

President Biden and his foreign policy team—National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan, Secretary of State Tony Blinken, and Victoria Nuland, the Undersecretary of State for Policy—had been vocal and consistent in their hostility to the two pipelines, which ran side by side for 750 miles under the Baltic Sea from two different ports in northeastern Russia near the Estonian border, passing close to the Danish island of Bornholm before ending in northern Germany.

The direct route, which bypassed any need to transit Ukraine, had been a boon for the German economy, which enjoyed an abundance of cheap Russian natural gas—enough to run its factories and heat its homes while enabling German distributors to sell excess gas, at a profit, throughout Western Europe. Action that could be traced to the administration would violate US promises to minimize direct conflict with Russia. Secrecy was essential.

Imagine my surprise at being proven right yet again. Ahem.

Literally so, at that.

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A path is being cleared

Posted on February 6, 2023February 6, 2023 by Mike

For…well, now, let’s see, whom?

The Democrat Long Knives Come Out for Kamala Harris; Democrats Tell Their Newsletter The New York Times That They Have to Ditch Harris To Have Any Chance of Winning in 2024

My italics at the end, to underscore where I must beg to differ with Ace’s take. The D卐M☭CRATs know perfectly well who has and does not have “any chance of winning” in 2024, or any other year going forward. This bit from the NYT’s article I thought was amusing.

Now that Biden has insinuated that he intends to run again, the NYT reported many Democrats worry that Harris’ name on the ticket as his running mate will deter voters. Their worries came after a FiveThirtyEight poll showed Harris’ approval rating at 39%.

“I can’t think of one thing she’s done except stay out of the way and stand beside him at certain ceremonies,” Morgan told the NYT.

Umm, s’cuse me for saying so and all, but that’s pretty much the Veep’s entire job description: travel the world to attend state funerals, otherwise just stand around quietly in the background waiting for somebody to assassinate your boss. It’s why “Cactus Jack” Garner, the VP for FDR’s first two terms as POTUS, famously noted that the job was “not worth a bucket of warm piss.” In fact, the one occasion in recent memory that a Veep was called upon to actually do something important was in January 2021, when “Deep State Mike” Pence declined to do his duty and went ahead and certified the results of a manifestly fraudulent election, despite a veritable ziggurat of credible evidence refuting its legitimacy.

It was truly a day that will live in infamy, to quote somebody other.

But yeah, it does indeed appear that a path is being cleared for somebody, sure enough. The only question is who that somebody might be, and it’s a real head-scratcher.

Okay, okay, I admit: no, it is NOT.

The party certainly doesn’t have a deep bench of candidates. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg’s miserable performance shows he’s incapable of running the country. Socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) would be 83 years old on his Inauguration Day. Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) likely lacks the charisma to gain national support.

These are desperate times indeed for Democrats when California Gov. Gavin Newsom and Warren are the best the party has to offer.

But there’s another candidate who just might save the day. As abhorrent as the thought may be, former first lady Michelle Obama’s name is increasingly being bandied about as a potential nominee.

As we know, Big Mike repeatedly expressed her disdain for being First “Lady” while her “husband” Bathhouse Barry served his two terms as the Left’s designated weapon of mass destruction in Mordor On The Potomac, which personal disgruntlement would seem to militate against her campaigning for a White House encore. But Toni Williams knows the score on that.

Michelle Obama may say she doesn’t want to be President, but if her country needs her, she will swallow the bile she feels for this country and step up to be our First Authentically Black and Female President. Who could resist. Joel Gilbert definitely thinks she is running and copying Barack (you know the drill) Obama’s formula. She introduced Joe Biden at the 2020 Democrat Convention, she has a book, and she has a voter registration group.

Who could blame Michelle? She would go down in history. She would be the Mother of the Rebirth of Our Country Without Original Sin. You can hear it now, can’t you? She will finish the “fundamental transformation” of our country begun under her husband. Joe can’t do it. Eight years of Michelle Obama will do the job. Our country will be finished.

And my dear friends, I don’t think we will get a choice. If our Lizard Overlords choose Michelle, she will be the Chosen One. The scowling America Hater will be the next President of the United States. She will be installed just as creepy Joe was installed. The Deep State is like a Marvel Cinematic Universe Villain. It cannot be destroyed. Trump tried and look what they are still doing to him. You may think Donald Trump is too damaged to run again. When the Lizard Overlords run Michelle, Donald (Obi-Wan Kenobi) Trump will be our only hope. File this away under predictions and then thank me when I am right. May the force be with you.

Donal Trump isn’t too damaged to run again, but he IS too damaged to win, even if he could find a way to circumvent the D卐M☭CRATs’ now solidly-secured lock on national “elections.” Toni may have gotten that part wrong, but she’s right on the money when she says We The People don’t get to have any say about who the next President will be. Not this time, not the next time, nor any other time.

Yes, there’s something we can do about that, but it will be neither easy, nor pleasant, nor guaranteed to turn out the way we’d like it to. One way or another, though, rest assured that the Deep State not only can but WILL be destroyed. As history tells us, it’s not a matter of if, but of when.

(Victory Girls link via Sarah Hoyt)

Peace through strength

Posted on February 6, 2023February 6, 2023 by Mike

Or chaos through senility.

It is worth remembering that during Donald Trump’s first term as president (note that I say “first term”), America and indeed the world was a more pacific place. Russia did not invade Ukraine. Iran was bottled up. The Abraham Accords brought peace to the Middle East. Amazing.

How did he do it? By taking a page from Ronald Reagan’s playbook. Next to “Make America Great Again” (and perhaps laments about “fake news”) the phrase that one heard most often from the Trump campaign and, then, the Trump Administration was “peace through strength.” It was born of Trump’s understanding that weakness is provocative and destabilizing while recognized strength encourages peace and social order.

Biden has depleted our Strategic Petroleum Reserve, shuttered the Keystone Pipeline, and put the kibosh on fracking. He has gone a long way towards transforming the United States military into a gender fluid sensitivity camp while also undermining the U.S. economy by incontinent spending and by pursuing other inflationary policies. Biden and his puppet masters tried to stymie Trump by turning his catchphrase “MAGA” into a negative epithet (and if “MAGA” is bad, how much worse is “Ultra MAGA”?). As Julie Kelly remarked, “if the balloon was an unarmed female veteran, the government would have shot it by now.”

But it didn’t work. So-called MAGA policies really did “make America great again”—richer, more secure, more confident and patriotic.

Which is precisely why they so desperately, fanatically hated it. And him, and us.

3

Old Media launches pre-emptive strike

Posted on February 4, 2023February 4, 2023 by Mike

In typical dishonest fashion, against their latest hate-object.

DeSantis Derangement Syndrome: The media get even more unhinged

For those of us with already-low expectations for the leftist media, they’ve been working to lower that bar even further in their coverage of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.

You’d think these press organizations would have learned from their Trump Derangement Syndrome, when they burned trust in so many institutions, including and specifically their own, trying to fight President Donald Trump. Instead, they’ve simply substituted DeSantis in their activist, bile-filled, often-totally-wrong rants.

CNN reporter John Blake sent this note to DeSantis’ press secretary, Bryan Griffin, asking for comment after the gov blocked a woke high-school class: “I’ve talked to one of the nation’s leading scholars on fascism who, along with another scholar who is an authority on fascism, say that DeSantis’ decision echoes similar decisions made by fascist dictators to force what one historian calls ‘collective amnesia’ about the past.”

I’m writing a piece calling the governor a fascist, care to comment? And how long have you been beating your wife?

Griffin posted Blake’s request to Twitter, pulling back the curtain on how hit pieces calling America’s most popular governor a “fascist” get made.

The Daily Beast ran an entirely fictitious account, likely written in crayon, of the DeSantis team paying influencers and “bot farms” on Twitter.

DeSantis for his part talks directly to Floridians and calmly explains his policies, which Floridians continue to support despite the media hoopla. He comes to his press conferences armed with facts and never lets the media get the better of him. He and his team have been teaching a master class in how to handle the dishonest press.

But they shouldn’t have to. Even those who don’t share his politics should speak up and say the coverage is absurd and lack of trust in news organizations has hurt us all. But they won’t because there are elections to win.

Well, that, plus they just enjoy the near-sexual frisson deceitfully slandering their adversaries and bringing them down provides them so much they really can’t help themselves. It’s too great a temptation for the snarling, yappy little ankle-biters to resist.

As for Ron The Great, he’s been an excellent governor, accomplishing several real and worthwhile things aimed at undoing many of the Great Leaps Forward made by Florida Leftards. Which is exactly why they hate him so desperately: love him or hate him, see him as a genuine reformer or just another grubby politician on the make, there’s no denying that DeSantis has been damned effective as governor of Florida.

And that’s what counts most at this point. The Sovereign States are where all the action is; for the most part, all the national political maneuvering and Titanic-deck-chair reshuffling hardly even registers with me anymore, it’s close to irrelevant. We know for sure and certain that the President is nothing more than a figurehead—a malleable, pliant ventriloquist’s dummy trotted out to make speeches at fundraisers. Trump’s Oval Orifice ordeal raised the curtain on that harsh reality, and the Biden meat-puppet’s disastrous tenure has confirmed it beyond all doubt.

I mean, seriously now: even diehard Dim-O-Creeps are coming around, in steadily increasing numbers, to the manifestly-obvious fact that the Biden meat-puppet isn’t in charge of his own daily bowel movement, much less of Amerika v2.0’s bloated central government, whether they’re willing to openly admit to it yet or not. Not that they’ll balk at campaigning, fundraising, and voting for the addle-pated old crook in 2024, mind. After all, they ARE still D卐M☭CRATs, you know.

Despite all the will he-won’t he 2024 Presidential speculation, despite oleaginous operators from both sides of the political fence presuming to put words in DeSantis’ mouth for their own purposes, I have yet to see the man himself utter Syllable One about the chances of him deciding to take a run at the tarnished brass ring. That makes me very happy indeed; as I’ve said over and over, Real Americans need Ron DeSantis right where he currently is. He’ll do way more good for us as Florida’s governor than he’ll ever be permitted to as POTUS, if only as a morale- and resolve-booster showing that the Left juggernaut isn’t invincible—that with a little effort and determination, they can in fact be defeated.

Should he decide to run anyhow, it will reveal much about who and what Ron DeSantis really is down deep—his character, his intelligence, his ego, his ambitions, his grasp of current reality, even—none of it the slightest bit encouraging. That will be a truly sad day, both for us and for the nation its own self.

1

How dare they!

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

Seems to be a few kinks that need to be worked out with AINO’s New Model Woke Army before it will be fully ready to do battle with the enemies of Progressivism.

U.S. Tanks In Ukraine Already Destroyed After Being Easily Recognized By Their Rainbow Camouflage

UKRAINE — Mere hours after deploying 31 brand new U.S. M1 Abrams tanks, sources are now reporting all 31 of them have been destroyed by the Russians. Experts are attributing this to the fact that each of the 31 tanks featured rainbow camouflage that was easily visible to the enemy Russians.

“These tanks are state of the art, boasting the latest and greatest in firepower, mobility, and of course LGBTQ-affirming camouflage,” said Biden’s Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin. “The fact the Russians would dare fire upon our rainbow-printed tanks shows how hateful, bigoted and on the wrong side of history these Russians truly are.”

Well, c’mon, DUH. I mean, it’s Russians, ferchrissake. Everybody knows how THEY are.

1

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