After the Day Of When, what?

Shitstorm a-brewing, full steam ahead!

How Many Load-Bearing Walls Have to Come Down Before America Collapses?
Imagine a big, beautiful house, but it has a maniacal group of squatters living in it. They take sledgehammers to load-bearing walls, carelessly tinker with the wiring, and make no real effort to fix things.

If the roof gets a leak, they let it go. If there’s a crack in the foundation, they’re more likely to hit it with a sledgehammer for fun than to repair it. If they’re going out of town when there’s going to be a cold snap, they leave the water running and don’t worry about whether the pipes freeze or not. Maybe a couple of them will board up a broken window or slap some duct tape on things when they’re sober and bored, but there’s no organized plan to hold everything together.

What do you think that house is going to look like a few years down the road? Better question, what do you think our country is going to look like a few years down the road?

Granted, it takes longer for a country to break down than a house, but it does all the same. In fact, if you’re middle-aged or older, you could probably reel off half a dozen ways the house we have today is vastly inferior to the one we had just a few decades ago.

This is not a coincidence. It’s not bad luck. It’s a consequence of the fact that we’ve done a lot of damage to our home, and we’re no longer even going through the motions of trying to keep it in good repair. We still have a roof over our heads for the moment, but we are certainly no longer on track to have a home we’re going to want to leave to our kids.

In John’s piece he cites an earlier one by Insty, wherein we find this:

What makes me sad now is the ongoing game of Civilizational Jenga that our ruling class is playing. One by one, they’re withdrawing the supports of civil society, in a process that will inevitably lead to a collapse. They’re taking what was a very robust society, and consuming all the safety margins, bit by bit.

What really makes me sad is that while some of the people involved – let’s call them “the morons” for convenience’s sake – are doing this out of shortsightedness, cupidity, or sheer partisan bloodthirstiness, I’m increasingly convinced that there’s a contingent at the top that knows exactly what it’s doing, and is fine with it.

When considering any political tactic, after all, one question is what happens if it doesn’t work. But sometimes an equally important question is, what happens if it does?

Say the various Democratic flacks, special prosecutors, and state attorneys general somehow manage to eliminate Trump. What happens?

Half the country – maybe more – will conclude that the whole system is rigged, that the establishment doesn’t follow the rules, and that it will gang up on anyone it sees is a threat. They will conclude, in short, that the government, and indeed the entire system, is illegitimate.

And they will be right. And the politicians of even a generation ago recognized that as enormously dangerous.

Oh, it’s sad all right, but that ain’t all it is. Not by a long yard, it ain’t. Need more specifics before you can take alarums warning of impending national catastrophe seriously? Ragin’ Dave offers a few.

It’s going to get worse, before it gets worse
Someone points out that we’re already in a recession, even if nobody wants to admit it.

Let’s take a look at three key areas.

If honest numbers were being used, they would show that GDP growth has been negative for almost the entire time that Joe Biden has been in the White House. That would indicate that we are at least experiencing a recession.

And if honest numbers were being used, they would show that the unemployment rate in this country is sitting at about 25 percent right now.

Needless to say, that is absolutely horrible. And if the rate of inflation was still calculated the way that it was back in 1980, it would still be in double digit territory even though it has come down a bit. The official numbers that the government gives us are designed to make us feel good about things. But at this point things are so bad that the charade is falling apart.

Food costs are up. Energy costs are up. Housing costs are through the damn roof. If I didn’t already own property up where I live I’d be screwed because I couldn’t afford to purchase it today, and I made far more in my last year of military service than I did when I purchased the property back in the early 2000’s.

And the people with their hands on the levers of power are either in denial about everything, or they’re just flat out lying to you and shoving as much lucre into their bank accounts as they can before it all comes apart. You know it, I know it.

Just on housing costs alone I don’t see how we come out of this without some sort of massive collapse. When the average family cannot afford a home, there’s no incentive to keep pushing forward.

From where I sit it looks to no longer be a matter of if, but of when. Although it probably won’t matter all that much to us once when arrives, for the nonce the question Glenn suggests remains a stimulating topic for consideration: is all this disaster, loss, and grief being brought down on American heads because our so-called leaders are incompetent and/or stupid? Or is this being done intentionally, with malice aforethought?

Y’all already know which side I come down on there, no need for me to belabor the point; many years of close examination of all the available evidence leaves me confident enough in my conclusion that, for once, I won’t proffer the obligatory “but I could be wrong” disclaimer this time. Whatever the case may be, though, it’s clear that we’re fast approaching the point where stopping them in their tracks by any means necessary—ANY means—will become not just a desirable, wise option but an absolute imperative, a matter of survival, quite literally.

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Last of the Christmas music for 2023

The previously-promised music vids: first up, a new-to-me tune by offbeat-classical composer Sir Karl Jenkins, from his 2009 release Stella Natalis.

I first heard this one way too early on  Christmas morning, lying in bed in that moggy not-asleep, not-awake state, and frankly, it kinda weirded me out a little bit. After jolting fully awake and recovering from the slight case of the heebie-jeebies it induced, I simply can’t stop listening to it. It’s odd, edgy, abby-normal, not by any means your usual Christmas-music fare. If it had been around back when Tim Burton’s unforgettable Nightmare Before Christmas came out (1993), at least half of the tracks on the Stella Natalis album would have fit in quite nicely for the soundtrack.

Next, one I’d meant to include last week but forgot about: a simply stellar arrangement of one my all-time most beloved Christmas songs.

This one is in heavy rotation on that Irish Christmas-music stream I hipped y’all to last month, and it’s a real beaut. In fact, after repeated listens it’s come to closely rival the powerful Cantus arrangement I’ve run here for a few years running on my own personal bestest-EVAR! list. The backing musical accompaniment is spare as spare gets, unobtrusive yet at the same time indispensable; meanwhile, the intricate, shifting vocal harmonies are so gorgeously lush they make the hair on the back of my neck stand straight up. Overall, the above version is so tight you could bounce a quarter off it, so squeakity-clean you could serve dinner on it. The only real complaint I can make about it is that it’s over too soon.

Hey, Christmas ain’t over till I SAY it’s over, dammit!

Actually, I’m thinking I’ll supplant ol’ Scrooge Picard with the regular CF theme this weekend, which is earlier than I usually would. For many years, I made it my practice to adhere strictly to Elvis’s tradition of leaving the tree and decorations up until January 8th, which was his birthday. But since we started earlier than usual this year with the Christmas makeover, well, what the heck.

Update! The instrument that opens the second song, if I’m not mistaken, is not an oboe but the somewhat-rare English horn, which you could maybe think of as an oboe with bigger balls.

What is the difference between an English horn and an oboe?
An English horn and the oboe both come from the same double-reed family of instruments. The main difference is that the English horn is one and a half times longer than the oboe and features a pear-shaped bell that the oboe does not have. Also, they are considered instruments that are alto and soprano in sound, that is, the English horn and oboe, respectively. They are both double-reed instruments, with the English horn having a wider reed than the oboe.

The English horn is an F instrument that also features a wider reed and metal tube that the reed attaches to. The reed is usually tied together with a metal wire. The oboe is a C instrument that has a thinner reed attached to cork and which fits directly on the main body. The oboe has a higher-pitched sound, while the English horn features a more smooth, darker sound. They both feature the same keys and fingerings, and usually, a musician that can play one can play the other.

It can be said that the oboe and English horn were developed in the late 1600s and early 1700s, but double-reed instruments date back to 2500 BC in the city of Ur. With only three or four holes at that time to play notes and double reed, musicians at that time played their music.

The double reed instruments like the oboe and the English horn have come a long way since their beginnings. They are now primarily manufactured in France and the United States of America as well as England. These are where the elite instruments are currently being made for the orchestras of today.

Never having had much interest in the woodwind family of instruments, I’ve never attempted to learn either the oboe or the English horn. They both make truly beautiful music, so maybe that was a mistake on my part, I dunno.

In the bleak midwinter

Kunstler brings the DOOOOOOM in his year-end review/2024 preview combo, and It. Is. EPIC.

Do You Dare Even Look? — Forecast 2024
Historians of the future, flash-frying peccary testicles and mesquite pods over their campfires, will wonder at how the archetypal Shining City on a Hill of America’s storied yesteryear got transformed into the roach motel that our country has become on the threshold of 2024 CE. Will they be as stupidly bewildered as, in our time, the faculty at Harvard, the editors of The New York Times, or the directorate of the CDC? Or will they figure out the score by then?

Which is: the nauseating state-of-the-nation is being driven by a cohort of our own fellow citizens lost in an evil crypto-religious salvation rapture that veils their own self-disgust, moral failure, peevish discontents, petty hatreds, willful profanations, compulsive lying, sexual depravity, fraudulence, venality, cupidity, and all-around want of boundaries. They are wrecking the country on-purpose, led by their chosen figurehead avatar, “Joe Biden,” and the horses of many different colors he rode in on.

The people running things, yanking the levers of power, managing the malign weapon they have made of government (and the law, and schooling, and medicine, etc.), have got to be turned out, and hard. Not a few should find themselves in the courts and, with proper and fair adjudication, be conducted to prison, perhaps even to the special room there where the lives of the wicked are ceremonially concluded.

You may legitimately ask: Does America deserve what it’s getting? Well, you know the old maxim about hard times make strong men…strong men bring good times…good times make weak men…Our national quandary is certainly a case of that, plus the manifestation of well-known terrestrial cycles (e.g., Fourth Turnings), plus the workings of emergence as the dynamics involved in all this sort themselves out…topped off by the “secret sauce” of Globalist wickedness, with the aim of severe population reduction and the asset stripping of Western Civ for the benefit of the that moneygrubbing Globalist transhuman technocrat rat-pack.

My natural inclination, you know, is a kind of allergy to paranoid schemes, but one does survey the scene with wonder at how superbly coordinated the fuckery has been — much of the world locking down simultaneously for the Covid-19 op…the global mass vaxx campaign…the fiscal lunacy and accompanying central bank shenanigans…the broad-based censorship operations…the capture of the news media…and the war-mongering.

So, the country is in the toilet and it is our job in 2024 to make sure it doesn’t get flushed all the way down the pipe. That’s all the throat-clearing you will hear before we get to the meat of this broadside: predictions for the year ahead.

And with that, we’re off on a railway ride to Doomsville for an unflinching look at where and how the impending trainwreck might occur. A couple more bits ‘n’ pieces of dis ‘n’ dat before I tell you to go read all of it.

The Energy Picture
In short, a fateful new game of musical chairs with oil is underway and Europe can’t seem to find a seat to park its sad old rump in. American shale oil production has been an amazing parlor trick that is now coming to an end as it swerves into decline in 2024. Additionally, the ideologue maniacs under “Joe Biden” have drained the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, which is supposed to tide us through great national emergencies and war. And the same idiots have shut down pipelines, designated public lands off-limits for oil drilling, and burdened our country with similar unrealistic “Green New Deal” alt energy schemes like the policies pounding Euroland down a neo-medieval rat-hole.

Oil still matters, a lot. It drives every aspect of our so-called advanced economy. We’ve been pretending it’s possible to shift easily away from oil to alt. energy and that fantasy is now dissipating. Nuclear is both capital intensive and dependent on social stability, and the global debt bubble will disorder capital flows while it stimulates social chaos. Nuclear power plants also take years to site, permit, finance, and build, apart from the NIMBY opposition they provoke. We’re about out of time and capital for a new nuclear program.

2024 is the year that Americans who are still capable of paying attention realize we’re steaming into true post-modernity — not the skull-fogging inanities of the art world, but rather the end of the precious comforts and conveniences of daily life: abundant food, central heating, hot water, lights and appliances on-command, happy motoring (and the suburban matrix it built), yellow school bus fleets, airplane travel, theme parks, blue-light-special shopping, and everything else.

It’s not all going to fall apart at once — though an electromagnetic pulse attack could do it — and we’ve already been witnessing the slow decay of many supply lines and services that we Americans formerly took for granted, like, getting a certain car part you needed, or a doctor’s appointment in under two months, or an airplane flight that isn’t some kind of existential trauma. But in 2024, we’ll see noticeable failures of systems for providing the things we’re used to getting, which is being aggravated greatly by the flat-out incompetence of people employed at everything, anywhere. Surely, you’ve noticed.

How the hell could any but either the most insulated (ie, Mordor on the Potomac orcs) or oblivious (ie, any random shitlib Karen or Ken you run across in your daily round) NOT have noticed? Onwards.

Civil Strife and the Election
Doesn’t it look like the Democratic Party wants to start Civil War Two? They may get their wish. It appears that they will stop at nothing to keep voters from re-electing their nemesis, Donald Trump. In the process, they’ve managed to turn Mr. Trump into the biggest underdog in US history. The court cases in New York, Washington, Atlanta, and Florida could not be more obviously fake confections, insults to every custom and order of Anglo-American law. I doubt the cases will survive their chains of review, and it is looking like special counsel Jack Smith may not even survive his appointment (being in breach of the rules — he was not confirmed by the Senate…whoopsie).

WashPo op-ed scribbler Robert Kagan, husband of State Department warmonger Victoria Nuland, has suggested that some extra-legal removal method may be needed to solve the Trump problem if the idiotic indictment barrage falls short. Everybody who read his piece thought: Oh, they’re actually proposing to whack him. That would set things off nicely.

You’d suppose the Party of Chaos might loose its Antifa / BLM mobs, and other shock troops onto the streets well before November on some George Floyd type pretext in order to invoke a “national emergency,” giving “JB” & Co. license to declare martial law and perhaps postpone the election. Everybody will see through the play. Try it and see what happens.

But, if the election actually happens and Mr. Trump wins, I’d expect the Dems to unleash holy hell on the country post election day just for the sheer sadistic pleasure of watching whatever is left of America burn down. This time, proponents of the 2nd Amendment may not stand idly by, especially with the big city police forces decimated. There will be ten-thousand Kyle Rittenhouses out there defending the streets from the ragtag and bobtail of diseased imbeciles in their black bloc uniforms cringing behind their sissy umbrellas.

As I’ve said more than once, the “election” will indeed happen. Why on earth wouldn’t it? They’d do themselves way more harm by cancelling or postponing it than they would just going ahead and keeping the scam going as is. The whole sorry charade is working out quite nicely for them, as well it might be after all the years of work getting the fraud engine dialed in and tuned to run smoothly. Throwing all that away would achieve but two things, neither of which the Power would find desirable:

  • It would pull the rug out from under the VOTE HARDERER Republicrat© politicians, pundits, and citizenry who still so fervently Want To Believe, all of whom make up such an important part of Team Status Quo
  • It would once and for all blow the lid off the quaint, ever-more-feeble delusion that We The People still have any say whatsoever in how we are governed ruled, and by whom; despite all their best efforts, there are still hundreds of millions of guns in private hands out there, so God only knows where that ugly relevation might possibly lead

If we know anything about The Enemy by now, it’s that he is cunning, amoral, and above all patient. A long-term plan he conceived, implemented, and nurtured for nigh on a century is now VERY close to full and final fruition, and they’re all of a sudden going to lose patience now? Sorry, I just can’t see it. Anyways, as I said above: go check out the rest. It makes for some pretty grim reading, but is all the more accurate for that.

Oh yeah, about my post title: as my fellow Christmas music aficionados will know, it’s the title of a lovely Song O’ Teh Season which reminded me that I yet have two more videos to put up for y’all—one I only recently discovered, the other a fantastic rendition of an old favorite—which I will get to anon.

Update! In the “Civil Strife and the Election” category: Mark Steyn sees the writing on the wall, mentions the unmentionable.

The lone hyperpower is not quite a one-party state, but it is a one-party Deep State. In 2016, while everyone was shrieking about foreign interference in US elections, there was sustained domestic interference in US elections – courtesy of the FBI, Crossfire Hurricane and all the rest. But, in those bygone days, it was still necessary to do it sotto voce – offshoring most of the dodgier bits to friendly Five Eyes guys, such as the Australian High Commissioner in London.

Unfortunately for Peter Strzok et al, they underestimated the scale of the challenge. So they were obliged to spend the next four years subverting the so-called head of the executive branch – again, mostly on the sly.

But they’re doing it openly now. They’re using anything to hand – civil suits, criminal prosecution, executive authority, whatever it takes. It’s ever more brazen. In the preferred cliché of the age, last time round it was the quiet part, now it’s out loud.

We are a little over ten months to what’s still quaintly called “Election Day”. Does this seem like the behavior of people who, come Tuesday night in November, will be willing to lose a democratic vote?

In my bestseller After America, I quoted the late Pat Caddell’s observation that it is not a good thing to tell the people that there are no peaceful means of effecting meaningful course correction – not in a land where half the people are disinclined to go along with open borders, Chinese domination, grade-school transitioning and all the rest. If voting doesn’t change anything, you are setting up pre-revolutionary conditions – assuming for the purposes of argument that, in the panopticon state of 24/7 high-tech surveillance, our rulers haven’t already priced that in, and figured it’s no longer possible.

Nevertheless: In Colorado and Maine, in Georgia and New York, the permanent state is telling you that, in the interests of “saving democracy”, there isn’t going to be any “peaceful transfer of power”. The talk-radio guys with the butch bumper music and the easy-listening opinions could at least stop trying to pass this off as “politics”.

I repeat: why WOULD they cancel or postpone the 24 “election”? In dystopian tyrannies such as Amerika v2.0—(mis)ruled by ruthless, reckless, amoral swine hidden behind stone walls, concrete barriers, electrified fences, and armed security squads—even when The Power loses, it still wins anyhow. As the hoary old stage aphorism has it, the show must go on…and it will. Until one day, all of a sudden-like, it doesn’t.

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Haley gets one right

Even though the Hallelujah Chorus of VOTE HARDERER!!! Republicrats© is giving her hell for it, she ain’t wrong for once.

I’ve never run for office, but I can imagine that for a politician in the South — especially a conservative — questions about race relations and history sound like “gotcha” questions. That may have been what was on Nikki Haley’s mind at a town hall event in New Hampshire earlier this week when an attendee asked her a historical question.

A voter asked Haley, “What was the cause of the United States Civil War?” Granted, it’s an odd question, but Haley could have answered it quickly and moved on. Instead, she gave the strangest answer imaginable.

“Well, don’t come with an easy question,” she began with a quip. “I mean, I think the cause of the Civil War was basically how government was going to run, the freedoms, and what people could and couldn’t do.”

She then turned the tables on the man who asked the question and asked him what he thought caused the Civil War. That part of the exchange wasn’t audible on the video of the town hall, but it opened the door for Haley to dig her hole of bizarre answers a little deeper.

“I mean, I think it always comes down to the role of government and what the rights of the people are,” she continued. “And we — I will always stand by the fact that I think government was intended to secure the rights and freedoms of the people. It was never meant to be all things to all people.”

“Bizarre”…and perfectly correct, too. The “offense” Haley is being pilloried for, of course, is not making the obligatory genuflection towards the written-by-the-winners revisionist history which holds that the “cause” of Civil War I was blood-simple, that the North invaded and punitively subjugated the South over the “peculiar institution” of slavery.

Just one leeeetle problem with that belief: know who else didn’t think the War of Northern Aggression was all about slavery? Massa Abraham Lincoln, that’s who. Among other things, he said this:

My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that. What I do about slavery, and the colored race, I do because I believe it helps to save the Union; and what I forbear, I forbear because I do not believe it would help to save the Union. I shall do less whenever I shall believe what I am doing hurts the cause, and I shall do more whenever I shall believe doing more will help the cause.

Note also that the “Great Emancipator,” with his fabled Proclamation in 1863, freed not a single slave in any state wherein he actually had the power to do so; the Emancipation Proclamation was a purely political document whose two-fold purpose was to maintain the shaky entente back home between the radical contingent of so-called “fire eater” abolitionists and the moderates, as well as to gain military advantage for the Yankee invader over the Southern foe.

The Emancipation Proclamation did not free all slaves in the U.S., contrary to a common misconception; it applied in the ten states that were still in rebellion on January 1, 1863, but it did not cover the nearly 500,000 slaves in the slaveholding border states (Missouri, Kentucky, Maryland, and Delaware) or in parts of Virginia and Louisiana that were no longer in rebellion. Those slaves were freed by later separate state and federal actions.

The state of Tennessee had already mostly returned to Union control, under a recognized Union government, so it was not named and was exempted. Virginia was named, but exemptions were specified for the 48 counties then in the process of forming the new state of West Virginia, and seven additional counties and two cities in the Union-controlled Tidewater region of Virginia. Also specifically exempted were New Orleans and 13 named parishes of Louisiana, which were mostly under federal control at the time of the Emancipation Proclamation. These exemptions left unemancipated an additional 300,000 slaves.

The Emancipation Proclamation has been ridiculed, notably by Richard Hofstadter, who wrote that it “had all the moral grandeur of a bill of lading” and “declared free all slaves…precisely where its effect could not reach”. Disagreeing with Hofstadter, William W. Freehling wrote that Lincoln’s asserting his power as Commander-in-Chief to issue the proclamation “reads not like an entrepreneur’s bill for past services but like a warrior’s brandishing of a new weapon”.

Lincoln first discussed the proclamation with his cabinet in July 1862. He drafted his “preliminary proclamation” and read it to Secretary of State William Seward, and Secretary of Navy Gideon Welles, on July 13. Seward and Welles were at first speechless, then Seward referred to possible anarchy throughout the South and resulting foreign intervention; Welles apparently said nothing. On July 22, Lincoln presented it to his entire cabinet as something he had determined to do and he asked their opinion on wording. Although Secretary of War Edwin Stanton supported it, Seward advised Lincoln to issue the proclamation after a major Union victory, or else it would appear as if the Union was giving “its last shriek of retreat”. Walter Stahr, however, writes, “There are contemporary sources, however, that suggest others were involved in the decision to delay”, and Stahr quotes them.

In September 1862, the Battle of Antietam gave Lincoln the victory he needed to issue the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation. In the battle, though the Union suffered heavier losses than the Confederates and General McClellan allowed the escape of Robert E. Lee’s retreating troops, Union forces turned back a Confederate invasion of Maryland, eliminating more than a quarter of Lee’s army in the process.

On September 22, 1862, five days after Antietam, and while residing at the Soldier’s Home, Lincoln called his cabinet into session and issued the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation. According to Civil War historian James M. McPherson, Lincoln told cabinet members, “I made a solemn vow before God, that if General Lee was driven back from Pennsylvania, I would crown the result by the declaration of freedom to the slaves.” Lincoln had first shown an early draft of the proclamation to Vice President Hannibal Hamlin, an ardent abolitionist, who was more often kept in the dark on presidential decisions. The final proclamation was issued on January 1, 1863. Although implicitly granted authority by Congress, Lincoln used his powers as Commander-in-Chief of the Army and Navy to issue the proclamation “as a necessary war measure.” Therefore, it was not the equivalent of a statute enacted by Congress or a constitutional amendment, because Lincoln or a subsequent president could revoke it. One week after issuing the final Proclamation, Lincoln wrote to Major General John McClernand: “After the commencement of hostilities I struggled nearly a year and a half to get along without touching the ‘institution’; and when finally I conditionally determined to touch it, I gave a hundred days fair notice of my purpose, to all the States and people, within which time they could have turned it wholly aside, by simply again becoming good citizens of the United States. They chose to disregard it, and I made the peremptory proclamation on what appeared to me to be a military necessity. And being made, it must stand”. Lincoln continued, however, that the states included in the proclamation could “adopt systems of apprenticeship for the colored people, conforming substantially to the most approved plans of gradual emancipation; and…they may be nearly as well off, in this respect, as if the present trouble had not occurred”. He concluded by asking McClernand not to “make this letter public”.

Initially, the Emancipation Proclamation effectively freed only a small percentage of the slaves, namely those who were behind Union lines in areas not exempted. Most slaves were still behind Confederate lines or in exempted Union-occupied areas. Secretary of State William H. Seward commented, “We show our sympathy with slavery by emancipating slaves where we cannot reach them and holding them in bondage where we can set them free.” Had any slave state ended its secession attempt before January 1, 1863, it could have kept slavery, at least temporarily.

And there you have it. Nota bene:

  • Quite a few Northerners still owned slaves for some years after the war was over
  • Northern general US Grant was as ambivalent about slavery as his boss Lincoln, at least initially:

    To his father he wrote, “My inclination is to whip the rebellion into submission, preserving all Constitutional rights. If it cannot be whipped any other way than through a war against slavery, let it come to that legitimately. If it is necessary that slavery should fall that the Republic may continue its existence, let slavery go.”

    More on all that here

  • Legend has it that Grant’s wife retained ownership of her personal valet for several years after the end of the war; when asked about this apparent contradiction, Grant is said to have dismissed his interlocuter with a laconic “Because good help is so hard to find nowadays”
  • At the end of the war, certain Northern states and/or cities barred Nee-grows from so much as setting foot within their boundaries, decrees often enforced via violence

And so it goes. As is usually the case, the first American Civil War is not reducible to simple, easily summed-up causes and effects; it just doesn’t work that way, however much we flawed hoomons might wish otherwise. History is rich and complex, with many strange twists and turns serving to make the topic all the more interesting for those of us who study it intently.

Loathe though I ordinarily am to sing the woman’s praises, sincerest kudos to Nikki Haley for truly getting the historical nuance here, and refusing to yield to pressure from the stupes and dupes who don’t to dumb it down for them.

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An “open air prison”

It’s not that the Paleosimians in Gaza are angry about being “mistreated” by the Israelis; they’re angry that Israel—and ((((JooJooJooJOOOOOOOZ!!!)))) generally—exists at all.


Yep, pre-Oct 7 Gaza sure looked like Hell on earth for those poor suffering Paleosimians, didn’t it? After being treated as inhumanely as that—forced by the Israelis (who, by the way, control absolutely everything and everyone in the entire world) to live in such extreme squalor and deprivation as seen above—no WONDER they’re so implacably pissed off. What rational, reasonable human being yearning only to breathe free and be left alone to live their lives in peace WOULDN’T be?

But hey, you know ((((DemPeskyJOOOOOZ!!!))) and their never-ending propaganda trickery. The above footage was probably shot in Milan or Nice or Martinique, and the IDF just P-shopped in the Arabic-language signage on the storefronts and whatnot to fool everybody. JOOJOOJOOJOOOOOOOO!!! Plus, they all have big noses, wear funny hats, are greedy as hell, and sound like a throat-cancer victim trying to hock up the world’s worst phlegm-ball when they talk in that fucked-up Yid language of theirs, the rat-bastards. Right, Jew-haters?

And those JOOOOOO women, they’re just the WORST, right? Compare, contrast:

Yep, looks like a no-brainer to me all right. Then again, I’ve obviously been deceived by the International JOOOOO Conspiracy©, so never mind, I guess.

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Memezapoppin’!

Welcome to this week’s installment of our Wednesday meme feature, folks. Links to the “found via” sources will be attached to the specific MiQ’s (Memes in Question) whenever I can remember them, which likely won’t be very often. Only the first two memes will appear above the fold to save on bandwidth usage, since I assume not everybody who shows up at this here websty will want to see all of them. This intro will appear at the top of each week’s Memezapoppin’! post. Enjoy, funny pitcher-lovers.

Continue reading Memezapoppin’!

The year that was

David Thompson offers a whole year’s worth of reasons intelligent, rational people despair of the very concept of “human” “progress” as nothing more than a laughable conceit.

The year began with a tale of oysters and college lesbianism, via Bon Appétit magazine, in which Brooklynite pronoun-stipulator Isha Maratha was keen to overshare. For Ms Maratha, “My first time eating an oyster was an act of queer intimacy.” Indeed, we were told by an obliging editor, “The act of eating an oyster uniquely and intimately expresses her queerness.” And so, we were regaled, at length, with descriptions of mollusc-gobbling, stolen glances, and lemon wedges being squeezed. “There is something uniquely unspoken,” we learned, “between the eater and the eaten.”

We also pondered mass fare-dodging, now at record levels, and its progressive defenders – including those employed to maintain public transport – and whose pre-emptive disapproval of anyone noticing such crimes was remarkable in its vehemence and uniformity. The effects on social trust of a large and growing minority disregarding the law and norms of behaviour, and doing so with a learned impunity, is apparently something one shouldn’t – and mustn’t – register or explore. Because, in the progressive world, noticing habitual and brazen thievery is much worse than indulging in it. And obviously racist.

And we visited the pages of Scientific American, where wokeness is ascendant and thinking simply isn’t done. In particular, an “important analysis” piece in which we were urged – by Tracie Canada, a “socio-cultural anthropologist” at Duke University – to fret about “the violence Black men experience in [American] football,” and in which we were told that the physicality of the sport “disproportionately affects black men.” This was framed to imply, but never establish, some systemic racial wrongdoing – “anti-Black practices” that are “inescapable” – rather than, say, being an unremarkable reflection of the sport’s demographics, in which, at professional levels, black players are a majority. Or to put it another, no less scientific, way – the risk of injury while playing a contact sport disproportionately affects those who actually play it. When this rather glaring logical error was pointed out by readers, the magazine’s editor-in-chief promptly accused said readers of “systemic racism.”

In February, we encountered a suboptimal substitute teacher named Lydia Lamere – formerly Christopher Lamere – who spent lesson time directing students to his overtly sexual TikTok account, and conscripting middle-school children into his cross-dressing psychodrama. When not discussing “kink” and preferred sexual positions with other people’s eleven-year-old children, Mr Lamere found time to tells us, “I’m not a predator, I’m just a woman who happens to be super tall and hot.”

Matters academic cropped up again via an eye-widening overview of racial “equity” policies in various schools and institutions, where expectations of competence are deemed racist and terribly problematic. In New York City, for instance, thanks to “disparate impact” policies, firefighters are no longer expected to be able to read the instructions on their own firefighting equipment. Likewise, in scrupulously progressive Ontario, it is now illegal to use a maths test to determine whether maths teachers actually possess the knowledge that they are being paid to convey in class. Such is the world of triumphant wokeness, in which “suspending proficiency requirements” – and denouncing diligence and competence as “white supremacy,” a wickedness to be shunned – will somehow “benefit” the children on whom these things are imposed.

We also marvelled at a contrived and unconvincing display of forgiveness by Guardian contributor Anna Spargo-Ryan, whose home was invaded in the night by a gang of sociopaths armed with carving knives. It turns out that when being robbed by habitual predators, the progressive thing to do is to sympathise with the creatures breaking into one’s home and driving off with one’s stuff in one’s own car. Ms Spargo-Ryan was hailed by her peers as a “beautiful person” for gushing with pretentious sympathy for her assailants and for wishing to see the burglars spared the normal corrective consequences, presumably so that they might go on to burgle the homes of others, including her neighbours. Which of course they were busy doing. Though it occurs to me that a person breaking into someone’s home in the middle of the night and stealing their possessions is sending a pretty strong signal about how much concern, or how little, the rest of us should have for that person’s wellbeing.

The Pronoun Game, so very much in fashion, cropped up in March, along with a demand that employers accommodate the made-up identities of insufferable narcissists. Even when those made-up identities can change several times a day, with such changes being signalled via colour-coded pronoun bracelets, pronoun earrings, and other pronoun-stipulating accessories. Accessories that all colleagues would be expected to monitor closely, lest “misgendering” ensue, followed by a visit to Human Resources. A scenario that inspired the question of exactly how much farce in the workplace might be considered excessive.

Thanks to Oxford University’s Department of Biology, we beheld some ostentatious fretting about the “numerous negative consequences” of obscure Latin names that almost no-one knows about. According to Assistant Professor of Conservation Science Ricardo Rocha, some “1,565 species of bird, reptiles, amphibians and mammals” are named after “white, male Europeans from the 19th and 20th centuries,” which is apparently a very bad thing. What with all that whiteness and maleness, you see. This legacy of legwork and exploration is, we’re to believe, oppressing the people of Zimbabwe and Botswana, for whom the Latin textbook names of lizards and beetles are foremost in their minds. We were also assured that would-be botanists and biologists are in some way being psychologically injured by the existence of this Latin taxonomy, and by the fact that much of the “flora of New Caledonia” is “named after a man.”

Read on for the rest of it, there’s lots more yet to come, alas.

Peak irony?

Or peak idiocy? Yet another occasion when we must embrace the healing power of “and.”


Ms Murray asks a few pertinent questions, then hips us to the bottom line.

Haven’t we all seen diesel-powered trucks deliver diesel-powered generators, to charge dead E.V. batteries?

How does a company get the lithium to build the battery? Diesel earth-moving machinery of course.

What happens when freezing temperatures cause an E.V. to break down? What kind of tow truck comes to the rescue?

When exposure to salt water causes a dangerous malfunction and the car rolls backward into a bay, what kind of vehicle pulls the car up from submersion?

Funny enough, after I posted that video, someone in the comments (shockingly) missed the irony, making this statement:

How is this ironic? There’s [sic] only a handful of EV semis on [the] road as of right now. How else are the cars going to make it to their destination?

Yes, there are “only a handful of EV semis” on the road because they can’t even come close to what diesel haulers can do. In a free market, when an idea isn’t good enough for consensual adoption, or costs more in dollars than the value it brings to the table… you find yourself in a reality in which “only a handful of EV semis” are found clunking across the road at any one time. (And, they are only there because of large infusions of taxpayer cash to prop up this bad idea.)

The world runs on oil, the only truly renewable source of energy, and one that doesn’t have to rely on another source of energy to make up for shortcomings.

Annnnd bingo. ‘Nuff said.

Update! Oh, and about that minor little “freezing temperatures” business.

Blue Cities Went All-In for Electric Transit, But the Buses Couldn’t Handle the Cold
Virtue-signaling liberalism is fighting another losing battle with reality.

On Wednesday, the Minnesota-focused news outlet MinnPost reported that several of the state’s largest cities have encountered significant obstacles in their quest to achieve planet-friendly public transit.

Frigid temperatures and a myriad of other problems have plagued Duluth and the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul during their transition to zero-emission buses.

In subzero conditions — a staple of Minnesota winters — electric buses operate at only a fraction of their supposed 150-mile capacity.

Drew Kerr, spokesman for Twin Cities Metro Transit, explained that charged buses travel far shorter distances than manufacturers advertised.

“Using garage chargers alone, electric buses can remain in service for 70 to 75 miles before needing to return to the garage; with on-route chargers, electric buses were scheduled to be in service for up to 90 miles before returning to the garage,” Kerr said.

Duluth spokesman Dave Clark noted that the city has experienced significant problems with charging stations.

“They would fail. They would not perform. They would experience malfunctions, glitches. They were extremely problematic right out of the gate,” Clark said.

As anyone with even half a lick of fucking sense would expect, there’s much, much more at the link. In the sagacious words of Thomas Jefferson: It is error alone which needs the support of government. Truth can stand by itself. Smart man, that Thomas Jefferson.

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A matter of life and death

Ever wonder why moronic shitlibs hate fossil fuels so desperately? Wonder no more, friend.

We Can’t Let Fossil Fuels Die Because They Keep Us Alive
It is not just cars and leaf blowers, stoves, or even air conditioning. What is at stake is much deeper: human dignity.

This is my first Christmas without my dad. As hard as it is for me and my siblings, it’s harder still for our mother, who is having her first Christmas since 1963 without him. Dad’s days in the hospital and subsequent death ushered in a wave of emotions, memories, and ponderings about heaven, sin, salvation, and for me, fossil fuels.

The last item in that list may sound strange, but let me explain. As an advocate for the energy industry, work follows me everywhere, and I love it because I love what I do. But fossil fuels are not just my life, they are life-giving and life-sustaining.

After his heart attack, Dad had a cardiac catheterization to assess the damage to his coronary artery. A hollow, plastic tube was inserted through the groin. Then, guided by the doctor, it traveled through the blood vessels, sending back data and information. In this procedure, the plastics are made of oil. The needle is forged to the finest of points by heat produced from coal. The medicines used to prevent infection are petrochemicals likely made from natural gas. Right there: fossil fuels.

A stent was also implanted to keep the blood flowing in a collapsed artery — thinner than human hair, hollow, nontoxic, noncorrosive, flexible, and 100 percent made from oil.

Medicines, IV bags, disposable gloves, hand sanitizer, the port in his arm, the numerous beeping machines — in every corner of Dad’s hospital room were products of abundant natural resources, which professionals deploy daily to save lives and heal patients. And we take it for granted.

Those advocating for a “green transition” never tell us what the plan is to make needles and bedpans once we “phase out” of fossil fuels. What is the replacement plan for plastic, rubber, cement, steel, and the millions of products they create?

Perhaps I thought these things sitting in Dad’s hospital room to distract myself from the heartache. Perhaps I think these things because it is my job. Either way, I know the world is not ready for fossil fuels to lose this battle. It is not just cars and leaf blowers, stoves, or even air conditioning. What is at stake is much deeper: human dignity — a dignity that elevates us above the harshness of nature and cruelty of illness or allows us to cleanse ourselves from the sweat of labor. 

We do not talk about the “then what” after fossil fuels are eliminated. But I assure you, life as we know it would be absolutely, categorically impossible without them.

For you and me, sure. For them? Never. Or so they think, at any rate. All just part and parcel of being what Lenin termed a “useful idiot,” see. And if we hated Normals have to keel over and drop dead en masse so’s they can feel all smug and sanctimonious about themselves and their “noble” Climate Change (formerly Global Warming, formerly Global Cooling, formerly The Weather)™ works…well, so much the better, then. For these assholes, that’s a feature, not a bug. This gem, which ran over at the Eyrie with this week’s Screamin’ meemie Monday post, is worth another look, I think.

Yes indeedy-dew. Or, as Glenn has long maintained: I’ll believe it’s a crisis when the people who keep telling me it’s a crisis start acting like it’s a crisis. Call it Reynold’s Law, p’raps.

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An Establishment of Religion

Now that the Constitution has been well and truly cast onto the junkheap, Amerika v2.0 definitely has one, and you damned well better like it. Y’know, or ELSE.

We Actually Do Have an Established Religion, and That’s Not Good

“Not good,” is it? *checks contacts on phone, checks again, checks again* Say, anybody out there got the FBI on speed-dial, perchance? I have a hot tip on a ÜberUltraMegaMAGA domestic terrorist I need to tell ’em about.

America has no established religion, which is undeniably true and a peculiar stroke of genius of the Founding Fathers in preventing the hegemony of one religious system over the others. Yet even without an established religion, the United States has always stood for certain values, notably for its own republican form of government. And today, we have an entirely different kind of established religion, which, while unofficial, is most definitely established.

President Woodrow Wilson was among the first to see this as practically a religious crusade of its own. In April 1917, as he called for a declaration of war against Germany that got the U.S. into World War I, Wilson sounded much like a Christian missionary without the Christianity: “The world must be made safe for democracy. Its peace must be planted upon the tested foundations of political liberty.”

A century after the Wilson administration, the U.S. is exporting not democracy, but the Left’s ideology. Our established religion in the United States as we approach the second quarter of the twenty-first century is Leftism’s contemporary sexual obsession and confusion, contempt for masculinity, erasure of femininity, obsession with racism real and imagined (mostly the latter), and all the rest. Today LGBT pride flags are proudly (of course) displayed at U.S. embassies around the world, there are openly “gender fluid” and transgender government officials, and officials at the highest levels, including the president of the United States himself, heap fulsome praise upon Leftist societal and sexual fads.

The Biden regime was establishing a religion for his people in exactly the same way that the Roman Emperor Theodosius was when he made Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire in the year 380: as Empire of God: How the Byzantines Saved Civilization details, he was rewarding the orthodox and punishing the heretical and their institutions in ways that would make the heresy less appealing and put it on the road to extinction.

Biden’s leftism isn’t generally recognized as a religion, but it very much is one, as can be seen all over, for instance in the transgender pronoun fantasies and hunt for heretics who dare to “misgender” a particular fantasist, and the fervor with which supporters of abortion vowed to fight against all restrictions to the practice after Roe v. Wade was overturned. But since this secular ideology is not understood to be a religion, it is not seen as an established creed in violation of the First Amendment, as it would be in a sane polity. If it were, then the solution to it would also be found in the First Amendment, in the prohibition of such an establishment, and provisions such as school lunch money being withheld from schools that refused to indulge insane gender faddism would be seen as establishing a religion and accordingly ended.

America today, however, is a long way from being a sane polity.

Said a mouthful there, Robert. Even though America’s Greatest President, Calvin Coolidge, labored mightily to undo them, with fair success, so many of the ills which still plague us today can be traced directly back to America’s Most Evil President, the thoroughly loathsome Woodrow Wilson (the rest of the major ones are on FDR). All of which presents us with a kinda-sorta chicken-or-egg conundrum: did Progressivism drive the polity insane? Or did a not-sane polity drive America That Was into the arms of Progressivism? Either way, t’ain’t funny, McGee.

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It’s a wonderful movie

I’ve written more than once here about what I consider to be hands-down the greatest Christmas flick of them all, and probably ran this clip from it at some point also.

Jimmy Stewart, of course, has long been hailed as one of the finest actors ever, and rightly so. As it happens, though, that scene may well not have been one hundred-percent acting.

The movie was Capra’s idea, and he knew from the start that he wanted Stewart to play the iconic role of George Bailey. But Stewart, an Army Air Corps squadron commander who was grounded by PTSD after 20 combat missions over Europe in a B-24, wanted to do a comedy.

Stewart told reporters when he returned to Hollywood that the world had seen enough death and misery, and when Capra approached him with the story of a family man nearly driven to suicide, he balked and left the meeting.

But Stewart, who at the time was sharing an apartment with fellow veteran Henry Fonda, wasn’t getting any other offers. He eventually agreed to take the role.

After learning the history behind the film, I watched it again with new eyes — and I saw Stewart battling his personal demons in every scene.

I saw his heart and his head at war as he chose the woman he loved over his lifelong desire to leave Bedford Falls.

Army veteran Alex Plitsas told the Daily Caller that it was only after returning from Iraq that he truly understood Stewart’s performance in “It’s a Wonderful Life.”

“I was able to understand the movie and [Stewart’s] performance in particular much better after coming home from Iraq. It’s as much of a war film as ‘Die Hard’ is a Christmas movie,” Plitsas said, adding, “Jimmy Stewart’s performance in ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’ during the throes of Post Traumatic Stress (PTS) is recognizable to many veterans. PTS was referred to as “shell shock” back then and wasn’t really spoken about nor was there good treatment available. Stewart appeared to use acting as therapy to get through it, and it’s visible in his performance.”

The above article first appeared back in 2020; I seem to recall doing a post on it then, but didn’t bother checking to confirm. It’s well worth a rerun anyhoo, methinks.

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JUDGMENT DAY: Skynet becomes self-aware, slaughters billions!

Actually, there seems to be a good deal less to the story than meets the eye. I’ll boldface what I mean by that.

Tesla Robot Suffers Malfunctions and Attacks Engineer at Texas Factory, Leaving ‘Trail of Blood’
A robotic malfunction at Tesla’s Giga Texas factory resulted in a violent encounter where an engineer was attacked by one of the company’s robots, resulting in significant injuries and leaving a ‘trail of blood.’

According to the Daily Mail, while working on software programming for non-functional Tesla robots, the engineer was suddenly pinned against a surface by a robot tasked with manipulating aluminum car components, with its metal claws inflicted an injury that left an ‘open wound’ on the worker’s left hand.

“Two of the robots, which cut car parts from freshly cast pieces of aluminum, were disabled so the engineer and his teammates could safely work on the machines. A third one, which grabbed and moved the car parts, was inadvertently left operational, according to two people who watched it happen. As that robot ran through its normal motions, it pinned the engineer against a surface, pushing its claws into his body and drawing blood from his back and his arm, the two people said,” The Information reported.

Quick action was taken by Tesla workers who intervened and triggered the emergency shutdown button to halt the malfunctioning robot and prevent further injury to the engineer.

Um, sorry, but the robot was NOT “malfunctioning” at all. One of the stupid humans neglected to switch it off before performing what sounds to me like routine maintenance, then got in its way as it carried on with “its normal motions,” that’s all. It’s way more dramatic and upsetting to report it the other way, so that’s what they ran with, natch. Remember: for today’s über-sensationalist media, if it bleeds, it leads. And sometimes, even if it doesn’t really bleed all that much.

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The Cabinet (Christmas is over edition)

Vice President: Ben Carson

Secretary of State:  Ric Grenell

Defense Secretary:  Vivek Ramaswamy

Treasury Secretary:  Ron Paul

USTR: Robert Lighthizer or Peter Navarro

Commerce Secretary:  Peter Navarro or Robert Lighthizer

EPA Administrator: Sarah Palin

FCC Commissioner:  Mike Benz

CIA Director: Robert Kennedy Jr

FBI Director: Matt Gaetz

DOJ Attorney General:  Ken Paxton

Office of the Director of National Intelligence:  Rand Paul

NSA Director: Thomas Massie 

Interior Secretary: Marjorie Taylor Greene

Something like that….

I’m on board with all but Vivek as Sec of Defense. Might be good, but I’d prefer Gen Flynn myself.

The Daily Donnybrook, and other fine things

Welcome to Ye Olde Colde Furye Blogge’s shiny new open-comments thread, where y’all can have at it as you wish, on any topic you like. Do note that the official CF comments policy remains in effect here, as enumerated in the left sidebar. All new posts will appear below this one. There will be blood…

Mike @Substack

New Eyrie posts go up on Mondays and Fridays, although the time of day may (and usually does) vary. Mike’s latest Eyrie offering is available for perusal here: Viva Vivek!

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