Page 257

A compendium of Stupid

Posted on March 22, 2022March 22, 2022 by Mike

Having savaged the droolcase Biden, slashed Veep Kumswalla into kibbles and bits, and torn Andy Koo-mo a new squeakhole, Matt the Merciless saves the best for last.

Speaking of fossils desperately trying to rise from the tar pits, Mitt Romney is back. Like we needed this? A man too dumb to beat Barack Obama. A man who took his beating lying down and apologized to his attackers for it. A man named fucking Willard.

Yes, Mitt, you were right: Russia is the main antagonist. Unfortunately, you could not make that case during a time of bad economic policies, rising world tensions, complete catastrophe at home, the attempted destruction of the American Health Care System (COVID did that, so maybe the Chinese warranted attention, too?), and an apparent regime of compete jackasses who couldn’t find their own asses with both hands and a flashlight, on a good day, many of whom have risen from the Obama Mausoleum to reoccupy the White House.

How much it must rankle you, Willard, that the man who accused you of wanting to reintroduce slavery on the campaign trail is now sitting in the Oval Office, eating pudding and soiling himself, while you howl from the wilderness about how right you were.

Here’s your fucking cookie. Now beat it.

And then there are the (allegedly) 81 million idiots who voted for, or vigorously advocated/defended this sort of stupidity. They’re ultimately responsible for this pile of dogshit.

Where is Darwin when you need him?

Where indeed. Via MisHum.

Time traveling

Posted on March 22, 2022March 22, 2022 by Mike

Lots of bitch, piss, and moan out there concerning Daylight Saving Time, much rejoicing over the vote in the Senate to make DST a year-round thing. My feeling on this burning issue amounts to basically: Meh. I don’t mind the early sunsets in winter; in fact, preferring winter over summer as I always have, I kinda enjoy ’em, honestly. But those of you out there kvetching and kvelling about how put out you are by the imposition and injustice of having to adjust the clocks twice a year, I suggest a trip to Finland in winter for some useful perspective. Consider:

Helsinki
Average Temperatures (December): High: 1C/33F Low: -4C/24F Sunrise and Sunset on December 21: 9:24am and 3:13pm

Don’t tell me, let me guess: you’re hating the place already, amIright? Well, hold onto your hats, because the farther north you go, the wilder it gets.

Kemi
Average Temperatures (December): High: -5C/23F Low: -13C/9F Sunrise and Sunset on December 21: 10:49am and 3:50pm

Hrmmm, a whole five hours of daylight? No wonder the Finns tend to drink to remarkable excess in wintertime. First time the band played there, I remember being absolutely floored by the Finnish people’s staggering capacity to lapup the joy-juice. But wait, we aren’t done just yet.

Levi
Average Temperatures (December): High: -8C/17F Low: -17C/1F Sunrise and Sunset on December 21: the sun doesn’t rise

See that? NO SUN at all. It’s that way on more than just the one December day, too.

What seemed weirder to me, though, was the summertime reversal of the sunrise/sunset craziness. For instance, in Helsinki last June 19th—generally speaking, the longest day in most countries is in June—sunset was at 3:53 AM, and sunset was at 10:49 that night, clocking in at 19 hours of daylight! When I’ve been there in summer, the crazy-long day messes with your internal clock, making it damned near impossible to get to sleep. From my own observation, most of the Finns didn’t bother to even try; they just stayed up and kept the party going until they fell over and slept wherever they landed. It was great fun, I assure you. Remember also that Helsinki is in the southern region of the country, making it one of the more moderate locales when it comes to both temperatures and sunrise/sunset times.

If you’re considering a trip to Finland, don’t let the appallingly radical swings in the sunsets and sunrises there dissuade you. Finland is a lovely and interesting country, her people a bit on the shy side for sure, but all of them decent, good-hearted folks nonetheless. The cuisine isn’t what I’d call outstanding, merely okay—dull, maybe, but certainly MUCH better than England. I love the place myself, always had a rockin’ good time over there. There’s more to life than just sunrise and sunset, after all.

A differing view

Posted on March 22, 2022March 22, 2022 by Mike

How Libtards would assume Whitey would perceive this story:

Black gurruh say her whip caught on fiyah ‘n’ shit, and black gurruh be trapped all up inside that bitch. It be on de innuhskate, all dem other peepuh just whizzin’ on by, don’ pay no tenshun, don’t stop to hep. But den some ol’ crackuh pull ovah behind huh, right? Black gurruh, she get all skayud; Whitey might be gon’ kill her ‘n’ shit, she be thankin’ nomesayn? But no, ain’ go down like dat. Skraight up, crackuh dude slam dat carruh winna with a big ol metal thang, some kind can or some shit. He buss de glass, and drag huh great big ayyyuh through dat winnah like a fuckin’ ghose! Dass some crazy-ass shit, right? But it for real, too. Dass wassup!

How Whitey actually DOES perceive it.

WARNER ROBINS, Ga. —

See? See?!? The story takes place in Georgia, horror of horrors, so right off the bat you just know there’s some racism going down.

A Cordele woman got stuck in her burning car on the interstate. As car after car passed by, one man saw something wrong and stopped to help.

“I actually wish we had more Erics because he didn’t have to do what he did. That’s why I said everybody passed,” Monica Westbrook said.

On her way to work last week, Westbrook realized her car had mechanical problems. It shut down completely on I-75 North and she barely managed to coast to the exit ramp. Then, she noticed her car started smoking, and she could not get out.

“The smoke started getting heavier and heavier, and that’s when I said, ‘Oh, my God, this car is going to catch on fire.’ Then, I attempted to get out of the vehicle and that’s when I realized I couldn’t,” Westbrook said.

Locked in, she started kicking on the back glass, attempting to get out through the trunk, but nothing worked.

“I was in panic mode — my car was full of smoke and I just couldn’t think. Cars were coming down the ramp and they were just going by. I just knew I was gone,” Westbrook said.

That’s when Eric Zastawrny spotted her car. He’s a safety manager so he had a fire extinguisher with him in his company car.

“He hit the window — he had a fire extinguisher. He was actually coming to put the car out, not realizing that I was inside the car. He actually broke the window with the fire extinguisher and pulled me out through the window,” Westbrook said.

“Pulled her out and at that time the car was beck into flames and we got away from the car,” Zastawrny said.

Westbrook says Zastawrny comforted her when she needed it most.

“When he pulled me out of the car, I just held onto him, and he just held on tighter,” Westbrook said.

Eric says it just felt natural.

Eric, incredibly enough, is a middle-aged white man. Cordele is a Negro woman. Somehow, bizarre though it may seem, neither of them were at all fussed over skin color. These are just ordinary folks, that’s all—regular American workaday stiffs brought together by unusual circumstances. Finding themselves in genuine peril, they responded by teaming up to do what needed doing, no politics, no racism, no hostility or anger involved. According to shitlibs, such a thing is an utter impossibility in our systemically-racist, genocidal country. In the slave-holder South? Forget about it.

Shitlibs are, of course and as usual, completely full of shit. Ignore them, that’s my advice.

You’re either predator or prey

Posted on March 22, 2022March 22, 2022 by Mike

Fear is a useful tool, one that reliably gets results. If they don’t fear you, you’re doin’ it wrong.

The date was November 4, 1980. Ronald Reagan had just been elected president. Ironically, it was exactly one year to the day that over 50 Americans were taken hostage by Iranian zealots under Jimmy Carter. For the likes of Col. Charles W. Scott, it marked a full year in captivity at the U.S. embassy in Tehran.

Scott later recalled the frightened reaction of his Islamist captors to Reagan’s landslide victory: “I remember specifically when one of the guards came in and said, ‘Reagan is now the new president. What do you think will happen when he comes into office?’ I didn’t say a word, I just went ‘BOOM.’ And they said, ‘Really?’ And I said ‘Yeah, the first day he’s in office after the inaugural ceremony, he’ll go back to the White House and say ‘OK, tell the Iranians if they don’t let those hostages go by midnight tomorrow night, its war.’”

A few weeks later, on January 20, 1981, quite literally as Reagan was being inaugurated, every single hostage was released. The double headline across the top of the New York Times the next day said it all: “Reagan Takes Oath as 40th President; Promises An ‘Era of National Renewal’; Minutes Later, 52 U.S. Hostages in Iran Fly to Freedom After 444-Day Ordeal.”

Richard V. Allen was Reagan’s foreign policy adviser during the campaign and his first national security adviser. I interviewed Allen on this subject. He noted that Reagan had “sought to be very careful not to inflame” or undercut the Carter administration’s diplomatic work, refraining “from doing or saying anything that would jeopardize whatever the [Carter] administration was doing to secure the release of the hostages.” But, said Allen, “we … never discouraged any journalist from thinking that, better yet, writing or saying, in effect, ‘the Iranians had better watch out, make their deal with Carter now, because once Reagan is in office, things will be radically different.’”

The outgoing Carter administration enhanced the Reagan threat through a high-level team engaged in negotiations with Iran. In the words of one Carter official, the team was ordered to communicate that “it will be a whole new ball game after January 20.”

The Iranians were convinced. The hostages were released on January 20 — the very moment that Reagan was being sworn in as 40th president of the United States.

“There was never any doubt in my mind that the release, coming at the precise timing of the inauguration itself, was both a slap at Carter and fear of what would come next,” judged Richard Allen.

Why mention this lesson now? Well, fast forward to the Trump years, and Joe Biden.

The same thing happened with liberals and Donald Trump. They portrayed Trump as a trigger-happy madman with his itchy finger dangerously near the nuclear button — like Reagan, a reckless cowboy. And yet, Trump rarely used military power as president. He actually got along with crazy Kim in North Korea, so much so that some of his gushing statements about the little dictator were outrageously embarrassing. What Trump achieved in the Middle East, with the president and his team getting multiple Arab nations to recognize Israel (the first Arab recognitions since Egypt in 1979 and Jordan in 1994), was tremendous. It would have earned a Democrat the Nobel Peace Prize. But no awards for Trump, as liberals were too busy framing him as a wild man.

Well, that liberal caricature probably had a positive effect in deterring someone like a Vladimir Putin.

Going back to 2014, recall that Putin plowed into the Crimea a year into Obama’s second term, and that Obama had infamously in an open-mic moment told Putin lap-dog Dmitri Medvedev in 2012 that he would have “more flexibility after the election.” A grinning Medvedev ghoulishly and greedily replied, “Yes, I tell Vladimir!”

Vlad listened. Putin, nurtured in the KGB, learned to respect strength and prey on weakness.

Again, a president who understood this was Ronald Reagan. “If you were going to approach the Russians with a dove of peace in one hand, you had to have a sword in the other,” said Reagan. “We had to bargain with them from strength, not weakness.” Reagan’s motto toward the USSR was dovorey no provorey, Russian for “trust but verify.”

And yet, that was not what Barack Obama did. Obama had approached Putin with a dove in one hand and a bouquet of roses in the other. Obama showed weakness, and the Russians exploited it. Putin abused it.

Reagan took pride in the fact that the Soviets didn’t gain “one inch of ground” while he was president. Indeed, they did not — and that was so after they picked up nearly a dozen satellite states in the immediate years before Reagan, under Presidents Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford.

Joe Biden is bringing us back to the Obama years and even the Carter years, when the Soviets invaded Afghanistan (seven weeks after the Iranians seized Americans as hostages in Iran) and picked up client states left and right.

Whatever Putin’s reasoning, it is undeniably striking that he didn’t seek to annihilate Ukraine under President Donald Trump. For four years, he hit the pause button. Now, his troops are everywhere in Ukraine. It happened under Joe Biden. That is a fact that cannot be shrugged off by Trump haters. In fact, fair-minded liberals get it: “OK, but if Putin thought Trump was really that supportive of him, why didn’t he invade when Trump was in office?” Bill Maher recently asked. “It’s at least worth asking that question if you’re not locked into one intransigent thought.”

It sure is.

Yet somehow—all the above being manifestly correct, easy to comprehend, and beyond debate—the Left will still go right on insisting that we rely on displays of abject weakness, groveling, self-abnegation, and piteous bowing and scraping to produce the desired bargain, restraint, or concession from our adversaries. It’s baffling, really. Are they just stubborn and stupid, clinging to failed strategies and tactics despite abundant historical evidence that they just don’t work—worse, that they often backfire, bringing about the exact opposite of the object they hoped for. Or is their knee-jerk, reflexive hatred for America and Americans—their implacable wish to see her brought low, their dogged belief that American failure and humiliation are GOOD things—so powerfully ingrained in them that bargaining from weakness is the only option their stilted intellects can conceive of, just as a matter of moral probity?

Are they simply bugfuck nuts? Madmen so secure in their anti-American, pacifist, collectivist catechism’s essential righteousness that it can, it will, it MUST ultimately prevail? Are they wilfully blind to observable reality? Forever locked into an untenable system of belief, an indefensible position, an unworkable ideology? Do they imagine themselves and their ideas so persuasive, so appealing, so obviously superior that sooner or later they will bring the rest of us into agreement with them, allowing them to get to work proselytizing the rest of the world, thereby finally bringing the dream of global socialism into real-world existence?

It’s a puzzle we’ll probably never put together, I guess. In light of that, we should halt any further effort to understand and/or accomodate them, and move on instead to suppressing them, to subjugating them. We should, at long last, teach them fear, re-implanting it so deeply in their minds that the mere thought of trying to regain their lost influence and power makes them involuntarily piss themselves.

Death Wish Nation

Posted on March 21, 2022March 21, 2022 by Mike

Kuenstler on our collective suicidal derangement.

The defining moment last week in America’s ongoing mental health crisis was U Penn swimmer Lia Thomas’s record-setting win in the NCAA women’s 500-yard freestyle championship race. It was celebrated in the sports news as a thing — that is, an alleged feature of reality. Lia Thomas began “transitioning” in 2019 when “she” was a full-grown male human being, otherwise known as a “man,” and was already competing in men’s NCAA swimming events. One thing you can conclude from this is that the board of the NCAA is insane.

Gee, wonder if the FemiNazis are beginning to rue some of the unwise choices they’ve made over the years yet. As this feller Thomas, might there not be a more, ummmm, practical motivation behind his “transition,” we wonders?

Seems to me the truly important “transition” here, as is true in almost every other case of a mentally-ill biological male athlete transforming himself from cellar-dwelling also-ran in competition against his fellow males into—HEY PRESTO!!—a suddenly-unbeatable champ when he’s stacked up against mere goils. It’s a pretty smooth ploy, turning radical-Left feminism’s own toxic catechism against them to take yourself from Zero to Hero in one savvy stroke.

I do hate it for the honest, decent young women who are being robbed of their chance to participate in clean, fair, and honorable athletic competition with their peers, truly I do. Hell, someday soon my own daughter could well be victimized by this same tedious horseshit, which I promise you will piss me off something awful. But this is a malady that must be burned out of the national corpus with fire, so thoroughly that it can never rise from its own ashes to lead us into a morass of folly and absurdity again. It sucks, sure, but it’s a none-too-gentle reminder of the price complacency and torpor in the face of Leftard incursion will always extract from the sane and the sensible.

It’s not the only institution in our country that has lost its mind. Are you comfortable with that?

They never asked us about it. We can only hope that very soon now they’ll come to rue their inconsiderate lapse, getting themselves a schoolin’ on how important such small courtesies are.

Outside of certain fairy-tales involving naked emperors, there is but one greater instance of a people being so willingly insulted by falsehood, namely, the still-continuing campaign to “vaccinate” and “boost” the public against Covid-19 with a genetic cocktail that doesn’t work to prevent illness or transmission of disease and has already killed or injured many thousands of people.

Yet, they’re still out there pimping for the vaxxes: Rochelle Walensky of the CDC, Dr. Anthony Fauci, Mary Basset (New York Commissioner of Public Health), and many other officials in other lands. This is a major part of the scripted suicide of the USA, along with the rest of Western Civ. Our government’s own Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) now lists a total of 24,177 pericarditis and myocarditis cases for all of year 2021, and 11,829 cases for just January and February of 2022. Do you see an ominous trend there? Those are but two deadly conditions linked to the vaxxes; there are over a thousand more.

The deluded people getting boosted now are taking on-board additional toxic spike proteins to the ones they already acquired in the first two shots. Might one predict that quite a few of them will develop a horrifying array of bodily disorders and die or become disabled in the next two years? It might soon even get hard for the Woked-up, vaxxed-up, Trump-maddened “blue” multitudes to ignore the impending mass murder they have been subjected to.

Such an unappetizing prospect might account for America’s reckless poking of the Russian bear over the future of Ukraine, a distraction from the developing picture of national assisted suicide here at home. The prospect of World War Three is apparently more compelling than the emerging information that indicates the US government is killing off its own population, and lying its face off in the process.

I get that, actually. Is it any wonder? There are two options that explain this: with our own despotic goobermint slaughtering us en masse, we’re the ones who’ll be doing all of the dying. On the other hand, in the WW3 scenario there’s at least a middling-fair chance the politicians and bureau-rats will be blowed up all to hell and gone right along with the rest of us poor schlubs, which I myself find a heck of a lot more palatable.

…Russia (has) had enough. It is doing something America no longer can do: establishing boundaries. Ukraine will not be used as a platform for further antagonisms. Our response: wreck the global economy starting with the international money system, and possibly bring on a world famine by destroying supply lines for fossil fuels and things made from them, such as fertilizer.

Our country is interested only in dissolving boundaries — geographical, as in our boundary with Mexico, behaviorally, as in the boundary between male and female, psychologically, as in the boundary between reality and fantasy, and existentially, as in being alive or dead. And now Russia, at considerable cost, has to literally teach the USA a lesson in the importance of boundaries. They are going to complete their operation in Ukraine and they’ll likely work-around the “sanctions” heaped on them. Their part of the world these days has all the production, a great many valuable commodities, and most of the world’s population.

Our part of the world seems bent on submitting to self-imposed tyranny and suicide. At least that has been the trend until now. Suddenly information is busting out from all angles penetrating and shattering the dome of unreality we’ve lived under for years. Yes, those vaxxes are killing a lot of people… yes, the Intel Community and the DNC overthrew the previous president…yes, every US Intel bigwig in the land lied to you about Hunter Biden’s laptop… yes, that laptop is crammed with hard evidence of bribery and, arguably, treason involving the current president…yes, the US economy is tanking because we’ve borrowed more money than we can ever pay back and we don’t produce enough stuff of value…and no, Russia is not “losing” in the Ukraine — rather, Russia is showing the commitment and fortitude of a nation interested in self-preservation. You think we might learn something from that?

Depends on who you’re talking about wnen you say “we,” Bill. In Amerika v2.0 the concept of “we” barely even exists, shattered by a divide grown so vast over so many years that it can no longer be spanned. There’s little discernible interest in trying to do so anyhow, on either side. The national squabble can only be resolved one way now. Most of us recognize what that means at this point; understandably, we’re reluctant to make it happen. But it’s nearly a dead cert that it will happen, like it or no. As for this mutually agreed-upon shemale/chicks with dicks/Manwoman mental breakdown which opened this post, the Bee has some breaking news for us.

NCAA Swimming Champ Caught In Possession Of Performance-Enhancing Testicles
ATLANTA, GA—Celebrations for winning the 500-yard freestyle at the NCAA Women’s Swimming and Diving Championships were short-lived for convincingly female athlete Lia Thomas, as authorities caught her in possession of performance-enhancing testicles.

“Investigators will need time to sift through the trail of evidence right now,” said NCAA’s Head of Testicle Enforcement, Bob Huevos, while holding up a jock strap, the device suspected to have been used to conceal the contraband from rigorous testing protocols. “We suspect the swimmer used this contraption to keep the performance-enhancing testicles secured between her legs.”

Blood tests of the disgraced, obviously-female swimmer have led Huevos to believe Thomas had a long history of using testicles to dose with powerful testosterone, perhaps beginning in early childhood.

“Long term testicle use like this may explain the female swimmer’s towering height, powerful muscles, dense bone structure, deep voice, and bulging crotch,” explained Huevos, “These permanent mutations from testosterone abuse would have given her a lifetime advantage over other female athletes even if she were to quit and go on estrogen. For that reason, Lia Thomas should be disqualified from competition.”

Heh—”Huevos,” no less. I see what you did there, you magnificent bastards. NCAA President Peter D’anglin declined to comment, as of presstime, on what’s being called the Nutsack-Doping scandal.

“Triggering the Irrelevant”

Posted on March 21, 2022March 21, 2022 by Mike

Vox puts up a most excellent Gab post.

The future belongs to those who show up for it. Stop whining. Start fighting by getting married, having children, and planting the acorns of the trees in whose shade your grandchildren will play.

Yes, there are risks. You might get your heart broken. You might lose half your toys. So what? Action requires risk and risk is inherent to life.

Over at the VD blog, he says that “All the cowards and incels on Gab were triggered by this,” which shouldn’t surprise anybody. Bottom line?

There is no point in whining, blackpilling, or worrying about things you can’t possibly control. If you’re not willing to take risks to build the future, if you’re not willing to live, if you’re not willing to set your face against the entropy of the universe, then you are irrelevant and your inferior genetic line will end with you, due to your cowardly narcissism.

We should all hope so; it’s better for everybody that way, frankly. Beyond that observation, all I can think to add is a hearty “Amen.”

A pathetic personal problem

Posted on March 21, 2022March 21, 2022 by Mike

A look at the sad, cowardly neurosis of the Masked Forever, Forever Masked poltroons.

Those among us who are perfectly healthy and remain dutifully masked despite the general lifting of mask mandates are making a political statement. For them, the masks meant something they continue to hold dear, cannot relinquish.

The masks were an important, probably the most important tool in the toolbox needed to destroy President Trump and the threat he posed to the Deep State and Democrat ruling class. For that ruling class, the masks were an evil genius deployment in a pseudo-crisis; for those who continue masking despite good health, the end of mandated masking abandons them to an unsure condition of political flux. The masks represent a kind of yoke, and to the still-masked among us, the end of masking means a return to an uneasy freedom that could lead to a vast majority of voters coming to their senses and re-electing Trump, for what many are convinced will be the second time.

But it is much more than Donald Trump they fear.

Freedom, self-reliance, limited government, and rugged individualism are values that do not rest easy on their minds. Living in a society where everyone is forced to hide behind an N95 is cocoon-like, comforting in a dysfunctional way. It signals the ultimate power of the nanny state they need to not feel adrift in a sea of American freedom.

The message sent by otherwise healthy maskers is that “we voted for Biden, we fear a return of Trump, we believe in the existential racism of the United States, we believe that a pandemic lie was justified to remove Trump and demoralize his supporters, and we think it’s better, just to be sure, that everyone continues to wear masks up until some unspecified period of time.”

And in the ultimate irony, the final proof of the grand masking spoof, as Title 42 expires, after forcing masks on the populace, the Democrat enforcers stand ready to open the immigration floodgates to an invasion of unvaccinated illegal aliens.

It is just so much bulls**t.

It is that, and always was. No matter; as Jesus said of the poor, these, ye shall always have with you. I called this thing from Day One, CF Lifers will recall: we’ll never again see a time in America with no Masked retards mincing nervously among us, as in Olden Thymes. We’re stuck with the damned things forever now—both Masks and the morons who love them, take your pick—and there’s a reason for that.

It worked, you see, the mask mandates. The fear campaign. The horrible illness that overcame an election, an economy, the psychological health of our children and grandchildren, our rugged individualist entrepreneurialism. Our freedom.

True, dat. Ellis concludes by over-optimism declaring that “The tables have turned…Unmasked America is rising up to unmask the maskers,” a spot of baseless, too-much-too-soon jingoism to which I can only respond with a question: Who, exactly, and how? The Masked feebs will only be uncovered via physical force, yanking their precious wubbies from off their sallow, pimply faces—a campaign I would certainly support, at least in theory, but which I can’t see ever getting off the ground. There’s a reason for that also, a good and reasonable one in this case. To wit: the very people most likely to be accepting of a broad, aggressive mask-off program would really rather just be left the hell alone, nothing more. As long as Masked mopes aren’t all up in OUR grills, we just aren’t terribly interested in putting ourselves all up in THEIRS.

In addition to the politics of the thing, the Mask is also a precious opportunity for some full-throttle virtue signalling, a thing no Karen in the lowing, cud-chewing herd has ever yet been known to let pass them by. Yet another angle—sheer blank stupidity,as evinced by the all-too-common muttonheads wearing their Face Wubbie over a full beard—we’ll just tiptoe quietly past for the nonce, I think.

PFunny, innit, how practically every problem confronting us today comes right back to the same old conflict, between those whose primary wish is to be left alone and those meddlesome puds for whom such forbearance just isn’t on the menu. Convince those assholes to tend to their own damned knitting and keep their noses out of our’n, and so much of all this angst and aggro goes away overnight. Unless and until we steel ourselves to doing whatever it takes to accomplish that end, however, The Mask and those contemptible tools enamored of them will remain with us.

Update! Whilst being schlepped around by my cousin and former badass Playboys drummer Mark on various cripple-maintenance errands today, he related an infuriating tale. It seems that the choir director at our church was forced out of his job by one of these Forever Masked bluenoses. Apparently, this woman was haranguing the director about not having a mask on during church, prattling witlessly on about how his selfish irresponsibility created a very real threat to her life. The director—a gentle, affable, and wholly conciliatory man who’s worked himself ragged for many years in the service of our church family—gently chided her with something along the lines of, ” MIz ____, you DO know those cloth masks do nothing, right?” Whereupon the old biddy (actually, if I’m not mistaken the woman is a few years younger than me) took it upon her obnoxious self to complain bitterly about being “intimidated” and “feeling threatened” and such-like at the next meeting of the church board. The miserable bint kept the pressure on relentlessly, until finally the director decided to pull the plug on the whole ridiculous non-troversy and resign his post, in the interest of restoring comity and calm before the bint had made things even worse for all concerned.

So, the direct result of this woman’s cowardice, ignorance, and petty vindictiveness is:

The church has been robbed of a tireless and irreplaceable asset
A good and decent man is out of a job he dearly loved, to which he had given of himself unstintingly for many, many years
The church has had some mighty big shoes dumped in its lap; filling them will be no simple task
Finding a replacement will also take a lot of time, I expect; it will be arduous, time-consuming, and will demand much of the congregants charged with getting it done—just more uneccessary cost imposed

It is unlikely in the extreme that the new director will be anything close to as diligent, as devoted, as musically talented, and as personable as the man they just lost for no good reason at all

This is exactly the sort of nonsense that can really wreck a church community, creating intra-personal rifts and a general miasma of unpleasantness and distrust, inflicting serious wounds that will be a long time healing. Ultimately, we can chalk it all up as yet another gratuitous cost extracted bythe Plandemic, one among innumerable others. This one in particular may look to outsiders like small beer when compared to the loss of one’s job, one’s life savings, one’s business, or one’s home. But neither is it nothing and should not be dismissed as such, if only because it was all so completely unwarranted. Tot up the final bill, and the Fauxvid Tyranny Test Run looks more and more like being a bona fide atrocity, a shoo-in for the title of Crime of the Century.

The homunculous Falsi and his abominable cohorts must all be made to pay for the havoc and misery they so cruelly wrought, and I mean pay goddamned dearly, too. Decades-long prison terms—in a REAL prison too, not some vacation enjoying the posh amenities of Club Fed—ought to be the least of their worries. Nobody seriously expects any such thing, of course. No, they’ll skate away clean, every man Jack of them—which might well be the greatest crime of all.

System of spoilage

Posted on March 21, 2022March 21, 2022 by Mike

How to drain a Swamp.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Unkinked, unserious

Posted on March 21, 2022March 21, 2022 by Mike

Or, as Arthur labels it, Justice for Cornrows.

House passes CROWN Act, banning race-based hair discrimination
The House passed legislation on Friday that would prohibit discrimination against people with hair styles associated with a particular race or national origin.

Lawmakers passed the bill, titled the Creating a Respectful and Open World for Natural Hair, or CROWN, Act, largely along party lines, 235-189. Only 14 Republicans joined Democrats in support of the measure.

Don’t ever let it be said that the US Congress can’t, or won’t, tackle the truly serious issues.

“For too long, Black girls have been discriminated against and criminalized for the hair that grows on our heads and the way we move through and show up in this world,” said Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.).

Black women in particular are more likely to report feeling discriminated against because of their hairstyles.

Or just because, y’know, reasons ‘n’ shit, nomesayin? Back over to Arthur for some closing hilarity.

I love the name, the CROWN Act, cuz dey be thinking dey dreadlocks be crownz and sheeit. See also: Kangz, We Wuz.

Criminalized you say? For your hair and the way you “move through…this world”? This is a choice example of how blaque gals move through this world…

[…a few clips of random black-beeyotch violence and mayhem…]

Whenever they “show up” in the world, chaos and violence seem to follow them.

A serious nation doesn’t devote even a second of time to the “problem” of racist hair rules.

Nope. Then again, all sense of seriousness and mature propriety fled Mordor On The Potomac and its environs long, long ago, alas.

Corn for food, not for fuel

Posted on March 21, 2022March 21, 2022 by Mike

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Couldn’t happen to a nicer bunch of assholes.

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

There are several ways we might think of all this:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Above their station

Posted on March 20, 2022March 20, 2022 by Mike

The Wokester punk-ass cockholsters dare to dream of cancelling Tchaikovsky now? SRSLY?!?

I see poor old Tchaikovsky is getting canceled by world-renowned ensembles such as the, er, Cardiff Philharmonic because he has stayed silent when he should have been noisily distancing himself from Vladimir Putin. As our friend Laura Rosen Cohen has pointed out, Peter Ilyich was quite the Ukrainophile: he used to summer there every year, just like many American politicians and money launderers. Nevertheless, his boots were on the ground far more often than Lindsey Graham’s: There are statues of Tchaikovsky and museums to him in at least two northern Ukrainian towns, as well as in Kiev.

So I thought, as compensation for disappointed Cardiff Phil customers, we’d have a little Tchaikovsky for our Sunday musical selection. Of course, ours is a department of songs, so you’ll have to suffer the great Russian with an American lyric – and, indeed, with a British lyric.

Our story begins in 1939. Well, actually, it begins in 1869. That’s when Tchaikovsky’s fellow composer Balakirev proposed Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet as a subject to young Pyotr Ilyitch. The resulting “fantasy-overture” uses the Bard’s characters and themes for a series of musical contrasts, starting with the reflective clarinet-and-bassoon melody representing the star-crossed lovers’ pal Friar Laurence, next a stormy passage for the feudin’ an’ a-fightin’ Montagues and Capulets, and then the famous soaring love theme…

As it happens, Pyotr Ilyich is a long-time favorite of mine, and the Fantasy Overture one of my favorites among his works, although I must point out that I like Tchaikosvky well enough that I can’t really think of any of them I find off-putting. The FO stands out in the Tchaikovsky catalog, with its strangely ominous and dark opening section:

Yep, we have ourselves another brilliant SteynMusic post here, folks. Incredibly, Mark missteps slightly with the next bit.

In the context of the full piece, it’s as if the composer is either too cool or too serious to let rip with the theme and blow the roof off.

Think so, do ya? Well, I don’t know what we’re to make of the thunderous close-out, then.

If that don’t blow your roof off but good, then I’d say you got yourself one hell of a stout roof. When Tchaikovsky’s signature drumroll begins its thunderous, crashing announcement of the final bars it’s some truly stirring stuff, and no mistake.

The story of What Happened Next takes some truly wild twists and turns from there, even by SteynMusic standards. Highly, HIGHLY recommended, people.

PC worlds are colliding

Posted on March 20, 2022March 20, 2022 by Mike

Peak Wokester insanity reached?

For a solid five minutes this week, I believed that an elderly woman in New York City had killed and decapitated another elderly woman. I believed it because it was in the papers. It was there in black and white. In the apartment of this ‘83-year-old Brooklyn woman’, the New York Times reported, cops found the decapitated head of Susan Leyden, a 68-year-old lady who had gone missing. Police became suspicious of the 83-year-old woman and so they ‘searched her apartment’, the BBC said, wherein they found ‘a human head’. A few days later, not far from this seemingly evil woman’s apartment, they also found Ms Leyden’s leg and torso. Grim. And surely unprecedented. When was the last time a very old woman was alleged to have killed and then gruesomely dismembered another woman?

I’m still trying to wrap my brain around the idea that an 83 year old woman would be physically capable of such a thing in the first place.

Then it hit me. I got to the very final line of the BBC report and saw these words – this 83-year-old ‘now identifies as a transgender woman’. I got further into the NYT piece, too. Its headline may have said ‘She Killed Two Women. At 83, She Is Charged With Dismembering a Third’, but then came this killer line: ‘[she] was listed as male in earlier court records but now identifies as a woman.’ So it wasn’t a woman. It wasn’t an 83-year-old lady who somehow summoned up the wickedness and the power to allegedly kill and horrifically mutilate a 68-year-old woman. It was a man. The NYT’s headline was a flagrant lie. So was the BBC’s entire account of this ‘woman’, she, allegedly killing Ms Leyden and then brutalising her corpse. I had been told, in no uncertain terms, that a woman killed a woman, and it was completely untrue.

This case is horrifying for two reasons. First and foremost because a woman has been killed and dismembered. That is appalling and it is essential that justice is done. But it’s also horrifying because the media are refusing to tell us the truth about it.

No shit, Dick Tracy, where’s the fucking squad car? And you find this revoltin’ development shocking…why, exactly?

Two of the most established media institutions in the Western world are misinforming their readers, telling us that a woman murdered a woman, because they now put ideology before truth. They put being politically pure before reporting the facts. We should not underestimate how serious this is, what a betrayal of journalism it represents. It is so clear now: the ideology of woke poses a very real, very grave threat to truth, objectivity and the gathering and dissemination of accurate information.

Not one of which things have played any discernible role in Praetorian Media “journalism” for many a long year now.

This is not an isolated incident.

A serious contender for Understatement Of The Year, that.

This is an offence against truth, reason and the very ability of society to record crimes and to understand the problems that it faces. It is also deeply insulting to the victims of male violence, who could find themselves forced in court to refer to the man who brutalised them as ‘she’. We need to stop pinning men’s crimes on women. More importantly, we need to overturn the mad idea that anyone who claims to be a woman is a woman. And we need to stop lying. BBC, NYT and all the rest of you: stop spreading misogynistic misinformation.

Welcome to the party, pal. Sadly, though, I must strongly advise you to not be holding your breath waiting for it.

What took you so long?

Posted on March 20, 2022March 20, 2022 by Mike

I expected this WAY before now, as y’all know.

I sense a disturbance in the force. In fact, I’ve been feeling the tremors for a while. Back in January, I wrote a column for American Greatness called “The Coming Dethronement of Joe Biden.” In it, I noted that Biden’s appalling performance as president would sooner or later—and probably sooner, given the ostentatious nature of his multifaceted failure—lead to his removal as president.

I should have added that it wasn’t Biden’s performance per se that would lead to his downfall. The problem, rather, was the way his performance was undermining his—and therefore his minders’ and puppetmasters’—political power. As Saul Alinsky, community organizer to the stars, noted, the “issue is never the issue.” Accordingly, the people who put Joe Biden in power—I cannot name them, but I know they are the same people who keep him in power—do not care about inflation, rising gas and food prices, COVID lockdowns or mask mandates, the porousness of our Southern border, the threat of war with Russia, or the myriad other issues that worry ordinary voters. I am quite certain, in fact, that the word “voters” brings a vaguely contemptuous smile to their faces.

They are not troubled by the suffering of the people, indeed, they approve of a certain amount of suffering. Suffering produces dependency; and dependency, in turn, is like an insurance policy for those who cater to it: the bureaucrats who fill the troughs that feed the populace. The point, of course, was never to end the dependency but to manage in such a way as to perpetuate and expand it. Joe Biden is an errand boy, a figurehead, in the metabolism of this great (not to say Great Society) act of political legerdemain.

The last several days have been full of wonder at the New York Time’s admission that, guess what, Hunter Biden’s “laptop from hell” was not—as Joe Biden claimed—“Russian disinformation.” Nope, everything that Donald Trump said to Leslie Stahl about it was true. Everything the New York Post said about it was true. Twitter and the rest of the regime media pronounced a damnatio memoriae on the Post and anyone who dared publicize the scurrilous story. The poor computer repair chap who found and publicized the dirt, political as well as sexual, on Hunter’s laptop was hounded and driven into bankruptcy. (Remember Jonah Goldberg on that poor fellow? I do. “Wait you believe the computer repair shop story? Like at face value?”)

Goldberg is but one of many who—if this were a better world and they were better people—would be scrambling madly to make a shamefaced apology to those of us upon whom the passage of time has now conferred total vindication.

Many people seem to think that the reason that the story of Hunter’s laptop—which is just as much about Joe Biden’s perfidy as it is about Hunter’s perversion—has emerged now is because it can no longer do any serious damage. The election is over, Biden won—at least, he was declared the winner, which is not quite the same thing, although it does mean that he gets to live at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

But I wonder if there isn’t something else going on. The news is full not only of stories about the New York Times fessing up, sort of, about the contents of Hunter’s laptop, but also of stories about how Hunter is likely to be indicted for tax fraud. In one sense, that is not news. I wrote about it at the end of 2020 when Hunter announced, sotto voce, that he had been informed that he was being investigated by the tax authorities. But in another sense, I suspect, that news, like the revelation from the New York Times that, what do you know, all that stuff about Hunter’s laptop was on the level, like Joe Biden’s bizarre suggestion a couple of days ago that “everybody knows somebody” who has taken nude pictures of some lover and then used them to “blackmail” the person—all that has a different valence now that the Biden Administration is seriously underwater and there are no lifelines in evidence.

The issue is never the issue. I suspect that Joe Biden is being prepped for ejection. Exactly how it will happen I do not yet know. But he is on the threshold, or possibly has even passed the threshold, where he could appear to govern. His minders understand this. They must be the ones to replace him, otherwise they themselves risk being replaced, which would be intolerable. As I say, it’s not entirely clear yet how the defenestration will take place. Obviously, Kamala will have to be dealt with first, and she will be. Look for some ground softening stories such as the Times just served up about the laptop. They won’t be long in coming.

T’is a consummation devoutly to be wished—not because it would solve any problems, not that it would fix anything, not that it would signal any monumental Ruling Class capitulation—simply because it would be a painful, humiliating slap in the face for two grubby little mountebanks who are long past due for one.

All good things

Posted on March 20, 2022March 20, 2022 by Mike

Say it ain’t so, Duck Duck Go.

Diet Google: DuckDuckGo Will ‘Down-Rank’ What It Decides Is ‘Disinformation’
Popular privacy-focused search engine DuckDuckGo, commonly considered an alternative to Google, has announced that it will be “down-ranking” sites associated with “disinformation,” along with adding “information boxes” to “highlight quality information.” The announcement received widespread backlash from DuckDuckGo supporters, who view the changes as adopting the censorship policies of the Masters of the Universe.

In a recent Twitter post, the CEO of privacy-focused search engine DuckDuckGo announced that the company would be downranking “sites associated with disinformation,” which has been a popular tactic by Google for years to reduce user access to content it considers objectionable.

DuckDuckGo CEO Gabriel Weinberg tweeted about the decision, stating that it was an effort to reduce Russian disinformation online. “Like so many others I am sickened by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the gigantic humanitarian crisis it continues to create. #StandWithUkraine️,” Weinberg stated, adding: “At DuckDuckGo, we’ve been rolling out search updates that down-rank sites associated with Russian disinformation.”

Weinberg goes on to say that DuckDuckGo will also be placing news modules and information boxes at the top of certain search results to highlight “quality information for rapidly unfolding topics.” This was a method used by many search engines and social media sites during the coronavirus pandemic to push official government narratives and information — that regularly changed drastically — to internet users.

Many were quick to point out that DuckDuckGo’s democratic approach to information was one of the major selling points of the website in the first place.

I must confess that the biggest selling point for me was simply that they weren’t Google. I’ll stick with DDG, at least for now, but won’t be cheerleading for them the way I had been until this move. It’s like this:

DuckDuckGo is apparently deciding that it has the judgment and authority to define and determine what is “relevant,” just like every other search engine. The company’s argument is that privacy and propaganda are two separate matters. Consequently, it appears the only difference between it and other search engines is that, by refraining from tracking its users, DuckDuckGo won’t know who they are censoring and propagandizing. And, per Weinberg’s “I Never Promised You a Rose Garden” defense, if any user expected more that’s on them, not on DuckDuckGo.

Perhaps. But what is on Weinberg is the fact that, like others in a lengthy line of morally weak Big Tech titans, he evidently can’t resist the temptation to shape how and what his users should consider and conclude.

As for dissatisfied DuckDuckGo users and countless others around the world, the key question remains: Where can they find a search engine that both respects privacy and rejects censorship?

Ain’t one, I’m afraid. Hopefully some enterprising soul will step up quickly to fill this new gap.

Grift most ingenious

Posted on March 20, 2022March 20, 2022 by Mike

Elon Musk vs Henry Ford.

Elon Musk is hailed as a “genius” by some.

And he is – but not in the way they mean it.

Like Henry Ford, Musk took something he didn’t invent that was essentially a curiosity and recast it in a different way. The difference being that when Henry Ford simplified the car by standardizing parts and mass producing them on an assembly line – as opposed to hand-building them, one at a time, as had been prior practice – the result was a much less expensive and far more practical car that almost anyone could afford to buy.

Musk did the opposite.

What Musk did was to rebrand the electric car as something sexy and “new” – even though the electric car concept is older than any Model T. But he made it seem new – and very sexy – by making it very quick and very sleek, with all the very latest in the way of gadgetry. All of which served to distract from its unaffordability, impracticality and inefficiency.

But the problem remained. How to sell what most people couldn’t afford?

Enter Elon’s real genius.

Unlike Henry Ford, who appealed to the marketplace, Elon Musk appealed to the government. Not merely to subsidize what he was otherwise unable to sell but – far more fundamental – to promote the sell. That is wasn’t merely an indulgence to purchase (or subsidize) an electric car.

It was a kind of moral necessity.

This is the nature of Elon’s “genius” – as contrasted with that of Henry Ford.

I always sorta liked Musk myself; he’s pretty skilled at donning the mantle of gadfly now and then, which is always amusing to me. That said, I see little if anything to argue with in Eric’s assessment here, unlovely though it is.

CF Search

Login, RSS, &c

CF Archives

Categories

2A/Mostly Guns

Alt-American

Big Dogs

Essayists

Mil

Nuttin’ But News

Odds Bodkins

Overseas/Non-US

Portals

Pure Bloggery

REAL Journalism

Substack Scalawags

The Funny Pages

Comments policy

CF Glossary

Subscribe to CF!

Shameless begging

Correspondence

Allied territory

Notable Quotes

RSS feed

.