Under The Surface

Posted on by accordingtohoyt

Last year, in our escape from lockdown Colorado, we visited a riverboat museum near Kansas City, and that was….. bizarre.

No, not the fact we went to the museum. Given how starved we were to see human beings, how addicted we are to museums, the weirder the better, and the fact I grew up on Mark Twain, it was almost guaranteed we’d go and poke about the museum.

The museum itself was also not bizarre. It was an interesting snapshot of life just before the civil war. (We incidentally found that one of my husband’s collateral ancestors (they were the only family of the name, in the town, but the name is not in his ancestry, so a brother or cousin of an ancestor) was bringing guns into slave states, in boxes marked “bibles.” Which frankly is no more than we expected. It’s rather annoying we have no idea what happened to that young man.) However, I grew up in a house that had been in the family for generations, and among people who never threw anything away that could still be used. So a lot of the dishes and the glassware looked like the stuff I used every day as a kid. Heck, a lot of the shoes and such looked like stuff you could find poking around the attics and outbuildings of the area in which I grew up. (And of COURSE we did. We were kids.)

I mean, it was interesting, but not startling or revelatory.

What was startling and revelatory was where the boat, which had sank some 150 (? I’m too lazy to look it up. Bear with me) before discovery was found: In the middle of a wheat field.

Apparently rivers, in the great flatlands of America have a tendency to meander wildly. Okay. I kind of get that. But the fascinating part is that no one had noticed. The boat sank in a time of newspapers, and reports, and writing and more importantly property records. And people have been looking for it pretty much since it sank. BUT THEY WEREN’T LOOKING IN THE RIGHT PLACE.

The family that owned the wheat field in which the riverboat was buried, had no clue it had ever been anything but a wheat field in living memory. A river deep enough that a floating palace was lost with all its contents (but no lives, save for a poor mule left tied up) just changed course slowly enough that…. well, it sort of became a wheat field.

Now, I understand that due to modern engineering this doesn’t happen anymore. Or at least it’s not supposed to. But all the same, bear with me a moment.

One of my favorite blogs was casting doubt that the republic still exists.

This is a little…. How do I put it? I love the blogger, but d*mn if you’re more depressive than I am you need to start reality-checking obsessively. (I do.)

The republic is sort of a schrodinger thing. If we’re going on “We only have a republic if it obeys the constitution as written”…. it probably ceased to exist twenty years in.

Of course it didn’t. There are…. meanderings and latitudes given and necessitated by the fact that we’re humans and that frankly tech innovation has thrown us a few curve balls that our founders, also being human and therefore fallible, no matter how amazing, could never have anticipated.

The biggest curve ball, though was mass production, mass communication and generally mass everything, which might have been a logical step in the industrial revolution, but the level to which it went was definitely had to see from centuries before.

The Mass Everything age almost necessitated the antithesis of the constitution: centralization of power, power in the hands of an unelected bureaucracy, all of it aided and abetted by the press covering it up.

If the republic is gone, it has been gone since at least the 30s, probably the 20s. Sorry, but nothing we’re seeing, from political prisoners to outrageous treason of both the People and the Country in the seats of power is new. FDR did it. Woodrow Wilson did it.

What is new and revolutionary is that we’re no longer in the “Mass Everything” age.

The left, who are the natural people — hyper social, power-craving, etc — to ascend that type of hierarchy are in control of the commanding heights of mass communication and bureaucracy, etc.

Their problem is that this is increasingly less relevant. And every time they make a major power grab, like the psy-ops we call the Covidiocy (NOT the virus. Yeah, the virus exists. It’s a severe flu, that fortunately kills very few people under 80. BUT the measures taken around and supposedly because of it, and the fear mongering in the mass media) loses them power. I’m highly amused in the grocery store by the — I’m sure corporate-enforced — announcements coming over the loudspeaker thanking us for wearing masks for “everyone’s safety.” Mind you, there’s usually ONE person in the store in a mask. Someone whose eyes look perfectly deranged and who is often dragging a masked toddler (poor thing). The rest of us at this point are treating it as “Something only crazy people and corporate entities believe is needed, anymore.”

And it will be hard, if not impossible to gin up the next panic. (which is why I’m sure the next grab will be a world war. But that’s something else.)

At this point everything those who belong to the old structures and long for centralized, massed power and communication can do only turns us against them and their obsessions. It’s sort of like…. a vaccination.

Look, America is an idea so powerful that though honored mostly in the breach, it has changed the world. Granted the echo-revolutions abroad were mostly crazy. But the fact that even the worst regimes have to FAKE being elected tells you the power of the idea.

It won’t perish. And we have a chance to ah…. really …. I hate it to say this but we have a chance to build back better, closer to the infrastructure the founders gave us, one better suited to a world of fractured production and communication.

Look at the people who supposedly have power. Note the trail of flames from their hair. No one who is winning is that scared.

But Sarah, you say, then why haven’t we revolted already.

Well — ask anyone on the left — we are revolting. Okay, jokes aside, we are rebelling. In a hundred different ways, we are turning our backs on the idea that “the best people” have our interests in mind, or that even if they did they could be trusted to carry them out, or any of that.

It used to be the institutions no one would doubt were the medical establishment that flew under the flag of ‘public health’ and public schooling. I mean, we screamed, yelled and pointed to abuses (and slow ratcheting thereof) and got told it was still mostly good. Oh, yeah, and the collection of statistics. Even when it was obvious they were lying, they were still used to slap us into silence.

I won’t say that’s a thing of the past but it’s becoming so. And it will become more so faster, the more they struggle.

Most of this type of movement is invisible, until it isn’t.

Today someone shared a meme lamenting that the right doesn’t just have right wing stations, etc. but is creating their own separate structures for information and commerce. Well, duh. The fact this is a surprise for them is amusing. For most of us, though, it’s news. We know we need it, but the movement is as yet slow and if you’re not looking in the right place you’ll never see it.

But it’s like that. This is how society changes. Not from above with fiats. That only distorts it. But slowly, from the bottom up. First almost imperceptibly and then all at once.

And then we forget that there was ever a wheat field there, and return to thinking that things are “as they ever were.” But they’re not. And you can see the signs if you look. The left is looking and getting scared. And scared people make stupid moves, which unfortunately affect us too.

Look, after a hundred years of psy-ops to make us feel isolated and small and like theirs was the inevitable future win, the surprising thing is that the worm is turning at all, not how slow it is.

Yes, we went along to get along, because we really thought we were small and isolated and because in the absence of alternate structures, we had to earn a living in their world.

For many of us it’s still that way. But the water is shifting. The silt is moving in to what was once river bed. Culture is on the move.

And there are far more of us than there ever were of them. And we’re an ornery bunch. Had to be to stand looking at mass-communication, mass-education, mass-entertainment and mass-bureaucracy, and plant our hands on our waists and say “No, you move.”

We’ve got this. It’s slow. Infuriatingly slow, because we’ve been standing (we thought) alone so long. And cold is the brotherless back, as our Dave Freer tells us.

But it’s changing. And it will heal over the break, and function again, at least for a while.

America is not dead. It is asleep. But it’s stirring. And it’s opened one eye. The rising will be swift and startling.

Keep your clothes and weapons where you can find them in the dark. And be not afraid.

257 thoughts on “Under The Surface”

  1. Ace has a post up about Axios complaining that “billionares” are financing the creation of “right-wing” online things.

    Oooh! Scary!

    I wonder how long it is before Glenn Greenwood is accused of being right-wing?

    Also, the river *obviously* moved because of global warming. I’m surprised that there was no mention of that in the museum.

    😛

    1. Greenwald (not -wood, if you’re talking about the co-founder of The Intercept) already has been accused of such, darn near every time he posts something that questions The Narrative(tm).

              1. “I hate Spellcheck! It’s inventor is my ENEMA! May he rot in HELLO!”

                Spellcheck (and grammar check) should be treated as an idiot who does not understand the genre. Let it flag what it sees as misspellings. Let it offer suggestions when you ask it to. Because sometimes even an idiot has a point.

                But do not ever, EVER give it permission to autocorrect.

                    1. I don’t know how your phone works, but on my phone, if I hit the backspace/delete key, ONCE, it undoes the autocorrect.

                    3. What keyboard are you using? There should be a “turn off auto-correct” buried in the keyboard settings, even with the Google keyboard.

                      On the “Gboard”: Settings > Text Corrections [scroll down] > Corrections – switches for Auto-correction, Undo auto-correct on backspace, etc.

                2. A Jewish woman once got a college paper about Judaism and rabbis with the comment written on it: “I thought rabbits weren’t kosher.”

              1. Just watch out for the plot bunnies. You never know when they decide to nibble on an autocarrot.

      2. It shows how insistent the left is on absolute one hundred percent lockstep conformity of thought and word to THE NARRATIVE, whatever The Party has pronounced it to be at any given moment. Any deviation from such conformity, especially when it points out the left’s hypocrisy is condemned and the thought criminal subject to efforts to erasure Stalin/Mao/Oceania style.

    2. The comment about conservative alternate publishers being established by billionaires was especially amusing, since indy publishing has been a thing since about 2005 … mostly self-financed. And I’d be willing to bet that most of those indy writers tend to the socially or politically conservative side

    3. I see Andrew Torba keeps expanding his business around Gab, if only because he’s been deplatformed from every “legitimate” source around. If I was paying sufficient attention, I think he’s launching an ecommerce site, along with a right wing alternative to payment processors. AFAIK, there are no billionaires in Torba’s circle…

      FWIW, GiveSendGo is an alternative to GoFundMe, for whenever GFM gets worried about the narrative being questioned.

      1. Yep. Torba is some kind of machine. The only guy I’m aware of that really is walking the walk when it comes to building outside and around the structures the globalist/left have taken over and corrupted. I don’t know how he does it all, but I’m glad he is.

        1. Open a savings account only for the payment processor, and keep only a few hundred dollars in it. Whatever is the minimum balance to prevent account fees. Pull the processed money out to your main account two or three times a month.

    4. But all the left wing stuff financed by billionaires like Soros, Zuckerberg, the Google folks, Dorsey, etc., is fine and dandy with them. Of course they are not against “money in politics”, what they are against is their political opponents being able to spend money the same way the leftist rich folk do. It is yet another classic example of their “do as I say, not as I do” and general projection of their sins onto others.

      1. They don’t see left-wing policies as “political” – to them it’s just ordinary good-government centrist common sense. It’s only the right-wing stuff that’s “political” and “partisan.”

        Everyone has a tendency to see their own positions as being less partisan and extreme than they actually are, but the Left has turned it up to [Numbers are a racist sexist bigoted patriarchal construct!]

        Related is the belief that “Democrats never lose an election. Not really. Not fairly.“

    5. I’m pretty sure that is already happening every time he posts against authoritarianism. I know he gets called it since he doesn’t shriek about fox to the extent that he calls out other propaganda arms (since his big thing is the use of media by the deep state and he figures the state media arms do more than enough shrieking against fox while putting out Cia press releases as news)

    6. The rivers move..because they are always looking for new paths. I read about the sunken riverboat some years back, when I was living in Missouri. Got to see what came up from below into a museum collection..

      1. Huh, I’ve driven past that any number of times given that I used to live in Council Bluffs but never heard about it. Gah. I would have totally gone had I known.

    2. Oh, yeah, they did an American episode of Time Team on that, I think. Either that, or it was Secrets of the Dead. Good show. The wheat field thing was just so freaky, because the river was quite far away by then.

      OTOH, the English Time Team had some island monastery that’s now twenty miles from the sea or something, and maybe more than one of those.

      1. I think there’s probably more than one. There are a couple of medieval ports that are now several miles inland and others which are now beneath the waves. We were married in a church that is now about 200 yards from the sea but which IIRC was described in the Domesday book as being a few miles inland

        1. For more than a century archeologists looked for the remains of cities mentioned in the Bible, that were supposed to be sea ports. It wasn’t until they were able to identify an inland site as a former coastal site that they realized the ocean had retreated a considerable distance in a couple-thousand years. They redrew their shoreline with a higher sea level and found other cities sitting right where they’d always been.

  3. The land my maternal grandfather docked his flatboat no longer exists. The place of my mother’s birth has submerged under the Mississippi. This makes genealogy difficult, as my younger sister discovered. Times change, locations do too. But the peoples desires remain.

    1. Grand ma West, had an old land grant that was given to one of her ancestors for his military service in the war of 1912, anyway between the time the land was surveyed and when he received his patent and arrived to settle it, the New Madrid earthquake occurred and his bottom land in western Kentucky, was at the bottom all right, that of the Mississippi River

  4. I still love how the build back better is a simply a dumpier plagiarism of Make America Great Again.

    Team Blue couldn’t even make their own slogan; they had to steal one and water it down to wet gruel.

    3. I’m reminded of the (ahem) ‘genius’ of a former First Lady coming up with a new campaign slogan. Can Democrats shamelessly plagiarize?

      Si Se Puede!
      (Yes We Can!, and I’m clueless about how to get the proper punctuation)

        1. That would make sense, but it doesn’t seem to work. I probably need to select a different keyboard layout. Or just use my phone as I’ve got a Spanish language keyboard on it.

    4. Only because they focus grouped the New New Great Square Frontier Society Deal, and the focus group was like, “can I have my fifty bucks and go home now?”

  5. Well said, as usual, Sarah. It makes me smile.

    There’s a group I watch on YT called “Academy of Ideas,” and their work does my heart very, very good. This video is titled “How To Be Free In An Unfree World,” and I think it will help anyone who, like me, can dip down into the pit of “Lord, I’m not enough to fix my life, much less the Republic.”

    Be well. Be optimistic. We’re Americans.

    1. Quite agree ’bout A of Ideas; those two Canuks take at least a semester’s worth of philosophy and condense it down to around 13 minutes, which is probably around today’s average attention span. Good blokes!

  6. The republic is sort of a schrodinger thing. If we’re going on “We only have a republic if it obeys the constitution as written”…. it probably ceased to exist twenty years in.

    Twenty whole years? That unbridled optimism is showing again.

    The biggest curve ball, though was mass production, mass communication and generally mass everything, which might have been a logical step in the industrial revolution, but the level to which it went was definitely had to see from centuries before.

    aka the *one* thing Marx got right: society is downstream of technology/economics.

      1. True.

        But, some of these relationships are chicken-and-egg, or what some folks might call ‘mutually-coupled’. Tech influences and is influenced by a lot.

  7. Seems some keep trying to create an Incident to get/let thing ‘go hot’ – but it’s NOT that sort of war. And the ones ‘they’ want to blame are (so far, at least) smart enough to avoid ‘going hot’.

    2. Going “hot” wouldn’t even be that way either. I’d expect it to simply be cutting the major in roads to various cities and letting them burn themselves out.

      Would anyone really miss DC, if we simply lost contact with it?

      I suppose I’d regret the loss of the Smithsonian archives, but it’s been since August (had to check) since I last heard back from them as is, so I’m not sure I’d notice that much.

      1. DC, has water access, a large military presence and as the seat of power might be preserved, at least for a while, at least the federal area around Pennsylvania and Construction Avenues. But the other big cities, they are barely hanging on as it is. Most large American cities are already on the road to collapse. And the ones that seem to be hanging on the best, such as Orlando; Boston, they have drastically shifted left in their most recent elections. And I suspect they to will start to descend into leftist oblivion.

        1. Large metro areas are very heavily dependent on regular maintenance to function. And at least some of that maintenance depends on supply that only exists outside of metro areas. Any city with its transportation access cut, or even severely hampered, is going to feel the pinch within two days at most. That pinch will only grow over time.

          Our infrastructure is still a lot more exposed than I’d like. Especially around older cities on the East Coast. Like DC. Which is why the military and civil forces watch very carefully people who show undue interest. As they bloody well should. I’d like to see better funding, support, and improvements to our infrastructure- sane improvements, mind. That isn’t likely to happen with leftists in charge.

          One can only hope President Trump or DeSantis, whoever gets in next, cleans house but good and puts people in positions of power that are 100% on board with making our country great.

          1. I’d like to see better funding, support, and improvements to our infrastructure

            –
            But there is no reason the government has to do it, and all manner of reasons it shouldn’t. If taxes weren’t so high, private businesses would have more money available for maintenance.

            Privately-owned parking lots are kept in a LOT better condition than the ‘public’ roads.

            The bigger an organization becomes, the more room it has for corruption. The U.S. federal government has become so monstrous and bloated, corruption is the norm, rather than the exception. Where the government spends money, how much, and on what, are all determined by political cronyism. Support some outrageous power grab, get a federal project in your state/district which is largely paid for by people who will never see it. Vast fortunes are transferred from the people of some states to the governments of other states in ways that were never envisioned by the Founders.
            ———————————
            “So you want to negotiate, do you? Have you ever seen The Fifth Element?”

            1. Indeed. What I want is to get government bureaucracy and red tape away from those things we can best improve on our own. Nuclear isn’t the only thing being held back by said bureaucracy.

          2. At least as important as a President Trump or DeSantis is Tea Party/GOP base control of Congress.

            1. More critical is getting State Houses and Sec State/ Attorney General of states. With Soros funded Sec State there’s a tendency to put voting changes in by fiat and the State Houses have been wishy washy even in the red states. It’s not a guarantee (C.F. Georgia in 2020 WTAF?!?), but without that fraud goes from possible to almost certain. We need more state houses to get better control of Congress via “Gerrymandering” (Hey my town is one of the ones in the original gerrymander 🙂 , smile when you say that). The other thing that would help would be a national movement to assigning electoral votes as Maine and Nebraska currently do, one per congressional district plus overall winner gets the 2 senate votes. This makes fraud via a single corrupt city/county (E.G. Atlanta, Philadelphia) less profitable (3 votes in the case of Atlanta instead of 16). If one could get it in some large blue states (California, NY) one might actually se some republican electors from this regions, although given current State houses in those states its highly unlikely

              1. We also need to go back to every representative represents the same number of people. I prefer the Wyoming plan, where representatives are assigned in multiples of the lowest state population. This would increase the house to about 650 or so.

        1. I quite enjoyed and was impressed by the Smithsonian back in the fifties. Today I wouldn’t make the effort of crossing the street to go inside.

          1. Jim if you did that you’d miss a treat. Air and Space is awesome (and the Udvar-Hazy annex out in Virginia is better). National Portrait museum is astounding especially the upper floor with drawers of cameo sized portraits (often of deceased children, so sad), Natural History is excellent, American History fun but ignore the silly tranzi writeups. The other art museums are awesome (Hirshorn, Freer and Sackler especially). Haven’t been in either of the newer museums (African American history and American Indian). likely lots of cool items, although plenty of tranzi dunning so probably no good for our blood pressure.

        2. There used to be an aquarium full of large fish in the basement of one of the downtown buildings. Commerce? I remember going down there to watch the fish whenever a business trip required too many meetings with too many people running around with their hair on fire.

          2. It was in the basement of Commerce on 14th St. My dad worked for Justice out of the Bond Building, which was also on 14th (back when it was mostly the porno shops and hookers strip in the 80s), so we’d go into the office with him and walk over to see the sharks fed.

            1. Searching for a “professional courtesy” joke….

              I like good lawyers, but it’s almost funny how predatory they can learn to be. Nick Rekieta’s crew of lawyer bloggers were just watching the Rittenhouse trial in such detail….

              2. In his defense, my dad wasn’t a very (financially) successful lawyer, which is why he ended up at Justice reviewing FOIA requests so he could put 3 daughters through college. Jokes on him though as in the end we all mostly got through on scholarships and GI bills.

              4. Find an engineer in the right circumstance, and you will notice that they can be just as weird, just as off kilter from the ordinary understanding of sanity. Or at least, some engineers.

                I’m not talking the usual sort of mental illness. I mean the sort of thinking where an engineer would just get why the choice gets made that way, but laymen just look at them funny when engineers talk about it.

                Occupations and hobbies, what we do, shape us. Professions can be extreme occupations, and can shape us extremely.

              5. As someone who has the dreadful Esq. suffex, I can tell you that watching it was like the Super Bowl and final four for those of us with law degrees.

            2. I had a project in the 80s which required me to visit the Commerce Dept. (They had a computer with a 10 MEGABYTE HARD DRIVE!) I never heard of the fish tank, but it was an interesting experience.
              I think Tip O’Neill held a door open for me there. At least, a portly gentleman with a shock of silver hair and a large, red nose did so.

      3. I think that a neutron bomb over DC would materially improve human well being. However, much like a similar event over Davos, it would also take in a significant number of hookers, strippers, rent boys and members of the servant class with them. I suppose it’s like Abraham’s dickering with God over Sodom and Gomorrah. Would you destroy the city if there are fifty righteous within the city?

      4. I’d be mildly disappointed not to see the Air & Space Museum again, and the Library of Congress’s online resources come in handy now and then, but losing them would be a small price to pay to get Federal bootheels off our backs.

          1. True enough. And there’s other examples and replicas of most of what they have in DC proper, and there are probably backups of the LoC content, as well.

      5. I think nukes on DC, Boston, Philthydelphia, Baltimore, NYC, Newark, Buffalo, St. Louis, New Orleans, Richmond, Atlanta, Miami, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Portlandia, and Seattle would fall under the head of civil improvements.

          2. I grew up outside Richmond. Got the pink monkey treatment from my neighbors, but still sentimental. HATE the gutting of Momument Avenue.

            1. My husband’s a Virginia boy. When the house gets cold I say the words “Monument Avenue” to him to save on electricity.

            2. I’m still stuck just outside the RIC for job, so I’d appreciate it if we can hold off a few years. But yes, they’ve done such a good job of gutting it in the last 12 months that the remainder is no great loss

              OTOH, our fabulous new LtGov will be working there soon, so…

        2. You missed New Haven, CT, which is an important target for wiping out a good portion of the next generation of the establishment.

            1. I have family friends from around there, too, and they’re not establishment, and I’d hate to see them die. Alas, New Haven happens to be home to Yale. Unless there is either a revolution or its students are wiped out, those students and their peers from Harvard will soon enough be occupying positions of power in the government and corporate world, or they’ll become academics. They’ll either be aiding the Feds in oppressing us, or else indoctrinating a another generation of Americans into being American-hating Marxist Commiescum.

                1. Maybe. I hope so. I agree we’re seeing growing awareness and a slow shift in perceptions. I’m not just sure the shift is happening fast enough to counter the tyrants before it all comes off the rails.

              2. There are hundreds of R1 and R2 schools. Some of them, in Red states, are deeply broken places that are a terrible influence on students.

                They aren’t the perfect fictional dystopian brainwashing machines.

                Okay, yeah, Iny League students buy into the mystique of the Ivy League, and are perhaps a bit more invested in insanity than other students.

                It is a quantitative difference, not a qualitative difference.

          2. And no mention of Chicago, that cancerous boil on the neck of an otherwise rural conservative farming state.

            1. The one thing I’d miss about Chicago was the Museum of Science and Industry. OTOH, when I was last close enough to consider a visit, the news reports of crime in the area told me that it had changed too much for my taste.

              I worried that Oregon plates on the car would make it a really bad idea to park near the museum. Sigh. I loved the place when I was young.

          3. As much as the first president of Yale (wasn’t Yale then anyhow) Abraham Pierson would be rooting for you to level his school (especially the Divinity School which is what he started and has been apostate for at least 50 years) please don’t nuke New Haven. Louis’ Lunch (alleged initial home of the hamburger) and Frank Pepe’s Pizza Napoletana and Modern Appiza are just too good to lose.

        3. Decorating lamp-posts is far less destructive and indiscriminate. The buildings are not at fault.

        4. No need to nuke Detroit; it would be an improvement.

          I used to wonder about cities in ancient times, that people lived in for thousands of years, and apparently just walked away. All through Central and South America, the Middle East, the Balkans, Cambodia, and India. And then in Russia after the Soviet Union dissolved, when everyone just dropped what they were doing and hauled ass, and the only things there now are animals and urban explorers.

          Other than a handful of tiny Gold Rush towns we haven’t seen that in the US, but given what Flint and Detroit have become, it doesn’t seem as unlikely as it would have not long ago.

    3. It looks like three major opportunities for WW 3 to get started (as best as I can puzzle, anyway).

      A) Russia v Ukraine. Aside from Brandon and son’s economic interests, I don’t see a good reason for the US to be interested, but that’s not the way the narrative is running.
      B) China v Taiwan. I’m thinking of the short story “Sucker Punch”, and recalling China’s excellence in design and manufacturing (did I skip a /sarc tag? Sorry). It promises to be ugly.
      C) Iran vs civilization, especially the US and Israel. Sure as hell looks like FICUS is bound and determined to enable Iran on that one.

      OTOH, NYC is going to a full vax-passport system, to be implemented just as DeBlasio skips town. That might be more interesting than scenarios A, B, and C. And yeah, I hate interesting in this context.

      1. A system that the current NY AG and candidate for governor heartily endorses and wants “expanded nationally”. Because there isn’t a totalitarian policy that Democrats don’t embrace.

            1. “WHAT ARE YOU? SOME KIND OF FUN POLICE!?”

              — Rough paraphrase of SF Mayor London Breed (I think) when asked why she had been unmasked at an indoor event in contravention of her own policies.

            2. Also, Kotek was at that shindig (for LGBTQXYZ+-) toted as the next governor of Oregon, and the first full lesbian one.

              Yes, flat out said “Tina will be the the first out-lesbian Governor in the country!”

              How many of them can we make die?

      4. There’s also a D and E.

        D: Some time in the next 90 days we have a Texas Power Outage with significant casualties and damage that’s directly traceable to Biden’s policies and executive inability,

        E: 2022 election is the same level of obvious fraudfest as 2020, making it 100% obvious that “voting our way out” is off the table.

        1. Agreed that scenarios D and E are all too likely, but I can’t imagine how either or both would help instigate WW 3 directly. OTOH, either could help trigger ACW 2.0, and *that* could lead to international fuckery. Whee.

  8. I wish I was there, not here. I’m not so sure about Europe. There is stirrings, but if they lead to anything it might not be something better.

  9. “Instant” changes are almost never instant.

    For example, let’s take a look at Hollywood. You have to assume that any movie in the theater right now was probably started before COVID happened. It might have even been finished during the time when “flatten the curve” happened. There’s a lead time, and when things start and finish are sometimes two entirely different times.

    Hell, Great Aunt could probably tell us about when she wrote a book for TradPub, and by the time she finished, the publisher had changed in two or three different ways and she could probably never even get that book published in the new publishing regime.

    The world is always in motion. That you can’t see motion doesn’t mean it isn’t happening.

    1. I read a book recommended by Sarah a few years ago, ‘America 3.0’. It was great, talked about a number of things you talked about in this post.

      I’m glad I live in a red state. The Covidiotcity is forcing people to choose. Red states are getting the best law enforcement.

      I also expect a surge in small business innovation from people who decided to strike out on their own over the mandates, in the next 3-5 years.

      Bit of a bumpy ride to their defeat. A bit more than a bumpy ride in Australia, Austria, and Germany. 😕

        1. *nod* Contingency planning when you’re on the spot is just good sense. May your eventual exfil be smooth and unburdened by the friction of busybodies, dead bodies, and all bureaucratic officialdom.

          1. I might be serving as an infil point for post-Blue reclamation. But, the bodies are buried deep. Amazing what you can do with low water levels in the dams and enough chicken wire.

      2. The thing is, there aren’t really blue states. There are blue cities that are big enough to rule the state. In Pennsylvania, go to the middle of the state, and you won’t notice COVID restrictions. Gotta love the Amish!

          1. Downtown Pittsburgh this past July wasn’t too bad. Sure, there were “mask required” signs up at some of the museums, but nobody hassled you if you wore it around your chin as soon as you were past the entry point.

  10. I guess I can’t just put a link in without saying something.
    So, submitted without unnecessary commentary…

    1. We were in Wisconsin last year just before Madison blew up (statue removal idiocy). Outside the urban areas, totally normal.
      For Dr. Tanstaafl.

      2. That’s just it, I think it’s only the big, lots cities. I’m twenty minutes outside Philly, and it’s different.

  11. *bounces up and down in chair* I know exactly where you were! I used to go to that museum with my folks and Sibling when we lived in that part of Nebraska. And yes, it is a great museum, and the bird-watching and all is superb.

    [Goes back to read rest of article]

      1. The fact that there’s more than one (OK, maybe two) “boat under a field” places, says something about change…

        Not entirely sure what, but something.

        1. Well there is possibly a third in Texas and others. Contrary to popular belief coasts move around for reasons not due to co2

  12. And if, when all a vigil keep
    the West’s asleep! the West’s asleep!
    alas, and well may Erin weep
    That Connaught lies in slumber deep
    But, hark a voice like thunder spake
    the West’s awake, the west’s awake.
    Sing Oh! Let England quake
    We’ll watch till death for Erin’s sake.

    Thomas Davis, of course.

  13. Gadsden flags, witty anti-authority stuff on masks, masks under chin and “Oh, sorry, I forgot.” People seeking out “cancelled” businesses to shop at, actively avoiding things made in China. “Let’s go, Brandon” and “Paging Lesko, Brandon,” and so on. We’ve been rebelling in small ways, and the word has gotten out, despite the best attempts of the Powers That Think They Be to smother it. Parents standing up to school boards and making them look like fools by reading classroom and library material “that you can’t read here, It’s obscene!” into the official record.

    ‘We are the little folk, we, too little to love or to hate
    But leave us alone and you’ll see/ how fast we can bring down the state!” R. Kipling

    1. Yeah, the Oregon mask mandates are still in effect with the state health-nazis planning to go for a :”permanent” edict, to be eased when true submission has been achieved. So, there’s some compliance. And complaints.`

      Most businesses have the employees masked up (OR-OSHA has rules, but the fines aren’t enforceable *if* the employer is willing to fight), and customers are supposed to be masked up. It varies, but 50 to 70% compliance seems to be the norm. OTOH, at least over here in Occupied Eastern Oregon the flyover counties, we don’t get nasty comments for being unmasked as customers. On the gripping hand, medical facilities enforce some flavor of mask or shields. Made my three(!) medical visits last week so much fun. At least they ignore exposed nostrils.

      1. Mandate is long gone here in Ohio, but where there are stores with “mask required” signs up compliance tends to be low, usually somewhere in the 20-40% range. Although I was horribly disappointed to attend an orchestral Christmas concert on Sunday, with no “mask required” sign, where well over 80% of the people were masked. I bailed after about 45 minutes, because I started feeling like I was in a room full of crazy people.

        1. I felt like that a lot when there was no attempt to enforce masking in a lot of the local stores yet voluntary compliance was about 50-60%. No notable upticks in it yet, thankfully, but we’re still early in the Omicron fearmongering so we’ll see.

  14. Having taught elementary school in my latter days, I just wish that kids (more than 3000 dead from the jab) weren’t paying the price for this criminal conspiracy and their parents’ stupidity…But it was ever thus…

    1. A few friends have posted pics of their young kids after getting the jab. And the only thing I can think is “What will you say to them when they have a heart attack, or your daughter can’t have kids because of your fear?”

      4. The people so desperate to get their daughters jabbed are the same types who’d drive their daughter to the abortion clinic if she got pregnant before the age of 35.

        1. Not necessarily. Anti-vax in general is frequently a “lefty suburban wine mom” thing. And PhD holders (who trend left) are the group of individuals in the country that’s most likely to be opposed to the jab..

  15. One of the best parts of the Arabia museum is ha the government had not one thing to do with it. It was built and created by the people who dug up the boat! I remember when it first opened. There was a lot of harrumphing going on by university types who believed that only properly degreed people should be allowed to touch the artifacts.

    1. Yes, the Arabia museum is pretty cool. I don’t think I’ve been there in years, but it was always interesting and educational.

    2. Yeah, and then the artifacts get hauled off somewhere else, miscataloged, stuck in a basement, and then sold off or discarded when they get short of room.

    3. Look at a lot of shipwrecks. It’s not found by folks with phds and jobs solely devoted to them but guys who go out on weekends and get in water. The actual forensic recovery may be performed by university folks but the actual search, archive digging, and so on are not.

      Hell, compare the backgrounds of Bob Ballard and Chatterton and Kohler and magnitude of their finds.

  16. We have been in Texas for almost a week now. The sense of relief I feel is palpable. I am so very happy we were able to make this move. My stress has decreased exponentially.

    I saw a story about the so-called “Patriotic Front” (or something like that today), and the media frothing that this was another right-wing group. Then watching the video, the sameness of the “men” in the group, the fact that they’re holding flags like Boy Scouts in a parade (nobody does that except Boy Scouts in a parade), the white balaclavas and sunglasses covering their entire face. It was too ridiculous. I went to FB to see if any of my usual suspects were frothing about it…nope. Which is a pretty big sign to me that even those who think they want this crap are realizing they’re being taken for a ride.

    Didn’t one of the Japanese generals or admirals argue against bombing Pearl Harbor on the grounds that America as an isolationist nation was a benefit to Japan, and they didn’t really want to awaken the sleeping tiger. It appears that our own political class has awakened the sleeping tiger. They’ve been warned.

      1. Admiral Yamamoto wasn’t too keen on the idea of attacking the US period, but since they were going to do the thing… He organized Pearl Harbor as their best shot

    2. Mr.Reagan has a vid today on this “Patriot Front” — it’s a front all right, tho whether for the FBI or Antifa or the DNC remains to be determined. He also notes it’s been around since at least 2017 (with a Gab account).

      The website is suspiciously similar to one run by some Antifa-adjacent, that was up a couple years ago.

      1. They used to be Vanguard America, which is a real white supremacist place, BUT keep in mind that 90% of those tend to be glowies. The rest are autists and schizophrenics.

        1. All indications of Patriot front is pure glowie. The shields apparently are only available to LEOs or fed agencies, and the pass they get for putting passengers in the box of U-haul trucks implies collaboration between them and the local law enforcement.

          I’d stay on the far side of the internet from their website.

        2. And, one has to wonder how many schizophrenic autists the Feds are employing as management of these Glowies, because the other obvious explanations are profound incompetence, and malicious compliance.

          1. I’m not sure there are enough schizophrenic autists to run all the glowies the Feds are funning. OTOH, between the latter two options, there’s lots of iron pyrite to be dug up. I suspect it’s more profound incompetence, merging into malice. I haven’t had the “pleasure” of dealing with many bureaucrats lately, so I’m not sure if those inclined to malicious complaince have beat feet or not.

    4. FBI no doubt, with maybe some connected to the military….Pearl Harbor was an obvious setup, as Soviet Agent Harry Hopkins was told to divert Japan from attacking Russia in the East…FDR knew, so not one ship commissioned after WW1 was in the harbor, just rusty old hulks…

      1. Courtesy of the naval treaties, most of the battleships were commissioned before WWI ended, or not long after.

      2. The West Virginia was commissioned in 1923. Her sister, USS Maryland, was also at Battleship Row that day.

        The reason why the battleships at Pearl Harbor were so old was for two reasons entirely unrelated to conspiracy theories about FDR trying to get the Japanese to attack (an idea that was seen as absurd at the time; even the Japanese weren’t sure they could hit the harbor due to logistical issues).

        The first reason is the naval treaties that TheOtherSean mentioned. Starting with the Washington Naval Treaty, warship construction was heavily curtailed, with strict limits on the numbers and types of ships each navy could have. The purpose of the treaty was to stop the expensive naval arms race that everyone knew was coming, and it largely did just that.

        The second reason was because the Atlantic was the active naval theater. No, the US wasn’t at war with Germany. But the US was actively engaging in Neutrality Patrols at the time, and US merchant ships were being sunk by German commerce raiders. So the more likely spot for trouble to occur was in the Atlantic, which is why the brand new battleships (the North Carolina and South Dakota-class ships) were sent to the Atlantic. All three New Mexicos were there as well, even though they were among the older battleships in the fleet, and according to your theory should have been at Pearl.

  17. But Sarah, you say, then why haven’t we revolted already.

    I ask folks who ask that, what they are expecting.

    Would it be things like avoiding places that require masks to shop?

    Would that be things like walking past the “do the right thing” sign at Menards that is telling people they should mask even if vaccinated, but MUST do so if they’re not?

    Move out of places with stupid laws and a reasonable expectation that no, their vote DIDN’T have any influence on said lawmakers?

    Homeschooling their kids?

    By amazing coincidence, the ‘revolution’ folks are asking for is either 1) movie style, leaning heavy on the French revolution or 2) being good little foot soldiers.

    No, thanks, I’ll stick with the American revolution as a template.

      1. Going off of the track record? I have zero confidence in the accuracy of the selection of those beheaded by the mob, however organized it may be.

        1. In theory there are ways to tilt the odds in a better direction. Though getting the theory into practice is always an issue.

          But it is also a matter of general principle: if you don’t have any politician heads on pikes, how can you possibly be a civilized country? :D.

        1. The way Despicable Kate Brown* is going, I wonder whether, or more likely how soon, she’ll make acquaintance with one of those teams. (Or else #TeamRomanianChristmas)

          (*) Also known as Commie Kate.

    2. Doesn’t mean there won’t be a butcher’s bill eventually, but it has a high likelihood of being localized and restricted in time to …. ah…. incidents.

      1. And, much like the “nobody fights back against AntiFa… we know because the news didn’t say anything” stuff, it is unlikely to get much air time. (hearing this from people that I SHARED ARTICLES WITH when people DID FIGHT BACK is one of the annoyances, and why I’m not as broke up about leaving Facebook as I could be!)

  18. This one worries me, just a bit, and amuses at the same time.
    Did anyone else notice the “Patriotic Front,” flap last night on Twitter? An alleged “journalist,” posted video of the “Patriotic Front,” marching in Washington. The PF consisted of a good-sized group of young men, all in good shape, wearing khaki pants, dark blue jackets, white gaiters (covering chin to nose), matching tan baseball caps with the PF “emblem,” and sunglasses. Most of them carry American flags, but some carry small, clear plastic shields with colored bands on them. Others carry larger metal shields with matching paint jobs.
    Another “journalist,” ran a long piece blaring that the PF is a “far-right,” group, which brings its members into cities in U-Haul trucks (which is how this bunch was taken away), staged in those citadels of right-wing thought known as suburbs. He said both that the group is dangerous, and if you find them in your neighborhood you should “confront” them!
    As it happened, the video gathered a lot of conservative ridicule (one comment being that right-wing rednecks would NOT be marching during the SEC championship) and it quickly turned out the original journalist was an AI -generated image with a brand new Twitter account. The header on the video tweets became that of the “Patriotic Front.”
    Supposedly the group has been around since 2017. Looks like a heavy-handed effort to set up a boogeyman to me.

    1. There aren’t enough genuine White Supremacists so the Feds had to gimmick up some fake ones. Masked ones, at that,so that their faces can’t be compared with photos of known Feds, or run through facial recognition likewise.

  19. a meme lamenting that the right doesn’t just have right wing stations, etc. but is creating their own separate structures for information and commerce

    Left: “If you don’t like how woke we’re making all the structures for informations and commerce, go make your own!”

    Right: “Okay”

    Left: “You can’t make your own structures for informations and commerce! That’s not fair!”

  20. The rivers on the great plains are known as alluvial streams because the flow through the alluvium that has been laid down over hundreds of years. Because of the way streams erode the alluvium, stream can move great distances over the years. Some old river boats have been found as much as 150 miles from any major river, buried in the soil the stream laid down as it meandered away from where the boat was abandoned.

    You can get an idea of what happens by looking down at the rivers to cross on bridges. Many of them have near vertical banks because they erode so easily. This is especially prominent on the bridge over the Missouri bridges near Columbia and St. Louis, MO, and the bridge over the Tennessee In Kentucky. It also leads to “oxbow lakes” in many locations.

    1. The big rivers in China – the Yangtze and Yellow rivers – are notorious for changing their river beds multiple times over the course of recorded history.

    2. It also leads to a terraced look when the river is meandering through an area of general uplift. You’ll get the river going back and forth across it’s valley and a stair step effect of previous valleys it has carved. Some can get quite shear if one side is less prone to erosion.

  21. American voters repudiated the republic with finality at the turn of the 20th century with the 16th and 17th amendments. That was the death of the founding vision and the genesis of the central government monster under which we live.

    That’s not to say that we can’t recover the republic in some degree or preserve/regain a free existence. It’s just a sad reality that we have to face. We the people…in the guise of our myopic ancestors…ordained this path a long time ago.

        1. The Progressives have been repudiating the Bill of Rights for a hundred years or so. They don’t call it that, of course, they just ignore it, or explain why it doesn’t apply in these “enlightened” times because it was written by White Men.

  22. Delusion.

    Isaiah 44 – They do not know, nor do they understand, for He has smeared over their eyes so that they cannot see and their hearts so that they cannot comprehend.
    No one recalls, nor is there knowledge or understanding to say, “I have burned half of it in the fire and also have baked bread over its coals. I roast meat and eat it. Then I make the rest of it into an abomination, I fall down before a block of wood!”
    He feeds on ashes; a deceived heart has turned him aside. And he cannot deliver himself, nor say, “Is there not a lie in my right hand?”

    —-

    Growing up, I lived an enormous part of my life online. Had issues with people, didn’t like socializing, retreated into a world of books and online forums where people could talk in a language I understood. For *years* I tried to drag my extended family into being more ‘online’, wishing that people would get on board with the idea of communicating by text and forums.

    It never worked. People would sign up / be interested for a short while and then go off to do their real lives and the online places would grow quiet, and then abandoned. It took me a long time to realize that the ‘old way’ of talking face to face actually had more benefits than I thought, and that most people preferred them to things like forums & chat (yes I am weird).

    Anyways, why bring it up? I think a whole slew of ‘smart’ people who grew up attached to their phones and living in the twitterverse have made the digital space their entire universe, and there is an enormous blind spot in those who structure their lives around the Digital world. Like a river just.. moving … and nobody noticing. . . there are many many things in the Real World that simply don’t exist in the Digital because *nobody is talking about it*. Whatever isn’t tweeted about **doesn’t exist**. Whatever is banned **doesn’t exist**.

    But we know this is a delusion. People don’t go away, don’t stop their personal connections, don’t stop working for the things they think are right. Being banned from Twitter or kicked of every social platform doesn’t stop people from influencing others, or supplying money and support to others, looking for alternatives. It just makes the blind spot larger.

    Covidiocy is/was the attempt of the digital world to apply its rules on the Real World. With this enormous blind spot, and the idea that a global, centralized ‘terms of service’ can control people just like they can control ‘accounts’ and ‘tweets’. They used fear and propaganda to push this idea that people are only ‘safe’ if you can scan them into your app and see if they are complying. But if nobody scans, nobody asks, nobody talks about it. . . the Digital overlords don’t know about it. Where the hell did Lets Go Brandon come from they wonder. . . and there is no framework for them to understand their lies for what they are.

  23. Cheshire Republic

    It appears to fade away, leaving only a disturbing feral grin, that seems to hint: “FAFO” .

  24. For me, it’s not so much an issue of the final outcome being in doubt. I’m well aware that, ultimately, the wrong shall fail, the right prevail (sing peace on Earth, good-will to men). What bothers me about the lack of visible revolt is that line in the Declaration of Independence: “when a long chain of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object, evinces a design to reduce [men] under absolute despotism, it is their right, *it is their duty,* to throw off such government and to provide new guards for their future security” (emphasis mine, of course). Now, it seems obvious to me that what the American people are doing can no more be described as throwing off their government than sitting around and waiting for the dragon to eat itself can be described as dragon-slaying; therefore, by our own charter’s definition, we would seem to be guilty of grossly neglecting a manifest duty. And bad things happen to people like that.

    (Of course, if the Republic doesn’t exist, I suppose the Declaration can’t be considered morally authoritative, so maybe people who think like this blogger of yours have an out. But boy howdy, are the rest of us in trouble.)

    1. It may seem obvious to you, but it does not seem obvious to me. We have not yet arrived at the Boston Tea Party (which was THREE YEARS after the Boston Massacre). We are barely into the ‘writing letters and circulating pamphlets’ phase (Welcome to Sarah Hoyts regular political pamphlet). There is a rather persistent tendency to compact time frames when looking back on history and skip straight to the boom (or focus so much on the ‘events that lead up’ to and leave out the boom). We’re not there yet. America has ALWAYS moved slowly save against individual catastrophic events (usually from the out side). We are in ‘events and factors leading to’ what they lead to… well time will tell. Ammo purchases and prices are up and not just from long time gun owners.

      People are voting with their feet and their wallets and they’re watching. And they’re making ready. If Oroborus eats itself before it comes time to shoot the beast in the head, all well and good (I don’t expect it but if we are handed a miracle, I will rejoice). The point isn’t the dragon slaying. Isn’t the throwing off, though that’s part of the process, it’s the building after. The old men and women in Washington, as out of touch as they are, don’t matter long run. They’re in the way. No more, no less. And THAT is what terrifies them. They’re not important and the bear they have been kicking is waking up and the chains are made of cobweb. But the bear doesn’t come out of hibernation all at once.

      1. “There is a rather persistent tendency to compact time frames when looking back on history”

        Of course, there’s also a rather persistent tendency to disregard the fact that communication / organizing technology has improved just a skosh from the days when letters were hand-written and had to go by horseback at the fastest. Do they balance out? YMMV.

        2. Technology may not matter if the time scale of the then culture, and the now culture are similar in this sort of decision making.

          Or, it may /cancel/. Which description will turn out to best fit how we do things? If it is ‘form an estimate about the preferences of those who can intervene’, and we also have tech changes in who can intervene…

          I don’t know, and I am a little sick, and a little busy to figure out what, all in all, I really think at the moment.

          I do suspect that the decision making is using channels that are not tech based, and hence slower than tech, due to tech surveillance of tech. Some of the signal is going through or using tech channels, but it may be slower, have a long processing period, or use a lot of signal history, as a result of evading the superficial surveillance.

          I dunno.

            1. Jesus Christ in Heaven, we are completely and utterly doomed here on Earth.

              Because two folks with depressive tendencies who don’t trust their own thinking, check it often in various ways, and are in a very messy situation, agree in not knowing what is going on.

              This is super, super, super impossible for humans to have any power against.

              (Okay, okay, we do only ever do Good things ultimately because of Your influence and intervention. Leaving That aside…)

              Dooomed, I tell You, doomeed.

              Thank you for Your patience with my sarcasm.

              Amen.

              (Yeah, Sarah, I am being a little bit silly right now, but I hope the regulars will forgive me.)

          2. Part of the decision procedure is predicated on “how many agree with me vs the enemy?”. That part we can accelerate. I would say *have* accelerated to the point of being a fraction of the Timeline Of Change.

            The other part is the slow working around to “guess I’d better sharpen some spikes”. This process still involves communication, and is somewhat accelerable, but mostly involves lots of slow political back and forth between the sides. Short of hijacking Pelosi’s driver and passing the word that she needs to start the gun confiscation tomorrow you can’t accelerate that.

            I’d also point to the oft-forgotten Lobby Day and note that our side is close enough to make the public armed but still peaceful demonstrations. The extremity of the lockdowns are part of the response to that, as well as the whole Glowies! Glowies everywhere! phenomena.

        3. communication has improved, and that’s why things ARE moving somewhat faster. Take in account that we’ve been gaslit and messed with for 100 years. The amazing thing is people are waking up AT ALL. Which btw proves that the indoctrination the left counted on does not work as it did in the works of great socialists, like, say 1984. (He was still a socialist and had the default assumptions.)
          But you know what hasn’t improved? People. And the culture is made of people, and it behaves in itself like a semi-sentient being. It takes time, Steve. I don’t like it any better than you do, but it takes time.

          1. The fact that I can tell someone across the country in milliseconds that I’m fed up does not decrease the time required to become fed up.

      2. I vaguely recall a story where a kingdom was desperately seeking a dragon slayer, and this guy shows up whose only qualification was…

        …dragon-skin boots.

      1. You know it is bad when even folks they thought were reliably on the left, comfortably ensconced in leftism and would never so much as peep if they had an inkling that something wasn’t right… When you’ve lost Sarah Silverman for Bob’s sake, that ought to be a sign.

        But, by and large, it isn’t. To them. They’ve been surprised at every occasion when reality somehow failed to conform to their fantasy. We write, we read spec fic, and we don’t make these kinds of mistakes! The ground is shifting under their feet, and yet they keep on marching on, like the road should bend to meet their path.

    3. Now, it seems obvious to me that what the American people are doing can no more be described as throwing off their government than sitting around and waiting for the dragon to eat itself can be described as dragon-slaying

      How nice for you.

      Have you considered, perhaps, that as Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes you should, perhaps, bother to make the case rather than assume it as required that the dragon must be slain, and any other solution is waiting for the dragon to slay itself?

      You want to sit in judgement over what We, The People are, or are not doing, based on what the Founders did, you could at least be bothered to build the case that the guards have failed.

      Got the checklist:
      1) there are intolerable abuses to the endpoint of absolute despotism
      2) which are not being fought, or
      3) the inside-the-system routes of fighting are being unjustly blocked to the point fighting is no possible.

      It’s going to have issues dealing with, say, Florida. Iowa. Every rural area in dark blue states where they *don’t* follow the stupid rules.
      Going to have issues dealing with either the OSHA or the medicare/medicaid clot-shot requirement, since both were fought– and stayed.

      For comparison, here’s how they supported their claim that the causes were neither light nor transient:

      The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.

      He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.

      He has forbidden his Governors to pass Laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his Assent should be obtained; and when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them.

      He has refused to pass other Laws for the accommodation of large districts of people, unless those people would relinquish the right of Representation in the Legislature, a right inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only.

      He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their public Records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures.

      He has dissolved Representative Houses repeatedly, for opposing with manly firmness his invasions on the rights of the people.

      He has refused for a long time, after such dissolutions, to cause others to be elected; whereby the Legislative powers, incapable of Annihilation, have returned to the People at large for their exercise; the State remaining in the mean time exposed to all the dangers of invasion from without, and convulsions within.

      He has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands.

      He has obstructed the Administration of Justice, by refusing his Assent to Laws for establishing Judiciary powers.

      He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone, for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.

      He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harrass our people, and eat out their substance.

      He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures.

      He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil power.

      He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his Assent to their Acts of pretended Legislation:

      For Quartering large bodies of armed troops among us:

      For protecting them, by a mock Trial, from punishment for any Murders which they should commit on the Inhabitants of these States:

      For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world:

      For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent:

      For depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury:

      For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences

      For abolishing the free System of English Laws in a neighbouring Province, establishing therein an Arbitrary government, and enlarging its Boundaries so as to render it at once an example and fit instrument for introducing the same absolute rule into these Colonies:

      For taking away our Charters, abolishing our most valuable Laws, and altering fundamentally the Forms of our Governments:

      For suspending our own Legislatures, and declaring themselves invested with power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever.

      He has abdicated Government here, by declaring us out of his Protection and waging War against us.

      He has plundered our seas, ravaged our Coasts, burnt our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people.

      He is at this time transporting large Armies of foreign Mercenaries to compleat the works of death, desolation and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of Cruelty & perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the Head of a civilized nation.

      He has constrained our fellow Citizens taken Captive on the high Seas to bear Arms against their Country, to become the executioners of their friends and Brethren, or to fall themselves by their Hands.

      He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.

      In every stage of these Oppressions We have Petitioned for Redress in the most humble terms: Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A Prince whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.

      1. I was busy yesterday, trying to do what I could on a decision, /and/ functioning on half a night’s sleep due to health issues.

        So, I was definitely too crazy to have a sound reaction, much less to express a sound reaction concisely.

        What struck me is that I very often see the “things are bad, why haven’t you/we acted yet” thought from four groups of people.

        1. People who /just/ realized that things are bad, and have yet to spend much time thinking about it.
        2. Glowies: Americans who are probable government agents trying in a controlled way to build narratives useful to the regime.
        3. Sincere foreigners, who are a bit sketchy about the differences between Americans and aliens, and who despite the judgement issues also have interests that line up well with those of Americans. (These are rare. The experienced aliens can grok some of the time that there are significant cultural differences.)
        4. Foreign devils trying to stir the pot. They don’t understand what they are trying to do, are basically speaking blindly, and say some pretty unusual things some of the time. When I say they don’t understand, I am saying that they are working off worse models than even the most moronic Democrats. The foreign devils are also probably taking stupid risks, but the key lack of understanding is forming superficial models heavily contaminated with university misinformation and hollywood misinformation, whihc misinformation is really meant to be effective on Americans. It works badly on Americans, because hollywood and academia are working off wrong models. But, hollywood and academia have somewhat less insane models than the foreign intelligence agencies do, because they get /some/ information that wasn’t filtered through nonsense.

        We do also have a fifth group, who have seen that the things have been super bad, and have seen so for many years, and can’t understand how the rest of us are so very blind. They may perhaps be fewer than even group three. (Text for group three implies group six, a larger number of congenial foreigners who are still aware of significant differences between their own culture, and American culture.)

        That reaction is not concisely expressed even now.

        I have, as is fairly known here, been arguing for slower possibly invisible processes being a correct course of action.

        Partly, because I can see in my own life how slow I am to irrevocably commit. I am bloody minded fanatic with a quick temper, albeit possibly a coward. It takes time to really move from “xenocide, if and only if we honestly persuade a working majority that it is wise and necessary*” to “First, we must get our own houses in order”.

        *This is a standard that basically is extraordinarily unlikely.

        1. That reaction is not concisely expressed even now.

          I’ll give extra points for it being a complicated subject.

          There’s also the “are in a bad area, and have been saying it’s bad and someone should do something, but since nobody is lining up to do what they are yelling all is lost.”

          I’ve been getting flack from THOSE ones for most of my life, generally when I WAS doing something, just not what, where and when they wanted it. Double-plus bad if it worked, or I knew that the situation wasn’t as they had heard.

          Or the ones who have been screaming for action on 25 of the last zero disasters, because if we don’t do as they say All Is Lost.
          (Contrast with Sarah, who has been pointing out strong possibilities, and ways to braces for problems, and generally not doing much yelling.)

          1. In fairness, I have very dirty hands.

            I am definitely one of those 25 of the last 0 screamers.

            I also have been a bit too complicit in the regime in various ways, and in potentially excessive tolerance of Democrats. And, before I could legally vote, in outright support for Democrats.

            I don’t have answers.

            I have been holding on to an approximation of sanity with my fingernails, using ‘I do not actually need a theoretical answer now, and can still help get something done later’.

            1. *points at Bob’s handle* You do give people warning, and in fact point out while you are yelling that you should probably not be trusted for well-considered, solid advice, as opposed to those who demand that one disregard one’s own judgement in favor of the screamer’s knee-jerks.

              1. Trust should be careful and deliberate, based on information that one has.

                There are a lot of people who have correct understanding, and are speaking honestly, that should still not be trusted by other persons, because those persons do not have the information to reasonably conclude trust from.

                Okay, that is me being a technocrat, because many personalities /can’t/ work that way, and just about everyone does trust some of the time based on factors that are not carefully based on information. There are also circumstances where a trust decision is necessary, where it is impossible to work it out the way I prefer.

                Still, I stand by due diligence being worth it. If that means that someone has to ignore everything I say, because the processing load isn’t worth it to them, good for them. I think I have things worth saying, but worth listening to is a value judgement made by others, and people deserve fair warning that I am not always having the same level of care in what I say.

      2. The frightening thing is how little would need to be changed to make it applicable for the portion of Oregon that isn’t Metro Portland. (And I suspect, the same holds true for non-Chicago Illinois, non-NYC New York, und so weiter.)

        1. Some of the highpoints, yes; obvious aspirations, yes.

          Actually point by point? For starters, it’d have to be successful. Consistently. And the removing representation– well, the COVID stuff is an obvious attempt, with emphasis on attempt, and wow is your Despicable scrambling to keep things in a panic.

    4. There have been several books recently (T. H. Breen and a few others) pointing out how long it took for a large percentage of people to move from “yeah, Parliament doesn’t quite get things over here” to “we can govern ourselves better” to “we will be independent and will return to our proper English liberties, no matter what Parliament and the king say.” It starts in 1764 and builds until 1776 (even though the shooting sort of started in 1775).

      Some of the communication networks developed during the Great Awakening, as a way to pass the word about traveling ministers such as Whitefield, and then stayed in business passing along sermons, then political and economic news.

      1. People didn’t emigrate to America because they liked European and civil wars, or religious strife, persecution, and harassment. Even for the Puritans, the dream was just to live under your own vine and your own fig tree, with no one to make you afraid. (cf. 1 Kgs. 1:25)

        So of course it takes a while for people to go from anger to action.

        1. Some of the people who enjoyed the banditry or civil wars in Europe, for a time, left for here because they grew tired of circumstances.

          It really is profoundly important to understand Americans and American culture in terms of the voluntary bottom up peace extended towards those that are party to that peace, mostly.

          Yes, the woke grievance studies ‘scholars’ are sometimes pointing to real things that are profound violations of that consensus, but they do so by ignoring the significant importance of that consensus, that we have now come to see those things as profound violations, as opposed to being completely justified because the other parties are willfully and knowingly against the consensus.

          Marxist theory insists of perfect categories of victim and oppressor. Modern critical theory insists that language based oppression can be very long term, and effectively permanent or steady state. Issue is, we know that lots of forms of oppression cause ‘feedback’ that changes some of the foundation for the oppression. In particular, language based oppression can be very very short term.

          The Marxist and critical basis of much formal academic theory equips a lot of scholars very badly for understanding things that are very significantly ‘transient’.

    5. The Declaration was issued by the revolutionary government, which was succeeded by the Confederation government, which was succeeded by the Federal government in 1789.

      The Declaration is *the* founding document of all three governments. The Federals may want to treat is as an amusing historical curiosity, but we’re getting close to yanking their shorts up over their head like we did to George III.

  25. Ah, you were at DeSoto Bend, the museum devoted to the wreck of the steamboat Bertram, right? It’s wonderful — like walking through a mid-19th century store — because the clothing, tools, preserve food, weapons, everthing else is NEW, not old and worn out.

  27. “Keep your clothes and weapons where you can find them in the dark.”

    I get a lot of ribbing for that here at Chez Phantom . ~:D

    Q: “Why do you insist on keeping that !@#% thing under the bed?!!”

    A: “Because the ***** is too big for indoors.” [runs and hides]

    1. Well, the ***** is good for one handed operation, the ***** works better against groups, and the ***** is if I run out of ammunition!

  28. The genesis of this article – that rivers meander, has a wonderful techie description: “fluvial geomorphology” – the study of how rivers and streams move (“meander”) in their streambeds. It has replaced my former favorite phrase to throw out at cocktail parties – “adiabatic lapse rate”. 🙂

    And I am pretty sure Our Host visited the Steamboat Arabia museum in KC, from her first paragraph, and from the mention of the only fatality being a mule. It is a fascinating place – highly recommended.

    1. They are wearing dark blue fleece jackets and khaki pants, in December. A few guys with tan army-ish desert boots, and the rest with nice brand, brand new, dark brown hiking boots.

      It looks like the LL Bean Revolutionaries.

        1. Also, pretty sure it’s not legal to ride in the back of a U-Haul, standing up. Of course, they are just driving back to a VA parking lot, but it is still illegal and goes against U-Haul terms of service.

          1. Bad trade craft, if it is the feds doing so. Some of those U-Hauls have distinctive markers, and might be traceable through U-Haul records.

          2. Witnesses were noting that the “Patriots” were getting in and out of the U-Haul trucks in front of the Capitol Police without any objection from the LEOs.

    2. Powerline posted a story today with some more information about the Patriot Front, echoing Sarah’s observation that “the demand for white supremacy far exceeds the supply.”

      Although, in parsing that a bit more, I think there is actually a large supply of white supremacy, but it’s on the Left.
      Their search for white supremacists on the Right is like looking for toilet paper during a pandemic.

      https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2021/12/desperately-seeking-white-supremacists.php

  30. Jerry Boyd used a similar river moving thing in one of the “Bob and Nikki” books… Of course it was a flying saucer, not a riverboat…

  32. Excellent white pill post!

    Great point that the age of centralization has passed.

    (There’s still some movement toward centralization via digitization….Amazon is still taking market share from small retailers, Google and Facebook now utterly dominate the advertising business, combining for more ad revenue than every newspaper, tv channel, radio station, billboard, etc etc etc combined). But even those behemoths now offer mass customization rather than mass marketing. In fact, Google, Facebook, and Amazon have, in spite of themselves, been useful to a lot of people who discovered alternatives to The Narrative. Amazon might make a lot of money, but it sells a much broader swathe of books than any book store ever did.)

    But that aside aside, it’s absolutely true that the culture has become vastly LESS centralized in recent years. Joe Biden press conferences ain’t no Roosevelt fireside chats. Anderson Cooper ain’t no Walter Cronkite. People NO LONGER BELIEVE IN the culture that is being “disseminated” top down. Heck, even the dissemination itself is more fragmented.

    And yet the establishment keeps acting AS IF they are succeeding at further centralization. When, as you point out, it’s not working on us and they clearly know that, judging from their hair on fire.

    The good news for us is that the Progressive Borg always overshoots. If they had brought the Covid scam to a “successful conclusion” after six months, it would have strengthened them. But they can’t ever bring themselves to stop. The people at the top often overshoot due to ambition, delusions of grandeur, and other issues, but more importantly, the useful idiots below them keep overshooting because their eager amplification of the Narrative is….organic rather than planned. They just agree and amplify every ridiculous pandemic thing until they are terrorizing children in every local school district. Even if Bill Gates and Tony Fauci called a halt today, the public school children of America would remain “masked” through the end of this school year. Which, in the eyes of sane parents, is utterly discrediting to “our leaders,” to “the Narrative,” and to the liberal useful idiots who enforced all the Covid terror at the local level.

    As you point out, people’s faith in their Doctors, Public School Teachers, and School Boards has collapsed. Collapsed. With good reason. But it’s still not totally visible. The media won’t report on it. The shrillest Covideers love Doctors and Teachers Unions more than ever. And many of us still feel isolated. But the culture has changed. The old authority figures are seen more clearly now. The consequences will be significant.

    Thank you for the White Pill. And I agree: Be Not Afraid!

    1. Amazon is still taking market share from small retailers

      Not sure about your area, but in ours– part of that is because the smaller retailers don’t try.
      They organize their business around themselves, and the market responds accordingly. There’s a really cool store in town, which has great toys, wonderful location, etc.
      It’s open weekdays from 10-5, and Saturdays 10-3. In a tourist town, when they stock a ton of impulse items, catty-corner from the big farmer’s market and craft thing ALL SUMMER LONG….they close before the market starts.

      I drove there three or four times before I learned that no, they are never open when I need one of the things they have.

      Contrast with the local hardware store, which set its hours to promote someone going “oh, didn’t I need…I’ll just pull in quick” on the way to or from home. If there’s a thing where you MIGHT think that someone COULD want to pop in, they extend their hours.

      Punchline? The Cool Impulse Stuff store actually has more counter-people hired. If you don’t count the contractor related guys, they have more employees than the hardware store. Just the hardware store is fine with having limited staffing in order to have longer hours.

  33. Remember the original Miracle on 34th Street, when Kris Kringle is proved to be Santa Claus because the Post Office says so? Love that scene, but when the remakes do the exact same scene I go, “That would just prove he ISN’T!”

  34. Sorry, just now catching up on comments! I definitely needed to read this back when you posted it, as much because it’s great to hear that something that awesome is close (for some definition of the term) to where you are now! The feeling of isolation can definitely get to you, especially when institutional stupidity starts landing on your head, but seeing things like the local Simon Jester’s street and stop sign artwork does help. I’ve heard others say that a lot of things have yet to catch up to the possibilities the Internet opened up, politicians most of all. It’s getting easier to Be Not Afraid these days, that’s for sure.

  35. Pingback: What I learned this week, December 11, 2021 | Bill Chance

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