The Flawless Dream

Posted on by Sarah A. Hoyt
From Pixabay, and it occurs to me it would make a great cover for a steampunk antho

Humans have ideas of what the future holds that were either formed very young, or formed young and through an accretion of stories, news, entertainment.

This can be either a personal future — or why I’m going slightly insane at turning 60 this year, because that’s grandma age. Also because, honestly, I have no clue where the last ten years went. And it wasn’t a matter of having fun — where we have an idea what people are like at various ages.

Or it can be societal.

I keep getting the feeling that part of what’s bizarre and insane about the last two years is that I fee like the people who were propagandized that the future was overpopulated and very poor due to exhaustion of natural resources are trying to create that future, even though neither of the conditions are true, because that’s the future in their heads, the future they’ve prepared for all along.

Yes, sure, there are other things at work. There is the Marxist cult, an inculcated hatred of humans, the desire to be special and elite in a sea of peasants who are forced to live in medieval conditions, and the general spite and malice of not particularly bright people who climbed the greased pole by ideology and, oh, yeah, spite and malice.

But over it all there ‘s that story at the back of their heads, the story they must make come through, because its what the future is.

We all have a story at the back of our heads of what the future will be like. Thank the Lord for Heinlein, it is not all fatalistic and destructive, but even Heinlein–

Let us face it, anyone from the age of eighty and younger grew up with the idea of infallible, increasingly centralized governments that could order anything and everything for good and ill.

The fact that those of us who are on the right have been awake since the fall of communism, and know the horrors it perpetrates, doesn’t mean we don’t believe in “infallible government.”

Partially, mind you, because our history of communist and totalitarian regimes is flawed and incorporates an incredible amount of the communists’ own propaganda. Sometimes via dissidents, telling us what they planned for us. And what they planned for us accords with things you can interpret as happening, kind of, sort of, if you squint.

But the fact is that centralized governments are always, forever, and everywhere inefficient. If they appear to have had a plan work perfectly, it is only because they are projecting what worked, and hiding what did. FDR wasn’t a heck of a lot more successful than Obama, it was the projection of his success via the media that caused people to fall in line over time. And World War II and war powers/measures didn’t help. (which is why our idiots long for a good war, and war powers.)

But now the wall of the media is fractured. And we can see what goes on behind the scenes.

So when you say things like that they’re going to ban cash….

Cooeee. They and what super power? Cash reappears/appears even when the cash being used becomes valueless. Mostly because people need to trade to eat. And it’s really hard to carry a cow in your pocket.

In Portugal, for a while, money was as good as valueless (well before my birth. Might have been before my dad’s. I’m not sure.) which is why there’s still a tradition of giving gold pound coins to kids at their birth and to newly weds at their weddings.

Because if they ban cash, it just means we use other cash. Old cash, foreign cash, precious metal coins. Precious metals by weight.

How are they going to ban cash?

Throughout the breadth and depth of the US, they’re gong to police every transaction, search everyone’s pockets? How?

And here’s the thing, just like the black market (and our subsidies) kept the USSR from starving, they can’t ban cash; they can’t “cancel” every deplorable; they can’t do any of that without they, themselves starving.

In fact, just with their war on oil, attempting to make “green energy” materialize out of their dreams, is going to hurt them badly. Sure, it will hurt us too. but we’re bracing for it, they’re not. Also, they’re more vulnerable than they thing.

What it’s not going to do is make the science for perfect, eternal renewable energy appear out of thin air.

The enemy gets a vote. It doesn’t get a veto. They don’t have magical powers. There is nothing that makes their plans come true perfectly, out of their dreams.

That they believe it, it’s excusable. They’ve grown up with the idea the more centralized the government, the more powerful.

We grew up with the same, of course, but we’re not as trusting, are we? We’ve seen behind the lies and the curtain.

And we’re their enemies. And we get a vote.

So does reality, which is also their enemy.

Stop assuming that whatever they want to do will work flawlessly. I’m going to bet you money it’s not even working in China. It’s just that we’re very far away and most of what we get is filtered through what the regime lets out. And at that, their culture has been molded over centuries to be way more compliant than ours.

Do not give magical powers to the enemy. The most flawless of their plans will still be shaky and unevenly implemented.

And the more elaborate, and far-reaching the plan the more flawed the implementation.

Be not afraid. Keep looking for the flaws.

They’re the most profitable points to push and bring the entire “flawless” lie down.

281 thoughts on “The Flawless Dream”

  1. Must be my nature, but I never believed the Commies were gonna win, or that big central Gov’t was gonna take over, nor did I fully believe the press when all I had was a pair of local papers and two of the networks to go by. I felt certain even when I couldn’t explain why I was certain (and still fail at explaining all too often). Now, as I’ve said many a time, I’ve had too many friends from Cuba, Cambodia, Vietnam, etc. not to mention family in whatever they want to call the Czech Republic to fall for the B.S.

    1. East Tennessee here. Folks down this way pretty much NEVER believed in central government. Revenuers, after all. Just leave us alone, we’re alright, Jack.

      3. Related andom discovery from last weekend: Rocky Top takes longer to listen to than driving through it via I-75.

    2. And read yesterday this administration is sending Cubans coming over on boats back. While keeping the border open. Grrrrrr.

        1. Exactly, They only want people coming to the USA who they are sure will vote for the Democrats. People fleeing the Castro communist tyranny will not be reliable Democratic Party voters.

      2. Obviously the Cubans should be boating to Mexico and crossing our border there.

        /sarcnotsarc

        1. The Cubans who can afford to fly to the mainland are doing just that.

          https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2022/04/07/cuba-migration-border-miami/

          Cuban migrants are coming to the United States in the highest numbers since the 1980 Mariel boatlift, arriving this time across the U.S. southern land border, not by sea.

          Last month, more than 32,000 Cubans were taken into U.S. custody along the Mexico border, double the number who arrived in February, according to unpublished U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) figures obtained by The Washington Post. CBP is on pace to apprehend more than 155,000 Cubans during the current fiscal year, records show, nearly four times the 2021 total and a twelvefold increase over 2020.

          1. It just struck me what a weird term “boatlift” is. I’m guessing it came about because everybody was thinking in terms of the Berlin airlift and such, but the Cubans were in boats. And the media couldn’t call it a flotilla or a fleet? How about a regatta? (Sounds nice and jaunty; I bet all the champagne socialists would find these Cuban immigrants much more convenient if they were putting on a regatta.)

    3. Just one from Cuba, a coworker of my father’s when I was growing up, but enough to teach me they couldn’t win.

      My fear is not Commies winning but freedom losing. The two are quite compatible.

      Then again, I hate the term “the right side of history” and I think the right in the US falls for it when it comes to freedom. Freedom as we understand it is roughly 300 years old (it predates the Founding and early attempts to curtail it led to the Founding) and even then for only part of the world. History, actual written to some degree history is at the outside 4000 years old and while the initial parts covered less of the population than freedom does not it has covered much of the world in that time.

      Freedom is still an aberration and reversion to the mean would mean the end of freedom. It is not enough for the commies, the latest attempt to end freedom and arguably the most successful, to lose. Freedom needs to actively win to avoid such reversion.

      1. one Marielito, one descended from those who left ahead of the commie goons (and not all that popular with Batista’s goons either), and one who came in some other way and wouldn’t go into detail.

      2. This is the thing. It’s not that big govt can lose. It can and people can subsist in smaller units, trade, etc in a modicum of freedom. But the death of the experiment of large United organizations of communities being free will destroy most.

        Feudalism was a pretty good precursor to the idea of subsidiaries. The peasants could live with their shatecropping and so on. But the actual civilization level in the world today is still built on the need for specialization and these idiots are bent on destroying it.

      3. I’d debate that this is a recreation to the mean. Freedom is new, yes, but every society that has robustly implemented it has thrived.

        I suspect this is more like the Rule of Law. As far as I can tell, the big Roman innovation was implementing and following laws consistently. It became corrupted and Rome fell, but the rule of law has persisted, because it is just a more effective way to live than family blood feuds.

        I think we may be seeing that here: the US and the Western world have thrived based on freedom and free markets. That’s being corrupted, and may well fall now, but the concept is well and truly loose and does work. It may just be that the successor states need to more carefully guard it from corruption next time.

        I wonder if the next big innovation will be on managing emotions? Apparently Rome had a fairly free market sort of by default, but they didn’t really understand the concept and let stuff get dictated by the state leaders more than they should have.

      4. Gods! I hate that phrase “The right side of history”. History is the sequence of events as they work out based on the choices of the individuals involved. It has no “side”. Claiming it does is is just anthropogenic nonsense for people who believe that their way of seeing the world is the righteous one.

        1. Like a lot of lies, I suspect it is based off of a grain of truth.

          It does appear that there are certain innovations that are so extremely beneficial that any group that abandons them loses out to those whole embrace them. Fire. The wheel. The steam engine. Specialization. Rule of law.

          I strongly suspect freedom is also one of those, but on the timescale of history, it has only been around a fairly short time. The US is still the first country to actually try it. It may well need a fall and rebirth cycle to really show that free societies thrive over top down ones, but I suspect that will be the case.

          The hubris of “the right side of history” is that it assumes we already know which innovations will be the ones that actually do build a better tomorrow, and which ones are simply false idols that will crumble to dust.

    5. I became politically aware during the time of Nixon, Ford, and Carter. I snarked at the time that if then current trends continued the US woud become the Soviet Union and the Soviet Union would become the US. Even under Brezhnev the USSR seemed to be “opening up” slowly but ongoing and the US, well, starting witn Nixons wage and price controls and continuing from there…

      Then Reagan came along and I started to hope. Then Mr. “Read My Lips” came along and the hope was banked. Then Clinton came along and the banked embers started to die. Then Bush II came along and, well, they didn’t exactly rekindle but the cooling slowed. Then we had…

      But, it was during Clinton’s years that I came across Jerry Pournelles” “A Step Farther Out” and that</>, more than anything else sstarted the process of rekindling those fires. As much as I loved Heinlein, he seemed to have a rather pessimistic view of the fate of the Earth and its people (although more optimistic about those who go to the stars). Pournelle was all about “Survival with Style” and that rekindled hope in a way that few authors have done before or sense (for me, YMMV and all that).

      In any case, it’s been a roller coaster ride.

    6. “…nor did I fully believe the press when all I had was a pair of local papers and two of the networks to go by.”

      +10 on this. I learned to take what the local papers published with a wheelbarrow of salt via a simple route: The three times the paper published a story about something with which I had a direct personal connection, either as participant or witness, they got it not only wrong but wildly wrong. And in each case the story followed the publisher’s “accepted” line. Don’t try to tell me about “journalistic objectivity”; that beast went extinct long ago, if it ever existed at all.

      1. Yeah, my Gran was a publicity hound (and wrote a gossip column when she lived in a retirement home) and when my Sis got hit by a car and returned home after 39 days, she had the Daily Press come. I think they got our last name right through the whole story, but almost every thing else, either never got it right, or got it right once and then wrong every other time and messed up the timelines.

  2. Sarah: “…turning 60 this year…”
    Me: “Humph. Amateurs.”

    And you’re right about the so-called “cashless society.” What medium of exchange is used to supply “drug gangs in Chicago” (to use a popular trope) with firearms? What makes anyone thing they’ll go to a form that allows the government to keep tabs on them. It’ll just be us sheep.

      1. Yep, though it’s September for me. If I had a lawn, I’d tell people to get off it. As it is, ’tis more weeds than grass.

          1. I practice the benign neglect school of gardening. Only the strong survive. Many of our plants have thorns. Living in Mordor west has some advantages. We complain when it is 90, wimps.

            1. I draw the line at weeds the county will fine us for. (Canada Thistle and relatives.) The only critters that will eat the thistles (and survive) are some goats, but the adult plants have some impressive thorns.

              We’re getting 90 F for the next several days. It was last week we had a hard freeze. Welcome to the intermountain West. We’re not Mordor, but it would have been interesting when some of the nearby volcanoes (cough Mount Mazama/Crater Lake cough) did their things. The natives called Mazama Thunderbeast.

              1. They’ve threatened 90+, and still are for Saturday and Sunday; southern Willamette Valley, west side of the state. But yesterday and today, only got to 82-ish, and very cool (cold?) wind. Friday, not suppose to get particularly hot.

                Naturally if it actually get hot in the Willamette Valley and inland, the Oregon coast is going to be windy and cold … Just how it works on the beaches of Oregon.

      3. 60? 70? Ah to be that young again!

        Me, 83. I’d write more but I really need to go out and drop, buck and split a few more cords of firewood, to supplement our, now, five dollar a gallon heating oil.

        1. five dollar a gallon heating oil.

          –
          Ouch.

          How many gallons do you need to store for winter?

          1. Looks up cords to gallons equivalents: A lot! /snarkj

            Seriously, the lady across the road with a 1 BR house (over heated garage/utility space) can go through 300 gallons a month. People who use mostly wood can go over 10 cords a winter. Depends on the size and insulation–log houses are murder.

            1. We used to go through 6 – 8 chords when wood was our primary heat (ceiling electric heat). Kept our electric bill down, but it went down even more when we finally went natural gas (15 years ago). Latter took getting natural gas line down the street first. Putting in the natural gas forced air heat more than paid for it’s installation. And that is counting the fact that by then our wood was all but free.

    2. Look at how often script has appeared in the US. I think the Syracuse Hour finally tapped out but there are still a couple. They were wildly popular in the Great Depression. Historically the government hasn’t cared as long as taxes are paid.

      What they can do is make scripts inconvenient for everything but local trade, but they are fans of localism. Sure, no more laptops if you’re not near a factory (mostly not in the US), but hey, them’s the breaks.

        1. I know they’ll get traded…SOME. The problem is a currency is only good if people accept it. If I have a Syracuse Hour it only has value if I need something from there or need something from someone who needs something from there.

          Would a nationwide or close to script soon develop? Yeah, probably 3-5 based in areas with a lot of trade. There would also be money changers specializing in scripts, but it’ll take some time.

          I’m not saying it won’t happen and won’t have value, just that it’ll localize trade quite a bit over having a national currency whose recognition and nation-wide usage is a matter of law.

          So it will be disruptive.

          That’s actually an argument that them going cashless is stupid, not that it will work or give them control. It’s an argument that all it will do is disrupt the economy while giving them nothing of what they want.

        2. DEATH had it right. We’re the place where the falling angel meets the rising ape. We’re the ones who keep insisting on believing what is not true so that it can become.

    3. Drug gangs have also been known to take necessities, like items like bottles of Tide in exchange for drugs…

      1. Tide isn’t a necessity. It’s a highly tradeable non-perishable commodity, because many inner-city stores will buy it with no questions asked to resell on the shelves. Cigarettes are another, but Tide is even more tradeable because no tax commissions focus on it like they do on alcohol and cigarettes, and thus the black market can be far more open in reselling to stores, not just individual consumers as packs or loosies. That’s why it’s shoplifted in mass amounts, regularly including pallets if not carefully guarded.

        And yes, specifically Tide. No-Name Knockoff detergent isn’t shoplifted, just Tide, in the same way that nobody loots no-name cheap sneakers. The resale market is in Nikes.

        1. Tide Ultra Stain Release is good stuff. However, it does sell at $1 per pound or less. I suspect the problem with the no-name is it trades at about half the cash per unit weight. $1/lb is already pretty unwieldy. 50c/lb just forget about it.

  3. Case in point. All the “experts” were positive that Russia with all its military might would take over the Ukraine in a long weekend. It’s been what going on two months now and that conflict is still going on stronger than ever. Turns out that Mr. Putin believed his own hype and that of every one of the long chain of military all the way down to the lowliest private who were all reporting what they thought their immediate boss wanted to hear rather than get in trouble by telling them the truth. Add in the corruption that is endemic with all such monolithic organizations and they are discovering things like manpower rosters half full of penciled in place holder names, and equipment that is missing critical parts that got sold off to feather some official’s dacha.
    And do not take comfort that we here in the US are all that much better. Please provide me with a list of ten politicians who can reasonably be assumed to not be beholden or on the take with some rich and powerful hidden agency or international strong man.

      1. Well of course because cheap Chinese knockoffs were procured for a third the cost of the military grade tires specified for the Russian vehicles. Somebody(s) in the logistics chain pocketed the difference, it’s how things are done there. Turns out that the knockoffs do not do well in mud and tend to separate from the rims, so hundreds of Russian vehicles are sitting out of commission. And I have every confidence that those profiting from that bit of business either fled the country or have been summarily dealt with in true Russian fashion.

        1. It’s how they are done here. Keep no spares for component parts, if a spec is old just use the new one even if the right spec is more stringent, don’t get the right tool to the mechanic, just get the system out of the motor pool so your superiors meet their thruput goals.

          This is just the Russian Army version of “you go to war with the army you have” bit from shrub and Co’s own invasion of a foreign country over it being a “threat”.

    2. Can vouch for it not being much better here, though it does seem to play out differently. I got deployed when I did because my state’s primary national guard unit reported they had 2,500 warm bodies to go. There’s some expected weirdness and need of substitutes due to humans, bureaucracies, and life generally being the north end of a south bound mule. Actual needed substitutes? 1500. (cost a 2 star general his job. They were already reorganizing the national guard and a whole bunch of the people who were responsible for that little Charlie Foxtrot got re-orged right out of a job. Never cared enough to see whatelse was done.) One of the differences between the US and Russia, though, is usually we come through on the individual level. Russia really doesn’t have a culture of that.

    3. Lithuania is the latest to poke Putin in the eye, not the Lithuanians have need of much excuse to poke Russia in the eye on principle.

      1. Lithuanian MP Matas Maldeikis recently tweeted that if Russia renounces the 1991 treaty recognizing Lithuanian independence, Lithuania will renounce the 1634 Treaty of Polyanovka and demand the return of Smolensk.

        Two can play the “let’s return to ancient borders” game!

      2. Much as the Reader sympathizes with the Lithuanians, he thinks it would be better if they keep their sticks to themselves at this point in time. A blockade IS an act of war and unlike Ukraine, Lithuania is in NATO.

    4. No takers Lar. Closest I can get is my neighbor who is a state rep (and a conservative and a gun owner), and still works for a living.

    5. Sorry Lar no can do here in MA. The democrats are almost totally on the take (except for those so inbred and stupid to not line up at the trough, they make domesticated turkeys look like geniuses). Most of the Republicans (RINO subspecies) aren’t on the take but that’s because they’re so inconsequential no one bothers to offer them anything. There are a couple Republican types who try real hard (e.g. Geoff Diehl gubernatorial candidate who was a member of the general Court (senate equivalent) I think) but with such massive opposition in the legislatures it is essentially pointless they essentially are Don Quixote tilting at windmills but with a less successful outcome. When a rejigger of the legislative seats comes around they’re almost always gerrymandered out of their seats, or set up to have to run against a similar candidate. And don’t even think of our House and Senate representatives… They all know you’ve got to “Serve Somebody” and it is very clear who their ultimate boss is.

    6. My dad is the local district committee chairman, and I can promise that he’s not on the take. Though I’m not sure he qualifies as a politician even though he -is- an elected official.

    7. I wouldn’t say we’re that much better in terms of corruption. But I would say Americans are much less resigned to living under tyrants than the Russians or Chinese.

  4. China is a Charlie Foxtrot. Nothing works very well there, most things don’t work at all. What they had done well is suborn western institutions and, especially, politicians. What we see about China is western propaganda, what works in China is stolen western IP. They haven’t been able to make the transition to high value added production and the levels of debt are blinding. People don’t realize that China has significantly more debt on significantly lower GDP than the US does, and the numbers are mostly a lie, so it’s probably worse.

    The only thing we have to fear from China is being caught in their death throws.

    1. Any Communist run Socialist society that is enduring at all is because of outside support and/or is using “capitalism” to keep the coffers appearing full and allowing the “elite” to remain in power.

      1. And they destroy the Earth. One of the things that really annoys me about the greenies is that they marry their greenieness with socialism. Idiots.

        3. It’s not even that but that they are merely nimbys. It’s as if it isn’t pollution if done by those wierd colored people things in Asia or Africa. Although getting rid of industry here and shipping it over to the Middle Kingdom is not a bad thing for lots of them. The managerial class gets more profits, the underclass gets cheaper stuff, and the middle class who could once sustain a family working as a lug nut turner now is out of work and hooked on opium. And it’s that middle class that pushes against the rulers in managerial class

    2. I’m waiting for the Three Gorges Dam to reveal how well it was built by failing.

      Given what the first Emperor of China became Emperor for doing, I wouldn’t want to be the head of the CCP when that thing fails.

        1. Also reports of violent crime getting out. I’m sure the party doesn’t like that.

          1. You can buy an apartment for wheat and garlic up north China at the moment. Not good for them, not good at all.

      2. The Reader hopes it fails on its own and not as an outcome of an attempted CCP invasion of Taiwan. The Reader is pretty sure an attempted invasion of Taiwan will result in a nuke being delivered to that locale.

        1. Any war plans against the PRC that don’t target it in the first 24 hours is foolish IMHO. The disruption caused by its failure would be a huge advantage.

            1. If/when is goes by itself (ChiCom construction is not notably durable), I wonder what our collective reaction will be. I mean, we are talking megadeaths. Lots of megadeaths. And in the space of a few hours.

              1. You thought we were sending a lot of money to ukraine and seeing massive aftershocks now. Chinese exports will be massively affected, sending import prices skyrocketing, we will be repeating the feb/Mar 2020 ‘send all our stockpiles to other countries’ again, and we will probably be dropping trillions in aid between military support, food, and other goods.

                But what else is china’s largest client state supposed to do but help the middle kingdom

            2. The Taiwanese would in a heartbeat if attacked. And they have the means. Anyone that thinks that Taiwan, South Korea, and Japan are not undeclared nuclear powers i.e. being a turn of a wrench away, is welcome to offer terms for the Chesapeake Bay spanning bridge the Reader keeps in his closet.

            3. I know we wouldn’t…because we’d rather kill a million of our own being nice than a million of theirs winning.

        1. 500 Million people, 147 large cities, 15% of world manufacturing. The dam deformed in 2020 and engineers figure that it’s not really up to a one in a century storm. The inspectors declared the Dam safe, but then they also have Chinese GDP growing at over 5% YOY in Q2 despite most of the country being closed and real estate prices haven’t declined since the local governments simply declared you couldn’t sell for less. No sales, no decline in Prices, no problem. So let it be written, so let it be done.

        2. Maybe,maybe not. Shanghai is at the mouth of a very long river, and much of the force of the unrushing water may have disipated by then.

          Wuhan, on the other hand…

      4. Three Gorges failing would be catastrophic, and could possibly even directly impact Shanghai (which is at the mouth of the river). The fallout from that would be interesting. Unfortunately, though, the death toll would be horrific, and on a massive scale.

        1. Yeah. That’s definitely high on my list of Do Not Want.

          Would be best if they just drained the thing, but the leadership certainly won’t. It’s not like they expect it could impact them even if it does go.

          Apparently there’s also a big dam in Iraq that’s positioned to wipe out Baghdad as well. Honestly, every major project statists build always seems to end up a grave threat to human life on massive scales.

          I think about the only way you can do giant projects safely is if the government has no stake in it succeeding, and the engineering and management staff all known the government will try them to the fullest extent of the law of they f-up and kill 1M+ people.

          Which now makes me wonder how compromised Hoover Dam must be…

  5. Back in the 70s, the FBI spy in the Weather Underground, Larry Grathwohl, related how Ayers and Dohrrn would brainstorm about how to get rid of the millions of Americans who wouldn’t comply with the communists. They agreed that they’d have to kill about 25 million people, using re-education camps. These evil monsters never served a minute of jail time even though their bombs killed a policeman. Ayers even said, famously: “Guilty as sin, free as a bird!”

    But they didn’t see their dreams come to life, did they? They’ve had to live in a free America for decades, still plotting and scheming, but never achieving their goal. Their adopted son, Chesa Boudin, was just recalled and thrown out of office in San Francisco. Their protege, Obama, can’t get an audience for his podcasts. Their puppet, Biden, is a joke. It’s very serious that we have this demented old man in the Presidency, but he’s failing. He’s showing us what’s behind the curtain, and it’s the dream of Ayers and Dorhn. And we’re not going to let that happen. Oh, I might die, but it’s not going to be marching into a gas chamber in a re-education camp.

    1. First they came for the Socialists, and I cheered
      Because Socialism is evil.

      Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I cheered
      Because Trade Unions were just con games to enrich the union leaders.

      Then they came for our guns, and we said “HELL NO!”
      And shot the crap out of the tyrants.

        2. I’m going to need a “Get off my lawn!” and a #TeamHeadsOnPikes t-shirt.

          Print-to-order please, I do not expect Hoyt Enterprises to carry inventory (or do fulfillment, or shipping, or take orders, or any of that crap. Sarah is supposed to be writing.)

          Make it a nice UnderArmor T please, and I’ll need some burning skulls as well. ~:D

          2. Funny: A little farther down the Twitstream some people are ragging on Herschel Walker for telling Staci Abrams she should move to one of the other 51 states if Georgia is ‘the worst state in the nation’, trying to portray him as dumb or ignorant. They apparently don’t realize that Herschel is trolling them with a ‘circle_back’ to Obama’s gaffe. Or they have no sense of humor. Or yes . . .

          3. They’re also going back to their segregationist Massive Resistance roots. “We’ll just pass another law and you can spend another 10 years in the courts.”

              1. The Reader hopes they will. In other times a firm having a partner who won at the Supreme Court was GOOD for business. The Reader’s son (who, God help him is a lawyer) observed that the firm had to have given permission for them to take this case at its inception.

    2. The Lords of Freedom don’t care if you die, dying is a free man’s stock and trade. They care very much how you die, in the street with whatever weapon you have against the state’s enforcers.

      Make the Captain and the Lieutenant proud when you go down.

  6. Three cheers for King Cash! I ALWAYS tip in cash, ’cause a tip is a private transaction between me and my server, not to be snooped on or meddled with by management or the state. I also have regular gang of service providers who I pay strictly in cash for similar reason. Plus, when I need something fixed quick, folks come ‘a runnin’ for cash on completion. As you might imagine, I’m a pretty popular guy in my corner of the burg.

  7. the desire to be special and elite in a sea of peasants who are forced to live in medieval conditions,

    As I get older I begin to wonder how much post apoc sci-fi with that premise is wishfulfillment. I doubt The RIngs of the Lords by Jack Chalker was (if anything, it was a warning that the elites will be medieval as well), but some of the rest. One wonders.

    And what they planned for us accords with things you can interpret as happening, kind of, sort of, if you squint.

    I’m not sure you always need to squint. Looking around I think you could say the Soviet campaign to rot the culture of the West from the inside via academics and other intellectuals was the single most successful thing the Soviets did given it has outlasted the Soviet Union by 30+ years.

    In fact, just with their war on oil, attempting to make “green energy” materialize out of their dreams, is going to hurt them badly.

    On Insty someone commented “the laptop class will be fine” on an article about economic problems. I pointed out “the laptop class thinks they’ll be fine, but they’ve forgotten where food, electricity, and even laptops come from.” If we weren’t going to have to pay the price with them I’d be all for it.

    I’m starting to think that’s something Rand misread in Atlas Shrugged. The reason Atlas hadn’t struggled yet wasn’t some sense of nobility about keeping things going for people, but the realization that in shrugging they would suffer most of the same deprivation the parasites would. It was only when the parasites raised the cost of not shrugging to the cost of shrugging in terms of deprivation that the mass of the productive gave up. That tracks with my theory of laziness: if you make doing nothing as expensive as acting, people will do nothing because that takes less energy.

    Actually, if you make the cost of acting equal to the cost of not acting minus the energy of acting you’ll get no action as the expended energy is the same.

    1. it is a special kind of stupid that types on a laptop/desktop/tablet/smart phone (99% of the time an iPhone or Mac) that we don’t need any oil drilling (or often enough, mining of minerals) while hooked to an internet. Often the same sorts who claim we should only eat local source food, while living in NYC or L.A.

    2. Everyone says the laptop class will be fine. Bob Farrell’s Rule #9 says that when all the experts agree something will happen, something else will happen. Something happening to the laptop class is the potential grey swan that I’m watching for in my day job.

      Farrell also says (rule # 10) that bull markets are more fun than bear markets and I think there’s going to be a great lack of fun for a long time to come. The recession has already started and I think it’s going to be a doozy.

      1. Gray swan you’re looking for?

        Hell, gray swam I’m waiting for/anticipating with glee. Yes, I work from home on a work provided laptop, but I’m not part of the laptop class.

        1. Fair enough. For me it’s mostly about money and I can’t get all worked up just about money.

          1. For me it hasn’t nothing to do with money. It is all about people who like treating me with contempt and acting superior getting recalibrated.

            1. And that’s where economics will always fail in its models: any model that assumes people are rational actors according to the lights of the modeler usually cannot account for non-monetary compensation like altruism and vengeance. …And any system that does manage one is blind to the other.

      2. The laptop class can only work remotely as long as there is reliable power and reliable Internet. Otherwise they cannot log in and are discovered to be not productive. (Because of someone vanishes consistently for long periods of time and everything continues to work, then they provide no value, and only add cost to the system.)

        Further, if you hired in remotely and worked remotely for bigcorp, and bigcorp lays you off, you simply vanish and have no contacts with which to find new work. It makes the laptop workers commoditized.

        1. They are already a commodity. If you’re not offshored and replaced you’ve got no route for advancing. If you don’t jump jobs and usually states you stagnate with raises below inflation. You’d think defense products would be made in the USA but we do import a lot of it because it’s cheaper.

        2. Got news for you, Harry. If the power and the internet get unreliable, a LOT of people not considered part of the laptop class will become unproductive because the materials will stop moving and the machines will stop synching at the velocity needed to sustain various modern technologies that we all rely on to stay alive.

          1. It is not that they will be unproductive. It is that them not logging in or showing up to work will have no impact on productivity.

            And if productivity does not change when they are not there, why have them at all?

    3. Yes, you have to squint. Look at the 2A clawback and constitutional carry. Look at people fighting CRT. No, they didn’t get their way, and it’s not really soviet, it’s their claiming credit for what happened due to other reasons.

      1. Successful doesn’t mean win. You can’t deny the German invasion of the Soviet Union wasn’t very successful in 1941 and 1942.
        Some of it happened due to other reasons, but I find it hard to deny Soviet directed activity by American communists is not a major thread in advancing a lot of it.

        Sometimes I think you squint so you only see the parts you want to see of fighting back and ignore the successes the other side has had. That’s why I keep saying them losing isn’t us winning. We have to see and control the whole battlefield to win. Saying “they can never succeed” is an easy way to not do that.

        1. Yeah, the New York governor’s response was instructive:

          “We’ll just pass a similar law and you can spend more money appealing to SCOTUS while we enforce it.”

          Remind me again how we should respect the cops who will enforce her new laws….. that are obviously unconstitutional on the face.

          1. Yep. And then look at that obergefell clerk, or the various Hawaiian judges during the period Trump could make EOs (I won’t say in charge of government. He wasn’t. At best it was a stalemate). And it won’t improve until the bough breaks.

          2. Remind me again why we should respect SCUS decisions we don’t like.

            Civilization is an agreement and once a sufficient minority gets away with disagreeing it fails. The advantage of being able to ignore law leads to such disregard to spread.

            1. THIS, dammit. And the Left has conclusively demonstrated that anything short of war is NOT persuasive…. or effective.

      2. Supreme Court just overturned New York State’s permit law. Very interesting indeed, especially given the current push for red flag.

        1. Here’s the song that Leslie Fish wrote about Bernie Goetz. Seems appropriate.

          1. You know, for all that Ms FIsh is an old hippie and a Wobbly (both of which I despise), I think I could quite easily like her.

            1. “Damn the cops who told him, ‘No, that’s not sufficient cause.'”

              A particularly appropriate line today.

          2. RKBA is for everybody. If a person cannot be out and about with a gun he cannot be out without a keeper.

    4. “…that premise is wish fulfillment.”

      Oh, yeah. It totally is. You can feel some of them -aching- to see the big towers fall and the suburbanites suffer. The hatred is palpable.

      My fiction is wish fulfillment too. It’s full of opportunities to bully the hell out of corrupt officials and thereby make the world a better place.

      Also many and various huge guns. ~:D Why stop at 7.62 when you can go 30mm?

        1. Ah, they switched to the XM256 120mm cannon in 1985 as part of the M1E1 upgrades.

            1. If you want to get firepower on the cheap, see if you can find some old VietNam Ontos tanks. The weirdest thing you’ve ever seen: 6 106mm recoiless rifles mounted on a track. You could fire 6 shots (with PRONOUNCED backblast), then you had to get out of the track to reload. But 6 106 rounds, well chosen in advance, can do a WORLD of hurt.

  8. You can ‘tell’ a person by their political philosophy! One’s political philosophy is an inventory of sorts, a list of values, personal judgments and assessments. Many people align their political philosophies with movements like Maoism, Leninism, Marxism, or in my case, Americanism — this identification defines them!

    People void of a political philosophies of their own are secondhanders who simply go with the group. Most white liberals fall into that category, they simply need to identify with the cool kids.

    Moreover, one’s political philosophy is a set of beliefs. Sadly, the Left is intolerant of anyone/anything which does not conform to its orthodoxy. These are dangerous people!

    1. My political philosophy consists of:
      (1) Leave me alone.
      (2) If I need help, I’ll ask for it. And I’ll pay you back for it too.
      (3) If you need help, I’ll offer it if I can. You don’t get to force me to do so.

    2. We need to change the perception of who the ‘cool kids’ are. When the ‘cool kids’ are the productive class, rather than the parasite class, we’ll be getting somewhere.

      1. Beyond that the Reader believes we need to make individual liberty, rule of law, and natural rights radical again. After all they were extremely radical in the 18th Century. We are NOT conservatives.

        3. Radical, n. “of or relating to the origin : FUNDAMENTAL”

          Of course, the “fun” of the word radical is that us has given it two opposite meanings.

          although the example given in definition 3.d: “advocating extreme measures to retain or restore a political state of affairs “the radical right” ” amused me greatly.

  9. Kind of funny that this song was the one that came up in the top of my mix today:

    (Just be aware, the singer’s English is very self taught.)

    Kind of what I needed to hear too. I guess when the algorithm is let do its job, its actually really good. It’s just all the people trying to put their thumbs on the scale that ruin it. The minute you get out of the areas they’re aware of, it starts surfacing stuff like this.

  10. As the military preaches, no plan survives contact with the enemy…Hence central planning can’t work, because reality is too powerful an enemy…

      2. A man said to the universe:
        “Sir, I exist!”
        “However,” replied the universe,
        “The fact has not created in me
        A sense of obligation.”
        — Stephen Crane.

  12. I said they’re trying to ban cash; I never said they would succeed.

    The enemy wants ‘war powers’ so bad, Turd-o declared war on a few hundred Canadian truckers having a street fair with bouncy castles. The Biden* Regime constantly repeats that “We are At War!” when we’re not. For the first time in 30 years, we don’t have American soldiers fighting in some other country. The elitists are uncomfortable with this lack of war, and seek to remedy it by any possible means.

    Huge centralized authority, government or otherwise, is inefficient. Information can’t get to where it’s needed, and/or it gets corrupted along the way. The only thing worse than a decision made with no information is a decision made with bad information. Government is a blind, blundering giant and the bigger it gets, the more damage it can do.

    Meanwhile, the ‘Leader Of The Free World’ is a mumbling, bumbling, stumbling buffoon unable to remember what day it is or which city the media circus is visiting. Biden hasn’t made a decision of his own in at least 3 years, including running for president.

    This is sort of rambling, isn’t it? Oh, well.
    ———————————
    The one thing we need more of from the government is LESS!!

  13. I like that illustration. Well, this reminds me of the old Bob Dylan song, Talkin’ World War III, where the doctor says, “I’ve been havin’ the same old dreams
    But mine was a little different, you see
    I dreamt the only person left after the war was me
    I didn’t see you around”

    I think that’s very true. The fact that we’re even speculating on this coming war means that we believe, erroneously, that we’ll be around after it’s over, decided, and done.

    It is a war, and it’s happening, I believe. And I have siblings that do not see it. The ‘it’ being this great change. All the pieces that have been constructed are now being put in place… propagandized mush-head youth, very violent youth, I might add, who are ignorant of history, more and more people dependent on ‘gubmint,’ a tiny fraction of our population producing the food, a cowed populace who ‘loves big brother, or sister.’

    Here’s what I believe. There really are only two outcomes. One, civil war, when people reach a tipping point. Or a different outcome, Americans just giving up and going quietly, well, not quietly, there will be a lot of complaining on social media sites, but so what? Going quietly into the dark cold night.

    But, we are in it. Our rulers, hidden, are imposing their will, tightening the noose around our necks. One side will prevail. If ‘they’ win, we’ll be looking at a long ‘Soviet style slog, 70 years or more, until hopefully enough people have had enough. If ‘we’ win, after a bloody fight, a disunited, broken nation, with the combatants going ‘to their corners.’ Neither of these outcomes is good.

    Of course, given the international scope of this great struggle, maybe these are the end times, the coming of the 2nd coming. I would prefer that wild card. But what I want… who cares?

    1. Our rulers, hidden, are imposing their will, tightening the noose around our necks.

      And doing an unbelievably shitty job of it. But that is what happens when a formerly dominant ideology is on the way out.

    2. Hey! Slaps Carl.
      You’re actually falling for the carefully constructed image of the left.
      This is what I meant. No, the youth is not all propagandized and violent. Not more than they’ve ever been (violent.) They’ve been more propagandized, but most of them have spit out the bullshit.
      As for “tiny population producing food!” That’s because they produce SO VERY MUCH.
      As for going quietly into that goodnight, as the Germans would say Du Spinst. No one is. Even now. Not outside a few puddingheads in the big cities.
      Going quietly my sore foot.
      As for not being alive at the end…. I don’t know about you, tovarish, but I intend to be.
      “Everything will be different” Yeah. In a way those who have been “put pieces in place” never saw coming, because the pieces they’re putting in place keep moving around.
      WAKE THE HECK UP. You’re having a nightmare. And it’s a STUPID one.

      1. but I intend to be.

        In my case, intent may have very little to do with it. I don’t expect to be, but I do expect to have a large honor guard in Valhalla (although, to be honest, I’m more hoping for Folkvangr, although perhaps Forsetti’s hall might be a better fit, or even Ullr’s).

      2. Yeah.. if you look at trends with Youth, they are tending to spend less time on social media and be more conservative about sex issues (probably picking up how screwed up their parents are).

        One of the big advantages of Big Tech is the ability to make you see The Lie wherever you look. Doesn’t matter what actually happens as long as they can show everyone that it didn’t. It’s perfect control but it manages to draw a good majority of people in… but it’s eroding, fast.

        I think Ukraine is an example – All western media in lockstep that Russia is irredeemably bad and Ukraine is a spotless virgin. (And seems likely that Russia believed its own version of the lies). But we are told we must ignore ALL stories of nazi battalions, rampant corruption, war crimes etc in order to ‘support the cause’ . . . and then the gas & fertiliser stops flowing. The EU is a slow motion trainwreck over it, the only upside is that it’s not winter yet.

        And people are waking up as it impacts their daily lives.

          1. remember, when someone says a place is run by nazis and the leader is a jew, their tale is more than just a bit outside reality. Not to mention being a Nazi is illegal in Ukraine (so actual ones hide in other parties like they do everywhere else and for the same reasons they hate the Russian gov’t, the Nazis are held in lowest contempt for their crimes against Ukraine). Ukraine is no more, and likely less corrupt than Russia is (the middle gov’t seems to be the problem, locals I’ve seen talk of aid from the gov’t coming from the top, getting to governors and then distributed or not, often disappearing somewhere between local councils and the Governors. Sometimes it’s the governor’s people, other times it’s the heads of the councils), This is a hold-over from the Soviet, as that was how things worked then, and after the fall only the crime bosses knowing how to operate and those like Putin grabbing enough power to hold due to their position and training. Ukraine’s biggest crime, other than, after tossing out a corruptocrat (who was also anti-Moscow), and electing a jewish comedian known to make fun of Putin, is throwing out corrupt Putin stooges. Russia has made being proud to be in, or from, Ukraine the definition of Nazi, so justifying their invasion. The battalions in question act the way they do because that is the way they were trained and acted under the Soviet, and how portions of the Russian Army acts.
            Being a proud Russian who thinks they should get the band back together and control all those old soviet client states again, is of course totally different.

          1. The only reason why Russia would be justified in invading The Ukraine would have been if there were criminal elements conducting raids across the border, and then hiding in the Ukraine with the government allowing them to do so. Kind of like Panco Villa and Mexico.

              1. Yep. And we have showed the world that even if you pay off our assholes, we’ll still happily abandon you… Just ask the Ukrainians if they think they got their money’s worth by paying Hunter Biden now, eh?

                2. … if only that would convince anyone to stop paying off our jackasses.

                  Of course if they’re paying off our jackasses with US taxpayer money US foreign aid, that probably alters their calculus a bit.

  14. My philosophy is about two centuries out of date. I’m an Age of Reason sort of guy.
    I believed in a centralized, technocratic meritocracy. Then I got better (grew up?) and the 21st century happened.
    I don’t understand how anyone can still believe in centralized anything. It’s been shown, over and over and over again, that local, distributed solutions are better. How old is Temple of Doom? “Top Men” were being mocked way back then.

    1. That was raiders. And yes. Subsidiarity is the best way. Except it is slower because you progress in fits and can fall back. Meanwhile fascism like we’re diving towards is faster and more powerful til it collapses. And since we were that last hope, I’m not sure if that will come.

  15. I never thought we would be as communistic as we are. I am appalled to think of how long the CIA, FBI, the cabal, might have been in charge and we didn’t catch on. Of course they don’t want real communism, they just want to be in charge of our every move. I know I’ve mentioned before I am 85, getting closer to 86 now, and I wonder, was I blind to believe the news people? I remember realizing there were some so much more conservative leaning than others. Now I know that just meant they were probably middle of the road. We’ve been fed a line for a long, long time. I wish I didn’t believe that, sometimes it may pay to stay dumb.

    At my age I should be relaxing, reading, listening to music, just having a sweet old time. I’m not. I spend my days in front of the computer reading the news, all the news, collecting bits and pieces to send out in a newsletter and put in my blog. And I grieve for the country my great grandchildren will never see. My grandchildren have seen some of it, and three of them are on the side of the cabal. I love them, I think they should know better, but I don’t even try to convince them of anything anymore.

    Older granddaughter is finishing her residency this month, also has a Master in Public Health, so no telling her the facts of political life, she is on a mission. All good intentions for them, but we all know where that path can lead. And that seems to be where the country is headed. In a hand basket.
    .

    1. I never thought we would be as communistic as we are.

      We aren’t.
      The word you are looking for is “Fascistic”, even if they are closely related.

        1. If a line starts with a number and a dot, WPDE sends them to sleep with the fishes. You can get around that by using the HTML code for a period — &#46;

          1. Like
          2. this

      2. most decidedly leaning on the Fascistic side of things, but these knobs think more of Marx than Bennie did, so more National Socialist, but change who the untermensch are to some extent (though most are about as anti jew, just not gas chamber levels. . . yet)

        1. I don’t know Bennie seemed more fond of Marx at the beginning. However even Bennie quickly figured out how screwed up communist/marxist ideals were likely when he tried to put them into action and he got bugger all as a result. Makes Bennie even idiot he was, far brighter then Obummer or the Turnip in Chief.

          1. He was a disillusioned Marxist (and defrocked, they kicked him out) who decided Marx was a loon, and tried to mould his own philosophy without the bits of Marx he thought were out to lunch.

          1. I agree. The common thread between all of them is they believe that the pie is fixed, so for anyone to get more, someone had to get less.

            The ancient Greeks believed this on an individual level; if your neighbor’s vineyard had a bumper harvest coming in, the way to get ahead wasn’t figure out what he did right, it was to cut down his vines in the night.

            Marx does the same thing, but now it was classes taking from eachother: he though the bourgeois got their by taking it from the lower classes.

            CRT just makes it about race. Race A got ahead by taking it from Race B.

            I don’t know what form it will take after CRT has burned itself to the ground, but I bet there will be one. It has existed before Marx and will probably exist long after he has been forgotten.

          2. I think “Target” is the word you are looking for… either that or impromptu shish kebab.

          1. Totalitarian is correct. They insist not just that we obey Big Brother’s decrees, they demand that we actively applaud and embrace the decrees and constantly express love for Big Brother. They are all on board with shooting the first person who stops clapping, as happened in Stalin’s Soviet Union (which along with Mao’s China is definitely one of the role models).

          1. Yep. The house that FDR built is crashing. That’s all the noise, fire and commotion. Our republic is still there, and if we try, it will come back.

    2. “I am appalled to think of how long the CIA, FBI, the cabal, might have been in charge and we didn’t catch on.”

      Maybe since Wilson. Definitely since FDR.

  16. And what they planned for us accords with things you can interpret as happening, kind of, sort of, if you squint.

    Or, you can see a dying giant in its death throes lashing out at all around it, causing an immense amount of destruction in the course of its dying.

    I mean, you could. 😉

  17. So does reality, which is also their enemy.

    Reality gets not just a vote, but the veto you say the enemy doesn’t get. It may be slow to fully exercise that veto but The Gods fo the Copybook Headings will have the final word. Count on it.

  18. It isn’t that they have a likelihood of success when they seek to ban cash, or oil, or anything else of that nature. It is a statement of their intent to impose totalitarian rule to the greatest extent possible. The only way to prevent them from succeeding is to actively oppose that effort in ways both big and small.

  19. Leftists are screaming in outrage again as the Supreme Court affirmed the Second Amendment means what it says when it comes to the right to bear arms, striking down NY’s onerous restrictions on the right to bear arms outside one’s home.:

    https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/paula-bolyard/2022/06/23/breaking-supreme-court-issues-landmark-ruling-expanding-gun-rights-n1607473

    Democratic New York Gov. Kathy Hochul stated that the U.S. only had access to muskets when the 2nd Amendment was written, and that she was “prepared to go back to muskets” through gun restrictions.

    Note that by her logic, the First Amendment would not protect free speech on radio, tv or the internet and press freedoms would be limited to stuff printed on wet ink movable type printing presses. This of course shows the absurdity of the “only muskets are protected”. In fact muskets were the most advanced firearm at the time, and the Constitution protects the right of the people to bear the most advanced firearms of the time, along with knives, swords, etc. Of course Hochul, like many of her fellow Democrats, hates the First Amendment also and wants government to have the power to ban speech it doesn’t like under the rubrics of “hate speech” and “misinformation”.

    Hochul and her fellow Democrats of course insist that there is no restriction on abortion allowed, even at the moment of birth, even though unlike the right to bear arms, abortion is mentioned nowhere in the Constitution.

    1. They’re lying about the muskets, too. Rifles were in common use (see ‘Kentucky Rifle’) as were pistols and shotguns. Multiple-shot guns such as ‘organ guns’ existed and better ones were under development. As for ‘The 2nd Amendment didn’t mean you could own a cannon’ — MOST of the Continental Army’s field guns were privately owned. As the war went on they were supplemented with captured British cannons.

      After the war, the owners took their cannons home. Good thing, too. We needed them again in 1812.

      What really burned my tookus, though, was Hochul’s pronouncement of “the government’s right” to subject us to its laws. The government doesn’t HAVE rights! People have rights. The government has a duty to protect those rights. Anybody that says such a stupid thing should be immediately removed from office and subjected to public ridicule. A generous pelting with spoiled vegetables would not be out of line.
      ———————————
      ‘Progressives’ suppress free speech because they don’t have the means to suppress free thought.

      Yet.

      1. There were Civil War artillery units that provided their own cannon in the 1860s. Indeed some Span-Am War arms were provided by private citizens. There is a very long tradition of private ownership of what Democrats like to call “weapons of war” that the writers of the Constitution were very well aware of and approved of at the time the Second Amendment was written.

        Hochul’s response is the essence of Democratic Party ideology-that people have no inherent individual rights (other than to have an abortion) and that all rights, liberties and property are granted by the state. In essence, their ideology is simply a retread of the feudal era’s “everything belongs to the king who rules as a matter of divine right”.

      3. “Multiple-shot guns such as ‘organ guns’ existed and better ones were under development. ”

        The Puckle Gun was developed in 1719 and actually adopted by the Royal Navy. It had all the elements of both the Gatling and the Revolver, except it was uncartridged black powder.

    2. Actually, they’re beginning to push for “abortion” past birth, for from 7 to 28 days. What we non-insane people call “murder.”

      1. If they like postpartum abortions so much, maybe we could satisfy their nature and let them experience one first hand as reciprocal gift by insisting they take a Covid booster every month for 10 months.

        Just consider the contributions to “Science”!

        1. Wait – what? How the hell do they legalize killing an actual, no shit, crying baby?

          1. No one enforces the law. And you can’t defend that “clump of cells”, you vigilante you.

            See? Easy.

            1. So it a neonate dies for an unreported reason, nothing happens? How many docs are actually willing to go along with this? I mean, humans have a very different emotional reaction to a yelling baby than a fetus visible only via ultrasound.

              1. “How many docs are actually willing to go along with this? ”

                In the jurisdictions that allow this? Pretty much any that are still in practice. As we saw during the pandemic, you either spout the party line, and practice it on the record, or you will be unemployed and your state medical license revoked.

            2. I see this inevitably coming up in a court of law with some piece-of-trash-masquerading-as-human having killed their own kid (or someone else’s), claiming “It’s perfectly legal, since it was under 7 weeks! And you didn’t charge me for practicing medicine without a license, so I get off free!”

          3. Infanticide has usually been legal. Roman writers s singled out Egyptians and Jews as the weirdos who don’t.

            That is how they got their fetal tissue: deliver the baby alive, dismember on the table. No anesthesia since it impairs the tissue’s value.

        1. They freaking lost two of the ten necessary righteous people when you and Dan left.

      4. my roomate got really pissed when our now former governor started talking about that….

      5. That’s how they do the harvesting. Deliver the baby alive and butcher on the operating table. Without anesthesia of course, it impairs the value of tissue.

    3. As if we don’t know that in New York, the ‘special need’ to justify getting a concealed carry permit includes being a politically connected Democrat.

    4. The Founding Fathers knew how firearms had already advanced from matchlock to wheellock and so forth, so there’s no way they intended the Second Amendment to apply only to the firearms of that exact time.

      1. If AK47’s had existed at the time, the writers of the Constitution would have expected the average citizen to have them.

      2. The Founding Fathers didn’t have the term “militarized police” but they were very much aware of and opposed to the concept. One of the purposes of the Second Amendment was to inhibit the formation of that sort of law enforcement, against whines of “But law enforcement neeeeds those advanced weapons that ordinary people aren’t allowed to have” – by the simple trick of eliminating the class of “advanced weapons that ordinary people aren’t allowed to have.”

        I somehow doubt that New York’s governor would want to limit cops to muzzle-loading black powder muskets. Especially those on her own protective detail. Because “They neeeed those advanced modern weapons that ordinary people shouldn’t be allowed to have.”

  20. It’s really not that large a stretch to think that the 2nd amendment requires all free men to keep and bear arms given what a well ordered militia is. The militia being all free men and all that. Our soi disant masters not being all that well educated don’t seem to know what the word means. They also seem to really want their own Hessians, what with the borders and all. All in all a good day.

    Next we watch their heads explode when they discover the difference between an enumerated right and a penumbra, In this, I agree with Fred that what is good in life is to scatter your enemy, to drive him before you, to see his cities reduced to ashes, to see those who live him reduced to tears — I’m not interested in gathering his wives and daughters to my bosom, the wife wouldn’t go along with that, I’ll settle for their lamentations.

    1. Herb not Fred. Herb looks exactly like one of my neighbors and I brain farted, again.

  21. at this point i am wondering what is really going on in china and how many have really died from Covid there.

      1. I’m thinking that a LOT of people died from Covid there, and it will be years if ever that we find out how many

        1. Draven I think our esteemed hostess has the right of it. Covid does kill but in normal sub 65 yo healthy populations its lethality is somewhere between common cold and a B type flu like Hong Kong. But we had pictures of folks dropping in the street. So either
          1) Those were faked for effect
          2) Those deaths happened and for some reason that populace was more sensitive to Covid (Malnourished? Lungs damaged from severe pollution? something else)
          3) Those deaths occurred but not for the reason stated (severe lead poisoning? Use of Chemical weapons? Some other disease CCP wanted to hide/suppress?)

          I think 1 requires a little too much conspiracy theory stuff. Doesn’t mean its NOT so but I think CCP’s usual inclination would be just to suppress the signal. Item 2 doesn’t match with what we saw. The only place Covid was that lethal was in nursing homes, and there you had VERY fragile people with multiple severe co morbidities and VERY close confinement (Even nice nursing homes tend to be 2+ to a room to ease nursing staff issues and deal with the fact that we really are social animals). So 3 seems the best by Occam’s razor, but all of it is just fricking strange

          1. 2A. Widespread, severe vitamin D deficiency.

            We know vitamin D deficiency is a major risk factor for COVID19 complications. We know malnutrition is common in China. Put ’em together and you could very well have people dropping dead in the streets.

            Which is why the communist Chinese were so disappointed that Americans weren’t dropping in the streets after they spread their little lab experiment around the world. Based on what happened in China, they expected to take out 40 or 50 million of us and bring about complete social collapse.
            ———————————
            Some folks can be taught. Others can learn by example. The rest have to piss on the electric fence for themselves.

  22. “And we’re their enemies. And we get a vote.”

    Not with ballots you won’t. As the article makes clear, Democrats are simply ignoring the law and daring you to do something besides talk.

    https://thefederalist.com/2022/06/23/yes-biden-is-hiding-his-plan-to-rig-the-2022-midterm-elections/

    “Executive Order 14019 ignores that the Constitution does not give the executive branch authority over elections. That power is reserved for the states, with a smaller role for Congress. With H.R. 1 and other Democrat Party efforts to grab more control over elections have thus far failed, Congress hasn’t authorized such an expansion.”

    1. I expect the Democrats’ election fraud efforts to ramp up even more as they rationalize their willingness to to do everything they can to guarantee they maintain and expand power as being “necessary” to “save democracy” (i.e. the Democratic Party) from the “extremists”, i.e. everyone to the right of Lenin and Mao. Their hope is that if they are successful they can pack the Court and strip away the actually enumerated rights protected by the Constitution, such as speech, bearing of arms, due process, etc.. They will not allow the Supreme Court to stand in the way of their Green Leap Forward and Mao’s Cultural Revolution Redux.

    1. Four other justices signed onto Alito’s opinion in Dobbs. Roberts agreed with the basic outcome (the state law is not overturned), but wrote a concurring opinion instead. The expected three justices dissented. In addition to joining Alito, Kavanaugh wrote a concurrence that basically said (among other things) that they’re not coming for same sex marriage, and states can’t block their own citizens from traveling to another state for an abortion.

      Roberts’s basic thrust appears to be that while he agrees Roe is a weak decision, he thinks it’s too disruptive to just entirely eliminate Roe. I’d argue otherwise. The reason why eliminating Roe is potentially so disruptive is because it was allowed to stand for so long, with multiple cases citing it. Letting it stand longer will make things even worse. Better to rip the band-aid off all at once, imo, and remove the possibility of it continuing to influence future judicial decisions.

      1. It doesn’t matter if the Supreme Court’s decision might be ‘disruptive’. All that matters is whether they are following the Constitution. They’ve got ONE JOB, and that’s it. If overturning an unconstitutional law is ‘disruptive’ — well, tough shit. The law should never have been passed in the first place.

        That’s the same noise they made about repealing 0bamaCare — “Too many people depend on it! WAAAH!”
        ———————————
        Candidate Joe Biden, August 2020: “We have assembled the most extensive, comprehensive and inclusive voter fraud organization in the history of American politics.”

        Minutes later: “What do you mean, I wasn’t supposed to say that?”

        1. The overriding of Plessy v. Fergusson caused a lot of mess too. I suppose our Chief Justice would have tried to deal with that piece meal too. That man either has the testicular fortitude of a low t field mouse or someone has him solidly over a barrel (Like rides on the Lotlita express or pictures of him engaging in fornicating goats). Ever since he failed to put Obama care out of its misery that has been clear. He’s better than say Merrick Garland, but only just…

      2. Now they need to overrule the Chevron case, which has been a big contributor to the unfettered rule of administrative agencies as lawmaker, investigator, judge, jury and executioner.

          1. Yes, Thor also must go (the case, not the Norse deity/Marvel comics character or extra-galactic alien from SG1).

    2. Someone needs to tell the genderistas that the Democrats are suddenly using the forbidden slur “woman” instead of the newspeak “womxn”.

  24. Looks like the summer riot season is going to start today as no doubt the left will engage in massive violence with the issuance of the Supreme Court decision in Dobbs this morning overturning Roe v Wade.

    1. My prediction (not hoping for this, just predicting it) is that at some point, one of those engaged in those violent “protests” is going to find out the hard way that “pro-life” does not mean the same thing as “pacifist”. At which point the left is going to try to turn the late protestor into another Horst Wessel.

      What I do hope is that if/when it happens, enough cameras catch the incident that it becomes abundantly obvious to any unbiased observer (i.e., not the news media) that the pro-life person only fired in self-defense.

      1. I also expect more assassination attempts against non-leftist Supreme Court justices which will include outright firebombing attempts of their homes, which Democrats will excuse as they push yet another court packing scheme. The violent leftists already know the Democrats approve of their use of violence and that the HarrisBiden DOJ and FBI will stand and watch if not actively assist in the violence.

      2. They will also find that the gas for the molotov cocktails is a lot more expensive than it was in 2020. Of course since we know the 2020 leftist riots, just like the ones coming this summer, are financed by the Democratic Party’s oligarchal backers, paying for the gasoline probably won’t be a problem for them.

        1. Already seeing some leftie types firing up the don’t-call-it-insurrectionist rhetoric about invading rural towns to “punish” Christians.

            1. Best comment “Antifa’s gonna end up like the Dalton’s at Coffeyville.”

              1. These days one has to wonder if it is another FBI/DOJ operation to try to create an incident they think they can use Reichstag Fire style in response to the Supreme Court upholding 2nd Amendment rights. It is very clear that the leftist establishment has no lines they won’t cross in pursuit of their effort to achieve “the fundamental transformation of America”.

                1. i wouldnt put it past them to think that once that fire is lit they can control it.

              3. Son we’re going to need Caterpillar D9’s to clean up after that. Translating for the doofus in question:
                “The Radical Christians are found in the rural areas”
                They’re there because the are sick and tired of idiots like you in the Cities. We don’t like your kind

                “Their towns are defenseless, they have almost no cops and their fireman are volunteers”
                They have no cops because 1) they have little crime, 2) most locals are armed in such a fashion that most of the worlds light infantry would be envious (also quite hard on criminals). And if something goes wrong they shout and their community shows up (thus volunteer firemen)

                “They have to borrow cops and fireman from neighboring jurisdictions miles away to handle anything big”
                See above shout and neighbors come running. And unlike in the city traveling 15 miles, heck 30 miles is nothing and there isn’t need to wait for a bus or subway or hail a cab…you get in the pick up truck and floor it 60-75 mph no traffic jams they’ll be there SOON with yet more ironmongery

                He then goes on to try to enlist his fellow idiots to do this. Folks who find going out for a 5 minute walk to get a cream brulee latte no foam with a double shot a trying experience. Folks to lazy to cash their fricking unemployment checks. Folks who have to depend on buses and tazis and ubers to get anywhere are going to go out to the ass end of nowhere (say on a Greyhound bus) with preloaded molotov cocktails to throw them at the local religious establishments. As they line up 100 deep with their armament ready to go they will be warned to desist or lethal force will be applied. As they try to throw their first fire bomb the promise will be kept, the firebombs will fall among the attackers. And what will follow will make Jehu at the temple of Baal (2 Kings 25-27) look like a Sunday school picnic, though I doubt the spot will be used as a latrine as that would show far too much respect for these idiots…

                1. Greyhound busses don’t go to the ass end of nowhere anymore. believe me, i regularly drive people from the local greyhound terminal to the smaller cities. so much so that alternate bus lines have sprung up that cover smaller cities better. (see: Flixbus)

                  1. Tells you how long I’ve had a car. Theoretically when I went to college I could have gone to a neighboring town and gone to Worcester via Greyhound. I think the ticket ran like $20 one way. Could also have taken an Amtrak into Boston and then commuter rail to Worcester and then a cab to School (the area around Grand Union station being similar to Mos Eisly in those days) Best guess is you’ d have burned $100 doing that, easier to catch a ride and pay for gas to a friend going to one of the half dozen colleges in Worcester.

                    1. i remember when i used Greyhound in ’89-90 between SC/GA and here that it stopped in every city of any size along 95.

                    2. I think the one I looked at stopped at Hartford CT and Springfield MA before hitting Worcester and ultimately ending up in Boston. It was like a 5 hour trip for a 1 3/4 hour direct drive.

                    3. yep, ft jackson to VA was similarly longer than necessary because of a stop in every podunk town for passengers that may or may not exist because they didnt have a system to tell them if there was.
                      Also, lately, lots of buses going northbound from here in the middle of the night seem tom be gettign cancelled, hence my surge in dc rides.

  25. Te Deum laudámus: te Dominum confitémur.
    Te ætérnum Patrem omnis terra venerátur.
    Tibi omnes Angeli; tibi cæli et univérsae potestátes.
    Tibi Chérubim et Séraphim incessábili voce proclámant:
    Sanctus, Sanctus, Sanctus, Dóminus Deus Sábaoth.
    Pleni sunt cæli et terra majestátis glóriæ tuæ.

  28. Since we appear to be ordering t-shirts, I’d suggest that we need (or will shortly need) a t-shirt that states “Keep Calm and Fix Bayonets”.

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