The End Is Near!

For some time I've had the feeling that we were living through some sort of transition. Our country seems to be collectively losing it's mind, we have a major war... er... sorry; "Special Military Operation" going on right in the middle of Europe, famine is stalking Africa (again), Russia and China are setting up deals left, right and center that bypass the US dollar and the US-controlled SWIFT payments system. Last but not least: our non-stop economic war against Russia not only is benefiting Russia but looks to leave major chunks of Europe freezing in the dark this winter.

Today I watched the funeral of Queen Elizabeth II. Not my normal use of time during the daytime, and as an American I'm supposed to not care about Britain's monarchy. I guess colonialism imprinted some sort of loyalty to Queen Elizabeth into my DNA or something. Regardless, the Queen was the only monarch I've ever known. Queen Elizabeth simply was the UK and today I watched as her casket was lowered into the Royal Crypt in Windsor Castle. Now I'm supposed to replace her with some jerk-off named Charles that most likely features prominently in Ghislaine Maxwell's little black book (his brother admitted as much). I can't picture ol' Chuck ever commanding the kind of unquestioned respect and loyalty that his mother did. Today while watching her funeral, I couldn't help but see the entire ceremony as nothing less that a giant exclamation point signalling the end to the arrangements that I have assumed were somehow permanently etched into the Universe.

Now please understand that when I talk about the end of our current way of life, that does not mean that humans are going extinct or any bullshit like that. We will do what we always do when a certain arrangement ends: we make new arrangements. And no, I have no idea what those might be or just how ugly the transition will get. Based on the breaking news, I don't think it will be a pleasant time. But that's just a wild-assed guess.

Speaking of transitions, here's a handy little table that shows that we are not going run modern industrial civilization on windmills and solar panels:

Fossil fuels have allowed human population to far exceed the carrying capacity of the planet. Historically, whenever a population outstrips resources things turn ugly fast. Expect that and prioritize accordingly.

Just Some Random Stuff

I don't really have a point to make today; just a bunch of random things that I've been collecting for the last month or so.

First up, in what I am sure will be a shock for everyone, some dude who likes to wear women's clothes and makeup, gives himself a stripper name and hangs around with little kids gets busted for...

....wait for it...

pedophilia.

Wow. Sure didn't see that coming </sarcasm>.

Since my last post, I've lost two girlfriends. Men of a certain age all remember being dragged through puberty by Lieutenant Nyota Uhura, perched on her chair hiking up her skirt as far as the censors would allow. She passed on July 30 at the age of 89 probably from the after-effects of the stroke she had about 7 years ago.

The other girlfriend I lost was Olivia Newton-John, otherwise known as Sandy Olsson from the movie Grease. She had been fighting cancer for some time and in fact created the Olivia Newton-John Cancer Wellness & Research Centre. She passed on August 8 at the age of 73.

Next up, a couple comics regarding the moral panic in Europe over cow farts:

 

This has been my beef with so-called environmentalists who are willing to literally starve a large percentage of the world population over cow farts, but refuse to stop flying all over the continent. If any country is serious about cutting CO2 emissions in half, make commercial air illegal. Done. Won't happen, of course, because western civilization is run by the most unserious people we can find.

And we will finish up with pure eye candy:

 

 

Happy Anniversary

Our first meeting.

Our first dance.

Our first kiss.

A night I will cherish for all eternity.

The Wide World of "Sports"

So it wasn't enough for a bunch of old fucks to beat up on a 15-year-old Russian Olympic skater and make her cry on international TV; now we have a 29-year-old, dude-in-a-dress sexual deviant beating up on 10-17 year old girls at a skateboarding "competition". Jay Leno once was reported as saying that if God doesn't destroy Hollywood Boulevard, He owes Sodom and Gomorrah an apology. I'm going to expand that: If God doesn't destroy all of Western Civilization, He owes Sodom and Gomorrah an apology and full pardon.

We Interrupt Our Regular Programming

In my last post, I was whinging about gas prices. I stated that the latest 20 cent increase hadn't found its way to northern Michigan. Yep, you guessed it. It's here. Less than 24 hours after I posted, gas here in the great white north jumped to $4.79/gallon. Based on past experience, I'm expecting $5/gallon once the fudgie season gets into full swing. 

Speaking of interruptions, Biden was on the boob tube last night yapping about bringing back the Clinton "assault weapons" ban and the ban on "high capacity" magazines. The problem I had with that law in the first place is that there is no such thing as an "assault weapon". There is absolutely no functional difference between an AR-15 and my dads .30-06 hunting rifle. Sure, cosmetically they are very different looking. The civilian AR-15 looks like the military version, but it does not function like one. The law was nick-named the "Ugly Gun Ban" by us NRA types who actually have some knowledge about how guns function. The list of banned weapons ended up being just that; an arbitrary list of ugly guns that looked frightening to pig ignorant congress-critters. 

Another "talking point" you will hear is how an AR-15 is sooooo powerful. When the original ban was being kicked around in congress, some Democrat dumb ass was going on about how an AR-15 couldn't be used for deer hunting because there wouldn't be anything left of the animal. Again, using my father's .30-06 as an example: with a 180 grain bullet, typical muzzle velocity is 2900 ft/sec and 3360 ft/lbs of energy, while an AR-15 (typically chambered for the .223) fires a 77 grain bullet at 3100 ft/sec, but only 1642 ft/lbs. In other words, yes, you are not allowed to hunt deer with an AR-15 not because it's "too powerful", but because it's too weak and would injure without killing the animal.

Then we get to "high capacity" magazines. What exactly is the magic number here? Two? Ten? Why is a 16-round magazine "high capacity" but a 15-round is not? Again, the law is completely arbitrary and not based on any definable principal.

But as usual, facts don't matter. It's all about the little Democrat snowflakes' feelings.

And the Beat Goes On

 

There are many things that are broken in modern "healthcare". This is a good summary of one of them. I have to admit, funny as that is, that I'm rather torn when it comes to healthcare. On the one hand, the pathetic response to the Covid pandemic was a classic case of the profit-above-all-else thinking that comes with a for-profit healthcare system. On the other hand, I'm pretty sure this joke was created by someone living under a nationalized healthcare system like you would find in England. From my experience in working for a couple large-ish hospital systems, all I can come up with as a solution is going back to the old system of smaller, localized hospitals run by doctors and nurses who had spent time on the floor, caring for patients. When I was growing up, there were at least a half dozen hospitals; some were supported by the Catholic church, some were supported by local tax dollars, some ran off endowments. None could really be said to be providing healthcare at a profit and all were run by people who had put in many long hours on the floor dealing with patients, instead of some know-nothing MBA who wouldn't know a stethoscope from a rectal thermometer.

We spent a few days down-state visiting family, which was nice. What wasn't nice was the price of gas. When we left, it was running between $4.57 and $4.59 per gallon all the way down. When we left for home, the price of gas had jumped 20 cents down-state. We were able to make it about two-thirds the way back on what we still had in the tank. It seems the price jump had not migrated this far north. I'm sure it will eventually. I gotta say, this sucks living on a fixed income. We were barely making it a year ago; now rent went up 7.5% and gas looks to be heading for $5/gallon or more. I might have to figure out how to ride a bicycle again. Or maybe we'll get one of these. 

The war in the Ukraine is playing out more-or-less how Putin wanted it to. It's taking longer than I think he originally thought it would due to some snafus on the Russian side, and more and better weapons (thanks to the American taxpayer) on the Ukrainian side. But the Russians are now in control of the majority of the Donbas and the southern seacoast, which is all of the Ukraine they want. The rest is just grifters and welfare queens. The US keeps trying to drag this thing out as long as possible in an attempt to create a Vietnam-style quagmire. I don't think it will work, but we'll just have to wait it out and see. Meanwhile, Ukrainian civilians are dying by the thousands. Kinda puts that whole bitchin'-about-gas-prices thing into perspective.

"President" Joe Biden continues to embarrass the nation as he wanders around in a dementia fog. I laugh every time I see speculation about him running for a second term. Not likely. Any halfway intelligent candidate could grind him into fine powder at the first debate. It wouldn't even be all that hard; just let him talk without interruption. He will quickly lose track of where he is and what he is doing. Maybe his handlers will bring back the Easter Bunny to keep him from wandering off the stage.

Speaking of living in a third-world country, one of the big nuke plants here in Michigan just went off-line due to cracks or corrosion or some such. Doesn't really matter why. What does matter is the rolling blackouts we've been promised on hot, windless days. I've been shopping Amazon for a large-ish key-start generator we can use here on the property.

Well, I should really try to get something done today. Debbie is off spending our life savings on a loaf of bread and a pound of bacon. Every time we see some rice or beans on the shelf, we grab some. Ya know; just in case. Later.

Fred Ain't Dead!

Several months ago, Fred Reed went radio silent. Given his age and health problems, I feared the worst. But instead of being dead, he had switched to a different platform. Woohoo! Fred is Back!

We're Here, We're Here, We're Here!!!

...and very little chance our little dust speck will get boiled. We are in Michigan and right now and it's a balmy 49 degrees. As I type this, I'm sitting in the cabin wrapped in blankets: my dust specks could certainly use a little boiling. The recent radio silence here was due to all the closing up of our Florida place and getting settled into my parents' cabin for the summer. It's amazing what you can forget in six months. The first couple days were just the two of us wandering around the cabin trying to find things we knew we had left here, but had no idea exactly where we had stashed them for the winter. 

Our sticker shock over food prices continues. Just when we think they cannot get any more absurd, they do. On our last foray into Sam's Club, we just cracked up laughing when we saw the packages of precooked bacon for nearly $18. And it wasn't even a full pound. It was some odd amount like 10.7 ounces. Like the stuff was some sort of rare and exotic meat harvested from the livers of new-born baby seals or some such. Incredible. Of course we stopped laughing a couple days later when gas jump 40 cents over night. It sure is a good thing this inflation is just transitory.

A while back I commented how the Federal Reserve had painted itself into a corner with near-zero interest rates (which means negative real rates when inflation gets factored in). If they left them where they were, inflation would keep screaming higher, but if they raised rates to tap the brakes on inflation, they would destroy all the various bubbles as well as crush anyone with large amounts of debt (which is pretty much everyone). Well, it looks like they chose door number 2 with a quick rate hike of .25 percent followed by another one for .5 percent just a few days ago. But that is just the opening act for another five or six more rate hikes by the end of the year. Anyone with a variable rate mortgage may want to start packing now and avoid the rush. 

It will be interesting to see just how much damage this will do to the economy. It will certainly bring an end to the huge bubble that's been blown in real estate. House starts have already taken a nose dive, and a similar crash in housing prices is sure to follow. We may also see more wild gyrations in auto sales. Higher rates may finally end the silly bidding wars that saw dealers getting thousands over sticker price, but may exacerbate the ridiculous prices in used cars, at least in the short term. That will likely end later in the year if the Fed follows through on its threat of even more rate hikes.

Not that any of this was unexpected or that getting interest rates back the something closer to sanity is a bad thing. Free money from the Fed is like pounding down a bottle of Jack Daniels. Sure it feels good for a short period of time, but then the puking starts and the fun is all over. Inflation clearing 8% with no end in site was our economy's response the to the alcohol poisoning of free money from the Fed. Next comes the long painful hangover of crashing prices in everything from stocks to houses, followed by a general contraction in economic activity as everyone resets to a lower standard of living.

One thing I love to watch is how gas prices going up over $4 dollars/gallon shoved Greta Thunberg and the rest of the merry band of climate change misfits right in the gutter. We're back to "Drill baby, drill!!" The Russia-Ukrainian war has caused huge price increases not just in oil, but natural gas and all the unpronounceable metals used in solar panels and windmills resulting in countries from Germany to Australia dusting off those old CO2-belching coal plants. It seems that when faced with the choices of freezing to death in the dark today vs. screwing up the climate 50 or 100 years from now, the world has decided to roll the dice on the second option. Not that solar panels and windmills were ever anything other than a technological gimmick to make a few high-income liberals feel a little less guilty about their own massive carbon footprint. I know I've said this before, but anytime you hear some rich dick helmet talking about reducing CO2, you need to chant the phrase, "CO2 is people!" over and over. And I mean that quite literally. Prior to humanity tapping into the earth's long-term carbon stores, there were maybe a billion people on the planet. Since we've started burning first coal, then oil and natural gas, that number has shot past 8 billion and looks to top 9 billion sometime in the next few decades, assuming the four horsemen stay in their stables. 

That currently looks to be a rather optimistic assumption. The red horse of war has, of course, been a regular feature of human history, but everyone is paying attention now that it involves white Europeans. Nobody gave a shit about refugees and dead children when they were just niggers, ragheads and coin slots (thank you Racial Slur Database; you really can find anything on the internets). But oh Good Lord have Mercy when it's white European refugees and dead children! The white horse paid us a recent visit with covid and the black horse looks to be stopping by this summer as world-wide food shortages start kicking in. Which means the pale horse won't be far behind and carbon emissions will fall. Isn't climate science fun? What was that faux-Chinese thing about living in interesting times?

Speaking of the red horse, can we stop already with the deification of Zelensky? He is absolutely not some Hero of Democracy. Even before the Russian invasion, he had placed the head of the opposition party under house arrest and had shut down and disappeared the heads of any media organization that dared to express even mild dissatisfaction with the Zelensky government. Imagine if Joe Biden put Trump under house arrest, shut down Fox News and had Suzanne Scott hauled off to some CIA black site. Not impossible, of course and the move would be wildly popular with our current crop of illiberal liberals. I mean, shit-damn-hell, Homeland Security just opened up a Ministry of Truth at the mere suggestion that Twitter's new owner, Elon Musk, may actually allow free speech. But regardless of likelihood, such a move could certainly not be seen as "defending democracy". Since the invasion, Zelensky has only gotten worse; outlawing all political parties other than his own and the Nazi parties, and nationalizing all the media. Why do Americans always have to paint every conflict as white hat vs. black hat? I mean, other than our general lack of intelligence and a collective memory that would embarrass a rather dull goldfish? There are no white hats here. Not us, not the Russians, not the Ukrainians, not NATO. And if we are so concerned for Ukrainian civilians, why are we doing everything we can to prolong the war? We are sending tens of billion of dollars in weapons and cash into a black hole. The Ukraine was a cesspool of corruption and grift before the war; why would everyone suddenly turn into angels? It's a safe assumption most of the weapons that manage to avoid being vaporized by Russian artillery or aircraft are going on the black market, not to front-line soldiers. And we already know from pallets of $100 bills disappearing in Afghanistan what happens to money in a war zone. All we are doing is giving false hope and guaranteeing even more (white) Ukrainians will get killed or be driven out of their homes. Stop the madness already.

Well, the sun's coming up which means I need to stop playing around here and get to work, work, work!

Will Smith (Briefly) Grows a Pair

So the world is all up in a tizzy because Will Smith bitch-slapped Chris Rock for making a tasteless joke about his wife. Liberal men (balls removed by feminists and stored in a jar on a shelf) jumped all over Will Smith for committing such a heinous act (Jon Katz will serve as a good example). I say, "Bravo, Will!" Of course, Hollywood being Hollywood, Will's publicist immediately pulled him aside for a quick talking-to, and Will, crying like a woman, apologized to the world for his indiscretion. But for a brief moment, one man acted like a man should act when his wife is attacked by some moron comedian.

Yes, I am aware that Will's wife talks about her medical condition. So what? That somehow makes her fair game? Who made that rule? Several members of my wife's family have the same condition. They talk about it frequently and even laugh about it. Does that mean I can make tasteless jokes at their expense? If I did, I would hope their husbands have the balls to punch me dead in the face, not just slap me.

I don't know that this post has any real point other that to say, "Well done, Will Smith. Well done!" Even if he did try to walk it all back a few minutes later.

Russia, Russia, Russia!!

 

So anyone with friends or family that insist that our news media and government couldn't possibly be lying to us about Ukraine, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, etc., etc., just show them this video and ask them to explain how what should have been the biggest story of the 2020 election was written off as "Russian propaganda". Now that it's too late to do anything about it, the New York Times admits that everything was true all along. No apologies, no one who was smeared as a "Putin Stooge" has been re-hired with back pay. Nothing. Not only is the MSM, our government, FBI, etc. a bunch of liars, they're don't even have enough sense to be embarrassed when caught at it.

Speaking of the Ukraine: Don't believe anything you see or hear from anyone. Russia, the US, Ukraine and everyone else is pumping out the propaganda hard and fast. As always, we have the fog of war to contend with, but that doesn't explain why footage from decades-old disaster movies is being put out there as factual coverage of the war. From my sources (some inside Russia), the war in Ukraine is going more-or-less as Russia had planned. The Ukrainian military is no longer a viable entity. There are still pockets of resistance, but they have been encircled and all supplies cut off. As far as the casualty figures being bandied about by both sides, again, I wouldn't believe any of it. And keep in mind that all the US is doing with it's propaganda and weapons is prolonging the agony for the Ukrainian people.

And speaking of Hunter's laptop, it is now more or less accepted fact that the US military was funding research into bio weapons in the Ukraine. Just like we were funding gain-of-function research at Wuhan. This is just another example of the US government being unaccountable to the American people. We (through our elected officials) made this very kind of research illegal. So the military or some branch of HHS that no one even knew existed prior to 2020 offshores the research. Perfect. Those of you who think voting actually matters, take note.

Now that Russia is the latest Great Satan, the Russia-bashing is in full bloom. Russian kids are getting the shit beat out of them at school, restaurants serving Russian food are being vandalized, Tchaikovsky (who lived and died before the Russian Federation, the Soviet Union and the Bolsheviks) has been canceled. Even my parent's church is getting into the act. I recently attended a men's prayer breakfast where the entire time of actual prayer (as opposed to stuffing our faces) was devoted to asking God to smite Putin (the latest incarnation of the antichrist if not Satan himself), smite his soldiers, smite the Russian people, etc. The longer I'm outside of Evangelicalism, the more confusing it gets. First, we had the Adoration of Trump, the most openly vile, amoral, profane human being to defile the office of President. Did he do some good things? Sure. Was he the least-bad alternative in 2016? Absolutely. But why are Evangelicals, with all their rules about proper behavior, ignoring it all in order to worship at the feet of Donald Trump? Now here we go again with pastors and other leaders in the church submitting prayers to God that fall so far outside of basic Biblical theology, they're in a different universe. But then, why would Evangelical churches be any different than every other failing institution in this country?

OK; enough for now.

Jump!!

It likely means I'm a horrible person, but I can't stop laughing.... (rated NSFW by the MPA)

Catching Up

I haven't done a real post in a while, so strap in boys and girls, 'cause here we go!

Trucker protests: I love the fact that the MSM thinks they can ignore 10's of thousands of semi's converging on Alberta and no one will notice. Whether you support the truckers or not, the protests have certainly uncovered a lot of sleazy behavior by the Canadian national government, the police, the MSM, and even crowd-funding site GoFundMe. I love how BLM protesters can set multiple cities on fire, loot, injure and even murder people, and GoFundMe never blinks an eye. But let some (mostly) white working-class truckers finally say "Enough!" to government over-regulation and GoFundMe wants to give the donations to... well... to BLM. When that gambit failed utterly, Trudeau invoked the War Powers Act (renamed to something less sinister-sounding in the 70's or 80's) to allow the Canadian government to seize the bank accounts of anyone receiving donated funds as well as anyone donating. Nice. If anyone would like to know how to turn a peaceful protest into an actual insurrection, just take careful notes of what Trudeau has done and will do. Dumb ass....

Meanwhile, the Olympic Committee has gone full mental by beating up on a 15-year-old girl who had the misfortune of being born in the United State's enemy du jour, Russia. Good job guys; real mature. You managed to throw her off her game enough that she finished in fourth and left the ice in tears. You old fucks must feel real tough and self-important now. Congratulations. I'm becoming less and less interested in sport of any kind. The Olympics were pretty much my last hope and that too has now been flushed down the toilet thanks both to this current nonsense as well as the whole turn-my-back-on-the-US-flag bullshit at the summer games. (And if you think I'm alone in this, check the ratings of professional sports, college sports, Olympics, what have you.)

I haven't talked about climate in a while. Given that everyone seems to have been convinced that replacing coal- and natural-gas-fired power plants with windmills and solar panels is a good idea, I thought I'd revisit the topic. First: Yes, despite what you may hear, fossil fuels are limited. Yes, despite what you may hear, we've used up roughly half of all the coal, oil and natural gas in the world. No, despite what you may hear most of the other half will never be "recovered" due to both technical and economic reasons. Second: Yes, despite what you may hear, weather is getting crazy. Maybe it's natural, maybe it's due to all the CO2 dumped into the atmosphere; probably, it's some of both. No matter, it's here. Now. Not in 100 years. Third: No despite what you may hear we are not replacing the automobile fleet with electric vehicles, if for no other reason than there is simply not enough lithium on the planet to built all those fire-trap EV's. 

So given all that what next? One idea being floated around is replacing electrical generation with nukes. Leaving aside all the questions of what we are going to do with the tons of high-level radioactive waste produced by enough nuclear reactors to replace the existing electrical grid (while ignoring the fantasy that we will "electrify the fleet"), we don't even know what to do with the comparably tiny amount of high-level waste we already produce. The big strike against nukes is that, at least here in the US, it took 40+ years to build and bring one reactor on line. One. We need to build something like 325 nuclear power plants (that's with multiple reactors per plant) every month for the next 100 years just to replace the current coal-fired electrical generation. Anyone who thinks that will happen is just mental. Where would we get all the materials? Where would we get all the uranium? China? I'm picking on nukes, but that's only because they are the easiest to imagine as an alternative to fossil fuels. Replacing even a tiny fraction of electrical generation with wind and solar is already bumping up against hard resource limits. Replacing it all or even a significant fraction (like 1/2 or just 1/3) is not even technically feasible before getting to the economics, politics, etc.

The greenie-weenies talk about cutting carbon emissions in half by some near-future date. So given the previous paragraph, how do we do that? Well, look around where you're sitting and imagine half of everything gone. Half the square-footage of your house. Half the vehicles. Half the food. Half the people in your family, neighborhood, city, state, nation. That's what cutting carbon emissions in half really means. Forget the technobabble bullshit from upper-middle-class "greens" who won't even stop flying to climate conferences or turn down the thermostat or quit stuffing their faces until they are morbidly obese. And no, the rich won't "go first"; remember that the entire US is filthy rich compared to the rest of the planet, so you really don't want to go there unless you want to be put in the same category as Al Gore telling me I need to ride a bike to work while flying on a private jet. (If you're wondering, that category would be "hypocrite".)

Well, it's going on midnight, so I should stop and go to bed. 'Nite all!!

I'd Probably Buy This....

Only in Florida

If you've spent any time reading any of the dozens of News-of-the-Weird-type web sites I'm sure you've noticed the over-representation of articles about Florida residents. And here is another:

NFL star Malik McDowell has been arrested in Florida after allegedly attacking a police officer and exposing himself in public.

But wait; there's more!

Yet this isn't [McDowell]'s first brush with the law. In 2017, McDowell was hit with a DUI charge in Michigan and booked for disorderly conduct for a fracas at an Atlanta nightclub.

In November 2019, McDowell was sentenced to 11 months in jail for a string of crimes such as assault, resisting arrest, and operating a vehicle while intoxicated.

So here we have someone given every chance in the world to succeed (including a free ride at Michigan State on the taxpayers' dime), and yet. Here we are. I've been offending people (and not giving a damn) by saying this for the last 40 years: You can take the boy out of the hood, but you can't take the hood out of the boy.

What Have I Been Sayin'?

This was posted on the NYT website a few days ago. Throughout two years of this stupid "masks work"/"masks don't work" screaming fit, some of us have been saying the same thing: It depends on what you mean by "masks" and what you mean by "work". No mask of any kind will absolutely, 100%, in all circumstances, prevent Covid transmission. Masks slow down transmission; crappy cloth masks barely slow it down at all while N95s increase time to infection from minutes to basically a full 24-hour day.

So while a cloth mask will probably keep you from getting Covid at the grocery store (as long as you wash the things frequently), a surgical mask would be better. (And for the love of God, throw the thing away after you use it a couple times instead of carrying it around for weeks in your pocket. Looking in your general direction, Dad!) Assuming you even worry about such things. We don't.

For kids sitting in a classroom in close proximity with 30-40 other kids for long periods of time, anything less than an N95 is Covid theater. So are the plexiglass partitions and the one-person plastic tents and all the rest of it. It does serve one important function; kids learn early to unquestioningly obey authority even when the authority figure is talking complete nonsense.

Happy 2022: The Year of Omicron

So everyone was hoping 2021 would be the end of all this Covid nonsense, but"Dr." Fauci and his merry bunch of misfits who reside in the news media, the tech companies and various 3-letter agencies of the Federal government have other ideas. From the FDA banning the use of antivirals for people infected with Covid to Twitter banning the inventor of the mRNA "vaccines", the display of sheer stupidity and naked greed by all parties was disgusting.

As if all that were not enough, the massive money printing by the Fed to the tune of $120 billion a month finally began to show up in other places than stock and real estate prices; namely in the price of food. We were already balanced on a knife's edge financially and would be in complete free fall if not for a bit of reserves we still had from when we were working. But those are gone and somehow we're supposed to pay a 7.5% increase in our rent, 50% increase in the price of gas, and a 25% increase in our grocery budget with a disability check that had a 5.5% COLA. And we are more fortunate than about half the country.

But no need to worry; Uncle Joe wishes 40% of the nation a Christmas full of pain and death.

So what do we have to look forward to in 2022? Nothing good, I'm afraid.

First, no matter what the Fed does, inflation is baked into the cake. There is so much money sloshing around in the banks and stock markets that it will continue to affect prices for some time to come. Second, the Fed can't really do anything right: stop printing money and raise interest rates to some reasonable level (say around 10%) and stock markets will crash faster and farther than anyone can imagine, and most debt, including a lot of government debt, goes into immediate default. The alternative is to continue to print $120 billion a month and hold interest rates nominally near zero (meaning negative real rates) and inflation continues to climb into the stratosphere.

In other words, we can be dirt poor and not able to afford anything, or we can have mountains of dollar bills that are not worth a loaf of bread. Either way, there will be a lot of hungry and angry people with nothing to do but roam the streets seeing how much damage they can do. Imagine the 2020 BLM protests times 100.

It looks like Omicron (which I swear was the name of one of the Transformers) will be the excuse for a new round of lockdowns and restrictions on churches (but not titty bars). The economy, already weakened by inflation and supply chain breakdowns, will simply fall over. The only ray of hope is the CDC's recent guidance that quarantine is only 5 days. No real science behind this; merely The Science and a sop to businesses trying to staff operations.

Another bright spot is the passing of peak Wokesterism. The witch trials are finally over and the hysteria seems to be dying down. Not that our college campuses are in any way safe for white straight males, but things are improving a bit out in the real world.

My advice for weathering all this is the same as it has been for the last couple decades: 1) get out of debt and stay out of debt. Do whatever you have to; sell everything that isn't nailed down, drive the oldest, cheapest thing you can find, downscale what you live in. Whatever it takes. 2) Keep the pantry stocked. I'm not saying buy 100-pound sacks of beans or anything; just the normal things you eat. Make sure you have a way to heat up food if the power is out. 3) Think about investing in a generator, especially if you depend on a well for water. Nothing sucks worse than being stuck in a house with no electricity for a week and no way to flush the toilet. 4) Keep some drinking water on hand. Again, nothing fancy; just a few days worth that you routinely use and replace.

Most importantly, keep your head on straight. Don't waste mental energy getting into pissing matches with "friends" on social media about vaccination status or Donald Trump. You have far more pressing concerns that are facing your immediate circle that you can actually do something about. I hate to say it, but the die are already cast as far as what happens to America. It's time to think small; your immediate family, neighbors, your church, etc. National events will play out regardless of what you do (and yes that includes voting). Go local.

And kids, always remember: don't do school; stay in drugs.

Happy 2022 everyone!

Merry Christmas!!

It's that time of year again!

And in celebration of 2022 being the Year of Omicron:

Exactly!

 

A Good Day

 

I know I do a lot of pissing and moaning about just about everything here on this blog, but some days are just plain good days. Saturday, we visited the Sweet Blossom Alpaca Farm during their annual Open Barn event. It can never be a bad day when you get a kiss from a llama.

Time Flies

So I look at the date of my last post and realize that it has been two months since I last posted. There are reasons, of course; the biggest one being that we've been working our butts off trying to get the place in Michigan ready for winter, then three days on the road driving to Florida only to find that the jungle had taken over down here while we were gone. One of our vines had even tried to eat the house. We've got things about 75% of the way cleared, but there is still a lot of work to do. We have a couple water control projects that we had hoped to get done while we were down here, but I'm not so sure we'll get to them.

Everyone has experienced what I call the Covid-excuse; due to Covid, wait times are longer, some items may not be available, blah, blah, blah. Recently, Covid-excuse has been replaced with other excuses like supply chain problems, labor shortages, etc.

(And just for the record, there is no labor shortage; we are in the first stages of a general strike.)

But on the way down to Florida, we hit the mother-lode at the Kennesaw, Georgia Chili's restaurant. The fun started before we even got in the door. Like many business establishments, the handicap parking spaces were closer to the dumpsters than the front door. We rounded the corner of the building only to be blasted with music so loud, it was pushing us across the parking lot. We looked like four mimes walking in the wind as we struggled our way to the front door.

We at last managed to fight our way inside only to find that the music was even louder. We tried to communicate with the hostess, but it was no use. We finally resorted to ASL to tell her there were four people in our party and that we would prefer a table. The hostess signed back that there would be a 35-40 minute wait. We settled in while Heart screeched at ear-splitting volume about how she was crazy on me. It was so loud, every beat on the kick drum banged our heads against the wall.

We were seated in about 30 minutes, grabbed menus, decided what everyone was having, then we waited.

And waited.

And waited.

Twenty minutes later, the only server in sight came sprinting over to our table to take our drink order. We gave her our drink and food order. Our server told my dad that they were out of coffee. We stared at her in disbelief. How does a restaurant run out of coffee? Our server informed us that it was "supply chain problems", a "national coffee shortage". I just laughed, we figured out something else for my dad to drink, then off she sprinted. More waiting.

While all this was going on, in comes The Table of Nine. These were obviously Very Important Persons as their table had two servers plus someone running plates. Meanwhile, our server was literally running flat out trying to serve the rest of the restaurant.

After more waiting, our server comes out with Debbie's and my steaks, but not my parents order. All they had ordered was potato soup, so I was thinking that this had to be good. Sure enough. "Sorry but my manager just informed me that we're out of potato soup." Let me guess: a national potato shortage? And why did it take half an hour to figure out that you were out of soup? And why wasn't it the manager who came out to tell us? So were scrambling trying to figure out something light for my parents when my mom blurts out, "Can you manage a couple grilled cheese sandwiches?" Sure! Would you like some fries with that? Yes, please. And off she goes sprinting for the kitchen. 

Oh, and did I mention that we had no napkins? Debbie finally went out to the van and dug a bunch of Burger King napkins out of the glove box. I suppose there is a national napkin shortage....

So here we set with our food and my parents have nothing. Finally we dig in. We had ordered our steaks medium. What was on our plate was not medium. It was not medium well. It wasn't even well done. We had been served two charcoal briquettes. At this point, we were so tired and hungry we didn't care. We crunched on our steaks. At least our sides were good. 

My parents' grilled cheese sandwiches came out. They looked perfect. We ate the rest of our food and waited some more for the bill. Our server brought it out and was gone in a flash. It was close to $50. We started looking at it more carefully. Debbie and I had ordered one of the $25 for two deals. That included an appetizer, two small steaks with sides, and a dessert. My parents' two grilled cheese sandwiches with a small handful of fries cost nearly the same. Seriously? At this point, we didn't have the energy to argue; we just wanted to get the hell out of there.

Just to be clear; I'm not blaming our server for any of this. This was a management failure pure and simple. At least we were entertained during our interminable waiting watching the Very Important Persons at The Table of Nine being endlessly fawned over by their two servers, table runner and even someone that looked suspiciously like a manager that came over and chatted everyone up while conspicuously NOT looking in our direction. I'm not sure who these people were, but I hope they give Chili's a lot of business, because I am done.

Inflection Points

I know people are constantly saying this, but it feels like we are living through a series of inflection points; socially, politically, economically. In its war on Ivermectin, the FDA is destroying what little credibility our political institutions have left. Between Wokeness and the undisguised lying by politicians, media and the rest, normal people are getting sick up and fed with the whole project. But first, our economy:

Imagine being at a party celebrating the vast wealth generated in the last ten months in stocks, cryptocurrencies, real estate and just about every other asset class. The lights flicker briefly but the host assures the crowd the generator powering the party is working perfectly.

Being a skeptic, you slip out on the excuse of bringing in more champagne and pay a visit to the generator room. To your horror, you find the entire arrangement held together with duct tape and rotted 2X4s, the electrical panel is an acrid-smelling mess of haphazard frayed wire and the generator is over-heated and vibrating off its foundation bolts. Whatever governor the engine once had is gone, it clearly won't last the night.

Large systems have huge amounts of inertia and can seem to be running normally for long periods of time before the wheels come off. Things have to be rather far along the process of disintegration for it to be so obvious to us smucks.

The FDA, the CDC, "Dr." Fauchi, the WHO all insist at the top of their lungs that the Covid "vaccines" are perfectly safe. Any attempt to say otherwise will get you quickly silenced by Big Tech followed by loss of employment. But we know these things are dangerous:

The spike proteins travel all through your body, through all your blood vessels, stick to their linings, and cause inflammation there. How would you like it if that happens to your brain, your heart, your lungs, your central nervous system? With no virus around? Remember, spike proteins are cytotoxic, they kill cells and/or turn them into spike protein factories, possibly for a long time. You don’t want these things in your body.

Yet, we inject millions of people every day with them, many two or even three times, and say this will make them safe. What do you think?

I think I'll pass on the "vaccine" and take my chances with Ivermectin, only now the AMA is threatening the medical license of any physician who has the temerity to prescribe Ivermectin to anyone with Covid. As luck would have it, there is a work-around; bed bugs. Just tell your doctor that your house has been infested with the little pests and that you need some Ivermectin. Just don't tell the FDA (or Google) that I told you.

Do you ever get the feeling the over half the country has completely lost any functional grip on reality? You are not alone:

Everybody I consort with has had enough of the whole nauseating game — the lying politicians, the lying media, the lying medical bureaucrats, the lying generals, the lying teachers, the lying celebrities, the lying tech moguls, the entire armature of counter-reality you want to impose on a once-fair land. We will never do your bidding. We will never peel your grapes. There are more of us than you. Go ahead, push just a little bit harder. 

Because most liberals are also pussies (literal or figurative) who have never thrown a punch or been hit by one, they have no idea what happens when you push too hard. We've been patient; we've waited for you to pull your own head out of your ass. We're done. From here on in, it gets very fucking real.

Odds and Ends

Some bits I picked up from the internets:

Hello Wordpress

 I never thought I would find myself here, but here I am. There are rumors floating about the internet that Google is considering dropping Blogger. I can find denials from high-placed officials, but we all know what those are worth. As a precaution, I copied all content from Blogger to here. Not sure what happens next; I guess I will keep both of them updated until something resolves.

Message from Sally

This is either Sally sending me a joke from the other side, or the simulation is developing a sense of humor. Family will understand....

Sally Otto, RIP

 A very hard day today; a funeral for someone who has been very special to me since I've been old enough to remember.

See you on the other side, Sally.

(Thanks Blogger for being too stupid to show the correct video. Here is a link to the correct video. The video below should be correct. I really need to find a better blogging platform....) [Update: You can also click on the title to open just this post and all will be right with the universe. And it also proves that I know what I'm doing unlike the morons over at Google.]

The Word(s) of the Day

Today's Word(s) of the day is ADE (antibody-dependent enhancement). This now appears to be just the latest in a long line of serious side effects of the covid-19 "vaccines". Here's one take on where we are, how we got here, and where we may be going:

When ADE becomes too widespread to ignore and people begin to die in significant numbers, expect governments to proclaim the arrival of the predicted new hyper-lethal variant and impose a new round of shutdowns, mask mandates, and the like. The media will insist that the people who are dying are all unvaccinated as long as they can get away with it; pay attention to the vaccination status and health outcomes of people you know for a reality check. Unless some way of stopping ADE-enhanced infections can be found in a hurry, medical systems will buckle under the caseload and triage will become the order of the day. How soon this will happen, if it does, is impossible to say in advance. It’s also impossible to know in advance how soon it will become clear that the vaccines are responsible—or just how violent a backlash against the political and economic establishment this could provoke.

Good times, for sure. Stock up on beans and ramen.

The New Hokey-Pokey

 

The Jab

I refused the Covid "vaccine" largely for personal reasons: I've already lost several organs and the use of my legs due to some sort of autoimmune disorder. The last thing I needed was to have myself injected with something linked to autoimmune disorders. I was simply not willing to take the risk especially given that it was completely unnecessary; I've already had and recovered from Covid-19. 

And as it turns out, the CDC now admits that after jabbing over half the country (and making billions for the virus-makers) we have evidence that the "vaccines" do nothing. They do not prevent infections or transmissions, and even the claim that they make infections less severe is looking shaky. Just to repeat, this isn't from some conspiracy theory, Q-Annon BS website. This is from the CDC. Ya know, "The Science".

All downside and no upside. No way in hell will I ever get jabbed.

Happy Anniversary

 

 

 You are my breath.

You are my life

You are the reason I exist.

I will love you through all eternity.

Heh...

 

Ivermectin and Other Radomness

For a little over a year, Amazon, Google, Facebook and Twitter have waged a desperate campaign to silence any discussion of using Ivermectin for Covid-19 infections. Some of us in the cynical camp have always assumed this was to a) allow the mass distribution of untested vaccines under the Emergency Use Authorization leading to b) massive profits for politically connected Big Pharma. Now the conspiracy is unraveling as I type this. More and more studies show the effectiveness of Ivermectin (especially when combined with zinc and Vitamin D) is equal to or greater than the (heavily inflated) numbers for the vaccines.

Meanwhile, Democrats insist that Donald Trump is a murderer for not telling people to wear masks. Leaving aside that masks have very limited use to prevent the spread of Covid-19, if Trump appearing on national television maskless makes him guilty at least in part for over a half-million deaths, how much more do Zuckerberg, Bezos, Dorsey and Pichai have to answer for? How may of the millions dead could have been saved by the early use of Ivermectin? How much sooner would we have known that Ivermectin works if these four... gentlemen had not decided to conspire to silence any discussion even among virologists of Ivermectin?

In completely unrelated news, we just suffered through one of the coldest first days of summer I can remember. It "only" got down in the mid-30's here, but further south, there were several inches of frost on some people's gardens. Then we had storms blow through that hit us with lightning, hail and waterspouts in Traverse Bay. For a minute, I thought we were back in Florida. We got outside today and got a bit done before the rain moves back in tomorrow for a week straight. We're going to need a row boat to get around the yard.

Not much else going on with us. We've sort of settled into our little hideout in the middle of nowhere. Governor Mussolini has finally lifted all restrictions, but we still don't leave the property any more than we have to. Summer Fudgey Season is nuts enough at the best of times; after being locked up for year, things are likely to be... well... lively. I'll take a hard pass on that.

Well, it's getting close to midnight and I have a delivery truck showing up at 0730, so I'll be signing off.

Fentanyl

 During the (completely unnecessary) lock-downs, fentanyl over-doses have more than quadrupled to 88,000 deaths over the last year, up from 19,000 the previous year. Seizures are up 800% at the Texas border. We know who and where in China this stuff is coming from. We've told the Chinese government who and where this stuff is coming from. They do nothing, and we do nothing about them doing nothing.

Meanwhile, 88,000 people are dead in the last 12 months alone. Add to that, all the spouses, parents, children, friends whose lives have been destroyed forever. This should be the primary focus of our conversations with China. It isn't. Not even close.

Scott Adams talked about his very personal encounter with fentanyl on his podcast from June 11, 2021. The relevant part starts at 20:15. Fair warning, it gets a little intense.

We are at war and we don't even realize it. Fuck Trump. Fuck Biden. Fuck China.

Something to Consider

 

Lord Farquaad on Mars

So, I'm pretty sure everyone understands that Elon Musk considers himself Emperor of Planet Earth and the only human that matters, but even he went a little over the top a few days ago when he declared, "a bunch of people will probably die" in his quest to colonize Mars. Our living, breathing Lord Farquaad continued, "but it's a sacrifice I'm willing to make." 

Okay, so he actually said, "but it's a glorious adventure and it'll be an amazing experience." Which is kind of the same thing. I'm sure someone slowly suffocating on the Martian surface after some bit of tech built by the lowest bidder fails, will say with their last gasp of air, "What a glorious adventure... gack!"

Global "Warming" in One Graph

 

Notice that there are a few of the models that don't grossly overstate the amount of expected warming. But I can pretty much guarantee that those models are not the ones that get shown to Greta or our congress.

Exactly This

 

Voter ID

 

 

The entire voter-ID-is-racist thing has to be one of most stupid ideas put forward by the BLM assholes. First, the primary reason (that 25% of blacks do not have photo ID) is complete bullshit. Are you telling me that fully 25% of blacks do not have jobs, do not have a place to live, never buy alcohol or cigarettes, are not legally married (which, come to think of it, may be true), never go into a bar or nightclub, do not drive, or any of the dozens of other everyday activities that require photo ID? And even if it is true, shouldn't the focus of the wokesters be on getting them photo ID?

On top of all that, MLB is moving the All-Star game from a state that just passed a voter ID law to a state that has had a voter ID law for years.

But it's all OK; now that I identify as black, I'll be screaming "JIM CROW" and "RACISM" every time I am required to show ID.

As for MLB, I can't tell you the last time I watched a game on TV. I haven't seen a game live since middle school. But I'll be damned if I ever do either of those things again. I said this when the NBA went on strike after the George Floyd death; professional sports seems to be dying out. Even the mighty Super Bowl managed to alienate about 15% of its audience, despite covid-19 giving people fewer options for how they spent a Sunday afternoon. So keep up the good work, guys! Keep playing politics while making whatever game you play increasingly boring to watch, and before you know it, you will all be doing what you were meant to do: flipping burgers.

Biden: The Golden Years

 

The New Day Dawns

I was going to post earlier, but things kept seeming to resolve, then go spinning off in some other insane direction. So lets dive right in with the latest in...

Trump Derangement Syndrome

All anyone in the media has been able to focus on for the last five years is Donald J. Trump. It's like the entire universe simply froze in place while Nancy Pelosi et. al. screamed, "ORANGE MAN BAD!!!" nonstop for the last five years. They claim that their man Sleepy Joe won the election, and contrary to all expectations The Donald vacated the White House and SJ was sworn in as the next president without any incident. You won. You got everything you wanted. SO WHY ARE YOU STILL TALKING ABOUT TRUMP!!! Even liberals I consider to be intelligent and articulate like Jon Katz keep saying that they are done talking about Trump, then less than 24 hours later, they are at it again! This whole farce of an impeachment trial is the same thing. The dude is out of office! Quit talking about him! But no! We're going to interrupt programming on every TV station and show videos that will make America understand how we feel! How all that hate directed at us makes us soooo sad!

Funny how these same assholes don't care how a shopkeeper in Portland feels watching his entire life's work and savings go up in smoke while the cops stand down and do nothing.

January 6th

What happened at the Capital building was a riot. It was not a coup attempt. It was not an insurrection. Those things require the participation of at least a portion of the military. Ya want to know what isn't a coup? Some dude in a viking hat taking selfies. Some dumb ass walking out with the speakers lectern. These people were so stupid, they live-streamed themselves committing multiple felony crimes. The thing that is either hilarious or just plain sad; at the one point in the nation's entire history when it would have been acceptable for everyone to wear a mask, I didn't see more than a dozen people with masks on. Now let me get this straight: I go to the capital, not wearing any sort of mask, wear face paint and viking horns, take lots of selfies while committing multiple felony crimes, post them on social media, brag about being there on social media, find myself in someone else's videos or photos on social media and tag it with a "THIS IS ME!" That is not a coup.

Meanwhile in Myanmar....

Big Tech Censorship

For years, there have been some who saw this day coming. Thanks to unchecked consolidation in the tech industry, no one can run a business or even run a humble little blog like this one without being entirely dependent on Apple, Google, Twitter, Facebook, Amazon or Microsoft (typically it will be several of those). For a long time, that power was not really used and everyone grew complacent. Then Alex Jones got cancelled. No one much cared, so Big Tech grew bolder by the minute. Now they are banning people wholesale by the thousands and the tens of thousands. Most times, they don't even give a fig leaf of an excuse; people are just disappeared. After Trump was banned from Twitter, hundreds of thousands signed up for Parler. So Twitter and Amazon and Apple and Google all conspired to eliminate Twitter's primary competitor. The excuse was that Parler was used to plan the Capital "insurrection", but the fear was that Trump would open an account on Parler and then it would be bye bye tweety bird. Gab was also threatened with extinction if they didn't adopt a TOS similar to Twitter and Facebook.

So for now, liberals have control of the news, the internet, the presidency, the House of Representatives and the Senate. What will they do with it? So far, they've mostly stabbed their constituents in the back, got into verbal cat fights with each other, and walked back every promise made in the campaign. ($2,000 checks? No No No dear man; you misunderstood. We said $1,400 checks. Send out the checks on day one? No No No dear man; you must realize we have to impeach Trump! So it's really all his fault you won't get your check until March or April or never. He made us impeach him!)

In other words, Democrats doing what Democrats always do when in power: nothing constructive.

Politics in the US has always been a pendulum swinging left to right inside fairly tight constraints. Trump gave that pendulum such a hard swing to the right it actually did real damage to our civic life. Now the pendulum has come thundering back to the left on an even wilder swing with active censorship, talk of lists of people in need of "deprogramming" and "deradicalization"; pretty much the whole Marxist shtick. As I said back in 2016, what comes next will destroy whatever remains of our traditional civic structure.If we are very, very lucky, we get Marcus Antony. More likely we will get someone like Nero.

Voting Irregularities

Something no one is allowed to talk about, or even think about. Unlike every election in the 3,000 years of democracy, this election was absolutely perfect with not a stray ballot from sea to shining sea. Even though it is a simple fact that anything with a computer chip can be hacked, God and his angels had their hands upon every voting machine, every vote tabulator, every Excel spreadsheet preventing any of them from being hacked and preserving, nay fortifying our democracy.

Now the explosive revelation in Time magazine that out betters, those individuals appointed by the Lord on High worked their fingers to the bone throughout 2020 fortifying our democracy by ensuring that American made the correct choice on November 3rd.

Vaccine Woes 

We still haven't gotten even the first jab, while people our age in other states have already had both. Florida is still trying to vaccinate the over-65 crowd which is about 3/5ths of Florida's population. The health department is supposed to be coming around to the parks and poking everyone over 65, but still no firm date when that is supposed to happen. At the rate things are going, we'll probably get ours up in Michigan if we ever get one. 

Like any vaccine, there are going to to adverse reactions, side effects, even deaths. A smart country would carefully track such things and report them publicly. We are not a smart country. We do everything we can to suppress any discussion of negative vaccine outcomes. Because like elections in America, our vaccines are absolutely 100% effective with no side effects whatsoever. None. Because Jesus himself made it and any criticism of the vaccine is therefore a criticism of Jesus. Why do you hate Jesus so much?

I could go on (and on and on...) but it's already 2am and I have a doctors appointment tomorrow. Find me on Gab (@rlfrost) and we'll stare awkwardly at each others' shoes. If this blog disappears real sudden like, it means they got me.....

"Literal Fascism"

 

I'll have more to say on January 6th, Parler, etc., as well as the worst start of a new president's first term in all of US history.

Happy 2021

Nothing exemplifies the American belief in magic like flipping the calendar to a new year. All our problems will simply vanish into the ether like so much smoke. Everyone gets a fresh start. We even get us a new president!

 Uh. Yeah. Me, I'm in the same camp as Tim Rickard, author of Brewster's Rocket: 

[The comic should be here, but GoComics rigs its pages so the image cannot be inserted in anyone else's web page. The bastards.]

Predictions for 2021:

Trump is still trying to contest the election results, but it will be to no avail if for no other reason than the MSM and BigTech have declared Biden the winner. Conservative media is full of theories about various methods Trump could use to overturn the official election results. My prediction is that, if any of them are tried, they will land with the same resounding thump as all the other "Krakens" the feckless Team Trump have tried. So Biden will be POTUS regardless.

Trump's vaccine is slowly being rolled out with a smattering of stories of the elderly dying shortly after receiving the vaccine, or some testing positive for covid after getting "the jab". I'm holding off on getting it and may just skip it altogether. Not so much out of fear of some nasty side effects, but just because of the talk of "vaccine passports" and such shit. Push me hard enough and I push back. Along with nearly half of the US population. There are even rumors of doctors and nurses refusing the vaccine, preferring to take their chances with covid. All of which adds up to covid not going anywhere anytime soon. 

And that all means that none of the economy-crushing restrictions will magically disappear when Biden pops into the Oval Orifice.  There will still be plenty of opportunities for state governors like Michigan's Gretchen "Mussolini" Whitmer to rule by fiat. 

The economy is continuing its spiral into a black hole. The media likes to blame covid because if it is only because of the pandemic, then as soon as the vaccine is widely distributed all the restrictions can be eliminated and everything goes back to normal. First of all, for those in the bottom 80%, normal sucked. Second, the economic collapse was already well underway before anyone ever heard of Wuhan, China. Covid and the lock downs just made what probably would have been a year-long contraction happen in about a week. And the longer the lock downs continue the more small businesses that are "temporarily" closed or are being forced to run at 50% capacity will close permanently, and more wealth gets concentrated into the hands of the elites.

Speaking of elites, thanks to the Federal Reserve printing money like mad, stock indexes set so many records in 2020 including on the final trading day of the year, it stopped being a newsworthy event. We are in an everything-in-a-bubble economy as prices for stocks, bonds and real estate become increasingly divorced from the real world.

Bottom line: 2021 will look a great deal like 2020 only more so.

How badly did 2020 kick the crap out of my predictions last year? Pretty much every which way. The biggie of course is the coronation of Biden by the press. No, I do not believe that he won the election. There is solid evidence all over the place of various types of fraud, from the Omar family's ballot harvesting operation in Minnesota to Republican poll watchers being locked out of ballot counting locations in Detroit to video of ballots being run through ballot counting machines multiple times to there somehow being tens of thousands of negative votes for Trump. The fraud was large scale and systematic. And remember, this was supposed to be a landslide for Biden. All the polls showed that Trump was only going to carry a few Republican strongholds like Montana and North Dakota, and Biden was going to carry in a Blue Wave on his coattails, giving Democrats a super majority in the house and a majority in the senate. This election was never supposed to be a nail-biter. But wrong is wrong, and I suppose that Biden stealing the election is as moral a path to the presidency as any other way in 21st century America.

Funny though, how the press still cannot shut up about Trump while Biden continues to hide in his basement.

I keep saying year after year that at some point, the Fed trick of printing money to keep the stock, bond and real estate markets in the stratosphere would stop working. Hasn't yet. Maybe this year....

Our personal lives got knocked for a loop last year as well. We ended up spending the summer in Michigan living in my parents' cabin mostly so Debbie could do their driving after we took my dad's keys away. Turned out there was a lot of work to do up there after several years of my parents not being able to do much. The current plan (subject to revision without notification) is that we will snow bird with them for a few years, then force them to decide: Florida or Michigan. The greedy corporate bastards at Sun will likely price us out of the park by then. The easiest financially is to just start staying in Michigan year 'round and sell our places down here. But that means dealing with winter and feet of snow every day. Not a fan.

Summer in Michigan turned out to be good for me. All the outdoor work built back some of the muscle that I lost while living in a recliner for a year. That gave me enough of my balance back that I can walk short distances without any assistance (as long as I have my braces on my feet). I'm still prevented from doing most of what needs to be done because I cannot kneel down. Well... to be accurate, I can get down on my knees; it's the getting up part that requires a call to 911. We may have a solution for that in the next week or so. We'll see if it works or if I just wasted $55. And have to call 911.

So that's how things look from here. We'll just have to see how everything shakes out.

Merry Christmas (Eve)!!!

I haven't done this in a couple years, so I thought I'd give everyone something to laugh about instead of my usual drivel.

 

[Updated] Found one just for 2020 The Year of Suck:

Bee, Bee, Bee, Bee

 

Same Ol', Same Ol'

 

Things That Make Me Giggle

 So there is this group of blacks that call themselves NFAC, which stands for "Nigers Fucking Around with Guns Coalition" or some such shit. Anyway, back in July, one of these dipshits managed to shoot himself and two other people while waving his loaded gun around. Now I see that the leader of this modern-day Mod Squad was arrested for pointing his gun at federal agents during one of those "mostly peaceful" protests. Turns out John Fitzgerald Johnson, aka "Grandmaster Jay" is one of those assholes that think that if only blacks had there own country, everything would be peace and harmony blah blah blah. This is, of course, just the first step that will ultimately lead to all blacks migrating back to Africa, where, as anyone who has a pulse knows, is a land flowing with milk and honey and prancing unicorns that shit Skittles and piss rainbows. And no one has to do any of that White shit like read, do math, or show up on time.

A little advise, Mr. Johnson: ya might want to google "Liberia" and see how that worked out the last time. That will give you something to read while you do your 20-year stretch in the federal pen. That's assuming you can do something as White as read.

Who needs cable TV when you have these assholes for entertainment?

Free and Fair Elections?

 

Living in the Third World

I've been waiting for some official announcement as to just who our next president will be. We are now 10 days past Election Day, and we still don't know for sure. The news media is hailing Sleepy Joe as our next president, but unless I missed a constitutional convention, the news media doesn't declare who the next president is. But why would I expect the end result of the most tainted election in my lifetime to be any different? Here are some random thoughts in no particular order:

1. The media always has its thumb on the scale for its favored candidate, but this year, it was completely ridiculous. No matter what Trump did or said, he was always the villain: if he had run out into traffic to save a family of baby ducks, the media would have ripped his ass for not finding a family of baby geese to save as well. (He's goose-a-phobic!!)

2. Black Lives Matter may have started out with good intentions, but it has turned into something else entirely. The leadership are not interested in sitting down and having any sort of dialogue, just screaming endless (and increasingly stupid) demands, just like the spoiled little brats they were taught to be at college. And when every demand isn't instantly met, they throw a temper tantrum and burn, loot and murder.

3. Every election has a certain level of vote fraud. I'm pretty sure the first recorded instance occurred about five minutes after the ancient Greeks invented voting. The question is, in a race as tight as this one, did the fraudulent votes account for a large enough share of the over-all vote to effect the outcome? The fact that the media and DNC seem to want to squash any attempt to answer that question, pretty much answers the question for me.

4. Twitter, Google  and Facebook censorship of anyone who raises even the most modest of questions regarding the election outcome (or climate change or the Holocaust or about 100 other verboten topics), or even makes a completely accurate statement of fact ("dead people voted in the 2020 election" or "blacks commit a disproportionate number of violent crimes") can get you banned for life. As far as I'm concerned, all three companies should be put to death: stock price set to zero, assets sold to the highest bidder with the funds used to pay as much corporate debt as possible. Any left-over debt is written off.

5. Americans have been gradually losing faith in various institutions for decades. I don't think there is a single person in the working class who believes the healthcare system gives a shit about either their health or their care. Nor does anyone I know still believe that there is anything higher or educational going on in our universities. But the one institution that most still had some faith in was voting. Nice to know that's now over with.

6. The post office was another institution people generally had good feelings about. Sure we all made jokes at mail carriers' expense ("Fragile" means you throw it underhand!) or bitched about long lines at Christmas, but people mostly were happy with the USPS. Then 2020 happened. While we were up in Michigan, it was taking up to two months from the cancellation date for mail to get forwarded to us. Not, as we are now finding out, that the cancellation date means anything as several post offices were ordering their employees to back date the cancellation mark on ballots. I know that the BLM assholes are trying to convince us normals that expecting blacks to meet deadlines and show up for work and school on time is racist, but give me a break. If you are so clueless you don't know when Election Day is, your vote shouldn't be counted. In any case, if I need to mail something important, I'll be using Fed-Ex.

7. At least the idea of the Deep State or the Permanent Bureaucracy has gone from tin-foil-hat crazy to accepted fact. And speaking of the deep state, I'm still waiting for an answer to a question I've been asking for a couple years, ever since the early days of Ukraine-gate: why is the fucking CIA wire-taping the president's phone? It says a great deal about just how far gone we are as a country that no one batted so much as an eyelash at that one.

8. Polling as a "science" is dead. Not only was Biden supposed to win in a landslide rather than the nail-bitter is has turned out to be, there was supposed to be a "blue wave" that gave control of the Senate to the Democrats as well as giving them a super-majority in the House. What actually happened is Republicans gained seats in the House and held (so far) a majority in the Senate. After calling not one, but two elections completely wrong, most thinking people will ignore pollsters and begin to listen to Vegas odds-makers instead.

9. Regardless of who gets sworn in on January 20, both major parties are pretty much toast. The RNC is fracturing between the Never-Trumpers and the Trump Foreverers, while the DNC is being torn asunder by the young-uns who want Medicare for All and zero tuition at state universities and colleges, and the leadership like Pelosi who are older than the pyramids and cannot be distinguished from the Never Trump Republicans.

10. Regardless of who gets sworn in on January 20, we're all screwed. All this fighting is over who gets to preside over the worst decade in American history. Oil production is crashing, heading down to as little as 5 million barrels per day. Our banks serve no purpose other than funneling Fed money printing to the top .1%. Main street family businesses are dropping like flies. Landlords are ignoring the eviction moratorium and throwing families out into the street. Once the moratorium expires at the end of the year, the current trickle of evictions will become a tsunami. (Same with mortgage foreclosures.) 

OK; this is getting way too long and it is way past my bedtime. Just one more thing and I'll shut up:

The latest in Trump Derangement Syndrome is the media meltdown because Trump finally fired all the Pentagon honchos who believed they could ignore the Commander-in-Chief without consequences. The media believes Trump is going to take over in a military coup. The less John le Carre-esque theory is that Trump is sick and tired of being ignored by the Pentagon when he orders our soldiers home from Afghanistan. There is nothing there worth one more American life. End it already. Have the boys home by Christmas.

Happy Holidays!

Spread the Debt Around

 

Democratic Integrity

 I know, I know; a contradiction of terms....

Our Efficient Government at Work

It's nice to see our government is capable of being streamlined and efficient in the face of a world-wide pandemic.

 

 Warp Speed indeed....

More BLM Stupidity

So the latest stupid thing from the BLM assholes is that they want to have their own cities and national anthem. I'm completely on board with that as long as:

The blacks-only cities are not tied into our national power grid. Make your own damn electricity. You might want to try solar panels. I hear they work really well at night....

The blacks-only cities are not tied into water or sewer systems located outside of the city borders. We literally don't want to deal with your shit. Incidentally, this was one of the many "oversights" of the stupid CHOP thing. "We are autonomous! Wait; what do you mean your not going to clean out our shit houses?"

Negotiate your own trade deals for all the stuff you can't make yourself (which is pretty much everything other than misspelled protest signs). 

While you're at it, set up your own internet and get the hell off of ours.

We'll let you keep all the millionaire crybabies that used to be professional athletes. As has been made obvious by all the booing at games and the tanking of the TV ratings, we are completely over paying $100 to watch a bunch of pampered assholes play a game. And no, we don't give a shit what someone who gets paid to play a game (and in the case of football players, has brain damage to boot) thinks about politics.

And you can take all your white, liberal handlers with you into your all-black autonomous zones because as we all know, race is just a social construct. So if someone says they are black, they must be black. (As opposed to Native American, where you have to show, ya know actual genetic proof. I'm looking in your direction, Elizabeth Warren....)

I know I sound like a broken record, but how stupid do you have to be to think this could end in anything but disaster for blacks in the US? What is basically being proposed here is a return to Jim Crow. All the blacks (and whites) who risked, and in many cases lost, everything to get rid of blacks-only bathrooms and all the rest of the "separate but equal" bullshit are spinning in their graves.

Biden 2020

 

Community Guidlines

2020 Election

 

Mostly...

 

Conspiracy Theory

 

Riots, Racism and Reparations

This is probably a post I shouldn't write, but when has that ever stopped me?

First, the obvious: the murder of George Floyd was a despicable and cowardly act by a clearly deranged individual who happened to have a badge. Unfortunately we are living in a time when such things are commonplace. Between the military giving both hardware and personnel to the local cops (around one fifth of all cops were former military), then jack around a quarter of them up on steroids and use military terminology meant to dehumanize the enemy when referring to citizens, and such acts are inevitable.

However.

To start at the end of the title of this rant, I, who has never owned a slave, will pay reparations to blacks, who have never been slaves, just as soon as I get my reparations check from the blacks who enslaved my white ancestors. Contrary to the bullshit spewed by BLM assholes, slavery is not and has never been some sort of uniquely white thing. Every race, ethnicity, nation, religion, etc. has both enslaved and been enslaved at some point in history. If we're going to start demanding reparations for every centuries-old wrong, there is going to be a lot of money changing hands.

As far as the riots, looting and arson goes, what is there to say? Blacks are doing what blacks have always done when they get pissed off: burn and loot their own neighborhoods. Six months from now, those very same blacks will bitch and moan about how shitty their neighborhoods are and how unfair and racist it is that they have to drive all the way out into the suburbs to find nice stores to shoplift in. I really don't care what they do as long as they keep it in their own neighborhoods. Bring that shit anywhere near my family and they will find out what a .22-250 does to a human skull.

And now on to racism. Are there whites that think blacks are inferior due to their skin color? Absolutely. Just like there are Asians who think they are innately superior to other races, Christians who think they are superior to all other religious belief systems, etc. etc. etc. Ranking humanity (with my race, creed, religion etc. being at or near the top) is as human as breathing. Whites do it, blacks do it (just listen to any of the BLM assholes or their apologists in the media), everyone does it. At some point, both white and black working class people will understand they have a common enemy (the investment class) and stop allowing themselves to be baited into hating each other by rich white liberals who live safe behind their gated and fenced neighborhoods patrolled by private security.

Which brings us to the whole defund the police bullshit. What an incredibly S. T. U. P. I. D. idea. To show just how stupid this idea is, we need look no further than CHAZ or CHOP or whatever the Seattle hipster ass clowns are calling the part of the city they claim is an autonomous zone. At least until the shooting starts, then they come whining back begging the residents of a foreign nation (the USA) to please, please, please come get our gunshot victims and arrest the bad guys and, while you are up, collect our garbage and empty our shit houses. Whata complete joke.

Meanwhile, cops nationwide are quitting and retiring in record numbers for completely obvious reasons. The ones that remain are giving BLM their wish and steering clear of black neighborhoods with lawlessness being the expected result. There is no way this ends well. The only advise I have for whites living in urban areas is to keep your powder dry.

I would get into the whole tearing down statues thing, but I'm pretty sure anyone reading this can figure out what I feel about that.

R.I.P. Western Civ.

Covid Baptism

Via Automatic Earth.

Hello Michigan!

[This was written over a period of several days while we tried to find internet]

Saturday May 9th

Well, we are now living in Michigan for the summer. We had planned to be up here for a couple weeks, not for six months. But we couldn't figure out a way for my snowbird parents to live up here now that we've taken my dad's car keys away from him. So the only solution we could come up with was for us to become reverse snowbirds and spend the summer living in the cabin on my parents' property. We got here on the first of May and have been scrubbing and sorting 30 years of accumulated debris. What's really weird about the whole thing is that my parents furnished the cabin with stuff from the house I grew up in. It's beyond strange to be using the same dishes, pots, pans, utensils, etc. from when I was a little kid.

As this is now our new normal, we went through all our clothes and decided what would come to Michigan and stay, what we would carry back and forth, and what will stay in Florida. There was no way we could have ever fit even 10% of what we had packed up into my parents' mini-van. We thought we were going to have to UPS the stuff up here, but we found out that one of Debbie's cousins runs a business that hauls snowbird crap between Michigan and Florida, and for a fraction of what it would have cost us to ship it any other way. woot.

In pandemic news, moving to Michigan means we are now under the rule of some wanabe Mussolini. The governor of Michigan has the place locked down tighter than nearly any other state and for longer than most. Everyone knows about the protest in Lansing, but the news media has it all wrong. The protestors are not "white supremacists" or Tea Partiers". They are ordinary people that are being forced into homelessness and even starvation by a lock-down that is mostly unnecessary anywhere in Michigan other than Detroit. The county we are in has had exactly 2 covid-19 deaths. The county that is less than a mile to our north has had zero deaths. So once again, the entire state is being punished because Detroit can't get it's shit together. Everyone likes to blame it all on poverty and GM closing the factories, and that certainly didn't help matters. But Detroit was a wreck long before GM sent all the jobs to China. For my entire life, the rest of the state pays for Detroit's incompetence. I can't count the number of times that the state legislature has taken money away from the local schools here in order to have more for the Detroit schools. Detroit goes bankrupt through corruption and gross stupidity, and the rest of the state gets to foot the bill. So now counties that have less than a dozen cases and no deaths have their economies (still reeling from the Volcker recession) stomped in to the mud yet again. But on the other hand, they didn't vote for her, so why would the Governor give a shit about them?

Weather-wise, we thought we had lucked out. The first day we were here, it got up into the 70's. But that proved to be a teaser. The last two days have been barely making it to 40 with 20-30 mph winds. And SNOW! Not just a few flakes, but actual SNOW on the GROUND! I could have died happy if I had never seen snow again. I'm staying inside wrapped up in blankets as much as possible, but we are still having supper with my parents every day. I "run" across the yard as fast as I can go screaming like a little girl the entire time. At least I'm getting some exercise....

One good thing that has come out of the whole pandemic thing is that people are getting a taste of what a low-carbon lifestyle is really like. No windmills or solar panels or electric cars; just a lot less of everything. Michael Moore is pushing a video on his YouTube channel that more or less puts paid to the whole Green New Deal type thinking. The mainline environmental groups have always pushed the fantasy of everyone in the world living an American, middle-class lifestyle fueled by solar panels and windmills, but as anyone who has lived off-grid knows, it's just that; fantasy. The simple truth is that you cannot run the national electric grid on power that disappears whenever the wind dies down or the sun sets. The intermittency problem can be partially solved for an individual household by using batteries, but how do you build a battery that can store the terawatts of juice to last North America for several days? Add in the electric vehicles that we are all supposed to be driving any day now, and the problem increases exponentially. It. Can. Not. Be. Done. That should be tattooed on the forehead of every politician who has signed onto AoC's Green New Deal. The irony is that the attempt will likely create more environmental destruction than if we just keep on the way we are until the fossil fuels become too expensive for general use.

The elephant in the room is population. Prior to humans breaking into the planet's carbon stores, human population never exceeded 1 billion. We are well on our way to 8 billion. What does that say about our low carbon future? Exactly. Look around you; only one out of every eight people gets to live. There are several ways that can happen, one of which, ironically, is pandemics. We could try something like China's now-abandoned one-child policy, but doing so would create a demographic disaster even worse than what we see in countries like Japan. We are in a trap; we've painted ourselves into a corner that has no way out that doesn't look like the scariest parts of the Bible.

Thursday May 14

We've more or less settled into the cabin. The weather has improved somewhat. We used the couple of nice days to tackle my dad's shed, which has become filled with tools and random junk over the last 30 years. It was so bad that even getting in the door was a challenge. A dozen or so garbage bags later, we are starting to make some progress, but we still have a long way to go. Once we are done there, we will start on my mom's shed which is almost as bad as my dad's was. I can't figure out how two people who lectured me for my entire life about how having things takes away from what is important in life could have accumulated so much useless crap.

I'd also like to get a small garden going. There is a large fenced area on the property that my dad planted for years. Then it just got to be more than he could handle, so the garden has sat fallow for several years. There is no way I can do anything like he used to in my condition, but I can do something on a smaller scale. Now that we are allowed to buy seeds and plants (and temperatures have stopped dropping into the teens at night) I need to get my butt into gear.

We are going to go searching for a wifi connection, so this may actually get posted before November...

Friday May 15

We have internet!!! We ran into the Verizon and picked up a Jetpack. I was playing with it all the way home. Works great even in the cabin! I doubt we can stream video, but for most of what we do, it works just fine. There is no data caps, but there is throttling after a certain point, but unless we start trying to binge-watch X-Files episodes, I don't think we will ever get anywhere near our cap.

Woo Hoo!