"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!