Category: Current Events

Ministry of Truth Suspended. Nina Jankowicz Returned to Padded Cell

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It just doesn’t get any funnier than this.

The Department of Homeland Security’s much criticized disinformation governance board is being paused after concerns it would infringe free speech and complaints about its executive director.

Less than a month after President Joe Biden’s administration touted the initiative, DHS has suspended the board, pending a review, with the future of its leader, Nina Jankowicz, still undecided.

“Nina Jankowicz has been subjected to unjustified and vile personal attacks and physical threats,” a DHS spokesperson told the Washington Post Wednesday. “In congressional hearings and in media interviews, the Secretary has repeatedly defended her as eminently qualified and underscored the importance of the Department’s disinformation work, and he will continue to do so.”

This is wonderful.  An awful government entity has been literally mocked out of existence.  Now let’s get busy working on the Education Department.  And while we’re at it let’s see if we can get Pete Buttigieg sent home too.

Will the Supreme Court Restore the Constitution?

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I read the Alito opinion.  I listened in the news to the fears of the Left about future decisions on other unconstitutional decisions.  And I think they may have a good reason to be afraid.  If this court was willing to overturn Roe v. Wade, then there isn’t any additional justification needed to overturn other unconstitutional laws.

The lack of constitutional grounds to declare gay marriage a national right is exactly the same as the problem with making abortion a right.  And some things are even easier to attack.  Affirmative action is actually prohibited by a constitutional amendment.  It was even acknowledged to be unconstitutional the last time it was allowed to stand by the Supreme Court.  Each of these examples of judicial malpractice can be addressed in exactly the same way as Roe v. Wade.  The question is will these justices continue to display the courage they seem to have right now?

I think they will.  And I think we’ll have the answer to the question in July.  That’s when the decision on Roe v. Wade is supposed to be announced.  If the five justices manage to stand up to the barrage of intimidation and character assassination that they are currently receiving then I think they’ll be hardened enough to move forward to other areas of the law where equally unconstitutional decisions have been made before.

I find this possibility exhilarating.  For my whole adult life, I have watched the Supreme Court create unjust laws and then fail to reverse those decisions when the chance to do so arose.  Justices named by Reagan, George Bush Sr. and George Bush Jr. were touted as conservatives and almost invariably turned out to be liberals.  But now, so many years later it looks like we’re there.  And half the thanks have to go to Mitch McConnell and Donald Trump, two men who cannot stand each other.  I find that highly ironic.  But I won’t look this gift horse in the mouth.  It’s too valuable.

Now, I’m fully aware that more than half of you are rolling your eyes and thinking, “What a hopeless optimist!”  And I can’t blame you.  We’ve been down this road so many times before that it’s completely understandable that most folks don’t want to get fooled again.  It’s just like that cartoon of Lucy pulling the football away from Charlie Brown just as he’s ready to kick it.  And ends up flat on his back.  For the last year I’ve been very doubtful that the Supreme Court would go all the way and overturn Roe altogether.  I figured they’d approve the fifteen-week limit in Mississippi and leave it at that.  But apparently, they’ve gotten together the backbone to admit the truth of the situation and make an honest ruling.  And that’s amazing.

So, if in July they back down and issue a watered-down decision I’ll openly admit my foolishness.  I’ll admit that we can’t “vote our way out of this.”  But if I’m right then I’ll expect the same admission from the skeptics and dissidents that say there’s no hope of turning things around.  And you know who you are out there.

A Segment of the Left is Growing Afraid of the Ukraine War

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It looks like the narrative of “fight to the last Ukrainian” is losing ground to the reality of what war with Russia will actually entail.  The NY Times, the establishment paper of record is beginning to question the wisdom of confronting Russia without limit.

NY Times shifts pro-war narrative

Even among leftists there is a limit to self-delusion.  Thinking about the consequences of baiting a nuclear power unnecessarily gives pause for even such true believers as the denizens of the Gray Lady.  Maybe there is hope that the stupidity of the Biden State Department will be reined in by whoever is actually running the country.  But I wouldn’t depend on our luck holding out until then.  Best to lay in a supply of iodine pills.

 

 

Tucker Carlson Addresses Dems Stoking Race Hatred through the Buffalo Shooting

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I’d say this was one of Carlson’s most thoughtful and effective discussions of how racialist political policies end up in mentally ill people committing violent and senseless acts.  I especially liked how he compared the racial hatred in Rwanda between the two black ethnicities, the Hutus and the Tutsis, with how the Democrats are stoking racial hatred in the United States.

The demonization of a whole race, whites, by the practitioners of critical race theory over the last ten years has now begun to bear fruit with black and white individuals with axes to grind acting out some race war fantasy on the streets of our cities.  And with the police now sidelined thanks to the George Floyd movement, these mentally ill people have an easy time slipping through the cracks and unleashing mayhem and murder on innocent people just trying to live their lives.

Carlson starts off the show by noting that over the last weekend a hundred and four Americans were shot to death.  This puts in perspective the 10 murders committed by the Buffalo shooter.  The ten murders were horrifying but hardly exceptional or even dominant on a national level.  It was just another example of the breakdown of law and order in Joe Biden’s America.  People can try to demagogue using racial politics to take advantage of this tragedy but until the Democrats drop identity politics this will be the future of our country going forward.

Silly Season 2022 – The Search for Intelligent Life on Capitol Hill

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As I reported yesterday summer has come to Dunwich and right on cue the media “silly season” erupts into life.  That’s right UFOs are back in the headlines.

“The House Intelligence Committee will hold the first open hearing on UFOs in more than 50 years.”

With apologies to the author of this article and in sympathy with all of my fellow science fiction devotees having the US Congress investigate UFOs is fraught with existential peril.  Imagining Nancy Pelosi presiding over a debate as to whether evidence of hypersonic maneuverability is terrestrial or extra-terrestrial without her invoking either Steven Spielberg or George Lucas seems impossible.  Maybe there are a half dozen congress critters with enough intelligence to weigh the kind of evidence that the Defense Department, the Intelligence Agencies and the Space Force will bring to the table but they will be drowned out by barnyard noises emanating from the majority of the denizens of the House of Representatives.  Imagine AOC and the rest of the “Squad” jumping to the defense of the little green men based on their evidence from the movie, “E.T., The Extraterrestrial” that government intent toward aliens is racist (or at least species-ist if I may coin the term).

The author finishes off this article with a demand for Washington to come clean on all their secret knowledge about UFOs.

“Top line: We don’t know what the most extraordinary “other” bin UFOs are, who or what is operating them, what their intentions might be, or how they operate. Maybe they are many different things with many different origins and intentions. Regardless, science demands we find out. This is no longer the early Cold War. The public can handle this subject with the seriousness it deserves. So also does our national security demand as much. Again, if another nation figures out how to replicate the way these most extraordinary UFOs operate before the U.S. does, we’ll have a problem.”

Well, we can’t even get the FBI and the courts to stop arresting Americans for trumped up charges of insurrection.  If the government actually had proof of extra-terrestrial life and technologies what are the chances that the CIA and the Defense Department would tell us the truth?  Slim and none would be the optimistic answer.

Luckily we can fall back on a very important source of information on UFO research.  I leave it for your consideration

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xngFNtzMf3s

 

Summer All in a Day

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Someone here in Dunwich flipped the Winter/Summer switch and now instead of shivering under a mountain of blankets at night I’m throwing off the sheet and turning on the ceiling fan.  Well, that’s as it should be.  Summer is brief and anything in the eighties is okay by me.

Camera Girl and I have been planting vegetables and a few flowers.  But today I finally ordered some thornless red raspberry plants for her.  She is a thrifty woman which I guess I should be grateful for but sometimes it paralyzes her if prices outrage her internal value measuring mechanism.  Somehow, she thinks people shouldn’t charge money for plants.  When this hesitancy goes on for too long, I step in and buy whichever choice I think she’d like to have the most.  Otherwise, she’d end up missing the season and be unhappy which would go against my internal value measuring mechanism.

Currently I’m studying the vagaries of lag bolt, pilot hole diameter as it relates to the designation of hard vs. soft wood.  I have been collecting the hardware I need for the latest battle in the war on decay.  Current my side is losing.  If the rain holds off tomorrow, I will venture out with sledge hammer, drill, hex driver and steely determination to set the world straight again.  Or at least several fence posts.

I consider this foray a proof of concept.  If successful, this will pave the way for a permanent solution to my fence problems.  If it fails, I must contemplate drastic measures involving steel posts and concrete which would be expensive and extremely time consuming.  But, ever the optimist, I refuse to even consider the possibility of defeat.

Camera Girl has been spotting critters around the yard.  She and the hounds have cornered some frogs and toads.  And yesterday she spotted a snake in her garden.  Her description was puzzling.  It was about a foot long and relatively thin but she said it was solid yellow.

We had a complete lack of garter snakes in the yard last year which was highly unusual.  I theorized that a warming event in the middle of the winter might have awakened the garter snakes and caused them to fail to survive the subsequent cold snap that followed.  Anyway, Camera Girl’s description sounded like an extremely unusual color and pattern for a garter.  I speculated that it was some kind of aberrantly light phase of the brown snake of which we have a generous number here.  I claimed skepticism of her description but she reminded me that I’m color blind so I deferred to her chromatic superiority.  I will search out this strange creature at some point.

So, I’m mostly enjoying the Summer of Dopey Joe.  Despite suffering through the annoyance of dealing with unreliable appliances from China and shortages of spare parts due to the “supply chain breakdown” I am still mostly cheerful.  Of course, if rolling blackouts become the outrage of the month in August that would tick me off.  But it would also give us a shot at winning some of the New England states in November.  And that would be an especially sweet cherry on top of the schadenfreude parfait.  There are hints of congressional and senate seats that might flip.  These would be transitory gains.  New England is permanently blue.  The people live at the center of the Cathedral.  But if just for a moment, as some sort of involuntary reflex, they vote for a Republican it would be a barometer of the depths of incompetence of the Biden Administration and a harbinger of disaster for the Democrats in 2024.

And that’s something I always want to celebrate.  Now where is that sunscreen?

The Five Stages of Grief – Part 1

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Lately, it’s almost as if every instinct and conscious decision that the Biden Administration exercises comes back to produce a rolling disaster that then must be explained as a random act of chance.  Nothing is ever Joe’s fault.  Think about it.  Something as basic as baby formula is unavailable in the supposed center of the global empire.  The fact that that doesn’t set off warning bells shows us just how feckless these people are.  Working women are both one of the Democrats core constituencies and also the group of mothers least likely to breast feed their infants for any extended time.  Panicking that group into thinking that their babies might starve is an unforced error of monumental stupidity.

And that is just the emergency du jour.  Tomorrow it might be organ theft gangs harvesting eyes and the day after that peanut butter shortages.  In essence it’s just comprehensive incompetence across the whole administration.  But that phenomenon has to be traced back to the source.  I’ll have to give Obama credit for telling us not to underestimate Biden’s ability to screw things up.

People say that the five stages of grief are denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance.  I think I have detected these stages in news coverage of the Biden Administration.  The Left is grieving for the loss of Joe FDR Biden’s New Deal Moment, the Great Reset, the Build Back Better Rip-Off.  If you think back to last year I remember when prices started to rise and the headlines were full of denial.  Do you remember how they claimed that the Fourth of July cookout was something like $1.47 cheaper than the year before?  And then there was the meme about inflation being temporary.

Let’s see what we have for anger.  Maybe that’s when everybody on the Left was getting mad about “Let’s Go Brandon.”  And I guess all that talk about a “Winter of Death for the Unvaccinated.”  That was pretty angry.

Lately I’m seeing a lot of bargaining in the articles.  A lot of it is in the vein of “If the Democrats do this and this and if somehow these other things happen, maybe the midterms won’t be so bad.  The latest is “If the Russian people overthrow Putin, then gasoline prices will come down.”

And just today I think I caught a good strong whiff of stage four, depression.  These have centered around the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade.  Even the anger at the Right on this issue can’t disguise the depression that exists on the Left over this defeat.  But I’m looking forward to a good bit more depression in the weeks and months ahead.

Looking ahead I’m contemplating what a Politico headline will look like when they’ve reached the acceptance stage.  And when will that happen.  Maybe it will coincide with the day after Election Day.  Would it feature a Banner headline reading “Let’s Go Brandon”?  Or maybe it will skip the euphemism and read “F*** Joe Biden” instead.  Personally, for the sake of decorum the former will do for me.

So, I’ll continue to monitor the headlines to see if my hypothesis stands up to scrutiny.

Biden Has Used Up All the Stupid Voters

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Watch this performance.  This is an act that he’s been using.  He selects some point he’s trying to make.  In this case it’s food shortages and he starts emoting about victims of this food shortage and works himself up into an angry tirade over the injustice and “un-American” nature of the problem.  He’s done this about insulin costs and other problems he’s showcasing.

But now he’s taken the act one step further.  Here he is flipping out about food shortages but he’s the one who is causing all the problems he’s railing against.  Biden locked down the country for a year and then can’t figure out why companies don’t produce things like baby formula.

I’m sure there are people stupid enough or emotionally unstable enough to be swayed by Dementia Joe’s play acting.  But at this point only the very stupid haven’t seen through his act.  I’m going to take a guess and say that number is less than ten percent of people.  If you add in the people who don’t believe the act but are bought and paid for by the Democrats, I think we’re looking at less than forty percent of the country.

This forty percent isn’t evenly spread out across the country.  The deep blue states like California and New York have a disproportionately large share of these people.  So even if there is a highly organized voter fraud effort in the swing states like Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, we may be reaching the point where some actual blue states begin to peel off and vote Republican.  There are indications of this in places like Nevada and New Hampshire.  We’ve already seen how Virginia flipped to a Republican governor and legislature.  Even deep blue New Jersey came very close to electing a Republican governor.

So, this is a testable hypothesis.  There’s been talk about a red wave capturing the House and Senate.  But more telling will be if blue states elect Republican governors and legislatures.  Places like Wisconsin and Minnesota were engulfed in the George Floyd street drama.  If places like these bring in Republicans that will be a clear signal that they’ve had enough.

If they don’t then we’ll never see a nationwide rollback of the progressives.  There will never be a clearer case of Leftist madness.  The destruction of the cities and the breakdown of law and order is crystal clear.  There is no doubt how it happened and who was responsible.  If this doesn’t convince moderate democrats to abandon their woke party leaders then nothing ever will.

So, I’m really glad to see Biden descend into lunacy, raging against the crises that he himself has orchestrated.  The majority of people will recognize this as absurd and demonstrably false.  The longer this goes on the more outraged the majority of the country will become against the Biden administration.  By November it will be responsible for a wave election.  By the end of 2024 it will be a tsunami that will displace the whole Democrat party for years to come.

But as I’ve stated before, that won’t make it any easier for all of us to survive until then.

Larry Correia Advocates for a New Federal Agency: THE DOFYJS

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Larry who is an accountant by training (and the author of books about monster hunters) explains why whittling down the federal bureaucracy is a life and death priority and thus proposes forming an agency of accountants to audit the rest of the federal government with the mission to eliminate 90% of it.  He calls it “The Department of F*** Your Job Security!”

Well, I might quibble about the name but the point is well made.  The bureaucracy is a parasite that has finally undermined its host.  Along with the thousand and one maladies that the progressives have saddled us with supporting the useless bureaucrats has become the cancer that will finish us off.

Kudos to Larry for identifying the chemotherapy that is needed to treat this disease.

Camera Girl Angers the Lightning God

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Many years ago, when Camera Girl was just a simple housewife.  This was before she became a jet-setting companion to a high-powered photographic dynamo; me.  One day while I was at work, I got a call from home.  She informed me that the fire department had to be called because our electric stove had malfunctioned and burst into flames.  The highly professional volunteer firemen had heroically dragged the stove out of the house and it was lying on the driveway like some stricken beast brought low by forces beyond the control of nature.  And she further informed me that the meat loaf was still in it and unless I wanted to try carbonized beef we would need to eat out.  Now, I know for a fact that she’s always disliked electric stoves and ovens.  She claims that only gas stoves provide the kind of temperature control she needs to cook food correctly.  I’m not saying she sabotaged that stove but it is true she was glad to get a new one.  Even if it was also an electric model.

Well yesterday lightning struck again.  At about 4 pm I heard a loud crackle of electricity like something out of the Frankenstein laboratory scene coming from the kitchen followed by Camera girl screaming something incoherently.  I ran into the kitchen to find smoke pouring from the oven.  I shut the power to the oven and turned on the vent fan above the stove.  Then I took the smoke alarm off the wall and put it where it wouldn’t go off.

Sure, enough for the third time in her career as chief cook and bottlewasher in “Chez photog” the heating element in one of her ovens failed.  This time I was there so the fire department wasn’t needed.  I could see the element was cracked and the sound I’d heard was power arcing over the gap.  After gently coaxing Camera Girl off the ceiling fan, I comforted her in her terror and convinced her that all would be well once we got our local appliance store to send a serviceman to install a new element.

But when I called them, it wasn’t as simple as that.  After providing them with the stove’s model number they informed me that they would have to order this critical part.  And when I asked them when they would be able to send someone to install it the pleasant young fellow on the line said, “In three or four weeks.”   I dared not tell Camera Girl that her stove would be out of service for a month so I asked the guy how difficult would it be for me to install it myself.  He thought it would be quite simple and foolproof.  So tomorrow morning I’ll go and pay fifty bucks for this replacement part and spend some part of the day installing it.

Obviously, this is a double-edged sword.  On the up side, I get to save a hundred fifty bucks in service call charges and appear to be a competent and self-sufficient alpha male.  On the down side if I louse up the installation Camera Girl will mock me mercilessly.

Well, there’s nothing to be done about it.  I must rise to the challenge.  I was thinking of watching some episodes of the Honeymooners tonight to see if I can get any pointers from Ralph Kramden’s technique handling Alice’s bouts of sarcasm.  What’s the worst that could happen?  Where did I put that fire extinguisher?