Politics as Usual
We took the day off from the land search today to perform the sort of maintenance tasks that everyone has to do… Laundry, cleaning, etcetera that are just not doable while you are spending 8 hours plus on the road looking at land. And incidentally so that I can get a good blog post in, and so that Kiti can get her nails done before they break off.
We’ve got a lot of stuff to cover today, so strap in, and lets get to it. As always, please notice the cup at the tip jar Where we restock the bar. Oh, and I would like to thank the current contributors to the ‘keep the author lubricated’ fund!
Let’s start with an ending. Joe Biden’s ending. When a Liberal resident (his handlers are the real president) of the Whitehouse loses the NYT, you know they’re headed for the circular file. The aforementioned fish wrapper did a piece today by one of my favorite idiots to mock, David Leonhadrt. Biden's legacy
While Joe is still lying through his teeth claiming that “border crossings went way down during my administration” even David admits: “Democrats have already abandoned Biden’s initial immigration policy, which contributed to a record surge at the southern border.” Then however he drifts off into la-la land with: “But one major part of Biden’s agenda has a decent chance of surviving. It was the idea that animated much of the legislation he signed — namely, that the federal government should take a more active role in both assisting and regulating the private sector than it did for much of the previous half-century.
“This idea has yet to acquire a simple name. The historian Gary Gerstle has called it the end of the neoliberal order. Felicia Wong and her colleagues at the Roosevelt Institute, a liberal think tank, have used the term “a new economics.” Jake Sullivan, a top Biden adviser, has referred to it as a new consensus. I’ve described it as part of a new centrism.”
David goes on in later paragraphs to scourge Biden on many but notably not all of his failures. Conspicuously absent is his failure with the Afghanistan withdrawal, something that will plague the world for decades.
Oh, and no, David you apparatchik, that is not “the center” it’s far to the left, and there’s been a name for it for a long time. It’s called socialism.
The problem with Joe’s socialism isn’t JUST that it’s socialism, and thus in conflict with the very core of US government’s design. It also suffers from the same disease that all socialism suffers from, it’s really not about making everyone winners and no one losers. It’s about making your chosen ones winners! and everyone else? Well, they’re serfs, and they don’t matter, as long as you can keep them powerless.
Let’s look for example at the difference between how the Carolinas have been treated V how LA county is being treated. https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/biden-raises-federal-funding-initial-los-angeles-fire/story?id=117516448 “The Federal Government will cover 100% of the initial costs of LA fire recovery” Compare this with bidens-fema-fails-again-26-families-promised-homes-only-3-get-them-it-gets-even-worse/ and this wonderful piece by the Bad Cat deregulating-barn-raising-fixes-this. Carolina was supposed to be kicking the folks that they allowed to stay in hotel rooms on FEMA’s dime out of those rooms, just in time for the next major artic blast in the area. This order was rescinded at the last minute due to public outcry, but only until Jan 25. Then it will be quietly implemented.
There’s a lot more to notice and take apart here though. ABC (mainstream media) covers how great Biden is for saving the poor people of LA. Of course the poor people of LA that are hit the hardest so far, are folks like the people of Palisades, where the median home is 3.4 million bucks, for a McMansion on a postage stamp. Yeah, it sucks like hell to be them, but compared to the folks that got smeared by Helene, well, they’re doing alright. But you see, they’re photogenic, and a lot of them are “our sort of people” who give to all the right causes, vote for all the right people, and attend all the right parties.
By contrast, MSM isn’t saying anything about the folks back in the hollers who lost everything. That’s only being covered by Independent Media (pst, that’s folks like me.) If you haven’t gone and read that Bad Cat post, take the time to scroll back up and read that sucker. I’ll wait.
Done? Good.
If you haven’t grown up around the Amish (I sort of did, we weren’t close, but we were near enough to see their works.) You may not appreciate the absolute ridiculousness of telling people “Well yeah, that home is there, but you can’t move into it, because you see, it doesn’t meet code, it wasn’t built by one of our union, approved, residential carpenters, so it’s not safe.”
If I had not followed the path my life took, I would have loved to apprentice myself for a couple years to an Amish carpenter. Those boys know what the hell they’re doing! Seriously. They put up stuff that lasts for centuries, and do it fast, without power tools. They do beautiful work that stands the test of time. One hundred plus of their tiny homes, are sitting unoccupied because the state, and local authorities, and FEMA won’t let people stay in them. Tent cities in the snow are apparently better for those peasants.
Meanwhile, CA is spending money to set up a “Price gouging hotline” to punish places that are selling construction material for more than the state thinks it should cost or charging more to build things than the state thinks is right. I wonder how much that hotline cost to set up and man? Think that could have gone to some better target?
Like oh… FIXING THE DAMN RESERVOIR?
Here’s a nice piece from a blogger I follow that is there in the scrum of Southern CA Fire country: culture-of-failure-geography-of-reality One of the things to note in this piece, is while Palisades has no water to fight fires with, thirty miles south in Rancho Palos Verdes they’re pumping a million gallons a day of fresh water into the ocean, to keep it from eroding their sea coast.
The punch line from that includes “So, again, Southern California is burning because it’s so desperately dry from a long drought caused by climate change, and it’s also pumping and dumping tens of millions of gallons of excessive groundwater from “two years of heavy rains.” Here’s a recent update on the project from the city government”
You really should go read the whole thing, it’s enlightening.
Chris did another article on the mess obvious-blue-model-failure-its-unclear that talks about how long this shit has been broken, and how no one raised a fuss because “well they’re our people so we don’t want to cause waves.” Pointing out that the local city council is too busy screaming that “Israel BAD, Palestine GOOD” and “PROTECT OUR UNDOCUMENTED CITIZENS” to worry about things like, oh, FIRE MAINS.
Gosh, if only there was a type of government that worried about local things, and another one that worried about international things. Oh, wait.
Then you’ve got the California “experts” who are screaming at anyone (like The Fat Electrician, another blogger) who dares to criticize their performance. “Sure, we could use seawater to put out the fire today, but tomorrow the pump would be corroded and unusable. Sea water is corrosive you moron!” Yes, that’s an actual quote. And on the face of it, it’s almost reasonable.
Except.
Gosh, the nine-stage centripetal pump that is on most fire engines, just happens to have another use. It’s the same pump as the trim and drain pumps on US Submarines. The pump that pressurizes our FIRE MAINS. Guess what goes though that pump? That’s right, SEA WATER! Oh, yes, you need to flush out the hoses afterwards with potable, and it helps to flush out the pump occasionally and conduct maintenance on it…
Gosh, if only there was someone who was familiar with using sea water through pumps to fight fires… Now where would we find such people? In the midst of the nearest LGBTMOUSE meeting where LA is recruiting firefighters? Um, probably not.
Of course the leftist Government-Entertainment Industrial Complex is all about “don’t blame the government!” It’s global warming, or it’s just the nature of the area, and no one should be living there, or my favorite “It’s too early to be fixing blame, we should wait until after the crisis is over before we examine the root causes.” /seattle-to-la-we-are-here-for-you
Now, once the crisis is over we’ll get “What difference – at this point, what difference does it make?” See it’s never the right time to hold leftists’ feet to the fire. It’s either too early, because we should just be dealing with the problem, or it’s too late, because it’s over and done with.
“When it ain’t rainin’ the roof don’t leak, and when it’s rainin’ I can’t fix it no how.”
"People are literally fleeing. Kids have lost their schools. Communities have lost their churches. Families have lost their homes. Some have even lost their lives. And the President-Elect's response is to politicize it." —California Governor Gavin Newsom
"That isn't quite true. The President-elect 'politicized' the fires by warning you that they would happen — in 2018, and 2019, and 2024. And you did nothing." —Michael Knowles
Gods save us.
Another item of note, this came out: https://www.visualcapitalist.com/mapped-u-s-states-with-the-most-guns/ which says that my future home state is way behind MT on gun ownership with only 52% of the people owning firearms, compared to MT at 66% Now the first thing that comes to mind is:
Of course the second thing that comes to mind, is that there’s a bunch of people that “just ain’t gonna talk about how many guns they own to no reporter type.” So those numbers are probably bullshit.
A further piece of politics as usual comes to us from Texas, where the Republican Party can’t elect a speaker for the house that the Republican party wants, because a small group of RINOs broke off and voted with the Democrats for a speaker that the Republicans are considering throwing out of their party. https://texasscorecard.com/state/democrat-coalition-propels-dustin-burrows-to-speaker-of-the-texas-house/ Once again we see that the Left gets their people to ‘vote the party line, no matter what’ while the Right is trying to herd cats.
Also from TX we get this piece: https://texasscorecard.com/state/texas-am-president-backtracks-on-sponsoring-dei-conference-after-gov-pressure/ It seems that It took threats of firing the President of Texas A&M to get him to quit sponsoring “The PhD Project Conference in Chicago” which claims to be all about Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, but bans white folk and Asians from attending.
In the world of Sports, we have this little Jem: eagles-brown-book-inner-excellence-amazon-1 Now, any way that we can get people to read is great by me, but imagine the world we live in where having a football player reading a book on the sidelines, is what gets that self help book to number one on the sales charts, from its previous high of 523,497th? Seriously folks?
Back on the National beat, we’ve got this little piece from Politico /newsletters/national-security-daily/2025/01/14 where they’re interviewing first-term Sen. JOHN CURTIS (R-Utah) and I’m just going to quote this little exchange:
"The biggest problem for me is she's been so low-profile," he said. "The others have come to my office and so if you go back to that analogy of a sheet of music, her sheet's pretty blank for me. I need more information to start filling that in, and, look, if I can't fill that in, I can't vote for her."
Now let me translate that. “ She didn’t come to my door, kiss the ring, and suck my cock, so fuck what’s best for the nation, I’m not voting for her. She’s gotta Respect muh Athoritah!”
Like it says at the top of the page, Politics as usual.
My former colleagues in Federal Government Management are in the news, https://www.dailysignal.com/2025/01/13/deep-state-gearing-nearly-half-federal-employees-swamp-plan-resist-trump-poll-finds/ Consider a situation where half of the managers at, oh say Ford, stated that they were going to resist anything that the CEO of Ford said he wanted to do.
Found the SWAMP.
Federal employees are too hard to fire. There, I said it.
Once you’re through your probationary period, unless you gore a sacred cow, by doing something like, oh, calling that purple haired thing that weighs five hundred pounds, rolls around in a wheelchair, has a face that looks like it fell into a tackle box, and is of indeterminant sex, by the wrong pronoun, you can’t be fired.
Seriously.
Oh, if you steal major amounts of stuff and get caught at it, maybe. DUI don’t do it, first or second offence of fucking your secretary on the clock doesn’t do it, (Third one did) Gambling debts will do it, and lying to security about almost anything can do it, but short of that, it’s incredibly hard to fire someone, I know, I’ve tried. We had someone who literally decked his boss, and didn’t get fired for it, even though he left in cuffs.
My fellow managers don’t understand why I support Trumps “schedule F” initiative. Dude, when you straight out say “If I disagree with something that the president legally tells me to do, I will not do it and will find a way to sabotage it.” As 42% of our federal managers did… Well, there’s the door, don’t let me find you on this side of it ever again.
In more Swamp related stuff, head-of-infamous-information-disorder we have “Ryan Merkley, who directed the Aspen Institute’s Commission on Information Disorder and also appeared in the Twitter Files as Wikimedia’s liaison to “Industry Meetings” with federal law enforcement, was elevated to the job (of COO) by NPR president/Titania McGrath clone Katherine Maher.” (quote from original) If you don’t remember these twits, they’re the folks that said “the First Amendment is the number one challenge we face in trying to report the news and get people to understand what we want them to.”
That’s National Public Radio, folks, your tax dollars going to fund your propagandization.
This has already gone on way too long, but there’s two more pieces I would be remiss if I didn’t mention. First you have one of Sal’s latest pieces. so-i-assume-fuel-supply-for-the-pacific? Sal is a big proponent, and rightfully so, of the non-sexy, grubby shit that makes sure you win wars. One of those things is FUEL. We’re apparently destroying the last major naval fuel dump south of Washington state on the Pacific. That is a major fucking problem. During the Second World War, we lost hundreds of aircraft trying to take out the German’s fuel supply… Here we are doing it ourselves for our enemy. What the actual fuck?
Finally, we have former-russian-mercenary-arrested-after-crossing-rio-grande-river/ Timur Praliev was reportedly carrying two passports—one from Russia and one from Kazakhstan—as well as $4,000 in U.S. cash and 60,000 Mexican pesos. Following a search of his backpack, Border Patrol agents discovered that he was also transporting a drone.
Praliev claimed to have previously worked for the Wagner Group, which is a Russian-backed paramilitary organization.
He was sentenced to “time served” and released into our nation, to await a hearing for “Refugee” status, that may happen in five years or so.
Dudes got two passports, a large chunk of cash, and a drone, he’s a Russian merc by his own admission, and you let him go free???
I’m not saying these people (leftist judges, and politicians) are enemy agents, but if they were, what would they do differently?
QOTD “the first law of economics is resource scarcity. There is never enough stuff to give everyone everything they want.
“The first law of politics is "ignore the first law of economics."
“The second law of politics is, of course, “blame the ill effects of any markets you break on capitalism and use them as a pretext to break more markets.”
The Bad Cat, mangling Thomas Sowell.
Yours in Service,
William Lehman