Getting Rid Of The Burden

Salma Zito has done it again:

Café Raymond is a favorite destination and, as usual, both floors, the balcony and the sidewalk tables at the diner are packed with patrons.

None of the people waiting for his signature stack of ricotta pancakes stuffed with blueberries, his home-cured smoked salmon and caper platter or his savory sunny-side-up egg and brisket hash have any idea the man behind the kitchen counter — Ray Mikesell — has placed his beloved restaurant up for sale. He’s calling it quits two decades after he returned home from Baltimore to raise his children and carve out a life in Pittsburgh.

Through tears he says he simply has had enough — not of his customers, not of creating new dishes or specialized drinks, but of all the uncertainty that has dogged nearly every small businessman in the country since the beginning of the pandemic.

“It started with COVID and just over time, the uncertainty, the stress of trying to stay open, the inability to hire people, the underlying tension in society, the inflationary cost of everything you need to purchase to create quality food, that is, if you can get it…” he says, his voice trailing. He stops and pauses to hold it together.

The food costs are crushing him, he said, but so is the cost of doing business, period. His utility bills have skyrocketed, as has the cost of fuel to pick up fresh meats and vegetables from local farms or to deliver food for catering jobs. The costs are crippling, he says, and they are creating a barrier to investing in a business he has loved for so long.

“It just breaks you down no matter how strong you are,” said Mr. Mikesell.

Here’s my take on this.  Every time a politician says he cares about small businesses and their owners, he’s lying in his teeth.

This new crowd of socialists (including, alas, the Socialist Lite Republicans) absolutely loathe small, successful businesses, for the same reason they hate people owning cars: having your own car gives you freedom of movement, and your own business makes you part of a community, a community that binds you to itself because they now have the freedom to decide when, where and what they want to eat, and not have to go at specific times to a dreary commissariat like the hapless Winston Smith in Orwell’s 1984, and be fed the same slop and gruel as everyone else.

And the government absolutely hates that you have those freedoms.

If that’s not the case, please then explain to me why commuter and passenger rail systems are so popular with neo-socialist governments and why, when businesses like that of Ray Mikesell experience the same ghastly misfortunes (created, it must be said, by government), the government policy does absolutely nothing to help those businesses except by ladling out one-time, piddly subsistence-level “incentives” instead of addressing the main issues that cripple both the businesses and their customers:  soaring inflation (created by the government printing too much money), high fuel prices (even though we are the most self-sufficient energy-producing nation on Earth), the double whammy of ever-higher food prices and shortages (in America!!!), and logistical / transport operations that are crippled by (all together now) government regulations.

I know that anecdotes are not data — except that they are, when the owner of a business like Café Raymond is not a statistical outlier, but just one of tens of thousands in a similar or worse predicament.

Explain to me why Ray Mikesell, and all those other business owners, should not just quit and go somewhere else.  Explain also why the millions of ordinary people who are affected by the closing of small businesses and their own personal misfortunes should not be heating barrels of tar, oiling ropes, and loading up their semiautomatic sporting rifles.

But then we’re the bad guys.  Yeah, right.

Giving It Away

I think this malfeasance started in earnest back in the Clinton administration:

The rare earths dependency on China stems in part from the fact that extracting rare earth minerals is an extremely polluting process that China has been willing to undertake, while most other countries have not, including the US, which ironically prides itself on having extremely strict environmental regulations in place.

The US, according to Reuters, has only one rare earths mine and no capability to process rare earth minerals. If China were to stop exporting them to the US, the country would fast run out of the basic building blocks required to produce the military hardware that the US needs, not to mention all the other items where rare earth minerals are needed.

And the article supplies a little extra perspective on China’s Belt And Road initiative.

Read it and weep.  (Or go to the range.)

Quote Of The Day

From this article:

“Rule of thumb: assume anything and everything you say and do online is being watched by someone somewhere. Because more often than not, that’s exactly what’s happening.”

In case that’s happening to me:

(by your pathetic definition)

Scratching Around

As Glenn Reynolds puts it, when it comes to violent White supremacist movements in the U.S., demand is far greater than supply — in other words, while the Democratic Socialists would just love to have a plethora of such groups around so that they can go all “Exterminate the Fascist Counter-Revolution!”, the fact is that there are no such groups extant, other than a few mopes muttering about “The Day Of Reckoning” and similar.

So they have to try to create such groups — with the support of their little Stasi underlings (a.k.a. the FBI) — with nomenclatures such as “concerned parents”, “Gretchen Whitmer kidnappers”,  “Ultra Magas” or “Jan 6 Insurrectionists”, and so on.

That effort, too, is failing.  So what next?  Step forward the post-9/11 knee-jerk agency known by the ominously-named Department of Homeland Security — the big guns, in other words.

And here is their master plan:

DHS Funds Leftist Orgs to Study ‘Radicalization,’ ‘White Supremacy’ in Video Games

Video games?

Are you kidding me?  So Call of Duty, Medal of Honor and… wait, I don’t know much about this stuff… oh yeah, World of Warcraft are the tools whereby impressionable kids are being “radicalized” and taught about the practice of White Supremacy?

I don’t know whether to chuckle, laugh hysterically or just wave my private parts at this foolishness.

What a bunch of pathetic morons.

Next they’ll be trying to link, oh I dunno, bulldog ownership to the above bogeymen (you heard it here first).  Hey, DHS / FBI fuckwits:  here’s your first candidate for a radical White supremacist bulldog owner:

Go get ‘im.

Unspeakable

In which we see the goals of the Left:

Irene Montero, a Communist who is the Minister of Equality in the left-wing Podemos government in Spain, says the quiet part out loud: that equality means children have the right to have sex if they want to.

And:

This is it. This is the end game of these queer theorists and gender ideologues: the sexualization of children. It was always going to end up here. This is what all these drag queen story hours mean, and these “family-friendly drag shows”. It’s all about sexualizing children and grooming them to become prey for pedophiles — sorry, “Minor-Attracted Persons.”

Did they even go this far in Weimar Germany?

Fuck me, not even the Soviet Union dared to go this far.  I think we need to go Full Hungarian (see article).  Otherwise:

Walls.  Machine guns.  Child mutilators.  Queer theorists and gender ideologues.

Some assembly required.

Or:  the new Republican House and Senate can grow some balls and start making Hungarian-style federal laws next year, instead of wasting their time in pointless impeachments of President Braindead.

Don’t hold your breath.

Story Of The Day

From Knuckledragger:

I wandered into the gun shop on the public square in town yesterday afternoon about 1 PM to buy a brick of 22LR and when I went to pay for it with cash, Brett started laughing at me with, “I guess you’ve heard about that credit card bullshit too, huh?”
He told me his credit and debit card sales are down 90% lately and every single one of his sales so far that day were cash transactions.

I’m going to head over to our local merchant of death later to see if he says the same.