Here’s a simple explanation for rising grocery costs, from the perspective of a baker:
…and make no mistake, this is happening all over the place.
Can we hold both the mid-term and presidential elections tomorrow?
Category: Politics
Trying not to start the public floggings
Beaten To The Punch
I was actually going to write this post, except that someone far more qualified than I wrote it first. And with far less profanity than I would have, too. A sample:
Fascism didn’t really come into play as a functioning ideology until Giovanni Gentile and Benito Mussolini, defined it as the state as an organic being, controlling everything. “Everything in the state, nothing against the state, nothing outside the state” became the definition of a totalitarian state (total control over the economy, society, and culture). Where Marx envisioned the “withering away” of the state (totally skipping over human nature and the drive for power and control, whether over other people or just your own life), Mussolini and Gentile envisioned the state as the sole arbiter of life, the universe, and everything.
Small-government conservatives, by definition, are therefore not fascists.
It’s a lot easier to define “fascism” or “fascist” as an epithet by using George Orwell’s remark, written in 1944:
The word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies ‘something not desirable.’
…to the accuser.
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.)
Florida vs. Davos
Here’s FuturePOTUS Ron DeSantis, talking about how conservative states rule, and the best way to bear the Internationalists.
I think the difference between then and now is, government is bigger and more powerful. But these agencies, particularly in law enforcement and national security, have been weaponized, so that they really represent the enforcement arm of one particular faction of society against the rest of us. And you do not have equal zeal with which they wield their power. People talk about the deep state like it’s some conspiracy. It’s not a conspiracy. What we have right now is the logical result of having an absence of constitutional accountability in the administrative state. And basically what human nature will do, of course, power is going to accumulate there. The founding fathers would have told us this if we had told them what was going on. So that’s the logical outgrowth of Congress abdicating its responsibility to hold the bureaucracy accountable for decades. It’s a logical result of Congress empowering the bureaucracy and letting them do a lot of the heavy legislating. And so that’s what we have. It’s not anything that really should surprise anybody.
All good stuff, and more besides.
Slanted Coverage
As the Italian general elections of earlier this week gave rise to victory of a coalition of “right-wing” and “neo-fascist” parties, the headlines were predictable:
The Irish Times: Just like Mussoliiiini!
BBC: Europe Trembles!
…and so on. (I may have jazzed up the headlines a little, but mine actually reflect the tone of the articles better than their own headlines do.)
Likewise, the pics in said outlets of future DagoPM Giorgia Meloni make her look like Chelsea Clinton’s uglier secret sister, but I am here to tell you that she’s not all bad:
But of course, none of that is important. Her government’s future policies are, though, and I’m predicting that the EU “government” is going to assume the full hair-on-fire position when the Italian Navy starts blockading the north coast of Africa to prevent more boatloads of “refugees” from reaching Italy.
One of Meloni’s biggest fans, incidentally, is HungoPM Viktor Orban, and given how much the Eurocrats hate him, that should be good enough for any of us.
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.