"Dialogue is only for people we like."

Boy Trudeau tells the Freedom Convoy protesters that they need to accept the infallibility of his decrees and go home. 

CNN's framing, uncritically accepting the spin of anti-protesters, is in stark contrast to their advocacy of the "fiery but mostly peaceful" protests of 2020. Naturally.

Anyway, it would cost BT nothing to at least hear out a delegation. But given that class warfare prerogatives prevent the elites from seeing the protesters as anything other than unruly serfs who must be made to assume their place, that will never happen.

Plus, conceding legitimacy to any complaint suggests that his regime might have erred, and he can't have that. 

Remember: everything is class warfare these days. Especially so-called identity politics, the most clever divide-and-conquer scheme devised in this century. Always be aware that those who thunder most about "privilege" have done and will do nothing to divest themselves of it. Acknowledging privilege absolves them and authorizes the wielding all of privilege's prerogatives. It's a topical cream: for external use only.

"[T[here is no plan to evacuate Americans who are outside Kabul..."

Citizens of a once-great nation, take note:

In media briefings, the State Department has declined to divulge its estimates of Americans in Afghanistan.

According to the aides, the administration officials — from the State and Defense departments, as well as the National Security Council and the Joint Chiefs of Staff — also told the assembled Senate staffers that there is no plan to evacuate Americans who are outside Kabul, as they do not have a way of getting through the Taliban checkpoints outside the Afghan capital.

Officials did not specify how many Americans are outside Kabul, the aides said. The briefing, which was held Tuesday morning and attended by aides representing a wide swath of Senate offices, lasted half an hour.

Numberless hostages to a triumphant and gloating theocratic regime.

Since there's no copyright on historical events, there's nothing to stop Clio from gleefully ripping off the past. And so she has here.

" Sorry--it was just too tempting."

Because they can.

Policies like Secretary Levine's led to unnecessary deaths of vulnerable elderly people and unnecessary separation of the elderly from their families.

Not that Secretary Levine's elderly mother was subjected to the same policies, because of course not.

The mindset which drives "Insider trading" applies to much more than stock portfolios. 

Thus, the "oligarchs of the people" will always have better for themselves than they will for the common herd. 

And make no mistake--they look out for each other, as this incarnate Peter Principle moment demonstrates.

Coronavirus *is* a menace.

And while I do not share the sentiment, I can certainly understand why people think it has been overplayed for political purposes. When people who claim to take it seriously act otherwise, it breeds deserved distrust.

Exhibit A: virus-ravaged New York's vaccination rates are low, especially on weekends:

For now, the vaccination effort does not resemble the sort of mass mobilization many imagined. New York City has yet to open any large vaccination sites. Instead, hospitals administered many of the first vaccinations to their employees. Hospitals have been encouraged to use each shipment of vaccines within a week, and the operation does not always have a race-against-the-clock feel.

The number of vaccinations plummets on weekends and all but stopped for Christmas Day, when more planes landed at Kennedy International Airport than vaccine doses were administered in New York City.

The vaccination program is now in its third week and has yet to accelerate dramatically, even as supply has begun to increase. More than 340,000 doses have been delivered to New York City so far.

Exhibit B: a Congresswoman who tested positive for the virus on December 28 was present for the vote for Speaker of the House yesterday--which blatantly violates the CDC guidance for infected persons.

[By the way, if you get hung up on the moniker for corona in the first link of Exhibit B, keep that and other irrelevant thoughts to yourself.]

How about another dose of economic vaccine?

The first doses of the Pfizer vaccine have been administered to frontline medical personnel in New York. A good day for Michigan-based Pfizer and for the world.

But our garbage Congress refuses to act on economic relief in the America of the second lockdowns. 

You probably haven't heard of the restaurant version of the Petticoat Junction. But its closure will be a hammer blow not only to the people who worked there, but also to the people who have for decades patronized this truck stop restaurant just outside of my hometown.

My anger with both houses of our national legislature for the posturing and slow-walking of relief is nearing nuclear fusion levels. The suffering is real, and the knowing, calculated indifference to it is the kind of behavior that destroys political legitimacy across the board. 

The deliberate destruction of livelihoods and the refusal to extend a helping hand is fertile soil for unrest. The grim sequel to 2020 beckons.

Huh.

The long-term survival of slave systems did not depend upon daily displays of terror or force, though obviously displays of power and the threat of dire punishment were always in the background.

No, slaveholders were smarter than that: divide and rule, giving some status, privilege and prestige, made it endure.

Even the most brutal of slaveholders were therefore compelled to develop a sophisticated system of management that exploited the most human aspirations and fears of the people they dominated.

Creating divisions between slaves was essential to this. Enslaved people outnumbered free whites in the British Caribbean. In Jamaica the ratio was higher than 10 to one, and on some big plantations it was about 100 to one. Managers therefore needed to divide slaves in order to rule over them. The slave trade from Africa provided them with one opportunity. As a manager of several large Jamaican sugar estates remarked in 1804, it was a general policy to ‘have the Negroes on an estate a mixture of nations so as to balance one set against another, to be sure of having two-thirds join the whites’ (in the event of an uprising). The theory behind this was that enslaved people from one African ‘nation’ would refuse to join rebellions plotted by those from others, or by creole (locally born) slaves, choosing instead to serve their white masters in the hope of rewards for loyal service.

Privileging some enslaved people above others was another effective means of sowing discord. Slaveholders encouraged complex social hierarchies on the plantations that amounted to something like a system of ‘class’. At the top of plantation slave communities in the sugar colonies of the Caribbean were skilled men, trained up at the behest of white managers to become sugar boilers, blacksmiths, carpenters, coopers, masons and drivers. Such men were, in general, materially better-off than field slaves (most of whom were women), and they tended to live longer.

The most important members of this enslaved elite were the drivers, responsible for enforcing discipline and work routines among the other enslaved workers. These men were essential to effective plantation management – a conduit for orders and, sometimes, for negotiations between white overseers and the massed ranks of field workers. They were also among the strongest survivors of the system.

The privileges conferred on the enslaved elite came in several forms: better food, more food, better clothing, more clothing, better and bigger housing, even the prospect (in some rare cases) that a master might use his last will and testament to free them.

Now, it is possible that a crude, nuance-impaired cynic might see something similar in the confluence of the divisions instilled by identity politics and the dispensation of privileges via governmental and corporate largess, all occurring while power and wealth are increasingly-centralized on a global scale.

But such persons can be dismissed out of hand.

Paging Tom Kratman. Tom Kratman, to the courtesy phone, please.

Seven years ago, I reviewed Caliphate, the dystopic sci-fi thriller from the pen of retired army officer Tom Kratman. I stand by the review: read it--it's a fine page turner.

Little did I know when I wrote it, however, that it would become topical. 

Europe's migrant flood has reached Caliphate levels--at least in Deutschland. 

Germany's Muslim population is set to nearly quadruple to an astonishing 20 million within the next five years, according to a demographic forecast by Bavarian lawmakers.

The German government expects to receive 1.5 million asylum seekers in 2015, and possibly even more in 2016. After factoring in family reunifications -- based on the assumption that individuals whose asylum applications are approved will subsequently bring an average of four additional family members to Germany -- that number will swell exponentially. This is in addition to the 5.8 million Muslims already living in Germany.

According to the president of the Bavarian Association of Municipalities (Bayerische Gemeindetag), Uwe Brandl, Germany is now on track to have "20 million Muslims by 2020." The surge in Germany's Muslim population represents a demographic shift of epic proportions, one that will change the face of Germany forever, "but we are just standing by, watching it happen."

Addressing an expo in Nuremburg on October 14, Brandl warned that untrammeled migration will entail heavy costs for German taxpayers and may also lead to social unrest. He said:

"A four-member refugee family receives up to 1,200 euros per month in transfer payments. Plus accommodation and meals. Now go to an unemployed German family man who has worked maybe 30 years, and now with his family receives only marginally more. These people are asking us whether we politicians really see this as fair and just."

Brandl said this also applies to the electronic health card, which provides asylum seekers with the same benefits as Germans who have paid into the health insurance system for many years. To criticize this as unfair has "nothing to do with racism or right-wing extremism."

Brandl's concerns are echoed in a leaked intelligence document, which warns that the influx of more than one million migrants from the Muslim world this year will lead to increasing political instability in Germany.

Just how on earth do Germany's ruling elites think they can pull this off without serious problems?

Fair's fair.

Profits at big U.S. banks soar since crisis: New York Fed: 

From 2009 to 2014, the combined net income of J.P. Morgan, Citigroup, Bank of America, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley annually averaged $41.73 million, up from annual average of $25.08 billion from 2002 to 2008, they said.

Helping boost profits were trading revenues that they and other dealers have seen returning to the levels before the financial crisis seven years ago. 

Their annual income was also more stable than pre-crisis levels, they added.

Before you start griping about bailouts, Joe and Jolene Taxpayer, remember: it's not like you haven't seen your net income shoot up by roughly sixty percent in the last six years, right? So there you go. 

You're welcome.

The markets love that easy money!

Wall Street, et al: where bad news for the plain folks is great news for the investor class.

All you need to know about the junkies created by the Fed's easy money policy.

Nope.

My first reaction was "Oh my God, no!"

That remained my basic reaction for hours.

At least until Obama mentioned Australia as a model of gun control in his posturing conference last night. Since Australia's laws included the confiscation of firearms...yeah, then I started to think he might want to take my guns. It's not the first time he mooned over the laws Down Under, either.

And right on time, Hillary Clinton chimed in that the Supreme Court was wrong in Heller.

So, yeah. I'm thinking they want to take my guns. They sure don't seem to be suggesting other alternatives.

It turns out we have capital punishment in Michigan after all.

Macomb County just executed a guy for unpaid traffic tickets.

It was a very, very slow execution at that--it took seventeen days for David Stojcevski to die.

And the "authorities" watched him the whole time:


Stojcevski was a drug addict, and was taking Methadone, Xanax, and Klonopin to treat his addiction. But without access to these prescriptions, he quickly went into withdrawal while in jail, according to WDIV's expert. Withdrawal caused him to behave irrationally, but jail officials ignored these obvious symptoms and instead placed him in a cell for the mentally unstable. 

He was stripped naked—so that he couldn’t hurt himself—and forced to languish under the unceasing bright lights (the jail doesn’t turn them off, even at night).

At one point, Stojcevski began fighting with another (naked) inmate, who was then moved out of the cell. Sometime later, completely alone, Stojcevski could be seen reenacting the fight—a clear sign of hallucination.

On his last day of life, the man refused to touch his food and was too weak to get up from the floor.

At the first, obvious sign of drug withdrawal, Stojcevski should have been given adequate medical treatment. He was not a violent criminal, or a danger to the public. He was a man who hadn’t paid a traffic ticket.

Stojcevski’s family is suing Macomb County. A lawyer for the county told WDIV that the suit “lacks legal merit,” and expects the family to lose when the case goes to trial. Macomb County has no plans to settle, according to the lawyer.

We live in Macomb County, and all I have to say to the Stojcevski family is: 

I hope you win millions.

Hey, Pro-lifers: Mitch McConnell has your back.

Makes it easier for him to plant a dagger in it.