Alone, you will fall

They’re not going to let you pass unnoticed and unhindered anymore.

For the last 20 years, I’ve been hearing from people who read my work and secretly agree with me, but keep silent in public for fear of endangering their jobs, their social position, or their professional contracts. They’ve operated, successfully for the most part, in a stealth mode where they pretend to go along to get along, and in the past they were generally able to presever whatever it was they were trying to preserve. But it is increasingly obvious that the days of free silence are now over thanks to the fake election of 2020, BLM, the Covid Flu, and the various organizational witchhunts that have followed in their wake:

Former Virginia Tech soccer player Kiersten Hening has filed a federal lawsuit against Hokies coach Charles “Chugger” Adair, claiming the coach benched her and “subjected her to verbal abuse” and ultimately forced her off the women’s soccer team because she refused to kneel before soccer matches.

According to the lawsuit first reported by the Richmond Times-Dispatch, Hening, a junior out of Midlothian, Va., was a “talented defender” who started her freshman and sophomore seasons and played the third-most minutes on the team in 2019. As she began her junior season in 2020, the suit alleges, Hening had the most minutes played on the roster and she was even selected to talk to the media before the season began.

The lawsuit alleges that on September 1, 2020, a student-athlete advisory committee discussed proposals for student-athletes to wear BLM COVID masks, BLM wristbands, armbands and BLM shirts during warmups. The soccer team discussed the proposal and “most” players supported the idea. Hening claims Adair supported the proposals and went even further with an idea to replace “Hokies” on the back of the team uniform with the names of alleged victims of police misconduct….

Hening states in her suit that at a September 12 game against Virginia, Adair made her the subject of a tirade because she wouldn’t take a knee with the rest of the starters before the match. The “campaign of abuse,” as Hening calls it in court documents, continued until she ultimately left the program on September 20.

There are several problems with this strategy, not least of all the psychological stress it imposes upon the individual who adopts it. First, it’s not honest and living a lie is always difficult. Second, it requires one to remain alone and without allies in the event of trouble. Third, it prevents others from knowing that they are not alone. Fourth, it renders one useless and hors de combat.

And then, of course, there is the problem that it simply can’t be relied upon to work anymore. 

You might say, with Theoden, that you will not risk open war. But I reply, with Aragorn, that open war is upon you whether you would risk it or not. Embrace the conflict. Join forces with your allies. Because neither neutrality nor invisibility is an option, and you will either stand with them or you will fall alone.

One of the reasons I will always have great respect for John C. Wright is that he did not hesitate to stand with Castalia House when we first raised the anti-SJW banner in science fiction. It is the first ally that is so very important, because it is that first ally who opens one’s eyes to the realization that one is not alone, that there are others who will not bend the knee to the wickedness, and that there is someone who will guard your back.


The end of the Republican establishment

For some strange reason, Republican Senators in safe seats are declaring that they will not run for re-election in 2022:

To date, five Republicans senators — Blunt, Richard Shelby (Alabama), Richard Burr (North Carolina), Pat Toomey (Pennsylvania) and Rob Portman (Ohio) — have all announced that they will not seek another term next November. It’s not a coincidence that all five are considered remnants of the Republican Party of George W. Bush and have struggled to adjust to the new Trump-led GOP.

“The rash of GOP retirements, likely to avoid Trump madness in the primaries, shows you Trump still isn’t done destroying the party,” tweeted conservative commentator (and CNN contributor) Amanda Carpenter after Blunt’s retirement announcement. “Onwards we go.”

The trend is hard to dispute.

Blunt, prior to Monday morning, was not seen as someone even considering not running again. He had spent a lifetime in politics — including a stint in House leadership — and is a close ally of Republican Senate Leader Mitch McConnell (Kentucky). And with the Republican trend in Missouri, Blunt’s path in a general election in 2020 is probably clearer than in either of his past two Senate bids.

They’re probably being told not to run, but by whom? 


The end of the legal option

The US Supreme Court has made it official: you steal it, you keep it:

Former president Donald Trump has seen his last remaining chance to reverse the outcome of November’s election slip away, with the Supreme Court refusing to take up his last challenge to Wisconsin’s voting process.

The Supreme Court on Monday declined to consider Trump’s case against the state of Wisconsin, in which the then-candidate had accused the Wisconsin Elections Commission (WEC) of violating both the Constitution and state law regarding the manner in which they set up mail-in voting for the weeks leading up to Election Day – along with a litany of other complaints.

Monday’s rejection of the certiorari petition thus appears to finish off any chances the former president might have had to keep his position in the Oval Office. As distant a possibility as winning a favorable SCOTUS disposition might have seemed, even the slightest of chances would have represented an improvement over the self-defeating option the plaintiffs opted for.

This concludes the judicial portion of the program. The legislative portion ended some time ago. The question is, is there a third act in the cards?


Dementia vs economics

 I think we can safely conclude that dementia won.

“The vast majority of economists, left, right, and center, from Wall Street to the private, uh, the private, ah ah ah economic private polling initiatives, the economists as I said, left, right, and center, say in addition to the needs that the people have, we need this to grow the economy. That if we haven’t spent this money and recreated the kind of incentive for people to be able to make a good living, that we’d be in real trouble.”

– Not-President Joe Biden

Also, it’s pretty much only Keynesian economists, of the neo- and post- varieties, that still subscribe to the stimulus concept that observably hasn’t been working at all since the early 1970s. Remember, Keynesian economics do not account for debt as a variable in any way, shape, or form, which is why they are increasingly irrelevant with every passing year.


Weekend at Biden’s

Forget conspiracy theories, Q, and stolen elections. Ignore the Ides of March. Simply apply Ockham’s Razor to the so-called Biden “presidency”:

No news conference. No Oval Office address. No primetime speech to a joint session of Congress.

President Joe Biden is the first executive in four decades to reach this point in his term without holding a formal question and answer session. It reflects a White House media strategy meant both to reserve major media set-pieces for the celebration of a legislative victory and to limit unforced errors from a historically gaffe-prone politician.

Biden has opted to take questions about as often as most of his recent predecessors, but he tends to field just one or two informal inquiries at a time, usually in a hurried setting at the end of an event.

In a sharp contrast with the previous administration, the White House is exerting extreme message discipline, empowering staff to speak but doing so with caution. Recalling both Biden’s largely leak-free campaign and the buttoned-up Obama administration, the new White House team has carefully managed the president’s appearances, trying to lower the temperature from Donald Trump’s Washington and to save a big media moment to mark what could soon be a signature accomplishment: passage of the COVID-19 bill.

Also, not the President. This is not a “White House media strategy”. It’s a “Weekend at Biden’s” strategy.


Trump CPAC speech

I have no interest whatsoever in anything CPAC-related, nor am I particularly interested in what Trump has to say in the wake of his failure to metaphorically cross the Rubicon. What separates the winners of history from the losers is acting at the moment of crisis, and as far as we can tell, President Trump failed to act. While it’s now clear that something is going on behind the scenes in Washington DC, it is equally clear that whoever is calling the shots does not answer to Donald Trump, at least not anymore.

I’m not personally down on Donald Trump. I still think he was the greatest President since Andrew Jackson. I’d be happy to see him run again in 2024 if the election system is going to be secured between now and then. But, based on the imperfect information we presently possess, I think he would have done better to emulate Caesar than Cincinnatus.

Anyhow, feel free to discuss the speech here.


That ship has sailed

I think it’s a little late to talk about “dignity” with regards to Creepy Joe’s Fake Administration:

The Chinese government forcibly anally swabbed U.S. diplomatic officials as part of the Chinese Communist Party’s new Covid testing protocols “in error,” prompting Joe Biden’s U.S. State Department to  beg China to stop violating the “dignity” of Biden officials.

VICE and the Washington Post were among the first outlets to report the story, in which China originally promised to stop anally swabbing State Department officials after complaints from the Biden administration, but has now reversed course and denied forcibly applying the test in the first place.

“The State Department never agreed to this kind of testing and protested directly to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs when we learned that some staff were subject to it,” a spokesperson from Biden’s State Department reported to VICE on Wednesday.

Let’s face it, the Chinese know perfectly well that Biden didn’t win. And now they’ve got carte blanche to do whatever they want, lest they expose the fraud. This is just a public humiliation ritual.


Everyone hates Andrew Cuomo

It’s fascinating to see how quickly the Narrative has shifted on Gov. Cuomo, who has gone from hero to target of a two-minute hate campaign.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is calling for an investigation into Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s mounting nursing home crisis.

“I support our state’s return to co-equal governance and stand with our local officials calling for a full investigation of the Cuomo administration’s handling of nursing homes during COVID-19,” the Queens Democrat wrote in a statement Friday.

“Thousands of vulnerable New Yorkers lost their lives in nursing homes throughout the pandemic. Their loved ones and the public deserve answers and transparency from their elected leadership, and the Secretary to the Governor’s remarks warrant a full investigation.”

The Cuomo administration is under fire over its alleged cover-up of New York nursing home deaths, which a state attorney general probe found were 50 percent higher than state authorities said.

Last week, The Post revealed that Cuomo’s top aide, Melissa DeRosa, privately admitted to state lawmakers that the administration deliberately withheld data on COVID-19 nursing home deaths from federal prosecutors out of fear that the true numbers would “be used against us.”

Even Alec Baldwin is piling on. What’s next, a stern denunciation by the woman who ate Taylor Swift? We haven’t hit peak curiousitude yet. Things just keep getting curiouser and curiouser…. 


Acquitted. Again.

Despite the best efforts of his lawyers to throw the trial, President Donald Trump was acquitted by the U.S. Senate today.

The second impeachment trial of President Donald Trump fizzled to a predictable close on Saturday as senators voted largely along party lines to acquit the U.S. president of the charge against him, ending a historic chapter in American political history. 

Trump was acquitted on the charge—”incitement of insurrection”—by a vote of 57-43, failing to achieve the necessary threshold of 67 votes.

That’s good news. Now restore the office already, please….


Lawyers doing lawyer things

 Anyone with an IQ over 115 is probably better off defending themselves, on average, than relying on a lawyer in most circumstances. It would astonish you to know how few lawyers even bother to read the material that is directly relevant to the situation; some litigators even go so far as to pride themselves on refusing to read anything. They read the judge, you see. Or the jury.

President Donald Trump was set off by the defense mustered by his legal team at the start of his Senate impeachment trial, raging at key admissions and a presentation that appeared to drive away a key Republican vote.

Trump, viewing the proceedings from his new home at Mar-a-Lago, was aghast that one of his lawyers, Bruce Castor, acknowledged the potency of the opening argument put forward by House Democratic impeachment managers, ABC News reported. 

Castor even acknowledged that his team changed course after viewing the Democrats’ presentation, which featured dramatic video of Trump supporters storming the Capitol and taunting police officers with obscenities as they bashed in doors and windows. 

‘I’ll be quite frank with you, we changed what we were going to do on account that we thought that the House managers’ presentation was well done,’ Castor admitted. ‘And I wanted you to know that we have responses to those things.’ 

During three-and-half hours of debate on the Senate floor Tuesday, the defense and prosecution had the chance to argue whether holding an impeachment trial of a former official is in line with the Constitution.

Several Republicans, however, are ridiculing Trump’s defense team for missing the point of their outlined argument against the constitutionality of the timing of the proceedings. 

‘I thought the President’s lawyer – the first lawyer just rambled on and on and on and didn’t really address the constitutional argument,’ Texas Senator John Cornyn told reporters outside the chamber following his vote against moving forward. 

It doesn’t surprise me at all that even a very high-priced lawyer would completely miss the point of the actual argument. From what I’ve seen, most of them – not all, but most – have a tendency to do the legal equivalent of “read until offended”. The legal version is “read until you recognize a term of art that might serve your objective”, then focus on relying upon that to the exclusion of all context, relevance, or consequence. The more procedural, as opposed to substantive, the better. And if anyone happens to point out that the application doesn’t make any sense in light of the context, relevance, or consequence, snort derisively that they just don’t understand the term of art or how the law works.

This inability to read correctly, by the way, is how many insane legal concepts are enshrined into law over time. One lawyer with a weak case presents an argument based on an out-of-context sentence, which a clueless judge erroneously accepts at face value. Once an appeals court accepts the same out-of-context argument, the new precedent is established, which gradually metastasizes up throughout the circuit, until the U.S. Supreme Court either cements the new precedent into law or throws it out entirely.