“The latest Democrat disaster to hit America is airline and railway strikes.”

November 2, 2022

Biden fast-tracks us to a solitary, poor, nasty, and brutish world

By Andrea Widburg at American Thinker:

When Democrats think of the endpoint of their green plans to fight climate change, they imagine a pastoral world in which happy, well-fed people frolic in fields of food and flowers, while their wise and benign overlords govern all wisely for the good of people, animals, and Mother Gaia herself. This is because Democrats are completely ignorant.

Once Democrats drain America’s dependence on fossil fuels, we will revert to a Hobbesian world in which, for most, life is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” Fossil fuel is responsible for everything in our world: food, clothing, shelter, medical care, transportation, heat in the winter, air conditioning in the summer, and the end of human chattel labor by substituting machines for slaves. Add in the deliberate breakdown of our transport sector in the form of air and rail strikes, and we Americans are in deep doo-doo.

The latest Democrat disaster to hit America is airline and railway strikes. Delta is America’s second-largest airline. It currently looks as if the pilots—close to 15,000 of them—are about to strike. Add to that the imminent breakdown in America’s diesel supply and a threatened railway strike, and it’s hard to calculate the scope of the disaster about to descend upon America’s airports and stores.

Flying Magazine reports:

Amid a protracted labor dispute over a new contract, nearly 15,000 Delta Air Lines (NYSE: DAL) pilots have voted to authorize a strike.

The airline’s unionized pilot group, which is part of the Air Line Pilots Association (ALPA), said that 96 percent of the pilot group participated in the vote, and that 99 percent voted in favor of strike authorization. According to the group, it was the first such vote in 16 years, emerging after negotiations for a more lucrative contract stalled.

This shouldn’t surprise us. In response to COVID, the airlines offered early retirements to many pilots to ease the burden on airline payrolls, and a lot of pilots took them up on that offer. With Americans flying again, the airlines can fill their planes but are struggling to find people to staff their cockpits. During a recent trip, my flight was delayed several hours Delta staff desperately hunted for an available pair of pilots.

Image: Fly Delta Air Lines sign by Mav. CC BY-SA 3.0.

Not long after, I spoke with a Delta pilot who said he wasn’t at all surprised; being short-staffed is now a common problem. No wonder pilots want better wages and working conditions. They’re currently a valuable commodity, and the airline is driving them hard.

Meanwhile, Wisconsin Rep. Bryan Steil is sounding the alarm about an imminent railway workers’ strike (after Biden got workers to promise to wait until after the mid-terms) which, when combined with the imminent end of available diesel fuel in America, will bring shipping to a halt.

“It’s incredibly concerning,” Steil said Tuesday on the “Just the News, No Noise” TV show. “We got to remember this is just weeks after President Biden told us that he had this all under control, and the trains would be running on time.

“We’re now learning it’s anything but that. It’s another game where the Biden administration has kicked the can down the road and kicked it past this election.”

Steil said the impact of the railroad strike could be exacerbated by ongoing shortages of diesel fuel, which power everything from tractor trailers to harvesting tractors.

“The shortages that we’re seeing around the country is concerning,” Steil continued.

Going into 2020, we were an energy-independent, affluent country, with low unemployment, and warehouses and shelves filled with goods for people who had money to buy them. We then got hit with the Democrats’ opportunistic response to COVID.

The Democrats’ policies were designed to drive Trump from the White House, destroy the working- and middle-classes, shut down free speech, end unfettered travel, accustom Americans to shortages, and tighten government control over every aspect of American life. With Biden successfully in the White House, Democrats heightened the effect of their disastrous policies by stifling oil production and refining, along with opening our border to millions of welfare-dependent illegal aliens.

We’re on the precipice of the net result of these policies: A return to the pre-modern era. If events proceed as predicted (airline shutdowns, railway shutdowns, running out of diesel, rapidly increasing fuel prices once Biden finishes draining the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, etc.), we’re going to experience the wonders of the pre-modern era: A Hobbesian world in which human lives are “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”

Our modern world is built on fossil fuels for comfort, manufacturing, farming, and transport. Take away fossil fuel and add in the chaos from strikes in fundamental, infrastructure industries, and we’re in the fast lane to Hobbes-land.

(“How does crime maim a great city like Chicago”)?

The Madness of Lori Lightfoot and Chicago’s Violent Crime

By Steve Huntley

November 2, 2022

How does crime maim a great city like Chicago? Let us count the ways.

For starters, regular visits to the excellent news website cwbchicago.com reveal a comprehensive, if depressing, chronicle of murders, robberies, assaults, carjackings, drag races on city streets and other crimes exacting a terrible toll on the city that used to work. And all too frequently, accounts of children cut down by stray bullets sprayed by punk gunslingers.

Or track the numbers, as the Sun-Times does with murders. It counts 578 people killed in Chicago so far in 2022. That rate is down a bit from the last two years but still way ahead of the toll before the Antifa/Black Lives Matter riots blighted American city centers with looting, arson, assault, an explosion of crime and the defund the police movement crippling law enforcement across the land.

Or there’s the regular Monday adding up of the previous weekend’s mayhem and havoc. The most recent weekend tally — 35 people shot, five of them fatally, according to ABC-Chicago.

Or there’s the outbreak of fear-inducing crime in neighborhoods once deemed safe, like Chicago’s affluent Lakeview neighborhood in the shadow of world-famous Wrigley Field

There were five separate armed robber/abduction/kidnappings reported there recently over a couple of days.

Or there’s the soon-to-be unleashed wave of criminals returning to the streets under Gov. J.B. Pritzker’s bill to eliminate cash bail, a measure opposed by virtually every state’s attorney in Illinois — except of course the criminal-coddling Cook County alleged prosecutor Kim Foxx.

Or, speaking of far-left extremist George Soros’ favorite Chicagoan, a CWB Chicago analysis shows that on Foxx’s watch, the average sentence for carjackings is 9.4 years, down from 12.4 years in the seven years before she became Cook County state’s attorney.

On and on it goes, the ways to count Chicago’s misery from crime.

It is a portrait of a city gone mad in its acceptance of crime.

More difficult to count in numbers is the anti-cop attitude of the ruling culture.

An example: The city’s civilian police oversight board wants to fire a police officer who killed a gun-carrying 13-year-old youth last year. The cop’s offense was that he was chasing the teenager and the shooting came as the youth dropped his gun — the kind of tragedy that can come from the high-pressure, ultra-stressful confrontations that force split-second decisions on police officers.

Think of that for a minute. The problem is not a teenager running around in the middle of the night with a dangerous weapon. Nothing bad could come from that, right? No, the problem is the cop trying to do something about it by pursuing him.

Madness.

In a previous column I wrote about the anti-cop, criminal-coddling left-wing culture using Orwellian manipulation of language to undermine the rule of law.

In his classic novel “1984”, George Orwell described the use of “Newspeak” to twist language and the meaning of words so that the story’s dictatorship could control the way the population thinks about their society.

Now we see 1984 in 2022. Law-breaking vagrants are rebranded as the homeless, an innocent sounding word. But it masks the wave of the mentally ill and drug addicts turning city streets into open air drug dens and markets, tent slums, bathrooms without walls and lawless zones.

Or illegal aliens, foreigners whose first encounter with our country is to break the law, are relabeled migrants or the undocumented. These innocuous sounding terms are meant to avert our gaze from the lawlessness of our open borders.

Most perversely, arresting and jailing criminals was demonized as “mass incarceration.”

Since then, the Orwellian redefinition of crimes has reached a new level with the imprisoning of criminals redefined as slavery.

Madness.

The complaint is that prisoners, people who’ve committed crimes so serious that society deems they should be locked up, are forced to work for little or no pay.

According to the New York Times, “Voters in five U.S. states (mostly in the South) where slavery or involuntary servitude remains legal as a punishment for people who are convicted of crimes will vote next month on whether to ban the practices outright.”

The Times cites a former prisoner in Louisiana complaining about working “long, hot days doing farm work” for 2 cents an hour. The article doesn’t say why this individual was in prison, though it says he served 26 years. Hmmm, I’m guessing he wasn’t one of those poor souls liberated recently by President Biden from prison for marijuana possession.

Also chiming in on this was CNN. It claimed that the 13th Amendment outlawing slavery included one exception. That amendment reads, “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.”

To anyone with at least fifth grade reading skills, that amendment clearly refers to involuntary servitude as acceptable punishment for criminals, it doesn’t not in any way authorize a return to slavery.

The inhabitants of the big house aren’t enslaved, they are in prison and forced to do the work required there because of their own crimes.

Actually, I’ll outrage liberals by saying they in effect volunteered for hard labor at little or no pay when they broke the law.

This is where we are today. Orwellian language perverts society’s thinking about crime. Jailing violent criminals is mass incarceration and slavery. The problem is not crime but the police response to it. Prosecutors who see their job as not putting criminals in jail but putting them back out on the streets to menace law-abiding citizens.

Madness.

So long as these attitudes prevail among our cultural and governing elites, the hopes and prayers of average Chicagoans for an end to the crime wave will fall on deaf ears.

The only answer is throwing the crime-coddling bums out.

What are the chances of that?

It’s not an encouraging record that Foxx already has been reelected once.

The prospects for change in November don’t look good with the Democrat Party’s iron-grip on Illinois thanks to the tribal-identity of so many voters in metropolitan Chicago to the political party responsible for the city’s misery.

It doesn’t help that Pritzker funneled millions in advertising in the Republican primary to help nominate the candidate he deemed easiest to beat as he runs for reelection. That’s something Democrats also did in four other states.

Let’s see, Pritzker and other Democrats do a Russian inference-like attack on GOP primaries in five states but claim it’s Republicans who are a threat to democracy. Only someone with Joe Biden’s mental capabilities could buy that.

The best hope for crime-weary Chicagoans comes in a mayoral primary in February. Lori Lightfoot has presided over Chicago’s descent into hell, sang karaoke as the city burned, and failed utterly in not standing up for the men and women of the Chicago Police Department who work for her on the front lines against the worst of our society. And oh, she’s just demanded a pay raise for her hard work in bringing the city to its knees. Or maybe it’s a karaoke bonus.

The field of candidates who want to end her reign as Chicago’s worst mayor is crowded and still growing. But she has identified the principal threat to her reelection — former Chicago schools chief executive officer Paul Vallas.

His campaign chest is approaching $2 million but more important than cash is his record of commitment to the city, his can-do spirit and his comprehensive plan to rebuild the city’s police force and tame the crime pandemic.

Lightfoot can’t confront him on the issues of crime and the city’s failing schools. So, she has resorted to the tried and true appeal to tribal politics.

She attacks Vallas as a closet Republican. Her message to voters: Don’t pay attention to your lying eyes about the mayhem and anarchy all around you, remember you are a Democrat and that fellow Vallas is a you-know-what.

It will be up to the voters of Chicago to decide what’s more important to them and their families — their tribal political allegiance or an end to the madness menacing their city and their lives.

(Article sent by Mark Waldeland.)

“Marxists aren’t alone!”

November 2, 2022

Why Do Progressives Hate Kids?

By J. Robert Smith at American Thinker:

It’s a tough question to ask: Why do progressives hate kids?  The question answers itself when you start stacking up the evidence.  Kids across the country — in various ways and to varying degrees — are suffering as a result. 

The midterm elections are about a lot of big issues: inflation, housing costs, groceries, gas, crime, the border… but the progressives’ comprehensive assault on children ranks right up there. 

It’s cliché, but America’s future is its kids.  Today, a perverse ethos guides progressives.  That ethos in practice is doing incalculable damage to young lives.  What progressives believe amounts to rationalized debauchery. 

The culture needs to be reclaimed by the decent majority.  Faith in God — increasingly unfashionable among progressives — remains the powerful counter to the resulting cancerous nihilism of progressivism.  The spiritual is the raison d’etre for the traditional values and mores that are necessary for society’s survival and health.  

The evil derives, in large part, from Marxism, which, in one form or another, is the animating spirit of modern progressivism.  Marx’s acolytes realized decades ago that to overthrow America’s magnificent experiment in liberty, it wasn’t enough to undermine free enterprise, but destroy the culture, which is the country’s backbone… which, as a matter of fact, is any country’s backbone. 

But Marxists aren’t alone.  The counterculture, which had its impetus in the 1960s, has cut a big, ugly swath through society.  It’s since been absorbed by progressivism and mainstreamed.  Yes, Marxists glommed onto the counterculture, but the counterculture was really an outgrowth of post-World War II affluence. 

The generation that came along in the 1950s knew not deprivation, not like their parents had experienced during the Great Depression.  Nor did they know the tumult of world war (the Cold War there was, but it was a different beast).  

The hedonistic mantra from the 60s — flagrantly lived out in the Disco 70s — was “If it feels good, do it.”  Better than half a century later, hedonism is no less potent, though, nowadays, it tends to be expressed in rationalizations like self-fulfillment, self-actualization, and the need to validate feelings, which are, almost inevitably, broken compasses leading nowhere good.                    

Then there are progressive box checkers — followers, like your uncle and aunt, Frank and Joyce.  They’re swell with your kids, though they’re a tad smug.  Their thinking is derivative.  Despite their educations, credentials, and stations in life, whatever spin comes from progressive thought and opinion leaders, they’ll parrot.  They’d be aghast if you said that their sensibilities hurt kids.

Yet, Frank, an attorney, should know about evidence.  Unless you deny what you’re seeing — quite a bit of that goes on among progressives — the evidence is compelling: progressive views and practices are terribly injurious to kids, whether as a result of willful or misguided intention. 

For Frank and Joyce, per script, drag queen story time at the local library or school is about expanding a child’s appreciation for diverse lifestyles.  Men camping it up in outrageous costumes, wigs, and makeup is, indeed, a slice of life that builds kids’ appreciation for porn clubs and stag parties.  Or maybe they, too, can cross-dress like the exhibitionists at diversity-affirming LGBTQ+ parades.  Or maybe they’ll join the Navy or merchant marine, and as “pollywogs,” cross-dress to transit the Equator.  You never know.   

Drag queen story time is just good fun, right?  Not so, says Christopher Rufo, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute.  Rufo correctly asserts that these stagings harm kids and the nuclear family.

From Fox News, October 28:   

Rufo said the folks who created the trend of hosting drag queen events for youngsters left a “trail of evidence” through their writings that suggest they want to “sexualize children and subvert the middle class family.”

“They want to basically eliminate what they call the sexual hierarchy in favor of creating a sexual connection between adult and child, which has, of course, long been the kind of final taboo of the sexual revolution,” he warned. 

Exposure to drag queens is a warmup act of sorts.  It’s actually a gateway to introducing kids to harder sexual indoctrination and perversions. 

Why stress reading, writing, and arithmetic when schools have a duty to subject students to sexually explicit curriculum?     

Per the Daily Caller, October 29:

[Erika Sanzi, director of outreach at Parents Defending Education reports that] a producer at a television station told her she could not discuss the different types of sex that 10-year-olds learn in the “Human Growth and Development” curriculum of a Wisconsin school district due to FCC regulations.”         

Today’s sexual indoctrination isn’t the sex education of yore.  Biology matters less than immersing kids in materials that, per Sanzi, instructs grade schoolers in “anal sex, oral sex and vaginal sex.” 

Why is this? 

Rufo is right, in that the left is smut-peddling children to undermine parents — and let’s add faith — as the traditional and rightful teachers about sex… sex in respectful, loving relationships… sex not just as pleasure (orgiastic indulgence for subversives), but, ultimately, as the means of procreation, which is the province of biological males and females. 

But Marxists’ fellow travelers — too many teachers (and their unions), administrators, and academics — are go-alongs afraid to challenge this pernicious ideology.  Some are true believers; others are debauched themselves. 

There’s a growing epidemic of sex crimes committed by educators against students.

Reported Fox News, October 14:

An analysis conducted by Fox News Digital found that from Jan. 1 to Sept. 30, at least 269 educators were arrested, which works out to roughly one arrest a day.

The 269 educators included four principals, two assistant principals, 226 teachers, 20 teacher’s aides and 17 substitute teachers.  

What about the derangement of transgenderism?  “Gender fluidity” is a gross conceit, advanced by those who are in full rebellion against God and nature. 

Permitting males who have had some cosmetic surgery, are pumped up on estrogen, and cross-dress into girls’ athletics accomplishes what?  Ask parents of female athletes about the injury to their daughters.  This is a mockery of young female athletes, who work hard to master a sport and achieve. 

Boys in girls’ restrooms?  Recall the notorious case of the cross-dressing teen who sexually assaulted girls in girls’ restrooms at two different Loudoun County, Virginia schools.  This lurid tale occurred not just because of the laxity of school administrators, but in service to lunacy.   

Recently, Vanderbilt University Medical Center was in the midst of a firestorm it created.  It was conducting “gender affirmation surgery” on minors.  The surgery is better understood as mutilation.  Under pressure, Vanderbilt has suspended permanent sex-change surgeries. 

If you want to know why Vanderbilt and other medical centers have jumped into “gender reassignment” surgeries and procedures, follow the money.  Alternative Reporter (October 5) states that the “industry was valued at $1.9 billion last year and is expected to increase at a compound annual growth rate of more than 11% through 2030.” 

A younger generation of medical practitioners have convinced themselves that altering a body affirms “feelings” about gender.  After all, we live in an age where feelings trump facts, reality, and reason. 

But hospital systems are controlled from their corporate suites.  Make no mistake that mutilating children’s bodies is for cold profit.

Don’t challenge the medical profession’s intentions, though.  The American Academy of Pediatrics, American Medical Association, and Children’s Hospital Association want Merrick Garland to sic the DoJ and FBI on detractors, not unlike what the American Federation of Teachers wanted done to parents who objected to the sexual indoctrination of their kids.   

Then there’s abortion, including late-term abortion.  Abortion merits an exposition of its own.  Let’s just say that it’s the greatest offense directed at children, in that their lives are snuffed out before their eyes ever see the sky.

This comprehensive assault on children is the consequence of a progressive worldview that has broken bad.  It’s a frightening, stomach-churning revelation. 

J. Robert Smith can be found regularly at Gab @JRobertSmith.  He also blogs at Flyover.               

Trouble In America City!

November 2, 2022

You’d Better Be Prepared for the Perfect Transportation Storm

By John Green at American Thinker:

We’ve all heard of the game “Where’s Waldo?”  Well, I’ve got a better question.  As we look upon the hordes of federal parasites dedicated public servants, where’s Pete?  We’re seeing the convergence of some dangerous circumstances — a perfect storm, if you will.  But it’s not a convergence of weather patterns, but problems with the transportation infrastructure.  Yet Pete (Buttigieg) is nowhere to be found — at least not anywhere near the problems he’s supposed to prevent.

Loaded ships are still waiting off the coast of California because there aren’t enough trucks that meet the state’s emission standards to unload them — and it’s going to get worse in 2023, when more rules kick in.  The ports are choked with cargo containers while perishables spoil and store shelves run empty.   It’s a government-created problem.  What is the government’s solution?  Mandate that port employees work overtime loading the trucks that aren’t there.  It’s government problem-solving 101.

The airline industry is plagued with cancelations and late flights.  And it’s not because of climate change (bad weather) or mechanical failures.  It’s because they don’t have enough pilots. When we tried to control a virus by closing the country, pilots retired, others refused to comply with the vaccine mandate and were fired, and some unknown number took the vax and found they could no longer pass their physicals.  But this time, Pete is on the case.  He’s told the airlines that the Department of Transportation will fine them if they don’t hire more of the pilots that don’t exist.  That should light a fire under their executive tails.

But the deadliest transportation storm front is the approaching railroad strike.  The Biden administration averted a strike in September by brokering a last-minute deal with the railroad unions.  Now Joe and Pete just need all 12 of the unions to approve the deal to avoid a strike — by November 19.  There’s just one problem.  It’s an “all or none” situation, and two unions have already rejected the deal.

If the deal falls through, 33 million tons of cargo per week will not be delivered.  That’s a lot of baby formula and toilet paper.  Factories will close, store shelves will run empty, power plants will go offline, and construction will stop.  Joe’s administration is lining up alternatives to trains if the railroads shut down.  They assure us that if they fumble this — and they may — we’ll just ship everything by truck.  But there’s a problem with that also.  It would take an additional 460,000 trucks to move the freight that trains move.  Bumper to bumper, that number of trucks would stretch across America — twice.  It may take Freightliner a few days to crank those out.

Even if we had those trucks, they would use five times more fuel than trains (see this and this).  That would be the fuel we don’t have, because Joe decided to wage war on the industry that produces the fuel — because he thinks he can control the weather that way.  Are you following that logic?

And speaking of fuel, that’s another problem. As we move into winter, we are facing a diesel fuel shortage that is becoming critical.  The Energy Information Administration has issued a report stating that as of October, we have only a 25-week reserve of fuel, and shortages are expected this winter.  That’s the lowest reserve America has had in 14 years.

If we run out, crops won’t be harvested, and supplies won’t be delivered — even if the trains are still running.  We’re just one natural disaster away from petrochemical Armageddon.  What steps is the government taking?

• Canceling pipelines
• Stopping the drilling on public lands
• Restricting fracking
• Selling our strategic reserve to China

But the Biden administration has a solution for the fuel shortage.  Buy electric cars, which run on electricity generated by burning the fuel Biden’s trying to eliminate.

This is what a man-made storm convergence looks like.  As cargo piles up in ports, a rail strike is looming — because of government dereliction.  We don’t have the trucks to move the cargo — because of ill conceived emissions standards.  If we did have the trucks, we couldn’t fuel them — because our government has decided that it prefers batteries to the fossil fuels that charge the batteries.

It’s a perfect storm of life-threatening crises — brought to us entirely by the Biden administration.  So who in our government should be fixing this mess?  That would be our intrepid secretary of transportation, Pete Buttegeig, who has never fixed anything in his life but checks all of the required intersectionality boxes.

So, let’s return to our opening question.  While all of these problems have grown, where has Pete been?

• Attending the grand opening of an LGBT bar
• Taking maternity leave
• Looking for new ways to tax motorists
• Making sure our highways aren’t racist

That’s what passes for an “adults back in charge” administration these days.  It kind of makes our outrage about mean tweets seem quaint — no?

So when the stupid front approaching from the west, collides with the dereliction front approaching from the east, and the transportation perfect storm dumps on all of us, we’ll find that

• We can’t buy groceries.
• We can’t heat our homes.
• We can’t go to work, even if there were something to buy.

When President “Soft-Serve” takes another long weekend while we shiver in our dark homes, we’ll know the consequence of entrusting fools to run our country.  Only the grace of God will prevent those consequences from becoming grave this winter.

John Green is a political refugee from Minnesota, now residing in Idaho.  He has written for American Thinker,American Free News Network, and The Blue State Conservative.  

Our Quiet Corners of GOPHER LAND….

 NOVEMBER 2, 2022 BY SCOTT JOHNSON at Power Line:

AT THE GRATEFUL DEAD MEET-UP

Taking a break from the news, I attended the 2022 edition of the annual Grateful Dead Meet-Up at the suburban AMC multiplex in Eden Prairie, Minnesota last night. This year’s Meet-Up featured a showing of the Dead’s April 17, 1972 concert at the Tivoli Concert Hall in Copenhagen, Denmark. The footage derived from what was advertised as the first-ever broadcast of a a live concert on Danish television.

Last night’s event represented a resumption of the annual Meet-Ups after a three-year hiatus induced by the plague hysteria. I did not see a single mask in evidence last night.

The Meet-Ups draw an older crowd. The audience for the show had the highest median age in the multiplex’s 18 theaters by a wide margin. The audience was not only the oldest but also the happiest, again by far. By contrast with the 2019 Meet-Up I attended, no one was dancing in the aisle, but the audience applauded after every number. We would have been happy to be there if only in the existential sense, but we were especially happy with the resumption of the Meet-Ups. In an introductory message David Lemieux promised more to come.

The Dead’s European tour was first memorialized on a fantastic three-album set. This year’s Meet-Up celebrated the 50th anniversary of the Europe ‘72 album, It’s a fantastic live album featuring the Dead’s original lineup plus Keith Godchaux. The godawful Donna Jean Godchaux appeared in the film toward the end only to dance onstage. (I think that was Donna. We only saw her from behind.)

The band’s return to the Tivoli made for the sixth show on the Dead’s Europe ’72 tour. The footage has been restored and color corrected in high definition with audio mixed from the 16-track analog master tapes. The film, however, features less than 90 minutes of a much-longer concert.

The show included an overview of the Dead’s 1972 touring repertoire, including versions of “China Cat Sunflower,” “I Know You Rider,” “Big Railroad Blues,” as well as the first live performance of “He’s Gone” and other new songs including the great “Jack Straw” and “One More Saturday Night.” The Europe ’72 tour was Ron “Pigpen” McKernan’s last with the band. He sounded in good form on the three songs he covers in the film.

The film does not follow the original order of the band’s setlist that night (setlist here). The film captures only a disordered fraction of the Dead’s concert. Where is the rest of it? The answer is out there somewhere. I wish Lemieux had offered some explanation.

The film also provides only a glimpse of the band stretching out, Dead style. That surprised me. “Truckin’” afforded the glimpse. I loved it (and I could have covered for Bobby when he missed the first line of the opening verse).

Although it wasn’t the closing number in the concert, the film closes on an upbeat note with “One More Saturday Night.”

In my comments on the 2017-2019 Meet-Ups I lamented the band’s partially drug-related mortality. This time around I was struck by the survival of core members including Bob Weir, Phil Lesh, and Bill Kreutzmann (Donna Jean Godchaux is also still with us). Long may they run.

Next year in Eden Prairie!

How Will Our Dems Blame The Pelosi Dump ON PRESIDENT TRUMP?

November 1, 2022

Pelosi Got Hammered

By J.B. Shurk at American Thinker:

When a story comes out about a Pelosi getting hammered, a normal person assumes the news has something to do with a drunk speaker of the House named Nancy slurring through a staged press conference with her Pravda media friends.  You do not expect to find out that an alleged commie Castro nudist with a fondness for psychedelics has managed to Mission: Impossible his way past tight security surrounding one of the speaker’s guarded homes in order to play handyman with her husband’s tools.  

If there were ever an apt metaphor for how horrendous crime has become in the blue hellholes ruled over by pompous, pampered Democrat “elites,” surely a Black Lives Matter–supporting, gay love–loving hippie effortlessly traipsing into the local digs of another out-of-touch, loony leftist — whose wife happens to be third in line of presidential succession — surely takes the cake!  If Nancy Pelosi can’t keep her drunk-driving husband safe from the carpentry fetishes of unwanted intruders, how can she keep normal law-abiding citizens safe from the narco-terrorists and sex-traffickers slipping past the southern border?  Oh, right — unlike Paul Pelosi’s alleged attacker, the U.S. government has given the criminals at our borders permission to enter freely.  

Needless to say, the whole Pelosi break-in is just too tantalizingly odd for ordinary Americans to dismiss as normal, run-of-the-mill, celebrity-inspired criminal craziness.  In my neck of the woods, few home invaders could have made it onto the premises without heavily armed homeowners greeting the interlopers with a few well placed slugs to say, “Hello.”  It boggles the mind to imagine that it is easier to sneak up on Nancy’s gilded husband in the middle of the night than it is to break into the humble abodes of “flyover country” folk, but that is the “official story,” and if there is anything Americans have learned during the Age of COVID and Climate Change Hysteria, the “official story” is the only story that will suffice.

Of course, the “official story” pushed by Hillary Clinton, Groper Joe Biden, and their mind slaves in the propagandistic press is that the alleged commie culprit attacked Nancy’s husband Paul in an act of solidarity with Donald Trump and his “Make America Great Again” patriotic posse.  Even though the alleged perp’s public history is about as anti-MAGA and pro-Marxist-socialist as one could possibly imagine, Drunk Hillary insists he’s part of the same “vast right-wing conspiracy” that’s been tormenting the Clintons ever since her husband Bill got caught hiding Cuban cigars with a White House intern in the Oval Office.  Creepy Joe says the hammer-time mayhem occurred only because too many dull-witted Americans (takes one to know one?) keep questioning the legitimacy of the 2020 election.  (By the way, if you haven’t yet seen Dinesh D’Souza’s 2000 Mules for a quick tutorial on the mechanics of mail-in ballot fraud, definitely check it out.)  And the oligarchy’s approved corporate press agents are all sputtering breathlessly that Paul’s unwanted hammering in crime-tolerant San Fran strikes yet another blow against our oh, so fragile, precious “democracy” — which apparently replaced our much more robust constitutional federal republic without amendments or fanfare right around the same time Obama and Holder’s Department of Justice began formally categorizing political adversaries as enemies of the State.  On the other hand, all of these people still inexplicably blame communist Lee Harvey Oswald’s assassination of JFK on “right-wing extremism” and “Texan aggression,” so their credibility is about as solid as our borders are secure.

No doubt you’ve seen all the details first reported and subsequently “clarified” or outright retracted by the San Francisco Police Department and the Democrats’ minions in the press.  It took nearly three days to “clarify” that Paul Pelosi did not know his attacker, that an unknown third party had not actually opened the front door for the police, that Pelosi and his unwanted guest were not wrestling in their underwear, and that the altercation involved a single hammer rather than dual hammer dueling.  Even in this technologically regressed era, when Pennsylvania and other battleground states require many days to (find and) count enough Democrat votes to “save democracy,” it remains somewhat shocking that major details surrounding a major case could get so bungled by the same officials and reporters who routinely demand public trust.  

Publicly available images of the Pelosi mansion show a ubiquity of security cameras surrounding its perimeter, so it strains credulity to suggest that the suspect’s movements and actions that night were difficult to pin down.  Surely the fact that an alleged drug addict with a history of mental illness seemingly managed to penetrate Pelosi’s security so effortlessly begs for further official clarification, lest the unbridled temerity of America’s growing criminal class swell further.  I mean, my word!  If it is that easy for a commie Castro nudist to prance right in the back door of the home of one of America’s most powerful politicians, then no unarmed American can possibly be safe!  Banning hammers in the United States would only ensure that ordinary, helpless Americans are forced to invite criminal hammer-holders into their homes during times of repair.  No, for safety’s sake, the Pelosi intrusion proves why every American should be armed to the teeth.  Only a commie malcontent brings a hammer and sickle to a gunfight!

Maybe as more details come dribbling out, the events of that night will make more sense.  However, when a gay rights and BLM activist who looks like a New-Age-y vegetarian disciple of the left’s murderous hero Che Guevara comes knocking on Paul Pelosi’s back door in the middle of the night and Pretend President Biden and his Democrat Propaganda Machine immediately jump into action by blaming Trump-supporters, the whole spin operation reeks of the same odor still choking doubters of Jeffrey Epstein’s declared suicide.  Maybe Epstein — the key witness to a child prostitution ring involving unknown perverts and rapists purportedly from the highest ranks of the world’s business and political classes — killed himself in a New York jail cell while guards and cameras were conveniently absent, and maybe Paul Pelosi’s alleged commie Castro nudist attacker was leading a secret double-life as a MAGA enthusiast.  Maybe the same FBI agents who still can’t find the alleged culprit responsible for leaving failed explosive devices near Republican and Democrat party headquarters around January 6, 2021 will miraculously find footage of the San Fran hammerer wearing a bright red cap and suspiciously waving an American flag.  Or maybe all the politicians and media pundits trying to frame the Pelosi incursion as a right-wing terrorist attack will be proved once again as first-rate peddlers of pernicious misinformation. 

What is absolutely certain is that neither the U.S. federal government nor its media propaganda organs give a fig about crime or political violence unless it can be used to slander MAGA Republicans.  Pro-life organizations and churches are firebombed, and the FBI does nothing.  Conservative volunteers and Republican campaign workers are brutally beaten and shot on the street, and the corporate news is silent.  A cowardly neighbor severely wounds Senator Rand Paul in a sneak attack, and Democrats (including Nancy Pelosi’s daughter) cry with laughter and jubilation.  A Democrat stalwart, brainwashed by the endless corporate news promoting the lie that Russia stole the 2016 election from Hillary, nearly succeeds in assassinating an entire baseball team of Republican senators and representatives (again including Rand Paul), and the Democrat-Media Complex hides behind calls for unity, while simultaneously casting blame on the victims.

Some commie nutjob gets into the Pelosis’ fortified complex, though, and somehow it’s all Trump’s fault!  As always, the mainstream media lies and doth protest too much!