The Rich are Rich for a Reason

 

The Rich are Rich for a Reason

©2021  Ross Williams

 

 

 

Like a growing number of people in today’s world of mandatory, government-imposed subsistence and poverty, our household is doing quite a lot for ourselves that most people, until very early last year, would get done professionally.  Like get our eggs, a lot of our meat, canned goods, our beer and wine and cheese.  Unlike most people, however, we’ve been doing it for years.  It’s because of the rest of you that we haven’t found any canning jar lids in over a year.  Thanks a lot, rookies.

 

We have chickens for our eggs and sheep for part of our meat, we put up gallons of tomatoes in all possible forms, and freeze a portion of our garden greens for later.  Last year we had so many apples that we ran out of recipes before we ran out of ingredients.  We’d gone cross-eyed trying to find different jelly and jam applications for the remaining bazillion apples.  Plain apple jelly is boring, and we’d gone through apple-mint jelly [we have a patch of mint as well], caramel apple jam, our family-favorite black apple jelly [apple juice and blackberry juice − we have blackberries, too], and an apple liqueur jelly [a failed experiment using a liquor cabinet alternative in place of the recipe-suggested brandy].

 

So the remaining apples were converted into alcohol.  I tried hard cidering some of it [another failed experiment] and apfelweining another portion of it [worked much better].  Since I‘ve made beer and wine for years it seemed a natural thing to do.  Shortly after I started this hobby, I asked my wife if she wanted to make cheese… the real way.  We’d done the vinegar curdled goat cheese a number of years ago.  It worked, but it wasn’t “real” cheese.

 

At any rate, our supplies of parts for these self-sufficiency exercises were getting low, and so on January 8^th [in the morning] I went online and ordered some malt extracts − gold and dark − for my brewery, and some rennet and cultures for my wife’s cheesery.  Stock items, all.  Just pull from the warehouse, box and ship.  January 8^th was a Friday.

 

Saturday the 9th I got an email from the beer supply folks that my shipment [two boxes, 40 pounds each] was at the shipper [UPS], and that I would receive an email from them with tracking information.  Within seconds, I received two emails from UPS, one per box, saying that they had my order, and they would be arriving the next Thursday, January 14^th.  I get my beer parts from Minneapolis.

 

It was late in the afternoon on the following Monday, January 11^th when I got an email from the cheese people saying that my package was being taken to the shipper [USPS].  I was also told that I’d be getting an email from them with tracking information.  It took from Friday morning, through Saturday, [Sunday off − okay, I guess I can understand], through almost the entire day Monday for them to get an interoffice email from the online order-taking department to the warehouse/shipping department to put three small stock items in a 3”x3”x3” box, with the order slip and a wad of padding, and take it to the post office.

 

On the morning of Monday the 11^th, UPS tracking showed my beer parts were leaving the UPS hub in Minnesota.  The cheese parts come from Massachusetts, roughly twice as far from me in suburban St Lose as Minneapolis is.

 

On Tuesday January 12^th, UPS tracking showed my beer parts were in the UPS hub in suburban Chicago.  Late in the afternoon on the 12^th, I finally got my tracking email from USPS, the US post office.  It had taken 23 hours to move from “we at the cheese parts supplier sent this to the post office” to “we at the post office got your cheese parts”.  I was given no estimated delivery date.  Later that day, it got sent to Stamford Connecticut, suburban New York City.

 

By Wednesday January 13^th, UPS had moved my two 40-pound boxes from the hub in suburban Chicago to their hub in suburban St Lose, while the feather-light box of animal rennet and cultures managed to make it from Stamford Connecticut a-a-all the way to White Plains New York − also suburban New York City.  A person can crawl from Stamford to White Plains faster than the USPS can move a tiny box.

 

On Thursday the 14^th, UPS tracking showed that my combined 80 pounds of barley syrups were being delivered that day, right on schedule.  On the other hand, and in a surprise move from the post office, the tiny box of cheese parts where the packaging weighed more than the contents finally managed to exit the vortex of suburban NYC and find its way to suburban Chicago.

 

Apparently all tuckered out from moving 3oz of contents in a 4oz box an entire third of the way across the continent the day before, it took a full 48 hours to get from the USPS facility in suburban Chicago to their USPS facility in St Lose MO.  It wasn’t until Friday the 15^th that USPS tracking showed that this package had made it to within 25 miles of my mailbox.  I was given an estimated delivery date of Saturday the 16th, “before 9PM”.

Nothing arrived on Saturday the 16^th, but just after 9PM USPS tracking informed me that the new estimated delivery was now Sunday the 17^th “before 9PM”.  Sunday the 17^th came and went with no cheese parts delivered and indeed USPS tracking erased all mention of expected deliveries and simply reverted to “we have your stuff in a warehouse.”

 

I was expecting nothing on Monday, the 18^th − a national holiday − however late in the day, USPS tracking showed this trivial little box had made it to the post office in my town.  The USPS apparently works on national holidays.  Two full days to move roughly 25 miles.  With two broken legs you could crawl it faster.

 

And then on Tuesday, the 19^th, it was finally delivered.

 

A number of things went wrong here.  The cheese people advertise this shipment method to be “2-10 day delivery”.  I ordered on the 8^th and got it on the 19^th.  That’s twelve days.  Now, one may wish to claim that the delivery was only 9 days, because it took three days to get the order out of their warehouse and into the grubby, unionized mitts of the USPS.  But that simply dodges the issue of why it takes three days to pick three stock items out of their warehouse and stuff it in a little box.  Even considering that one of these days was a presumably non-working Sunday, this is fairly inexcusable.  It could have − and should have − been to the post office by Friday afternoon.

 

Okay, sure, the cheese-parts outlet is a “family business” and maybe cousin Irene in shipping had an all-day root canal on Friday.  What’s the matter with Saturday?  I doubt they’re Jewish, and really doubt they’d be orthodox.  Even if they were, that leaves their Sundays open.  Even if a personal catastrophe hit the shipping department just as my online order came racing through the fiber optics on Friday, Monday morning to the post office, minimum.

 

The next major issue is why it took the post office nearly one-full day − 23 hours − to acknowledge receipt of a package, another day to shuffle between regional hubs in the same damned region, two full days to make the 4-5 hour drive from Chicago to St Lose, followed closely by why it took another two full days to make the 25 mile drive from St Lose to Edwardsville IL.  This last leg can’t claim to have been working around a national holiday; that was the day it seems to actually have travelled anywhere.  These are five to six days out of the 9-day travel time; there’s no reason it should have taken more than two days and change.

 

Online criticism of my beer parts supplier pings the place for being a division of the Big Brew giant Anheuser-Busch.  “Boo, hiss, commercial beer interests have no place in homebrewing!!”  If it’s true they’re owned by AB, then AB is simply capitalizing on a market niche they’ve driven off by manufacturing lousy, unimaginative, obscenely over-priced beer.  At least it shows foresight.  The fact that they provide timely service with efficient shipping contractors means I’ll continue to get my beer parts from them.

 

The cheese parts place, as a family business, is what I’d prefer to do business with, all things being equal.  But, as the timeline shows, all things are not equal.  Uninspired order fulfillment combines with the perennially inept and unionized indifference of the USPS parcel service to drive me, when shopping for future cheese parts, to Amazon.

Jeff Bezos doesn’t really need more money, but he sure as hell earns it.

 

Big Deal. The World Always Watches

Big Deal.  The World Always Watches

©2021  Ross Williams

 

 

 

The last chance to make a point about a transparently stolen election got short-circuited by a latter-day Storming of the Bastille.  The original Bastille, at the time of its storming by irritated French peasants, only held a handful of the insane, which makes the simile all the more apropos.  Any meaningful objection and debate of problematic state election procedures was quashed at the precise moment of the first objection to the result of those procedures.  It couldn’t have been scripted any better.  And when, hours later, the process of ratifying fraud resumed, all the starch had been removed from any remaining quibble.

 

Of course everyone’s falling all over themselves blaming Donnie Combover for it. He told his supporters to follow him to the Capitol, after all.  Which meant, of course, to storm the place ensuring that procedural quibble be dismantled.  He and his supporters have worked out an intricate code, in dog whistles [to use a term from the left], by which mundane sentiments actually translate to sinister messages.  Just ask anyone on the left; they’ll tell you.

 

The long and short of it, however, is that the last gasp of remediation was rendered impotent.  But sure, it’s his fault.  Consequently, he has, as I type this, 12 full days left to be a democrat playing a republican president on twitter… except that he’s been banned from twitter.  Perhaps he’ll take to parler and play president there for the time he has left.

 

Still, that’s not good enough for the psychotic democrats.  They’re demanding that President Cheeto be removed from office sooner.  “Invoke the 25^th Amendment or we’ll impeach him again!!” they’re bawling.  Because impeaching an ex-president is such a worthwhile and effective activity, and not embarrassing at all.  There are currently at least two separate Articles of Impeachment being drawn up.

 

All because of this national embarrassment.  We The People dared to infiltrate the Capitol, what is being called “The People’s House”.  Mere people don’t belong in The People’s House.

I’ll let the irony of this ersatz outrage sink in for a bit.

 

…

 

Resuming…

 

The impassioned plea from the artificially reasonable has been “Shouldn’t we all be embarrassed by what the world saw from us this week?”  Honestly, not especially.  As embarrassments go, this was rather timid.  I’m old enough to remember the world pillorying Jimmuh Cahtuh for being a demonstrable boob, and doing ditto to Cuckold Bill for operating a frat house instead of a White House.  This past week is, to reference Jimmuh Cahtuh once more [I’m sorry], peanuts.  In 1954, Puerto Rican nationalists infiltrated one of the House galleries with semi-automatic weapons and shot up the House of Representatives in session.  What we saw in DC this week was more reminiscent of the dispossessed in the world’s Banana Republics protesting a bogus election.  …an election over which Jimmuh Cahtuh [last time, I promise], the world’s pre-eminent Election Observer, would have had a whole herd of cows if it had occurred elsewhere and not in the US with a demented feeb pedophile and his socialist prat running mate being declared the winner.

 

For god’s fucking sake, even Iraq, in their first-ever actual democratic election, dyed every voter’s thumb purple to prevent them from being able to vote again, let alone for their ancestors.  The entire world watched an election in the US − the heretofore premier democracy − create, with astoundingly detached concern for integrity, a tableau for state-sponsored vote fraud.

 

That was embarrassing.

 

Mail-in ballots wouldn’t pass muster in the ex-Soviet Union.  Not even if the ballots were hand-delivered to Communist Party insiders.  There’s too much risk of the politically dispossessed getting hold of them.

 

I’ve gone on record time and time again being unsurprised by, understanding the reasons behind, and supporting people protesting − even violently − against the government of a free people when that government abuses its defined powers.  The government of a free people which abuses those powers does not rule over free people, it rules over subjects.  It is, in the description of our own Declaration of Independence, an illegitimate government.

 

I’ve done this here, here, here, here, and here.  And likely several other places as well.

When people violently protest government, it’s because government is being abusive.  This is a historical constant.

In the face of abusive government, dismantling or destroying the government façade and killing its agents is another historical constant.   A constant we are guaranteed to see far more of in the months and years to come for one reason and one reason only.  Government − OUR government − is becoming more abusive of its defined powers.

 

The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.

-Thos. Jefferson

 

Insofar as manure goes, you can’t get much more shitty than the current apologism for the farcical nod to democracy and rule of law being made by, almost literally, everyone.  Many democrats are actually leveraging recent events into an excuse to criminalize anyone who fails to acquiesce to “progressive” [ironic term] sensibilities.  Mrs Barry Hussein wants social media outlets to “condemn” Orangeman and everyone who voted for him, and effectively prohibit any of their ideas from being aired.  Free speech for me but not for thee.  When thee speaks it, it becomes WrongThink.  This renders her husband’s mid-2011 declaration that those voting for his opponent were, in his words, “the enemy” as mere hyperbolic flourish, and takes it to absolutely fascistic extremes.  ABC − the public airwaves’ television network − has taken the position that we need to “cleanse the nation” of people who don’t support …well, essentially, socialism and socialism’s monochromatic outlook.  ABC is, no doubt, willing to step up and provide that outlook.

 

Rushing the Capitol building, breaking windows and ransacking the office of Congresscunt Pelosi is being described in more outraged terminology than an entire summer of arson, vandalism and indiscriminate destruction was described by any democrat or their propagandist press.  “Peaceful protest”, according to Michelle Obama, is what you have when churches, department stores, entire fleets of used cars and whole city blocks are destroyed by tens of thousands of leftists over five long months in multiple large and medium-sized cities.  Riot, insurrection and sedition is when several dozen MAGA-hatted yahoos break a bunch of windows and throw papers around over a couple hours… once.

 

The cognitive dissonance is staggering.

 

The summer’s riots began as justifiable outrage over cops abusing their authority.  For maybe as many as 24 hours, the target of mob violence was the Minneapolis police who, between the four officers on the scene, somehow managed to subdue and handcuff a big, burly guy accused of passing a fake Jackson, but who could NOT, between the same four, manage to pick him up and move him literally three feet to the backseat of the patrol car.  The natural alternative to sticking him in the cop car and hauling him away to jail is, of course, to stand on his back for nine minutes until he asphyxiates.

 

There was absolutely zero excuse for what the cops did.  And for as many as 24 hours, almost literally 99% of the nation understood that and was singing from the same hymnal.  To the degree I sing from hymnals I was among them.

 

To that end, the police station in Minneapolis was attacked and virtually destroyed.  Around 25% of the nation cheered.  This is historically what happens when government abuses its authority.  Just a heads up, government.  Don’t want your police stations demolished? color within the lines.  It’s not hard, so why does it need to be said?  Because I understand the grand historical sweeps at play, I supported the effort.  It should be obvious by this point that voting the bastards out doesn’t work.  Nor does using the courts to “operate within the system to fix the system”.  The concept of qualified immunity for cops “just doing their job” [shades of Nuremburg rationalization] was invented by the courts themselves.

I’m from the Sheldon Cooper school:
“Sheldon, why are you arguing with the DMV?”
“How else are they going to learn?”

Cops have a legitimate authority to arrest fake paper passers. They do NOT have a legitimate authority to stand on a citizen's back until he expires, regardless of the excuses the cop can concoct.  I’m not a Thin Blue Liner.  Authoritarian despotism is historically far more likely than anything else to hide behind the blue line.

Ya wanna burn down the cop shop when cops arrogantly kill someone needlessly?  I get it.

 

But it was after this the peaceful protests started.  A Target department store was gutted by the flames of peaceful protest after every single plasma TV on its shelves had been liberated.  An auto parts store, obliterated from the map.  An entire city block, razed. 

Wait, did the owners of these also stand on George Floyd’s back?  Did I miss something?

No, and yes.  What I missed was that the protest was joined by the twin travelling minstrels of the commies of BLM and the anarchists of Auntie Fey.  The commies of BLM switched the narrative from “abuse of government power by a disconnected and indifferent group of idiot cops” to “this only happens to black people, because everybody else, and cops too, is racist”.

 
And, well, Tony Timpa. 

 

The solution the commies of BLM offered? defund the police.  Take money away from cops.  If cops don’t get paid, they won’t be racists with guns.  That they can’t also interfere with the liberation of department store merchandise or drugland territorial wars is just a coincidence.

The anarchists of Auntie Fey brought with them mounds of Soros-provided bombs, bricks and lead pipes, and peaceful protest was unleashed all over the city.  And then cities all over the country, because Auntie Fey isn’t an actual organization, or anything, with chapters spread hither and yon.

We obtained a slow, rolling Kristallnacht that put the original Brownshirted version to shame.  Hey, they have insurance, right?

 

If violent response to government is a historical constant in the face of abusive government, what is the destruction of random private property while simultaneously blaming the private property owners for their own losses?

 

It is authoritarian revolution.  It is the Reign of Terror purges in French Revolution France.  It is the Bolshevik Revolution purges in Russia.  It is the fascist take-over of Germany and the various Final Solutions it offered.  It is the Reds Brigading of China.  It is the countless purges of countless tyrants at countless times and places.  Idi Amin, Pol Pot, Fidel Castro, Hugo Chavez…

 

These people can’t blame government for their piqué, for they aspire to government control.  And when they control the government, they will need everyone to obey the new government they control.  So they blame everyone else.  Nobles, bourgeoisie, Jews and gypsies and homosexuals, whomever.  Medusa had her basket of deplorables and vast right-wing conspiracy.  Barry Hussein had “the enemy” Americans who weren’t going to vote for his re-election, and his wife has anyone who continues to refuse supporting their bankrupt [and bankrupTING] notions.  BLM has its cultural appropriation and un-decolonized institutions inspiring a form of racism so subtle that it has to be browbeaten to be discerned.  The ABC television network has every citizen who is not fully on board with “progressive” [ironic term] politics.

 

Say what you will about Donnie Combover, he blamed the government itself: the Deep State swamp.  The nameless, faceless bureaucracy that actually controls the nation.  By doing so, he spoke to a sentiment that has been simmering for two generations or more among the [arguably] largest share of our nation’s people.  Whether they realize it or not, or whether they hold more stock in the form of the message than in its content, are separate issues entirely.  Most Americans innately understand that the government is the problem.

 

It was this government that created a landscape for stealing an election away from the guy whose raison d’être was to curtail excessive, anonymous government that abuses its powers.  “Drain the swamp.”  People stormed and vandalized the specific location that was ratifying the current abuse?  I am thoroughly unsurprised.  The historical constant resurfaces.

 

Who else is that government going to blame for people behaving the way people always behave when government abuses its power?  Themselves?

 

That’s who should be blamed, but, no.  They’ll blame the guy who points out the loudest that the emperor is wearing no clothes.  That’s Orangeman, and they’ll blame him, because Orangeman bad.  He said “Let’s go to the Capitol”.  This, naturally, to the left [and the left’s co-conspirators], is indistinguishable from the exhortation, “Let’s ransack the Capitol.”  And because of this leap of logic, the guy is required to be impeached yet again over lefty psychosis.

Just imagine what would have happened if President Cheeto had declared the Capitol’s ransacking to be “brilliant”, “essential” and “necessary” the way Knee-Pads Harris described five months of arbitrary nationwide destruction by the BLM commies and their anarchist Auntie Fey minions.

The Proof is in the Hearing

 

The Proof is in the Hearing

©2021  Ross Williams

 

 

 

If I have to listen to another imbecile claim “There’s no proof!!” I’m likely to dig up my aluminum softball bat and introduce his ears to each other.

 

Anyone with a scientific background or − especially in this case − a legal background, knows better than to say this.  Proof is not the starting point.  Proof is a conclusion built upon a systematic, fair and honest inspection of evidence.  There has been no inspection of evidence, and there has been only slightly more active search for evidence.  Nonetheless, evidence exists, and is massive.  It seems nearly overwhelming.

 

There was no proof that the solar system was heliocentric until after the evidence was presented and medieval protoscientists stopped being a-skeered of running up against papal bulls.  There was no proof that John Wayne Gacy killed a bunch of kids until after the evidence was inspected, cross examined and ruled upon.

 

You need to actually review the evidence and determine that it is insufficient before you can say “there’s no proof.”  There has been no such review.  No inspection.  No hearing.  No trial.  There is no legitimate basis for claiming “there is no proof.”  Sticking your fingers in your ears while shouting “No proof!!” at the top of your lungs is called denial.

Denial because you wish to appear “objective” to those in ideological denial is an anti-intellectual collaboration.  It is − and I’m choosing my metaphors deliberately here − the same politics that led to the creation of Vichy France.

 

Evidence of what, you ask?  Vote fraud.  Concerted, deliberate vote fraud.

 

Evidence started piling up on election day itself.  Voting machines in multiple states converted around 30% of the votes for the republican presidential candidate into votes for the democrat candidate, and never the other way around.  “Software glitch” was the official excuse.  The counties in question hadn’t updated their software on schedule, which means one of two conditions apply:
1] the software had always been faulty, and every prior election should be considered invalid, or
2] the software was deliberately written to malfunction in a specific manner unless new software was purchased and installed on top of it.

In either event, the company behind the voting tabulation systems [Dominion] is effectively copping to incompetence or fraud.  While only fraud is outright criminal, both are tortable.

As a 35-year IT wonk, I would be extremely loath to claim “software glitch” when seeking to absolve myself of blame.  I’d claim misaligned optical scanners in the machines.  Always blame the hardware.

 

The immediate evidence continues.  Poll workers, observers and media in multiple states were − illegally and unprecedentedly − sent home while vote tabulation continued.  In Georgia, it was accompanied by hauling duffels of votes out from hiding as soon as anyone not in on it had been shooed away.  Yes, this was caught on camera, to which the ubiquitous response was, essentially, “These are not the fraudulent votes you’re looking for.”

 

Other Jedi mind tricks were undertaken in Nevada, Arizona and Michigan where dead people voted by the tens of thousands, non-residents and non-citizens voted by the mere thousands, and − in an apparent nod to accommodating mental illness − the schizophrenics were all given one vote for each of their personalities: nearly 100,000 multiple ballots were documented.

 

In all states that are considered at issue here, signature verification was refused on mail-in ballots, in violation each state’s election law.  Pennsylvania attempted to head off criticism at the pass by issuing a series of regulatory moves and judicial rulings prior to the election that precluded the statutory need for signature verification − a move which is, itself, in direct violation of law: only the legislature may alter the manner in which elections are conducted, not judges and certainly not unelected bureaucrats.  And by virtue of this, Pennsylvania is in violation of not only their state laws, but also the federal Voting Rights Act, which figured prominently in Bush v. Gore in 2000.

 

So evidence abounds.

 

Evidence that vote fraud did occur, and evidence that a handful of states made it trivially easy for vote fraud to be conducted with official state blessing.  Seemingly a thousand lawsuits were filed in state and federal courts asking for this evidence to be officially heard, and in all but one [to my knowledge] instance, the suits were thrown out with the judge commonly ruling [drumr-r-r-r-r-roll] “There is no proof.”

In the one suit where a hearing was actually held, the judge ruled that the evidence was not admissible and [long-winded judicial double-talk short] “What else ya got?  Nothing?  So wut yer sayin is you got no proof.  Okay … case dismissed.”  Hint, yeronners: hie thine asses back to law school.  You obviously missed a few key lectures on trial procedure.

Not to be outdone, the US Supreme Court, in a ruling that hearkens back to the galaxy far, far away ruled that Texas [et al] cannot complain about Pennsylvania failing and refusing to follow its own, and US, election law because fraudulently determining the galactic Chancellor in the way the Trade Federation rigged it has no effect on Naboo.  Apparently Texas [et al] won’t be affected by a president elected by ghosts, split personalities and out-of-state visitors, and cannot bitch about it in court.  “You have no standing.”

 

At least they didn’t say “There is no proof.”  They are skilled enough jurists that they ignored that issue altogether.

 

Four years [and likely many, many more] of chapped-ass democrats pulling a page from every communist dictator’s conspiratorial anti-American playbook, witness Chavez, Castro and any of the L’il Kims in their man-god franchise.  “The complete lack of evidence supporting my claim that the CIA is behind this popular revolt/natural consequence of socialist economics proves the CIA did it!”

 

Democrats have claimed Russia rigged the 2016 election with zero evidence apart from Orangeman’s offhand “Wouldn’t it be funny if Russia had Medusa’s emails…?” [turns out they did] and the absolute dearth of evidence of either connection or consequential election interference constitutes proof of both. 

 

Donnie Combover − the guy they love to remind everyone is a failure in business − is apparently, like the stumblebum CIA, just that good.  It’s obviously been a 50-year set-up.  “How can I parlay my father’s $100 million inheritance into a 21^st Century presidency?   I know!!  Convert that $100 mill into a few billion by repeatedly “failing” in business.  That’s the ticket!”

 

Today democrats are, to a hypocrite, claiming elections can’t be rigged.  ...at least not when means, motive and opportunity are prodigiously supported by evidence.  That’s just crazy talk.  Evidently, elections can only be rigged when means and opportunity are absent [Russia may, and probably does, have motive], and evidence has to be manufactured.

 

The crossroad is most likely behind us.  We seem to be on a one-way street to an authoritarian fascist dictatorship supported by the ghosts, schizos, and out-of-staters, and rationalized by the various Marshall Pétain among us who don’t want to risk their standing by insisting that the craven courts actually do their job.

 

A republic, madam, if you can keep it.