Truckistan, Mon Amour

When Hollywood loved men in trucks. Also disobedience.

Old America, Data Point #1: “Convoy”, the country novelty song by C.W. McCall glorifying defiance of authority, spent six weeks at #1 in the pop charts in 1976.

Data Point #2: Smokey and the Bandit was the second highest grossing film in 1977, after Star Wars. The entire plot line could be summed as: man escorts a truckload of beer across the South, evading authority. Plus flirtatious banter with Sally Field.

One might argue that America doesn’t exist anymore, but that would be misleading. It simply has no place at the media banquet.  Truckers are un-photogenic people who know no one and nobody knows.  They bring us neccesities and reside in the dhimmitude of undesirable zip codes.

Besides, aren’t half of them, you know, fat racists or something?

Nothing has illustrated the existential gulf between the Laptop Class and the Peasants more than Canadians lining roads in solidarity as the Freedom Convoy, 40 kilometers long, rolled across the provinces in protest of the mRNA “vaccine” mandate.

Evan Mitsui/CBC

While the truckers enacted a platonic ideal of non-violent civil disobedience in downtown Ottawa,  Prime Minister Trudeau, who was elected with less than a third of the popular vote, invoked for the first time in Canadian history the Emergencies Act, claiming for himself the powers of martial law.

We are 100 weeks beyond two weeks to stop the spread. Does anyone really think this is about public health anymore?

Ottawans took to the streets with jerry cans to provide gas.  Donations poured in by the millions, first to GoFundMe, which seized the funds and threatened to redistribute them to other causes, then to GiveSendGo, which was promptly hacked by a Twitch-streamer who doxxed the mailing list.  Now the donors, many of them small businesspeople, are being threatened by activists and contacted by the media who demand convoy supporters explain themselves.

This smug prick is our future. Get used to the smell of his ball sac on your nose.   Everything you see in this frame; the throne chair, the microphone, the monitors, were delivered to his home….by truckers. Everything, save the smirk.

Now the Trudeau administration is in the process of identifying the protestors and those who donated to them so as cut them off from access to banking, consequently from participation in society.

It’s worth noting in 1976 Betty Ford took to CB radio to court the working class during her husband’s election campaign. I’m trying to imagine Jill Biden, or anyone else, doing the same today.  Can you? Me, neither.

If you’re keeping score at home, the Canadian head of state has chosen to deprive his citizens of liberty as a constituency service on behalf of the Pfizer Corporation.

Trudeau could easily have played the hero by suspending the mandate. He could have climbed aboard a rig and led the trucks out of the capitol like Moses in a sea of Maple Leaf flags. But he didn’t.  In all the sturm and drang of recent weeks no one seriously proposed actually, you know, honoring the truckers simple request.

A Digital Passport is much too important.  That’s where this is all going.  If 70% of us just got the jab, we were told, we would all be given our lives back. We’re way past 70% now and the experimental drugs have failed to convey immunity as promised. Guess who is blamed for that?

The Los Angeles Board of Supervisors want to lay off 2000 Sheriffs Dept. personnel for refusing the jab.  Sheriff Villanueva has refused to cooperate. So they voted to take the decision-making away from him and convey it to a willing bureaucrat. That’s a whole lot of political capital to spend on firing people.

The effect, if not intent, of a Digital Passport is to render once inalienable rights conditional, and subject to revocation by corporations, at the behest of politicians. Once the architecture is in place, any criteria can be loaded into it.

Canadians still have some fight in them. Do Americans? I’d like to think so, but we’ve been acting like a defeated people.

When the trucker hat was ironic                                                    Credit: Elle Magazine

Here is wisdom: Stop appealing to the government for a redress of grievances.  This isn’t 2002. That is as viable as Paris Hilton in a Von Dutch trucker hat.

Twitter and YouTube don’t ask for permission to de-platform people. The shadow funders behind the Center for Countering Digital Hate didn’t ask permission when it named itself the arbiter of acceptable opinion.

This works in both directions.

Try this: STOP DRIVING, truckers. Also, Amazon delivery people. UPS. Uber and Lyft drivers. Everyone.  Let no wheels roll for one week. See how long the digerati manage without their pleasures brought to them on the daily.

The financial benefits of the new economy may flow upward, but the transportation network remains an essential hard power. It should be deployed as such.

Count me in.

Let Us Now Fire the Peasants

Pink as the new tyranny

Buffy Wicks (D-Oakland) wants to fire people. On Friday she introduced  AB1993, requiring the termination of every employee in California who fails to obtain a mRNA shot, including independent contractors.

Contractor? Hey, that’s me.  I’m among the officially wicked now. Or about to be.

All over the world the vax mandates are coming down. In the U.K., in Denmark, in Sweden, in the western provinces of Canada.   But in Los Angeles, because we can’t have nice things, the pink safety mafia is cranking the screws, deep into the future.

When pink was just pink

This might be a good juncture to state the obvious. There has been a total collapse in the efficacy of the mRNA shots over the past six months. They do not convey immunity. They do not stop transmission or infection. They have proven totally ineffective against the Omicron variant. The potency of the shot lasts less than six months, and begins tapering off after three months. In short, the Pfizer and Moderna jabs are not vaccines.  Referring to them as such serves the purposes of the pharmaceutical industry. They also have a terrible safety profile.

This isn’t about public health. This is about a digital passport on your phone like a QR code.  Once the architecture is in place, any criteria can be swapped in.

This will not end with the Wuhan virus, for this is the beginning of something.  Why do you think they are expending so much political capital to keep it?

Peasants, in our natural habitat

Get your sunshine, take your vitamin D, hit the trails, build your immune system and stop cooperating. Call bullshit by its rightful name.

Go Rams.

Everyone Is Lying. Merry Christmas!

On Saturday I drove a trio of beauties to the pageant of pulchritude at Petit Hermitage in West Hollywood, young women who spent the trip altering PDF files of Covid tests to satisfy the doorman.

There was never any question of their gaining entry, Wuhan status be damned. Take it from someone who knows, the nightclub economy is founded on the presence of such women being prominently visible.  How else can you charge $2000 for a table and move discount champagne from Costco at $2o a flute?  Stretch pants and cleavage…

On Monday, I moseyed down to mandate-free Santa Monica for dinner, and was irritated to learn this particular restaurant was asking for proof of vaccination. Neither my companion nor myself being vax-submissive, we turned to leave, as which point the hostess rather furtively urged us to just show her our phones.  She looked at our blank screens, smiled broadly and seated us amidst the other unmasked diners who may have been showing  proof or nothing at all.

In June we had a preference cascade where everyone took their masks off. This winter we have a preference cascade for fake paperwork.

We’ve entered the public hypocrisy phase of late stage Communist nations. They pretend to pay us and we pretend to work.

Behold the mission failure of Wuhan Zero. Behold the arrogance of the administrators who claimed they would stop a virus. Mutations of the 1918 Spanish Flu are with us today, but Omicron is the little people’s fault for insufficient obeisance to diktats from on high. If only we ignored the adverse event profile and lined up for the vaccine which turns to not to be a vaccine after all, if only we would submit to a protocol of semi-annual shots, and masks, and distancing, and permission slips for family gatherings, it would be over.  Our liberties will be restored.  Why can’t we be nudged toward perfection?

Not a true statement. Not even close.

Masks will protect us, says Fauci, knowingly lying. Children are at risk of Covid, schools should be closed. That too is a lie. People who have a positive PCR test actually have Covid, also a lie. Here’s another lie, squared: the signers of the Great Barrington Declaration are discredited frauds.

I am science, says Fauci, lying abundantly, those who question my policy are anti-science.

Here’s a little science: the “vaccines” neither prevent infection nor transmission, and have a useful life cycle of less than six months, obliging the CDC to quietly rewrite the definition of the term vaccine.  Boosters appear to be of little use against Omicron, a mutation beyond the reach of Pfizer and Moderna. Natural immunity following infection has proven the strongest, ideal resistance.

If I said this on Twitter, Facebook or IG, I would be de-platformed for trafficking in misinformation.  This would be a lie, wholly endorsed by the legacy media, eager to license free speech on its terms. Their answer to Omicron, as is Fauci’s, is more jabs and silencing questions.

Have you noticed no one is talking about herd immunity anymore? Herd immunity has an off-ramp, and we can’t have that. Wuhan metrics now reference deadlines of total compliance. Deadlines perpetually pushed back weeks or months in the face of passive resistance from those lying liars, the segment of the public insensible to bullying.

Here are therapeutic protocols which have proven to work at scale:
-Vitamin D
-Ivermectin
-Hydroxychloroquine
-Zinc
-Monoclonal antibodies
-Exercise in the sunshine

Here’s what hasn’t worked: keeping everyone indoors, sedentary and isolated, for two years.  Sending people who test positive home to wait until they develop respiratory failure before a treatment protocol is offered. Putting people on respirators.

Guess which we are obligated to lie about?

The Clerisy’s ideal citizen. Very on brand for 2021 and ready to inform on others.

Here is wisdom, from an older source: there is nothing new under the sun. Viruses have been with us since the beginning.  So has human folly. One can no more eradicate the mutations of the former than one could frailties of character.  Hubris and arrogance are with us always. It is our nature.

Tonight we celebrate the birth of Christ, who had something to say about man’s fallen nature and the futility of earthly perfection. People will light candles and publically lie about believing in Him. Others will lie to themselves in an effort to discount any possibility his revelation might prove true, then quietly fulfill his teachings.

Mrs. UpintheValley hasn’t darkened the door of a church in a decade. Tonight she’s going to sneak a $100 gift card into the mailbox of a neighbor who is struggling to pay her bills.  One could say she has been infected with an irrepressible urge to commit virtue.

I take comfort in the assumption He will not return in my lifetime as I fear we just might kill him all over again. In the meantime, let us live not by lies. Let us build our immune systems. Merry Christmas!

To Be A Good Witness

Dinnertime at Hot Wings. Fork it over.

The LAPD has a message for all of us: In the event of robbery, surrender your valuables.  “If you are being robbed, do not resist the robbery suspects; cooperate and comply with their demands. Be a good witness.”

This is not exactly helpful. What would you tell the police when they arrive? He was wearing a hoodie, officer… 

The Hoodie Posse is running California right now.  You have to admire the brazenness of walking into Home Depot en masse to steal hammers and crowbars…then moving on to the mall for the next robbery.

Thieves drive late model cars to the site of their crimes, double park in the street. Why wouldn’t you? George Gascon is not sending anyone to jail. He would rather police your language.  Don’t call them looters. Too much racial baggage.

There is a clear societal consensus against stealing, yet robbery is not enforced.

There is no consensus on vaccine mandates but they are enforced ruthlessly. Welcome to clown world.

“If you criticize me, you’re criticizing science,” declares Anthony Fauci, more than once. “Senators who ask questions are liars.”

Gavin Newsom has extended his ’emergency powers’ until March, making for two years of rule by administrative decree, unchallenged by the California legacy media or the legislature.

Everyone must get a booster, declared King Gavin, who rolled up his sleeve for the Moderna jab, then disappeared off the face of the earth for a week, failing to attend Cop26.  He resurfaced at the Ivy Getty wedding.

If you want to understand California in one frame, here it is.

The perpetrator was wearing a car salesman grin and a lot of hair product, officer.  He was accompanied by the Speaker of the House. The billionaires granddaughter was quite smashing. The gala was a paid for by fossil fuel wealth, passing down to the fourth generation. All the guests were given a tax cut from Nancy. No, seriously.

I’m making my witness. Am I cooperating enough?

The “vaccines” neither prevent transmission nor infection and lose efficacy after six months.  They no longer correlate with hospitalization or death rates. Why do we continue to refer to the jab as a vaccine?

Why do we yearn for the leash?  Why are so many of us acting like a conquered people?

We are living out a society-wide version of Flowers for Algernon, losing our collective intelligence, cognizant our maxims of prudence are slipping away, yet at the same time incapable of course correction.  So far.

Writing about diners surrendering their valuables table side without resistance and ending up writing about vaccine efficacy is very on brand for 2021.

It’s really about the loss of civic guardrails that maintain trust.   To ask these questions is my way of being a good witness.

The answer is not a booster shot.

Squeal Points

AFP/ Getty Images

There’s a guy on our street who likes to open the trunk of his car, roll down the windows, turn the bass up to 11, then go into the house to drink beer with his sound system parked in the driveway, rattling windows to the end of the block.  On a Tuesday morning.  He does this frequently.  The house is a rental, paid for by the government. The owner lives in the Hollywood Hills. Somebody had enough and called the police with a noise complaint.

“We’ll send a patrol car over,” said the LAPD.

Two hours later, no police.   Okay, perhaps not the most pressing issue the LAPD has on its hands.  Then again, it’s a weekday morning in the Valley. How much action can there be?

Have we crossed the rubicon beyond which quality of life issues are no longer enforced?  Or do we have a supply chain problem in public safety?

Fewer people are willing to be cops anymore. Urban cops. During the summer of George Floyd, young men delighted in going nose to nose with police lines for the benefit of cameras:

Punk ass bitch.
Make a move, Opie.
Where you gun, 5-0?
Whatcha gonna do, bitch?
Cracka.

The cop is required to be unflappable, at parade rest,  in a mimicry of boredom while aerosolized spittle pocks his face. Cell phones record his every twitch, waiting on the slightest crack in composure. Black cops? Even worse. Uncle Tom. Why you cooning? 

Raise the cost on enforcing laws enough and below a certain level they won’t be enforced anymore.   This is the squeal point.

Gadsden flag on the tarmac

The Biden administration, because it is totally, absolutely not authoritarian and only here to restore our democratic norms, is telling every company in America to fire vax-resisting workers six weeks before Christmas. Blue state governors and local officials, eager to play along, have similar mandates.

Because Americans are a free people, essential workers are pushing back. Nurses. Truckers. Railroad engineers. Cops and firemen. Sheriff Alex Villaneuva isn’t enforcing the mandate, so now the county has to fire 25% of its uniformed personnel. Only it hasn’t done so yet. They supervisors keep delaying. In New York, the fire department has 18 fire houses unmanned this week, the squads on unpaid leave. Garbage is piling up in the street after Mayor DeBlasio laid off 20% of the Sanitation workers.

Two weeks ago the pilots of Southwest Airlines staged a sick-out, resulting in the cancellation of 2000 flights. The CEO blamed it on anything but the the vax mandate, before quietly dropping vaccination requirements.  Then over Halloween weekend American Airlines cancelled 1,500 flights due to “high wind gusts” and…staffing shortages.

Union Pacific just dropped its vax mandate when 44% of railroad workers refused to comply.

The squeal point works in two directions.

Today America is the snail on the edge of a straight razor with edicts being handed down, then ignored. Then threatened again, and postponed once more.

There’s a financial economy and then there’s the real economy and logistics is the field on which they meet.

Kyrie Irving, integrity in motion

Kyrie Irving of the Brooklyn Nets is forgoing a $35 million salary and a chance at a championship ring on a super team that was built for him.

“To him, this is about a grander fight than the one on the court and Irving is challenging a perceived control of society and people’s livelihood, according to sources with knowledge of Irving’s mindset.”

“Kyrie wants to be a voice for the voiceless,” a source told The Athletic. 

The smart money says Kyrie will fold.  When the Nets begin to make a run, and he’s on the couch getting fat, and all of the Big Apple is blaming him for denying the city its first NBA title since 1973, he won’t be able to hold out.

It’s only been three weeks, but so far Kyrie is sticking to principle. He’s losing more money per day than most of us will make in a year.

Today the L.A. vaccine mandate goes into effect and today is the day I stop spending money in my beloved Los Angeles. My impact won’t be Kyrie-like in scale, but it will be felt, in the aggregate.

We should each of us think seriously what our squeal point might be, and why, and then try to hold out a little longer. If the state prevails on this, there will be no limiting principle to freedom of movement, of association, or commerce.

After that, its going to be Irish democracy, the refuge of a conquered people.

How To Karen A City

Queen Nury, in ecstasy                                                                                                                                    KCBS/LA

Bossy McBossypants, your moment is now. Remember July? You were against the ropes.  Your year of telling everyone what to do was at an ebb.  You were being shooed away like a covey of annoying birds. A scold of Karens, ignored.

Now we will be made to listen, won’t we?

The City Council is set to pass an ordinance this week requiring patrons to show proof of full vaccination at indoor areas including restaurants, bars, gyms, movie theaters, convention centers, card rooms, museums, malls, play areas, spas and salons in the city beginning Nov. 4.

A passport in all but name, as a condition of enjoying the fruits of the city.

“No one is forcing anyone to get vaccinated,” Nury Martinez said. “But if you don’t, there are certain things you will not be able to do without showing proof of vaccination.”

“Venues can be issued a citation for not implementing the requirement, and may be fined $1,000 for a second violation, and even more for subsequent violations, according to the city’s ordinance.”

Say hello to the little commissars eagerly bursting forth, like the Lorax from the tree stump.

Perhaps this would be a good time to consider:

  1. Los Angeles County is 77% vaccinated. Among those aged 50+ the rate is 85%. Add another ten percent for people who have recovered from infection and we have achieved the herd immunity threshold, historically. But, as with all things Wuhan, the normal rules are suspended.
  2. If you are vaccinated, the un-vaxxed pose little threat to you. As in, a 0.004 percent chance of hospitalization.
  3. Children are not at risk, full stop.
  4. All the vaccines have a problematic safety record among younger vaxees. The danger of the jab, while statistically remote, exceeds the danger of the virus itself in, say, a healthy 25 year old.
  5. Natural immunity has proved stronger, and less leaky, than the vax. Requiring America’s most immune people be injected with an unproven drug for which one is obliged to sign a waiver exempting the manufacturer from a lengthy list of side effects including myocarditis, has no sound basis in science and places Los Angeles in direct conflict with the Nuremberg Code.

The question we might ask ourselves is: why now?  This is the finish line.  Caveat: yes, there are people refusing to vax, who, given their health profile would be wiser to do so and may pay with their lives. This is their right in a free society. Despite what we are told they have not overwhelmed the healthcare system. The Delta wave is receding after two months, the typical timeline for a viral wave in every locale on Earth. It is the nature of infection.  Each subsequent wave will be smaller. Wuhan will be endemic but manageable.  There will be never be zero cases.

Unless of course the vaccines prove useless against subsequent mutations, in which case why are they mandated at all?

Why the biomedical police state?

These hands…are trying to say something                                                                                                           AP

Some people just love, love, love the new dispensation, safety being but a pretense for the really fun part: standing atop the parapet wearing the epaulets of emergency powers.  Kathy Hochul, the placeholder Governor of New York, has given herself the authority to fire 100,000 un-vaxxed health workers and replace them with the National Guard. In the middle of a nursing shortage.

Why would 100,000 nurses, of all people, refuse the vaccine? It’s worth considering.

For now, the mandates are pandemic-based. This won’t last. Once the architecture is loaded on your phone, the passport will extend to other things entirely. So get ready for perpetual crisis theater. The clerisy has learned it can do whatever it desires when America Is In Crisis™.  Who would stop them? Not the Times or CNN.

If gun control can be rebranded as a public health issue, then so has ‘racism’ and ‘transphobia’, however the nanny state chooses to define those terms.   If the CDC can bar landlords from evicting non-payers of rent, then health and safety has no limiting principle.

A Chinese social credit system begins here, in exactly this newly claimed space. Anything our betters don’t care for will be loaded into it. Participation in society will be contingent on affirming things we may not believe.

If that sounds a bit hyperbolic please consider all the things in recent memory that were never, ever going to happen, except, well, maaaybe a decade from now, only to come true in under a year.  Tell it to all the people de-platformed from Twitter and YouTube. De-monetized. Banned from banking services.

No one’s “being forced”, remember, only being denied entry to as many things as possible in Los Angeles, America’s best governed city.

Which is why, as a fully vaxxed person, I will not partake of the mandate nor carry the passport, and won’t do so even when conveniently embedded on my phone. Convenience is the road to perdition.

Girls night out, MacLeod Ale Brewery, July. Remember July?

Last week I passed an opportunity to see James McAvoy in the National Theater adaptation of Cyrano.  That hurt. It means I’m not seeing going to see Tannhauser and Aida at the LA Opera. It means, if the council resolution passes, I will be quitting my membership at LA Fitness after 20 years.

So where will my discretionary spending go? To Hermosa. To Santa Monica. To Culver. To Playa. To any city that will have my consumer dollars, the only means I have at present to assert my foundational liberties.

How will that help Los Angeles?  It won’t. Those cities will prosper from our foolishness in the same way they have for decades. It’s worth noting the one element they have in common: populations under 100,000.  Elected officials have to answer the phone in Hermosa, unlike here. Freedom doesn’t begin in Utah, it can be found just across the city limits.

It’s why Amazon Studios are in Culver and Disney and Yahoo are in Burbank and Skechers is based in Manhattan Beach. Why Mattel and Rocketdyne are in El Segundo. Why 99 Cents Only is based in Commerce and Avery-Dennison is in Glendale. The satellite communities of L.A. aren’t run by ignorant grasping hacks.

Meanwhile, in another America, getting further and further away from us by the day:

America’s primal yawp sounds like Metallica.   It doesn’t wear a mask, nor require a passport and is rather altogether joyful. This is us, in sixty seconds. This has been us all along.  Yes, even in Los Angeles.