How old are you?

I'm assuming the people reading this are adults.

How certain, when you're old, are you that you will need exactly nothing from anyone.  No money, no personal care, nobody to wipe your ass when you can't?  Nobody (or damn few) people paying taxes to cover things that you might need but no longer can go out and earn on your own.

How sure?

Because that's the bet in this election.

You see, one view is that wide-open borders, "nobody is illegal", everyone who comes gets $2,000+/mo without working a single day for any of it, skills are immaterial, desire is immaterial (other than to consume the $2,000) and more.  This position, in larger and larger amounts, starting with "your strawberries will go up 25 cents a pint if you don't let them in" then "you won't be able to get your roof done" and now "any Haitian can come" has driven a collapse in women willing to give birth and raise another generation.

You think not?

How many 18 year old young women see their grandma getting $1,500 a month from Social Security, $300 is deducted from that for Medicare (in its various parts including "D") so they get $1,200 a month to spend in total -- and its taxable -- while every illegal immigrant that comes in gets $2,000 a month tax free and then contemplate their future if they decide to have a kid with their boyfriend (hopefully future husband)?

Oh to be sure that's not the whole reason but its part of it, and the left is responsible for most -- but not all -- of the rest too.

Contemplate Harris' incessant bleating about abortion.  OK, right to choose.  I get it.  But then HARRIS let rapists into the nation from Venezuela and Haiti and rape they did, including raping CHILDREN.  Tell me ladies, would you rather have access to all the abortions you want all the way up until the baby takes it first breath or not be raped in the first place and thus not have the need for one?  How many women want to bring a child into the world that has a 50% chance, because said kid is a girl, of having to deal with the risk of those animals raping her?  How many women say "fuck that shit!" and as a result decided not to have kids at all?

And let's cut the crap about the abortion issue in the first place: 90+% of the nation is somewhere in the middle, myself included. The "extreme ends" are "no abortions ever" and "you can abort while in active labor with the head sticking out of the vagina."  And yes, that IS the legal structure in a handful of states today, including VP candidate Walz's Minnesota which had that change in law passed WHILE WALZ WAS GOVERNOR and he signed the legislation.  To quote specifically from the AG's page:

• Minnesota’s Standard: Minnesota statute guarantees Minnesotans’ right to make decisions regarding their reproductive health care free from interference by the state. This includes the right to terminate a pregnancy. A patient’s decision about whether and when to terminate a pregnancy is between the patient and their provider. (Minn. Stat. § 145.409, subd. 3.)

In other words there is no cut-off of any sort under any circumstances, period.

Harris' position is precisely this when it comes to legal structure and no, Trump's is not the former ("no abortions ever") despite attempts to claim otherwise; he has explicitly disavowed that, never attempted to enact it in his first term and in fact acted on and put his actual view into practice when Roe was kicked back to the States by the USSC -- and his VP candidate has said he respected his State's voters who said "no, that's not our position either."  Thus the only plausible read on Trump (and his VP's) position is that it is somewhere in the middle, exactly as is 90+% of the American population and further Trump has explicitly stated he will not seek to stop States that adopt the Harris and Walz view even though he personally (as does his VP candidate) disagrees with it.

How about all this trans shit?  If you cut your dick or tits off and either chemically or physically destroy your reproductive organs you can't make any kids, ever, and you can't ever change your mind because you intentionally destroyed your biological capacity to reproduce.  This is even more extreme than, for example, a man getting a vasectomy as at least in theory that might be reversible where removal of the testicles is never reversible.  The entire trans thing is in fact, at its core, the destruction of reproductive capacity.  You may not admit that it is this way but its true whether you like it or not.

The excuse is "well I was told Johnny might kill himself if we don't do that."  Well, he might, although there's now study work the NIH funded -- and then pulled the funding on -- because it showed that puberty blockers did not improve outcomes.  When that signal appeared suddenly the government didn't want to fund it anymore and nobody wants to publish it either.  But whether that's the last word on it or not doesn't matter because while Johnny might kill himself if he doesn't get the pills if he does get the pills with high probability, and ONE HUNDRED PERCENT OF THE TIME if he cuts his penis and testicles off, he will NEVER make a child.

EVER.

How do you know that ten years later he won't want one - or three?

How many children do you know who were utterly certain of something at age 10 or 15 and ten years later still were of the precise same opinion?  How many kids go to college and change majors?  How many people get married and then divorce?  How many marry and stay with for life their first boyfriend or girlfriend?  I have known hundreds of kids both in my own youth and as an adult and every single one of them changed their mind between the age of 10 and somewhere in adulthood on something of serious importance in their life.

Who in their right mind pushes a speculative thing at the cost of an absolutely biologically certain one in a population that has a ONE HUNDRED PERCENT probability that one or more seriously-held positions by that individual will change over time?

How about the "need" for a two-income home to be able to afford to live?  What happens if you have a kid and then one of you loses your job?  Can you really have it all?  No, but you can live on the edge of disaster all the time and guess who advanced THAT shit in American Society?  Obama, Biden and HARRIS.  Think not?  How does your grocery bill, rent and car insurance over the last three and a half years compare with the raises you've received?

The entire budget deficit and thus the inflation in the economy is all, right now, in CMS.  That's Medicare and Medicaid.  Obamacare was an attempt to bail out the medical system on your back and you bought it.  So a drug-addled individual shooting up heroin could have "free" medical care you got screwed with a 500% cost increase for shittier coverage and don't tell me you didn't because I used to buy it both for my employees and then when I sold the company I had to buy it personally for myself and my daughter when she was a child.  Let me put HARD NUMBERS to this for you: There was not a single college-age adult working for my firm that had a rated cost (yes, every single person was individually rated) over $100/month, most were well below that, and it was pretty darn good health insurance.  That wasn't the employee's cost, it was THE TOTAL COST and I know what it was for every individual employee because I wrote the checks.   Go find and ask one of the people who worked for me what the payroll deduction was for individual health insurance -- it was $15/pay period. Why?  Because ERISA mandates I cannot take more than half nor can I discriminate and deduct different amounts per-person or I lose above the line tax deductibility so there is your proof right on the check stub; most of those young people's all-in cost was under $75/mo.  In exchange for being "compassionate", which you were sold, the price you pay quadrupled, the coverage went to shit with most plans now requiring a several thousand dollar a year deductible and at the same time we added 20 million illegal immigrants that are also have THEIR medical costs in your bill because they pay ZERO.  What's worse is that what you got was more grift and scam -- not better health.  Look at the size of Americans over the last 25 years and tell me it got better!  It has gotten much worse!

The same thing happened after Obama federalized all student loans.  College costs skyrocketed in the 15 years since continuing the pattern of the previous two decades and now Harris' plan is not to punish the colleges who sold your kid a worthless degree for $200,000, an act of abject fraud, but to try to shove the cost up your ass as a taxpayer.  This, if she was to succeed (the USSC has blocked it but Harris and Biden have ignored the decision) would simply make college even more expensive since they would still have zero accountability for screwing your kid.

Why do you think all those colleges and professors endorse Harris when she is all-in on them being able to continue to rape your wallet AND THAT OF YOUR CHILDREN?

How about the unbridled fear being run about throwing out all the illegal aliens and dispatching all the government waste, which is likely at least a third and maybe half or more of all government spending and jobs?

Well, do you like higher prices or lower prices?  Do you want to be able to afford a house and are you a citizen?  Do you like higher or lower grocery bills, car prices and everything else?

Supply and demand is not a suggestion and every government dollar spent is in fact a tax whether its directly leveled on you or it is indirectly leveled through inflation when the government spends more than it taxes.  If you get rid of a large part of demand prices go down and not a little.  If you remove taxes by deleting government spending for which there is no benefit other than a government employee getting paid to do nothing of value then once again prices will go down -- and again, not a little.

Will doing that (presuming a candidate was to actually do it) result in a short-term dislocation in the economy?  Of course it will.  But the wild-eyed improvement and opportunity that will be created by doing so will also flood business back to the US where it formerly made sense to offshore and those lower costs across the board will very-rapidly result in a huge economic boom.  If you think not look at 1920/21 when all sorts of insane inefficient crap happened in the years right after the war and rather than bail anyone out or force taxpayers to eat it Coolidge and The Fed said "nuts!"  There was a huge economic dislocation but within 18 months all the lost jobs were regained and the largest economic growth EVER RECORDED in American history occurred.

Of course if you don't care about your kids or any future kids -- and you clearly don't if you intend to or already have voted for Harris -- then how about you?

The future has no kids except those born to people who can't think and don't care (thus will not be taxpayers on net), no tax base, no money and if the government keeps emitting credit in their vote-buying handout schemes to millions of illegal immigrants and their cronies in industry, particularly the health industry, inflation will destroy you and ruin the value of your assets, interest rates will skyrocket and there will be no health care available at all or anyone to wipe your ass since there will be no children and thus nobody to do it.

And let me be clear: There is no solution to the problem of falling child-bearing rates other than to change the incentives for higher-intelligence, more-discerning men and women.  That means we had better stop demonizing those in that category AND we had better, right now and permanently, restore merit-only consideration for all things, stop putting American citizens BEHIND others and stop forcing Americans to pay other people's bills -- including those who make poor personal decisions, and not on a political lark either -- as a durable, demonstrably and legally enforceable change in how we conduct not just business but government right here in the US.  That means dismantling ALL "DIE" policies nationally under pain of prosecution and imprisonment as the unlawful discrimination that it is right here, right now with ZERO exceptions whether in government or private industry.

Oh by the way if you think that's really not necessary how many kids were poisoned in Flint and what color were most of them?  Why weren't the lead water lines which had been there for a hundred years poisoning people until recently?  Simple: They're not unsafe if you have competent people running the water plant, and Flint did -- the people running it knew what would happen if they didn't do their jobs with competence, the city hired competent people and they lived there, so they'd be poisoning themselves.

Then the city decides to change their water supply but in the meantime has forced out or simply hired incompetent people to replace those who retired who did not have the intellectual chops to understand the requirements.  The system was made unsafe by stupidity; rather than keep and hire people who had the intellectual firepower to monitor and balance the water chemistry properly they hired people who couldn't and didn't.  The result was a bunch of black kids being poisoned.

If you think this is an isolated incident you're wrong.  Its everywhere and you need look no further than Western NC for a prime example.  This is also why health has gone completely to shit -- rather than hire people who have the intellectual chops and will report honestly on what is going on we instead hire people who care only about money and either don't understand or don't give a shit.  The result of all of this, economy-wide, is the slow destruction of standard of living along with radically higher costs that make having children and building families uneconomic and literally physically dangerous.

You cannot force people to build families, you can only incentivize them to do so.  You threaten to and do screw kids down the road because of their race or sex -- specifically because they're white, male or worse both -- and thinking adults will refuse to have children.

They are doing exactly that.

In test after test for the last 3-1/2 years Harris and Biden have gone even further and put non-citizens ahead of Americans.  They have done it repeatedly, maliciously and without a care in the world.  Tens of billions have been spent housing "migrants" who broke the law to enter the United States at $300+ a night while zero has been spent housing American citizens displaced by natural disasters.  Billions have gone to Ukraine and Israel while the people in NC who got trashed by a storm are left with literally nothing and in fact have been stonewalled in their attempts to merely survive and rebuild their lives.  Rather than send in the ACOE and Seabees to get roads and makeshift bridges back in place on an immediate basis so recovery supplies can reach these people coal miners from West Virginia showed up with their own equipment and fuel and did what the government said would take six months to a year in three days, several other groups of "hillbillies" with their own equipment took the wreckage and fashioned multiple makeshift but serviceable bridges so relief supplies can flow into the impacted areas and thousands of ordinary Americans in fact did and still are buying and delivering said supplies on their own despite the government actively discouraging and in a few cases attempting to prohibit same.  This is a continued pattern of deliberate "fuck you" toward Americans by Harris' administration and her personally while at the same time we are feeding supplies and money to a war their party was involved in starting all the way back to Maidan when Obama was in office along with millions of illegal aliens they have unlawfully allowed to enter and remain in the United States.

I don't know that Trump -- and perhaps Vance after him -- will fix any of this.  I remind you that he did promise to neuter the medical monster in the 2016 campaign, I didn't believe him, I said so before the election in my column and literally on election night all three platform planks in which he made said promises disappeared.  I watched it happen in a bar in Pensacola at an election night watch party with my laptop on the table.

To be crystal-clear: I do not like Trump, I wrote dozens of articles during the 2016 campaign and over his four years as President critical of him and his administration and I'm unconvinced on Vance.  Trump bears full responsibility (and he has refused to address or take responsibility for any of it) for the catastrophe of the first year of Covid and his bullshit literally killed people -- and a lot of them too, specifically with the bonus structure he put into CMS, ventilators and Remdesivir.  He also failed to prosecute any of the states that shoved sick older people with Covid into nursing homes and thus slaughtered the other old and frail residents in said places.  That absolutely was a federal offense on several levels including, because most of those people were on either Medicare or Medicaid, federal fraud in the context of those programs.  He had every ability to throw thousands of people in prison for that crap and didn't so much as lift a finger, never mind "Warp Speed" which we now know was a disastrously bad policy that Biden and Harris turned around and demanded you be needle-raped with after, during the 2020 campaign, stating they believed it was dogshit.

But what I do know is that Harris has vowed to make every bit of public health, energy stability, immigration, and the economy worse never mind deliberately fucking over Americans while providing "help" to illegals along with other nations and over the last 3-1/2 years along with Biden SHE'S DONE IT so its not empty rhetoric or a campaign slogan -- its a realized and clearly stated goal she has been executing on, WITH MALICE, for nearly four years already.  And Harris has presided over record deficits -- and climbing, along with record inefficiency; Harris and Biden did not send in the Seabees and ACOE after Helene to put up temporary bridges and roads into the trashed areas, claimed it would take until next spring or later to make progress and a bunch of hillbillies reconnected Bat Cave and Chimney Rock using their own equipment and fuel in three days.  You paid for ALL of FEMA, the Seabees and ACOE in the form of HIGHER PRICES for everything while a handful of unpaid hillbillies with their own gear got done in three days what the government didn't even try to begin and thus demonstrated conclusively that in this regard government wasted the money and didn't do the job.

If America votes to fuck itself by electing Harris do not complain for the next four years because all you will get from me is a middle finger in response since you will be receiving exactly what you voted for and the record is clear and on the table for anyone with a room-temperature IQ who cares to look.

If you argue that any non-Asian nation has some obligation to, or "should" reduce carbon emissions you are an agent of said Asian nations.

Why?

This is why:

The debate is over folks.

This isn't my data, its independently compiled.  It is fact.  No other nation is material to emissions expansion and none will be so long as Asia is four or more times, and expanding at a near-vertical rate, that of any other area.

In short any such claim is an attempt to cripple or even destroy the nation in question for the benefit of Asia.  This is the very definition of sedition or even treason, and it is time that we make clear that any and all who make such claims particularly from the media or political spheres will be punished in accordance with their attempt to destroy the nation their demands are aimed at.

Yes, they're entitled to a trial first, but if they in fact have attempted to do so in any way the only appropriate penalty for destroying a nation for the particularized benefit of another is execution in accordance with long-standing principles and laws governing those who would deliberately overthrow or destroy sovereign nations for the specific benefit of another.

The title pretty-much describes the functional reality of most of what's wrong in America today.

America is presumably a capitalist nation.  Capitalism is an economic system where buyers and sellers enter bids and offers for various goods and services and the laws of supply and demand tend to dictate where price, production, expansion and contraction fall.

Its not a perfect system; among other things its reactionary by nature, in that until demand shows up supply will not, and thus it is always "behind" if you will.  However, it has over time proved to be superior to any sort of central control.

There is a fly in the ointment: Humans are not necessarily good -- either all the time or even most humans some of the time.  In fact most humans will pick up a $20 bill that is sitting on the sidewalk and put it in their pocket after taking a quick look around to see if anyone will actually see them do it.  This, even if they have reason to believe it fell out of the guy's pocket 20' in front of them and for the majority even if they saw it fall out.

Now just because you took advantage of a situation doesn't make you a bad person.  If you in no way influenced the other person's bad decision or the outcome from it then to feast on it is perfectly fine both ethically and morally.  You owe that individual nothing and in fact it is precisely this that powers productivity and capitalism forward!

That is, if I can take advantage of some unrelated person's idiocy such that I can rent their office space for a tiny fraction of what they were paying because the owner has to fill it, the original lessee has no money and thus can't fulfil their contract and I have both money and need for the space there's nothing wrong with that.  I had no part of creating either party's unfortunate circumstance.

But now let's take a different scenario.

I'm a dude with political power.  I also own a bunch of rental properties.  This puts me in a position to influence policy in a manner that causes a supply/demand imbalance in the rental housing market.  Let's say that, for example, I arrange with the Federal government to "welcome" a few thousand "migrants" into my town, all of whom come with serious federal subsidies amounting to a couple of thousand dollars a month plus they have work permits.

Think about what happens here.  The local employer base can pay these people less because they have a $24,000 annual tax free subsidy that the Federal government "gives" them.  In truth they didn't give anyone anything -- they stole it from US Citizens since the government can't make money -- it can only transfer it from one person to another.  In addition the local residents do not qualify for that same $24,000 annual subsidy and thus the price of rent now increases dramatically because the supply of housing does not change much on a rapid basis but the demand does and the people that are presenting the new demand are obtaining, by force, the $24,000 from the rest of the US population.

As the landlord I'm happier than a pig in shit.  I can (and do) double or even triple the rent.  When the American citizens can't pay and the "migrants" can, guess who gets the apartment?  While my costs might go up a bit (more people, more wear, etc.) my profits skyrocket.

The problem is that I didn't honestly earn the money.  I deliberately put in motion a scheme where I indirectly stole tens of thousands of dollars per person, per year for each apartment through the tenants and ultimately from every US Citizen.  The harm to anyone citizen is diffuse but just as someone who skims ten cents each from 10 million account holders in a bank I still stole a million bucks.

Worse, the harm is not entirely diffuse.  The townsfolk who are displaced get the immediate negative impact of having their place to live ripped out from under them.  Given the further-depressed wage base in the local area which I created whether on purpose or simply as a reasonably foreseeable consequence of the policy I screwed them twice -- first by ripping their place to live out from under them by soliciting the subsidy and then again by destroying wages in the local area so they can't replace either their job or their apartment.

This isn't a "natural" capitalist circumstance and there is no creative destruction of someone who made a poor decision and as a result someone else who happens along gets to feast on the back of the voluntarily poor decision of the schlub who made it.

To some people these situations may look similar -- but they're not.

How about the medical field.  We now know that "big sugar" bribed medical researchers; they paid for work to target their desired results and there was no disclosure that they funded that work.  Now that would be bad enough but in fact it gets worse because if you can manage to convince people of something like this and it screws you then the business interests who make money because you're screwed love it -- so long as you don't blame them.

In other words in a capitalist system your incentive is to spend the least you can on medical care to obtain an acceptable result.  Your physician's and the local hospital's incentive is to get you to spend every available dollar to obtain an acceptable result, and if you run out of dollars then advocating for shifting some of that price onto other people by force (since they'd never do it voluntarily) is next.  There is no incentive in the medical system to promote anything that leads you to spend less or even better, nothing even if the result would be objectively superior!

The tension between buyer and seller is normal in a capitalist system however as soon as others are forced to pay the bill then your incentives are destroyed and the provider is enriched at the cost, forcibly extracted, of others.

The nuances of this are complicated but it all comes down to one thing: Capitalism isn't forcing others to pay someone else's bill; that's theft and since theft always involves involuntary taking no matter the actor involved it is supposed to be a crime.  Further, when such theft distorts the market then the people who are priced out of whatever it was by said theft are immediately and irreparably harmed.

How do we redress this?  Well, there are plenty of laws on the books (8 USC 1324 and 15 USC Ch 1) dealing with most of these practices but nobody has been criminally prosecuted and sent to prison for either of these offenses in decades despite there literally being too many instances of these acts on a daily basis to list.  They continue because nobody goes to jail; the richer you are (that is, the more you exploit people and rob them on an individual or collective basis) the more prison sucks compared to your daily lifestyle.  It thus is the ultimate progressive punishment; the homeless man doesn't think of prison as all that bad compared to the alternative while Jeff Bezos, a Mayor or Governor would find it an extraordinarily bad thing.

That's how it should be.

But financial punishment is not enough when the harm is irreparable.  Money damages do not bring back dead people or restore a destroyed life.  Time can never be recovered and thus there are crimes for which the only reasonable punishment is execution.  This set of offenses, in size, is of that kind and character and incidentally this behavior by American government and business interests is, when you boil it all down, in fact identical in form and fashion to slavery which we allegedly banned by Constitutional Amendment.

I have to give him this: He's consistent.

With only three months until the election, the Biden administration is attempting to score political points by launching a proceeding to loosen federal restrictions on marijuana. Unable to satisfy either the legal or scientific standards for making this change, the Biden-Harris administration is engaging in a cynical shell game, rewriting the rules and ignoring the science to achieve its partisan objective.  

Oh, false.

First, Marijuana never met the standard for Schedule I -- no medical use and high potential for dependence and abuse.

The former is false; marijuana has had a hundreds of year history of medical use in various forms.  The FDA and DEA continue to claim that there's no "accepted medical use" but the FDA also will not permit formal testing and no company will pay for the extreme levels of security and such required to do it because there's no way to make a patented profit off it.

Barr's argument is that despite over a hundred years of known, documented use in the United States "weed today is different because people make it stronger."

So let me see if I get this right: I should be able to buy beer provided it is no more than 5% ABV.  I should not be able to buy whiskey, because it is typically eight times as strong as beer -- never mind that this also means that a typical user might pour himself two fingers of same over stones (or rocks) and thus drink 1/8th the amount.  Oh, and the four high-grav IPAs in my fridge right now should be a felony offense?

Could I take a "modern" joint of 30-50% THC and smoke the whole thing instead of taking a single puff?  Certainly, but I could also take the entire bottle of whiskey and chug it, and if I did that it would probably end very badly for me due to vomiting, alcohol poisoning and possibly death!

This is plainly fallacious. In the U.S., the availability of drugs for medical use is not based on their political popularity but only on the FDA’s decision, based on rigorous scientific study, that the drug is safe, effective and uniformly made. The FDA has still not found an acceptable medical use for marijuana.

The FDA found that Covid shots were "safe and effective"; we can argue over safety but not effectiveness as their claim was formally, as Biden said, if you take this shot you won't get Covid.  Not only did the FDA say this so did the manufacturers in public statements.  Those statements were categorically false: Biden took the shots and went on to get Covid more than once, thereby falsifying his own claim.  So did myriad others in the Administration and advisory roles, including Fauci himself. 

On the other hand people like myself who refused that false claim (and thus also avoided the risk since it is now known there's also unsafe, exactly as I expected and warned about since there was 10+ years of data on that technology and it had never once passed safety review and thus never was formally trialed for effectiveness against anything else) only got covid once.

This comes at a time when cartels and transnational criminal organizations with connections to Mexico and China have expanded their operation of marijuana cultivation and distribution inside the United States.  

This has nothing do with legal marijuana cultivation, processing, sale and consumption.  I fully support finding and prosecuting every single illegal grow and everyone connected with it to the fullest extent of the law, including hammering said persons with selling knowingly-mislabeled or adulterated drugs which, under existing law, is a very-serious federal offense.

This, incidentally, is the entire point of legal distribution: Enforcement of labeling and purity requirements along with attempting to limit sales to and use by minors.  There is absolutely no way to do this with illegal drugs and that is a huge problem -- a significant percentage of those poisoned by fentanyl did not intend to buy or use an opiate yet they bought adulterated drugs on the street and thus were, from a legal point of view, poisoned.

Existing federal authority allows for 20 years in the slammer for adulterated drugs (21 USC Sec 333) so for those products that have an active ingredient other than listed, or which have other substances in them which have a reasonable probability of causing serious adverse consequences or death to humans or animals there is already an existing remedy under Federal Law.

So which world would you rather live in?

One where we throw in jail all the counterfeit and illegal producers and generate tax revenue from the legal, tested and thus reasonably-assured "as labeled" producers and outlets or street dealers who sell whatever, from wherever, adulterated with whatever might be in there whether they know it or not?

Bill Barr's position is that "well if you use illegal drugs you deserve to die!"

I find that position not only reprehensible but criminally corrupt besides, particularly given the proved corruption within our FDA which has been on full public display over the last four years (and much longer, if you bother to look or care) and would like to see that rat bastard rot in prison -- or worse.

..... the average jackass who turns his phone OFF and maintains absolute silence with regard to what he or she is doing, where they're going and what they're after may well get caught but they will also almost-certainly succeed.

How do I know this?

Because of the fact that we can't even run an oiler to make sure our Naval vessels have fuel for their planes and choppers without the asshole at the helm running it hard aground and worse the command structure above said captain has only one such vessel in the area so there is no redundancy AND someone on that ship (a crew member, obviously) videoed the damage with a cellphone and uploaded it to social media so every douche-nozzle in the world that might want to shoot at us knows its literal open season on said fleet as at present we can't refuel!

In other words the supposedly best of the best in the area of fighting forces can't manage to operate a ship, can't provide redundancy if the one ship that is utterly critical to a part of any necessary mission gets damaged and if that wasn't bad enough they can't even keep the details of the damage, which make clear the vessel is inoperative at the present time, away from public -- and our enemy's -- eyes.

Any such enemy might reasonably conclude we're no better than that when it comes to operating anything else.  Like, for instance, the defensive and offensive weapons on said ships and aircraft.

Oh by the way right here in the last couple months we have had one jackass who managed to get shots off at a Presidential candidate and killed people in the crowd (nearly succeeding in their primary goal) and a second who managed to scout out a golf course and lay in wait for nearly a full day without detection -- and only by dumb luck was he stupid enough to expose his rifle barrel where it could be seen before he used it (and thus got caught.)  Oh and this second guy has been arrested for felonies more times than most shoplifters stole a ham sandwich but not once has he gone to prison for any of it and he was apparently soliciting people to go "fight" in YoooooKRRRRANE.  Where did he get the money to do all that shit with no visible means of support and how the hell did he stay out of prison all these years?

We additionally have a crap-ton of fighting age single men being imported into this country from other nations by our own government and they're not only allowed to stay they're showered with public money stolen from you and I at literal gunpoint.  This, we're told, is "compassionate" when the evidence is that they're a bunch of thugs or even worse, might be organized and thus an effective militia and, if and when the time comes we don't even have the competence and willingness to go hunt those fuckers down and make them assume room temperature never mind the stupidity (or is it malice by Biden and Harris specifically?) of letting them into the country in the first place.

Then we have so-called "infrastructure" that is single-point failure prone in multiple places, including the entire communications network in Asheville and the surrounding area.  Never mind intentionally building high-value and even necessary things on a floodplain which has its name for what should be an obvious reason to someone with more than two IQ points.  Incidentally FEMA publishes maps of said places and yes, those flooded areas in Asheville are in them.  "But muh property tax revenue!" says the all-woman, no-brains city council.  Why how not-diverse you are and clearly, what also wasn't in evidence is any hint of competence when it comes to infrastructure resilience.  No, you can't prevent floods but you can build things that aren't 100% chucklefucked and have some measure of redundancy. Clearly, they didn't.

Oh, you want to see the world burn?  Well you just might -- right here, in your town -- and you should have no illusion that the local cops, national guard or even the military are competent to deal with it anywhere, whether here at home or halfway around the world.

What is in evidence at this point is that the only important thing is that your hair, pronouns or whatever you have between your legs is "correct" by some "diversity" mandate -- competence is simply not part of the agenda or requirements anywhere from school teachers to college admission and degrees, the allegedly "best" police force in the world (the Secret Service) AND EVEN ship's captains in the fucking US Navy.  All of it today -- every single bit of it from medicine to the military -- appears to be nothing more than a giant grift for Lockheed-Martin, BAE Systems, your local hospital administrator and corporate bullshitter with an appropriate percentage kicked back to a Congresscritter's or Administration FAMILY MEMBERS AND POLITICAL FRIENDS.

This is quite-literally how Rome burned and if we don't cut all of that crap out right now so will we.