Rubber Tire Buggy
Rubber Tire Buggy
A murder ballad in the age of See No Evil.
Author’s Note:
The ongoing situation in Appalachia remains equal parts infuriating and inspiring. Both good and bad news keeps leaking out, typically from direct sources and independent journalists on the ground. The good news mostly arrives in the form of local and private rescue and repair operations, the bad in the form of ongoing state and federal hindrance of the same. But due to the destruction of so much technical and transportation infrastructure — and an obsequious or self-imposed blackout of the corporate press — the fog of war remains especially dense throughout the most affected counties and towns.
Still, we don’t need to squint hard to see enemy shapes bobbing around in that fog. Our countrymen are under attack by a bunch of pencil pushing psychopathic bureaucrats. That’s a big mistake, because the folks they’re attacking have a long history of fighting back. Hard.
We should help them. Not necessarily to fight: like I said, these people are perfectly capable of doing that on their own.
What we can do is shoe their army, keep its soldiers flush with ammo and rations, and make them whole when the fight is done. Better us than a government that hates them.
So, I’ll direct you again to the list of private charities and rescue organizations compiled by Starr of Appalachia here. The Federal Leviathan can drag its high heels and tentacles all it wants. It has made a critical error in awakening such a strong and ferocious people. Accomplices in those crimes may live to regret it.
Meanwhile, I've realized that I’m pretty useless in fights like this one. I don’t know how to fly a helicopter, for instance, or drive a forklift, or any number of skills that might assist these rescue operations directly. The best I can manage at the moment is to float a few petrobucks their way, before their fictional value goes up in smoke.
I can also offer some thoughts on why and how slaughters like these are taking place with such frequency and intensity in recent years. These thoughts and research took me a lot of time to compile, so some of the information below may be out of date.
But what’s clear to me is this: there’s a monster roving through this particular fog of war. One that swallows whole peoples, and converts ruins to profits in its slimy guts.
The sooner we hunt it down and slay it, the better.
The “Conspiracy” Circuit
By now, you’re probably familiar with the following cycle.
This cycle is never clearer than when Something Happens. That was the case when Joe Biden’s neural-net shit the bed on live TV, and all the usual suspects were overnighted a brand new script. Up was down, black was white. We weren’t at war with Eastasia anymore. Today it was our enduring friend and ally. Tomorrow, it will be wiped off the map, never having existed at all.
Simultaneously, the party’s mindkilled hoi polloi were somehow beamed a mass memory-rewriting instruction across the ether. They never said Biden wasn’t senile. You’re making that up! Also, Trump is still more senile than Biden (not to mention Super Duper Hitler), so it’s a wash, at best. Via this magical anti-detective work, the world still makes the same sense as before, even though key facts of the case have flipped entirely backwards.
It’s a neat trick. Especially since it’s one that can be apparently played over and over, with no flash of the cards for the rubes in the crowd. It was the same when Biden was replaced in a palace coup by Harris, the mechanics of which were eerily similar to the Sanders-Clinton intrigues at the 2016 convention. But nothing is ever looked askance at by the anti-detective, because nothing’s ever amiss. Everything is under control.
But at least with the palace intrigue version of the trick, we could claim it’s just part of the larger magic show of politics. At least nobody got hurt, right? And even if someone did, that just leads to another wild-eyed conspiracy theory which is nevertheless doomed to follow a certain pattern.
The theory begins as the pure delusion of cranks and the mentally unhinged, tinfoil-hat territory. After a number of years or decades, there may be rumblings from within certain corners of an institution, which will promptly be marginalized and contained by interested parties. One fine morning, via mechanisms obscured to the public, the claim is suddenly “discovered” to contain some validity after all — though it still isn’t as quite as bad as those kooks claimed it was, and it was the product of honest mistakes instead of profitable malice. You’ll then see a string of sneaky diversions and limited hangouts unspool from authorized media venues. They will formally open the doors to a discussion of the theory’s merits, while typically dangling the full version just slightly out of frame.
At this stage, something interesting begins to happen. You might spot a few of the claim’s former “debunkers” offering tepid walkbacks, or even pseudo-admissions of error, in the hopes of salvaging some credibility moving forward. Sometimes these admissions are unintentionally hilarious.
(excepts from “Granite Geek: I have long dismissed opponents of public water fluoridation but maybe I went too far”, published in the “Pulitzer Prize winning” Concord Monitor).
I have been so adamant partly because anti-fluoride arguments reek of the flawed thinking I hear from anti-vaccine cranks and their COVID-conspiracy brethren. Start with “the government can’t tell me what to do,” add in cherry-picked data pushed by attention-seeking blowhards, top off with suspicion about “chemicals” and voila! you’ve got endless attempts to block something that is a benefit to humanity.
But a couple of events in recent weeks have raised questions about my self-righteous certainty.
David “Granite Geek” Brooks goes on to cite the relevant details of the negative health effects of fluoridated water, framed as though they were only recently discovered, and not the product of a multi-decadal uphill struggle against powerful institutional interests (which he joined in the lazy dismissal of all critics as crazy and/or evil).
He closes with one of the most limited hangouts ever devised, wearing a cheap Halloween costume of grace (emphasis mine).
“We’ll continue to follow the science,” said Michael Auerbach, executive director of the state dental society.
As for me, I’m still a fluoridation fan but with less certainty than before.
I’m also embarrassed that my past certainty turned into a snooty, holier-than-thou attitude. This attitude isn’t just annoying but can cut off debate: If you’re a “crank” then I don’t need to listen to you.
That position is understandable when dealing with extremes like people who talk about chemtrails in the sky or think that medical masks don’t reduce disease transmission and must be banned. The craziness brought out by COVID, fueled by Trump’s erratic and irrational statements, makes it hard not to dismiss any opposition to established medical practices. Otherwise you’ll spend your life trying to stop out BS, which takes 10 times as much effort as generating nonsense in the first place.
But I’ve come to realize that fluoridation is a case where my devotion to rational argument spilled over into smugness.
In other words, maybe I was the crank. Boy, that’s a disturbing thought.
I doubt it disturbs him anywhere near as much as it should. Note how the herd of surviving sacred cows are dogmatically marched out. Brooks was — maybe, possibly, a teensy bit — wrong about the health hazards of fluoridated drinking water, sure. But his faith in the overall narrative remains granite-hard. He is still ready, willing and able to sling out casual smears about a wide range of subjects — at least until those calves are put to the sword.
And round and round we go.
If you have tracked similar claims through their full life cycle (e.g. The USS Liberty, Hussein’s “weapons of mass destruction”; Snowden’s PRISM leak; Hunter Biden’s laptop; the January 6th “insurrection”, Joe Biden’s compos mentis; “safe and effective” mRNA vaccines, etc.), you already know where this train’s headed. If you look carefully, you can even pin down which stage in the cycle a particular claim has reached, such as the effectiveness of masks versus airborne respiratory viruses.
Eventually, once a safe distance has been established, the “conspiracy theory” becomes a dry, uncontroversial fact. Thankfully, the goalposts were quietly moved again in the background, such that those who were correct are still called loons, and those who flunked or lied are still deemed experts.
In other words, Mr. Jones, you may indeed have been proved correct that “they’re turning the fucking frogs gay.” But rest assured you’re still 100% wrong about literally everything else that’s happening, right here and now.
There is never any fire in the moment, no matter how much smoke. And you better not shout fire in Uncle Sam’s crowded theater of war, if you know what’s good for you.
Except sometimes there really is a fire. Or a flood, or some other humanitarian disaster that barges its way into the news cycle.
During these events, key data such as loss of life, destruction of property, ecological damage, and economic ruin often remain largely undisputed in the moment. The argument instead moves into the realm of cause and motive.
In these cases, the part of “conspiracy loon” is played by those who look at the bigger picture of incentives in play, and ask simple questions about suspicious decisions and behaviors that appeared to worsen the result. The part of the expert is either played by the usual “unnamed (insert agency) sources”, or by private actors looking to boost their profile and influence amongst the regime faithful.
That was the dynamic when Something Happened in Lahaina. In Canada. In East Palestine. In Baltimore. It’s still the case in my own town, with its ongoing demolition by toxic empathizers and kangaroo courts. It’s the case in Beirut, where apparently all has truly become fair in love and war, and in Kiev1, where ex-comedians and oligarchs are funneled hundred of billions in federal reserve notes to fuel the human meatgrinders. Each of these events comes packaged with obvious knock-on effects that are beneficial to one or more of military contractors, central banks, multinational corporations, private equity firms, and the political institutions that legitimize them.
Coincidentally, of course.
But what does “coincidence” mean? I’ve noticed that when most people use the c-word, it’s typically as a thought-terminating escape hatch. It means we don’t need to look any further past, or deeper into, the set of official data we are fed, because any and all connections we may find there are presumed to be the product of pure chance. It becomes like a perverse extrapolation of “innocent until proven guilty” into the world of investigative journalism; all potentially incriminating facts are totally unrelated by default, no matter how conveniently they align with powerful incentives.
The investigator must move Heaven and Earth to prove otherwise. It’s not enough to find a smoking gun. We must find it in their hands, at the moment the shot is fired. And sometimes even that isn’t enough. Just ask Alec Baldwin. Or Alejandro Mayorkas.
Meanwhile,
explains the definition of coincidence, stripped of all courtroom drama:The picture of the blackout [with the lighted Sacré-Cœur Basilica] heads today’s post. These two events form a coincidence. A co-incident. Two, or more, incidents occurring together near in time, where “near” is judged relative to the circumstances.
Two or more incidents occurring near in time are not by themselves interesting. After all, as you read these words, right now, there are innumerable incidents happening in world, and outside the world. So many that no man could count them all. This is true now, and will always be true.
Recognizing this, there are two main meanings of coincidence, and they are mirrors of each other. The first is co-incidents matched with a causal connection. The second, which predominates, features the same co-incidents but where there is no causal connection, and where some might falsely think there is. This dismisses from consideration the infinite number co-incidents that assail us, and focuses on those which appear to have, or are wrongly thought to have, some causal tie.
So when most people describe two or more incidents as being “coincidental”, the unconfessed admission is that a causal connection is at least plausible, even if they reject the connection as false. Yes, they can see that the cloud looks like a dragon. It also kind of looks like a goose, and a milkmaid, but — when all is said and done — it’s just a cloud. The only way it could possibly be a dragon is if it suddenly started bathing us in flames. At which point, it would be too late to prevent tragedy; our granite-hard incredulity will have doomed us.
But there’s a flip side to that coin.
To point out dragons requires a profound sense of responsibility, which is all too often taken lightly. Dragon-spotting has transformed from a cottage industry to something like a retail market for (virtual) commodities. There’s a growing demand for newer and more terrifying dragons to fear and loathe, and a growing number of shopkeepers who will gladly supply them. The problem is that most dragons aren’t real, or aren’t what they seem to be. So we must be careful in our investigations.
With that in mind, let’s talk about what’s happening in Appalachia. Carefully.
A Tale of Two Storms
In late August of 2005, Hurricane Katrina descended on the Gulf Coast. Both the storm itself and its aftermath caused a horrific loss of life, as well as more than a hundred billion dollars of damage to property and infrastructure.
The state of Louisiana and the city of New Orleans were hit hardest in terms of raw numbers, and their officials took some criticism for poor preparation, incompetent crisis management and substandard levee construction/maintenance.2 But the federal relief effort in Katrina’s wake was the most memorable and controversial aspect of the event; not only the images of suffering and death, but the increasingly outraged accusations being flung around.
Most of these were centered on FEMA’s response, which was deemed late, inadequate, and criminally incompetent by the liberal media. But some reporters and celebrity gadflies went even further in their criticism, invoking the specter of a callous — and perhaps actively murderous — form of racism at play.
Aside from the sturm and drang of racial grievances, others wondered whether FEMA’s lame response was part of a lengthier gentrification/urban renewal plot. When we look at demographic shift in the two decades since Katrina, it seems to provide us with a co-incident to ponder. Some critics will cite a pre-storm low-income housing shortage as a causal trend that Katrina merely accelerated. But that trend doesn’t eliminate the case for incentivized FEMA failures. If we followed the money, it may be in fact bolster it.
I am hearing echoes of Katrina in Helene. Not in the corporate media’s coverage of its gruesome aftermath, to the extent that exists at all.
Meanwhile, there’s no been complementary echo of Kanye’s Katrina quip, and one will not be forthcoming from today’s version of the Left. That seems absurd on its face, given the similarities between the victims of Helene to those of Katrina.
Indeed, Appalachia has long been the most poverty-stricken region in the U.S., making her residents weak to the kind of predation that can only be accomplished by government officials, large corporations, banks, equity predators, and the vast armies of lawyers and pencil-pushers that support them. Yet Appalachian men also disproportionately enlist in the military and fight our wars. They minmax reward and sacrifice, more than any other American demographic.
Given these plain facts, you’d think the Left would flock to their side in a crisis. And, once upon a time, they might have. But not anymore. In the face of all that tragedy and ruin, today’s Laptop Leftists and Snot Mongers are more likely to recite dogma from their new secular State Religion (“Climate Change”, “white supremacy” and “decolonization” being among the most common liturgies, but that well of slaugh-ghairms runs ever deeper, darker and uglier).
So what happened, between Katrina and Helene? What changed?
We all know what changed.
Some on our side will claim there never really was a “Left” as popularly imagined, and that all their showy egalitarianism was never more than a convenient mask for plain old power lust. If any of them cared about The Little Guy™ it was only insomuch as his little ass could be rallied to fill the slot marked “D” on the ballot box, with the minimum investment of time, money and effort required to keep them on the plantation.
As Lyndon Johnson almost certainly once quipped of the Civil Rights Amendment, “I’ll have those niggers voting Democratic for two-hundred years.” The same strategy was applied to the hillbillies with Johnson’s Appalachian Regional Development Act of 1965. And although no equivalent quip has been unearthed, the notion that Johnson had any more affection for those mountain men — or for any human being not named “Lyndon Johnson” — strikes me as a prey response to camouflaged predators.
Johnson was also (perhaps charitably3) quoted as saying the following:
“These Negroes, they’re getting pretty uppity these days and that’s a problem for us since they’ve got something now they never had before, the political pull to back up their uppityness. Now we’ve got to do something about this, we’ve got to give them a little something, just enough to quiet them down, not enough to make a difference.”
— Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream (Goodwin, 1991)
“Just a little something” doesn’t hardly describe the impoverished living conditions through large swathes of Appalachia, which rival those in what most people would call the Third World. The “little something” is enough to survive, maybe, but never to thrive, and thereby potentially upset the power dynamic. This approach is far from novel. It’s a stick disguised as a very thin, slightly rotten carrot.
What happens if your brand loyalty at the ballot box ever wavered? What if you suddenly started to vote the other way? Or to logjam all the wonderful “progress” those major corporations and equity partners have in store for your ancestral homeland, by demanding a bigger slice of that pie? What if you got “uppidity” and forgot your place?
Well then maybe you’ll lose even those crumbs and other little-somethings they so generously allotted you. Or maybe an even bigger stick awaits all you niggers and crackers, if you ever step too far out of line.
This is the point in a lengthy article where I will usually rattle my cup and beg for support. Instead, I will ask my readers to consider donating to one or more of the following organizations. I expect you’ll all do your due diligence in advance of sending money.
Beacon of Hope: Serving Madison County, NC with food distribution and other assistance.
Helping Asheville Area Farmers to recover from the hurricane (a crowdfund campaign by local farmers).
Grassroots Aid Partnership: a locally-based (western NC and eastern TN) disaster relief organization.
Operation Airdrop: mobilizes volunteer pilots and a diverse fleet of aircraft to deliver essential supplies to areas cut off from traditional aid routes.
828strong: A local church’s relief effort, focused on getting food, water, and critical supplies to worst-affected areas.
Mercy Chefs: A faith-based organization providing restaurant-quality prepared meals to hungry and food-insecure people in the disaster area.
Beloved Asheville: Supplying food and other assistance in the wake of the disaster.
Cajun Navy: Organizes search-and-rescue operations and provides relief services in areas affected by natural disaster.
Carolina Emergency Response Team: Assists first responders and citizens during natural disasters through providing life saving assets and man power when assets and man power are stretched thin.
I’m sure there are a lot more out there. If you know of any good ones, please add it to the comments. An army marches on its belly, so let’s keep them fed.
The Case for LIHOP
Eyewitnesses and independent journalists have already contributed a great deal of evidence that something very strange — and possibly very sinister — is happening in the Appalachian flood zone.
Since day one of the recovery effort, reports have been streaming in with regards to grounded rescue vehicles, seized humanitarian shipments, arrest threats for non-governmental aid workers, official claims of insufficient emergency funds, and a general atmosphere of obstruction and quiescence on the part of those federal agencies and appointees tasked with handling national disaster zones.
Some of these reports contain an element of dark comedy, like shipments of electric chainsaws sent to towns without power. Others are just dark as Hell, like desperate pleas not for rations or medical supplies, but for corpse recovery and storage.
If you investigate these and other claims via Google-Fu, you will be bombarded with articles screaming “disinformation” at the top of their lungs. In every case, the “debunking” is a matter of a government official disputing the claim. “We asked Ted Bundy if he killed that woman, and he said no. Claim debunked!” Or more aptly, Power couldn’t possibly be lying, because Power told me so. The insanity is almost palpable. It’s hard to believe a human being would waste an instant of his life typing this stuff (and, if dead internet theory proves accurate, it’s possible they aren’t).
As for the rest of us citizen journalists, we must rake through the muck.
recently wrote a piece that included an assortment of the early ground evidence, with regards to the federal government’s catastrophically underwhelming and incompetent response.It isn’t only civilian helicopters being grounded: Pete Buttigieg has told people to keep their drones out of the air, too, ostensibly to prevent them from interfering with relief missions. It’s true that the last thing a helicopter pilot wants is to run into someone’s quadrotor drone, but people have also speculated that this is because the Feds don’t want people seeing their (lack of) action.
There are multiple reports of FEMA or other government agencies confiscating supplies, blocking volunteers, telling volunteers to stand down, and refusing to accept material assistance:
While FEMA itself is apparently nowhere to be seen:
But, hey: at least the lights are still on in Kiev. That will make it much easier for Russian troops to add her residents to the mass sacrificial pyre later this year (which for some reason the USG spent nearly $200 billion dollars building).
These claims are still streaming in, and with a raft of audiovisual evidence to corroborate them. All of these co-incidents are piling up, in other words. Their appearance in such close proximity demands that we at least pose the question of stupidity versus malice. And by “we”, I mean anyone who has been paying the least bit of attention to the events of recent years, and who has not been so utterly mindkilled by their political allegiance that this strikes them as a reasonable performance evaluation:
The above items aren’t intended to be comprehensive. There have been many more reports since, and, not being a paid journalist, I can’t keep track of them all let alone investigate each claim in depth. The signals are swimming in a sea of noise, as usual, so I take for granted that some claims simply aren’t true. But the general case against the federal response that’s emerging might be summarized as follows:
Non-deployment, delayed deployment and under-utilization of resources. Both military and non-military rescue vehicles inexplicably grounded, withheld or thinly/sporadically deployed to nearby disaster zones. Areas in the most need of rescue efforts are being drastically underserved.
Hostility towards and/or active opposition to private assistance efforts. Threats of arrest made against non-governmental rescue and relief operations. Seizure of private humanitarian aid shipments. Obstruction of private access to hard-hit areas requesting assistance. Demands that all donations flow through official relief agencies and vendors.
Perverse funding priorities and accounting discrepancies. Resources that were earmarked for disaster relief have been quietly steered towards other activities, including funding for programs to house non-citizens (e.g. FEMA’s 2024 Shelter and Services Program). FEMA’s declarations of budgeting for natural disasters are in dispute. Direct financial relief to flood victims is providing little assistance and is limited in scope to politically convenient demographics and populations. Public misrepresentation of available disaster relief funds.
Significant underreporting of casualties. The number of confirmed deaths is very low compared to eyewitness reports. While underreporting could very well be a benign artifact of the generally confusing aftermath of disasters, intentional lowball figures could suppress donations. Underreporting could also be used to deflate public interest in the story, leading to less demand for oversight and accountability.
There is more I could mention, such as the suspiciously defensive output of FEMA, the White House and other executive officials and agencies involved.
provides a good overview of these bizarre reactions and pressers here, in which the primary concern of the federal government appears to be — you guessed it — “misinformation” and reputational damage control, rather than the crisis itself. A taste:In the opening moments of the disaster in North Carolina, the Secretary of Homeland Security took his security detail and went clothes shopping. This is….
Yeah, I give up. Their instinctive response to a wave of dead Americans was to tone-police about rhetoric. Literal sociopathy, total failure of basic human understanding.
The constantly recited disinformation theme is itself a sign of pathological institutions, coding the completely ordinary process of discussion as a problem that needs to be repressed. What I’m seeing — tell me if it’s what you’re seeing, because maybe I’m wrong — is a widespread collapse of basic behavioral norms, starting with the foundational concept in emergency work that it’s not about you. Yes, people are upset, and the discourse around a disaster tends to be disordered. Shut up and work on organizing the trucks and helicopters.
Given this emerging picture, one doesn’t need to be a “conspiracy theorist” to pose the question of “stupid or evil?”
It’s not merely the government’s response that’s been highly questionable. “Stupid or evil?” also extends to the curiously slight and ever-thinning media coverage of the disaster, as well as the priorities of those progressive news editors and tech firms that elevate and rank that coverage.
For example, here are Google’s top ranked “News” tab results for “north carolina hurricane victims” on October 11, 2024. Note not only the content, but the dates and times of these posts.
The timeliness of the articles drops to “1 week ago” after the fourth result. The first of those aging reports is an AP wire report filed on 9/30/2024 titled “Supplies arrive by plane and by mule in North Carolina as Helene’s death toll tops 130” So even “1 week ago” was a bit of a stretch. It’s almost as if no one in the regime-approved and Google-promoted media cares about what’s going on in North Carolina. At least, not in terms of the humanitarian crisis.
But a quartz mine back in business?
Well, that article makes top billing, obviously. It even outranks the NYT’s latest soliloquy on “misinformation” (and we all know how much Google loves those). But the algorithm has spoken: the quartz industry emerges as the top “hurricane victim” of North Carolina.
Sibelco and The Quartz Corp. shut down operations ahead of the arrival of Helene, which devastated Spruce Pine and surrounding Mitchell County. Following the storm, both companies said that all of their employees were accounted for and safe.
The Quartz Corp. had said last week that it was too early to know when it would resume operations, adding it would depend on the rebuilding of local infrastructure.
Spruce Pine quartz is used around the world to manufacture the equipment needed to make silicon chips. An estimated 70% to 90% of the crucibles used worldwide in which polysilicon used for the chips is melted down are made from Spruce Pine quartz, according to Vince Beiser, the author of "The World in a Grain."
The high-tech quartz is also used in manufacturing solar panels and fiber-optic cables.
Quartz isn’t the only lucrative deposit located inside the flood zone — arguably, it isn’t even the most valuable one, depending on how you measure it. But the fact is that any damage done to that industry would have repercussions which far exceed the local, state, or even national economy.
If you’re curious about the quartz industry’s political alignment and policy preferences, you could go straight to the PR source. But, knowing my readers, you could probably get there on logic alone.
Here’s a hint: they are in the “green” business.
And, cousin, business is a-boomin’.
The World According to Dragons
A quick confession:
Sometimes when I sit down to write, I imagine I am writing for a progressive liberal audience. For instance, when I wrote about immigration early in the year, it was with some blurry hope that I could reach a reader on the political left, who nevertheless harbored some suspicions that something’s rotten in Denmark.
I realize this probably isn’t the case, that I’m mostly just preaching to a choir. But in the case of Appalachia, I believe it still may possible to “break on through to the other side,” as Morrison put it, if only to whichever old school, anti-corporate lefties have survived the Woke Left’s purges. My reasoning is that I’d rather make friends of those people than enemies, even if we continue to disagree about many important things. The reason this group seems like it may still be reachable is that, despite their unworkable remedies, the notion of a malicious government in cahoots with big business is well within their wheelhouse.
So what say you, my imaginary liberal friend?
Is the federal response to Helene incompetence or malice?
We could easily say “both” and not be wrong. But the real question is whether malice is in the driver’s seat in Appalachia, or merely riding shotgun. If it’s the latter, we can chalk up most of the suspicious nodes (e.g. seized supply shipments, electric chainsaws) to smaller, nested players swinging side-deals in the chaos. Looters with badges, essentially. If it’s the former, that means we might be dealing with a dragon after all.
But a dragon isn’t like a normal animal. Its motivations and goals aren’t just geared towards short-term survival, for example. Nor is it solely animated by evil intent: individual organs may delight in widespread murder and suffering in the moment, and other outcomes that feed sadistic appetites, but these evil delights are often secondary to cause, the bloody cherries on top.
What primarily motivates dragons is the acquisition of treasure to stack into their hoards. The whole of the beast therefore doesn’t move unless gold is on the menu, even if that meal won’t be served for years or decades to come. Dragons therefore also pass the marshmallow test with flying colors. They can be patient where profit is concerned. In their egregious, institutionalized forms — government contractors and agencies, multinational funds and corporations, money laundering charities and NGOs, etc. — the dragon detects gold in places that others can’t or won’t.
I’m guessing most of you dragon-spotters out there are already savvy to what they’re smelling in the Appalachian mountains. For the rest, I’ve included a short list of incentives on the table.
First, here are some maps showing key trends in population and urbanization between 2010 - 2016.
Keep in mind that this time window also encompasses the dramatic political realignment (from solid Democrat to solid Republican) as well as the government’s attendant shift in subsidies from coal to “clean energy” throughout the region.
But, as you’ll hopefully see, the true color of the dragon’s scales is neither Red nor Blue. It’s as Green as the hillsides of West Virginia, in every sense of that word.
Lithium
Western North Carolina boasts some of the richest lithium deposits in the world. If you’re unclear about of the value of lithium, check the battery compartments of your digital devices. Depending on how you view the market, the value of lithium may already rival or exceed quartz, or soon will.
The global lithium market size was estimated at USD 31.75 billion in 2023 and is expected to grow at a CAGR of 17.7% from 2024 to 2030. Vehicle electrification is projected to attract a significant volume of lithium-ion batteries, which is anticipated to drive market growth over the forecast period. The automotive application segment is expected to witness substantial growth, driven by stringent regulations imposed by government bodies on ICE automakers to reduce carbon dioxide emissions from vehicles. This has shifted the interest of automakers toward producing EVs, which is anticipated to benefit the demand for lithium and related products.
There’s the golden spoil. Do you see the dragon yet?
Recognizing the strategic importance of lithium, the U.S. Department of the Interior designated it as a critical mineral in 2018, a move that expedited the mine permitting process. This was highlighted by the approval of the Thacker Pass Lithium Mine by the Bureau of Land Management in January 2021. Operated by Lithium Nevada Corporation, this mine is poised to become the largest lithium supply source in the U.S., with projections indicating its capability to produce approximately 60 kilotons of battery-grade lithium carbonate annually by 2026.
The U.S. government is implementing measures to ensure that there is a sufficient supply of lithium to meet the increasing demand from various industries. In September 2023, an agreement worth USD 90 million was signed between Albemarle Corporation and the U.S. government to support domestic mining and production of lithium. The objective of the agreement is to assist Albemarle in reopening its Kings Mountain, N.C. lithium mine, which is anticipated to commence operations between 2025 and 2030. Albemarle's Kings Mountain mine is expected to contribute to the expansion of domestic lithium production for the country's battery supply chain.
There has been much pushback against the notion of a lithium land grab. For example, the “Kings Mountain” theory of government seizure seems like a designed strawman operation, planted to distract both professional and amateur conspiracy-deboonkers from the larger trends. The same people have also been downplaying Appalachia’s lithium deposits more generally, and North Carolina’s more specifically. Many of these people mean well, but the sources they point to aren’t showing them the whole picture. Maybe the U.S. Department of Dragons Defense can set them straight on how it sees North Carolina:
"The agreement with Albemarle demonstrates the DoD's ongoing commitment to meeting the needs of our warfighter, today and in the future," said Mr. Anthony Di Stasio, MCEIP Director. "This investment directly supports President Biden's April 2022 Presidential Determination for Critical Materials in Large-Capacity Batteries."
This agreement represents the continuation of the MCEIP five-year investment plan to secure supply chains for minerals and materials critical to the DoD and the commercial sector. The DoD is committed to continuing to work with industry to ensure the continued availability of these essential resources.
No matter how you slice it, North Carolina is sitting on the proverbial goldmine. There are multivariant, overlapping interests in supercharging lithium production there, with heavy implications for the future of our military, our national economy, and global trade.
What could possibly be the holdup?
CHAKRABARTI: Jim Palenick is Kings Mountain city manager. He supports reopening the mine. But he says if Kings Mountain is going to play a major role in America’s clean energy future, he wants more benefits to stay in his community.
PALENICK: Yes, Albemarle will take some spodumene concentrate out. They'll sell it for a large amount of money. They'll process it in a new plant that they're building well down in Richburg, South Carolina for $1.3 billion. They will take all of their research and development professional employees out to Charlotte. And pretty much the only thing the city of Kings Mountain gets out of this is being the host community for this very large mining operation.CHAKRABARTI: Palenick wants to make sure Kings Mountain gets properly compensated. He points to the substantial federal funding Albemarle Corporation has already received.
PALENICK: The federal government, so they have said nationally, it's important enough for us to give this private corporation $240 million. That's because the rest of this country is going to benefit from the product that they produce. If this is worth 240 million of subsidy going to you, is that also worthy of paying that amount for the negative side of it coming back?
In case it’s not obvious, lithium is also a key component in the broader “Sustainable Energy” movment. Which leads us to....
Carbon Sequestration
In the verbiage of Climate Change activism, uninhabited forested lands have been designated as “carbon sinks”, meaning they absorb more CO₂ than they emit. Discussion of carbon sinks — most particularly how to incentivize, cultivate, and expand them — have been a centerpiece of climate policy planners for a couple of decades now. I don’t think it’s too much to say that such depopulated lands occupy a place of reverence in the Carbon Reduction movement, iconic in their return-to-nature imagery. If we were to see Mankind as a plague on the planet, as many of their more rabid cultists do, sequestrating land becomes a religious duty.
As many longtime readers/listeners know, I consider the entire AGW movement to be a religious doomsday cult, with roots that run deep into the blackest Malthusian soil. But if you happen to be one of these “cultists”, please read on: I promise I won’t try to sway your opinion on the matter. In fact, you could be 100% correct in your thinking, and still see the dragon.
All we need to agree on is that the incentive for carbon sinks exists, regardless of whether it is noble or wise. We will likely also agree that one of the major “fruits” of policies and prescriptions regarding carbon sinks has been the development of “carbon credit” markets, cap-and-trade schemes, and the like.
In such bureaucratically managed marketplaces, the currency is “carbon sequestration credits” measured in units of carbon dioxide that are removed from the atmosphere. I won’t dwell on the sanity of such credit exchange markets. In short, they are a scam, even according to the standards of non-gullible Climate Change activists. Cap-and-trade is a particularly transparent scam, which is why California is (so far) the only U.S. state to adopt it.
The federal government does not directly sell carbon credits from public land. Not currently, at least. Append that to the list of things feds don’t currently do. But now look at those population density maps above, and compare them to the following “carbon capture” map. Try to see both of these through the farseeing eyes of a dragon, with plans to someday capitalize on carbon sinks, California-style.
If the “global” (but, really, U.S. and Europe) carbon-reduction agenda were to be fully adopted — a stated priority of at least one-half of American politicians and appointees, and a probable hidden priority of most of the rest — and various proposed carbon offset markets were implemented, public lands would become lucrative trading hotspots for sequestration credits overnight.
And if enough contiguous territory were swept clean of infrastructure and people — for example, entire towns wiped off the map — an “emergency” declaration of eminent domain might set the stage for future market participation and credit sales. Favored corporate buyers from the donor class could swap these credits for a license to produce their dirty, filthy (life-sustaining) CO₂ emissions elsewhere. Everybody wins! Except for you-know-who.
When combined with untapped mineral deposits, a redrawn “green” map would likely include vast tracts of such nationalized carbon sinks, sprinkled with carve-outs for lithium and quartz mining. Meanwhile the coal mines could be taxed buy credits to “offset” their own emissions penalties, with the extracted sums flowing into pockets hither and yon. Mostly yon, if know your history.
That’s a process the Labor Left used to understand, back when they were still a relevant player in Democratic party politics. Even the Green Left could still understand some of the perverse incentives embedded in sequestration, if they tried. But they’re usually too busy worshipping Gaia to notice Tiamat licking her lips.
Tourism
If you’ve ever visited the wilder stretches of Appalachia, you know that words like “scenic” do not begin to describe it. The region boasts some of the most beautiful vistas in the continental United States, and arguably the world. It’s estimated that around three million tourists per year embark upon some segment of the Appalachian Trail, to catch a glimpse of what might be fabled Avalon, if not quite Eden.
But the problem is that the roughly $700 million per year in tourist dollars that isn’t grubbed by government rent-seekers tends to flow into the pockets of local businesses and family farms. And you just know that a big old chunk of the revenue is cash business, conducted under the register. I don’t know in what proportion, but you can bet your sweet ass that it’s a helluva lot more than that.
Our dragon also knows, but isn’t interested enough to send its collection agents. To a dragon, 700 million dollars is a paltry sum, barely a calorie let alone an appetizer. Even if the monster saw fit to raid the mountains and extract the whole sum, the juice wouldn’t be worth the squeeze. What it sees, as always, is opportunities for endless growth and expansion.
For example, the typical trail tourist almost certainly has more wealth that could be extracted, if only the “right” sort of investors could get a foothold in the local markets. Much like Lahaina, the problem is that a bunch of stubborn poor people currently occupy those opportunity zones, and have thus far resisted all efforts to bribed or otherwise chased off.
Now: try to see the Appalachian Trail through a dragon’s eyes. The Trail as brought to you by Amazon. By Target. By Home Depot. By Marriot. By Disney. By Pfizer. The authentic American experience, underwritten by Blackrock and other equity vampires. More diverse and inclusive than ever before. A trail of streaming rainbow flags and immigrant welcome centers. A trail with educational plaques posted at regular intervals, dedicated to the suffering of native tribes at the hands of white devils. White devils who’ve since been exorcised and purged, thank Gaia.
But that last magic trick is a tricky proposition; the hardscrabble whites who haunt these lands are notoriously protective of what little they’ve got. They know how to squeeze blood from stones, too, and recognize a bad deal when they see one. They may squabble and fight with each other, even to the death when honor’s at stake. But they have a tendency to band together when the jumped up jaspers and carpetbaggers come a-knocking.
They also know a dragon when they see one. The men and women of Appalachia are born and bred dragon-spotters. It’s in their blood.
It’s in my blood, too.
The White Nigger
You’ll notice I didn’t bother to mention the political incentive behind the slaughter. For one thing, it’s just too fucking obvious. For another, it’s already been beat to death. Long story short: a big election is coming up, and the people of western North Carolina are a “problem”.
The Scots-Irish have always been a problem, whether you were English or Scottish, Irish or Cherokee, Billie Yank or Johnny Reb. It didn’t matter where you came from, which crown you wore or worshipped, what your “politics” were. If you didn’t mind your manners and your business, you could expect to have a fight on your hands.
And not just any fight. These people aren’t “normal” fighters, the same way a pit pull isn’t a normal dog. You might lose a lot more than your teeth.
"Who are we? We are the molten core at the very center of the raw, unbridled, rebellious spirit of America. We helped build this nation, from the bottom up. We face life on our feet, not on our knees. We were born fighting. And if the cause is right, we will never retreat."
― James Webb, Born Fighting: How the Scots-Irish Shaped America
I have described myself before as mostly the product of immigrants, shipped in on floating tenements to meet that Big Green Whore on the bay. But one quarter of me is Scots-Irish, with roots that go back to the Revolutionary War. That in itself is no big deal; around 40 percent of Washington’s army were Ulster stock. We fought both sides of the Civil War, too, and kept on filling the front ranks of every war thereafter. The Scotch-Irish are like a biological weapon that America has unleashed over and over against all her opponents, a war crime hammered into human form.
Payment for these bloody services has mostly come in the form of honor. For other peoples that might seem like thin gruel, but the Ulster Scot feasts on honor like ambrosia. Glory too, and just the thrill of battle and other violent adventures. These appetites have of course been pathologized, by the kind of high-minded “intellectuals” who tend to kneel before dragons and other swamp monsters. The same kind who talk a good game about fighting, but tend to up and disappear when the actual fight breaks out.
Not these ones. Born fighting and die fighting, with plenty of brawls and shootouts in between. Athena pisses her panties when she sees them on the march, and Apollo drives his team to early sunsets. Any general who ever lived would gladly take ten of them against fifty, and sometimes did. But he still better watch his step - and his mouth, around this bunch. These men were born to fight, but not necessarily to take orders. Especially not from some high falutin DC skunk who yammers about “leading from behind.”
On the other hand: honor don’t put bread on the table.
So they got to work. And by “work”, I’m talking about the meanest, hardest kind you can imagine, cracking coal and shale and limestone and skulls and damn anything else you put in front of these men that needed cracking. Jobs that killed your knees and lungs and eyes and hearts, that ate you piece by piece until there was nothing left but your soul and your mountain pride.
But it turns out both of those are stubbornly immortal, to the endless vexation of dragons and their pencil-pushing minions.
While researching the efforts by the [Obama] administration to expand food stamp participation, Caroline May of the Daily Caller unearthed one particular point of frustration for food stamp officials: "mountain pride."
Mountain pride prevents many Appalachian residents from accepting food stamps even though they're eligible, according to the Ashe County North Carolina Department of Social Services. As a result, social workers in the rural Appalachian county, which borders Tennessee and Virginia, are developing strategies and offering rewards for defeating mountain pride. Apparently, as they see it, they need to get more silly hillbillies to take their government handouts like other Americans
Appalachian culture, above all else, is defined by self-reliance. Where cities had specialists -- carpenters, blacksmiths, tanners and bakers, for example -- isolation created by the difficult terrain meant Appalachian settlers and generations of their descendants were forced to be jacks of all trades. Every person was his own butcher, baker and candlestick maker.
If hard times hit or tragedy struck, these tough souls didn't rely on the government for assistance. They simply persevered, maybe with a helping hand from their church or their closest neighbors, who were often miles away.
I remember this story like it happened yesterday. It was one of those that just stuck with me over the years. Stuck in my craw, as my southern cousins might say.
The nerve of some manicured DC bureau-rat, some bloodless little squeak of a man, pronouncing his “frustration” with a people who wouldn’t take his free handouts. Too proud? Yeah, I guess. But maybe it’s also because they understood the hidden cost of those. Who and what they would owe.
And Obama looming above this little fink, the Light Bringer himself, with his oh-so-breakable nose poked up in the air. Disgusted by the very idea of this tribe of untamable savages, with their guns and their bibles and their principles of self-reliance and honor. These white men whose jobs would make a field nigger shudder, and a house nigger faint. These paleface devils who’ll charge into the breach, fight against the longest odds, to win or die trying.
Just not for your army, Uncle Sam. Not no more.
Your cause ain’t just, and your tent’s filling up with varmints.
But they still don’t get it.
“What kind of fool turns down a free lunch?” they marvel, at their thousand-dollar-a-plate fundraisers to combat white supremacy and colonialism and the patriarchy and such.
What would it take to get through to all these stubborn white niggers? To make them sign on the dotted line, and bend the knee with the rest of the useless eaters?
More than anything any of them ever had, or will ever have. We’re like the Terminator, when it comes to stuck-up assholes like you.
We can't be bargained with. We can't be reasoned with. We don’t feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And we absolutely, positively will not stop, until you get the hell up out the holler.
Like I said:
A problem.
That said, we’re only a problem if you make us one. If you let us be what we are, set out feasts of honor and glory, we can also be a solution to so many of your problems. We’ll venture into the wildest world to tame it, fight your enemies to the last man, dig your empire’s black blood out of the deepest holes. If you want to go space, we’ll be the first to blast off in them rocketships, to live or die in parts unknown. And if there’s a bunch of aliens out there that need pacifying? Even better.
So here’s a question: Why didn’t the elites just do that? Why didn’t they just let those mountain men keep their “stupid” honor, given all the benefits they could reap from it?
I can almost understand why they would starve them of bread, heat, electricity, clean water, and other “luxuries” of the modern world. I even get why they’d take away their coal mining gigs, which after all offend their delicate sensibilities and climate gods.
But why starve them of a good that literally costs you nothing?
In fact, why not just starve them of honor, but go to the trouble of spitting on them constantly? Why is nearly every media portrayal of these folks so viciously lopsided? After all, these are your soldiers, your explorers, your lawmen, your working class heroes and presidents alike.
But that is not how they are shown. They are instead cast as the stupidest, lowliest, most vile wretches to ever walk the Earth. These ugly stereotypes are far older than most people alive today even realize, because they’re embedded so deeply in Hollywood’s earliest tropes that people will confuse them for reality itself. They range from gap-toothed dancing clowns to drunken, lazy criminals to sinister sub-human monsters, with little air between them. They are the last remaining people on Earth you are allowed to unconditionally mock and hate. In fact, you are encouraged to do so.
Notice how, near the end of this trailer, the implication is that hillbillies aren’t monsters because some of them are gay. That’s a neat trick too. It shows how the Enemy reviles you, even when it’s pretending to be “on your side.” Like other white men in nouveau Hollywoodland, the hillbilly is your friend, as long as he’s sucking cock.
But the monsters continue to prevail. They are not so much romanticized as exoticized, like weird and dangerous animals in a zoo. Point and laugh, kids, but don’t get too close. Don’t put your fingers through those bars, or you might draw back a stump.
Fear and mockery, schadenfreude and shame. That’s the formula by which they remain the elites’ favorite punching bag and scapegoat, fair game for any accusation or cheap smear. But most of all, they present a moral and intellectual low bar for other whites to measure themselves against. I asked before if you thought the government’s response was evil or stupid, but the white victims of this flood stand perpetually accused of both in absentia. Whether they manifest as Cletus and Brandine Spuckler on The Simpsons or the mutant rapists of Deliverance, you can feel secure in your superiority.
The spell is cast at all levels. Their accents alone have become a kind of coded slur, deemed interchangeable with cognitive impairment, religious hypocrisy, uncleanliness, drunkenness, criminality, sadistic cruelty, gratuitous violence, and every form of ignorance and bigotry known to Man. It’s also a dramatic shortcut for the most witless and soulless of the Hollywood crowd: the moment a character begins to talk with that cadence and drawl, nine-times-out-of-ten both actor and writer are building a case against him.
This guy’s one of Them, you’re commanded to think, with all the subtlety of a brick to the face.
He can’t be loved or trusted, can’t be sympathized with or redeemed.
He can only be humiliated or killed.
That’s the reason so many of the accounts and rumors swirling out of North Carolina seem so plausible. Those flood victims have been dehumanized since before we were born. You will therefore feel less sympathy for them, and won’t hold the accused to the same sort of scrutiny. It’s an old tactic, because it works. Unlike the sacred black victims of Katrina, these people are probably lying, or exaggerating, or running some scam.
And even if they aren’t, they probably deserve it.
That’ll teach ‘em, for being a bunch of racist, sexist, homophobic Christofacsists. That’ll teach ‘em for not wanting “big government.” That’ll teach ‘em, for not believing in The Science.4
You know it’s true. The hillbilly is the Eternal Jew of the neoliberal imagination, the subhuman wretch unworthy of dignity or understanding. He is the butt of every joke and the source of every evil. Even if you are my imaginary liberal friend, you know it’s true.
But do you know why it’s true?
Here’s a hint: It’s not just because they’re white. That’s a necessary part of the reason, but not the most important part. The same goes for being poor; that makes them an easier target for dragons, but that’s not it either.
My guess is it’s because of all the poetry.
“He Done Her Wrong”
The Scots-Irish have garnered such a reputation as America's warriors and frontiersmen, people often forget we also rank among her greatest poets.
By that I don’t mean the famous named poets and novelists from Ulster stock. It’s true that we have Faulkner, Twain, Steinbeck, Wolfe, Poe (supposedly we have Stephen King, too, though you’re welcome to keep that scumbag traitor). But that’s not the kind of poetry I’m talking about.
If you google “Appalachian murder ballads” you’ll find a lot of the same longwinded nonsense and noise you’d expect near the top of the results. I’ll save you some time: they’re all about the patriarchy, and violence against women. Their evidence is that the songs will generally convey some sympathy for the murderer, even when the honor killer is a she.5
Frankie and Johnnie were lovers Oh! Lord, how they did love Swore to be true to each other Just as true as the stars up above He was her man, he wouldn't do her wrong Frankie went down to the corner Just for a bucket of beer She said, Mister Bartender Has my lovin' Johnny been here? He is my man, he wouldn't do me wrong
The big brains of the humanities department struggle with Frankie and Johnny. It’s the piece they can’t fit into their postmodern theory puzzle, no matter how hard they jam and squeeze. I could well imagine one of them breaking out the jigsaw in desperation.
“Maybe it’s just code for a forbidden gay romance? I mean, ‘Frankie’ sounds kind of like a guy’s name, right?”
Like most other murder ballads that survived into the recording era, it boasts multiple variants and origin stories (for instance, sometimes the guy ain’t even named Johnny). Other songs of its kind likewise get blurry real quick, when you try to figure out who “wrote” them. This ain’t Rogers and Hammerstein. Some of these hillbilly elegies were born across the ocean long ago, on the misty borderlands between warring kingdoms. Like ancient myths, they have too many authors, so they have none at all.
They tell tales of love and dishonor, murder and grief. The character of these stories seems to bewilder the people who try to dissect them. They can understand grief for the victim, but not for the perp. What’s wrong with these psychos? Can’t they tell the good guys from the bad guys?
Or bad girls, as the case may be?
I don't wanna cause you no trouble I don't wanna tell you no lies But I saw your lover half an hour ago With a girl named Nellie Bly He is your man, but he's doin' you wrong Frankie looked over the transom There to her great surprise There on the couch sat Johnnie Makin' love to Nellie Bly He was her man, he was doin' her wrong Frankie drew back her komono Pulled out a little forty-four Rooty-toot-toot, three times she shot Right through that hardwood door Lordy, shot her man, but he done her wrong
Like other anti-detectives, they can’t see the obvious answer, even though it’s staring them right in the face. The best they can manage is to get it half-right. They’ll tell you we’re an honor cult, and we sympathize with the murderers because they killed for honor’s sake. Which is true enough, but it’s only half the story. In fact, the other half of the story is what terrifies them.
When they mean “honor cult” as an insult (which they usually do), they aren’t completely wrong. Pride without virtue may be the Devil’s favorite sin, but I’d wager honor without justice runs a close second. If honor is all you have, the only thing that matters, then you’ll have nothing much to show for it in the long run. Honor is a high virtue, but it needs to be tempered by something even better and higher. Something to square the debt when honor bites off more than it can chew.
"Bring out your rubber-tired buggies, bring out the rubber-tired hacks. I'm takin' my man to the graveyard, but I ain't gonna bring him back. Lord, he was my man, then he done me wrong." "Bring out a thousand policemen, bring 'em around today, To lock me down in the dungeon cell and throw that key away. I shot my man, he was doin' me wrong."
The universe is a place of debt and repayment. Invisible energy exchanges flow all around us, with thermodynamic accountants tending the books. If there’s a void, it will eventually be filled. If there’s a debt, it will eventually be paid. Red is made black again, or the cosmos flies apart at the seams.
What happens when that debt is truly massive? And what if the debtors are too distant and faceless to round up, or too ensconced by wealth and military might to be forced to pay? Or both?
That’s the operating theory of those swamp monsters who pretend to rule us from afar. They can skip out on every debt, scot free. You see it in the Treasury Department, the Fed and its magical money printer. You can see it in the waves of criminal invaders pouring across the borders, to snatch up free housing and EBT cards.
You can see it when Martha Raddatz says it’s just a “handful” of apartment buildings taken over by Venezuelan gangs. What’s the big deal, you deplorable hillbilly?
The hillbilly got the better of this jumped up jasper, but the jasper doesn’t know it. Remember how this particular song goes:
It’s not happening
It’s happening, not that bad.
It’s bad, but it’s being handled.
It’s not being handled, and that’s your fault.
And if “hillbillies” are the victims, there’s one more line:
They probably deserve it.
Men like Vance are the most fearsome monsters imaginable, to media critters like Raddatz with sinecures in the current regime. As that regime crumbles around them, they fear retribution might be at hand for them as well, for propping it up with disingenuous tactics, smear campaigns and treacherous propagandizing against your own countrymen.
So what’s the big deal if Springfield, Ohio has been forced to accept 15,000 Haitian immigrants in a city of 60,000?
What are those flyover rubes complaining about? It can’t be that bad.
And if it is that bad, they deserve it.
Imagine being one of these media personalities. Of not just thinking about the world in these terms, but being recorded saying these thoughts aloud. You might fear retribution too. So much that you’ll support any form of centralized power to prevent it, no matter how illiberal and draconian.
Their anxiety will only ramp up as the snake eats its tail. Imagine if your livelihood required you to publicly defend statements like this:
I have a very good imagination, but even I have trouble modelling that mindset. It’s akin to trying to imagine how a murderer on death row feels, when he knows his time is short. But I’m guessing a godless murderer is just pining for that phone call from the governor. He could have a “basement full of dead kids” as the repugnant Sam Harris once put it, and you’d still kiss his ass (and other body parts) to secure that pardon.
Frankie said to the warden, "What are they going to do?" The warden, he said to Frankie, "It's electric chair for you, 'Cause you shot your man, he was doin' you wrong." This story has no moral, this story has no end This story just goes to show that there ain' no good in men He was her man, and he done her wrong
We do feel grief for the killer. She was done wrong, so she did what honor required. That’s not to say she went about it honorably; she shot him through a door, lending her typically male crime a much more feminine flavor. She dared not put herself in danger, in that telling, or look him in the eye when she killed him. The attack was launched from an unseen distance, against an unarmed man.
But, on the other hand, she caught him stepping out on her. He done her wrong.
We also mourn the aftermath. It’s sad that the world of cops and judges and hangmen needs to step in and settle Frankie’s debt, because she won’t settle it herself. Some might say she can’t do that, because that would just be another murder debt that could never be squared. I’m not sure about that one. I go back and forth.
But her crime of passion is a familiar one. She loved him jealously, which is not to say immorally. But too much jealousy leads to ruin. Johnny may be her lover, and owe her his fidelity. But he’s also a living man and Child of God. You can’t just gun him down because he strayed.
We hear echoes of this ballad throughout the Midwest and South Atlantic states. Southern whites have been drifting out of Democratic reach for a couple of generations, now, with the rustbelt and the mountain whites representing the last “faithful” holdouts in places like Kentucky, Ohio and the Carolinas. The Johnnies to their Frankies, so to speak.
Does that mean the latter strikes out with murderous rage? Not necessarily. But given the way their constituencies have been trained to fear and loathe these people, and the tastes and priorities of the progressive elites, is it really that hard to imagine some form of vindictive punishment might have played a role in how this situation has been playing out?
We all know Donald Trump’s their Moby Dick. But is he also their Nellie Bligh?
Did all them poor white crackers done Dems wrong?
Final Thoughts
There are many things I’m still unsure about. For example, I’m unsure to what extent the federal response to North Carolina constitute crimes of opportunity versus a coordinated and pre-planned LIHOP. That’s not to imply some sort of “weather machine” was involved; I know some are convinced that the hurricane’s path and/or intensity was influenced by some kind of secret geoengineering project. I’m not personally sold on that one.
Not yet, anyway. I’ve spent some time looking into the potential mechanics of how such a technology might work, as far as practical applications go. What started out as skeptical curiosity is developing into an article of its own.
If and when I continue with it, my goal will be to approach the subject as carefully and technically as I can. At this point in my research, I will say I’m still very skeptical. There are several major obstacles such weather engineers would need to overcome, made even more difficult by the risk of exposure.
However. I do not dismiss out of hand the possibility of weaponized geoengineering playing a role in this and other catastrophes. The reason I don’t boils down to this:
If they were capable of doing it, would they?
Sadly, my answer is:
You bet your ass they would.
I’ve seen too much of their treachery and mass murder to answer otherwise. Even the horrors they openly admit to would seal that deal. Whoever or whatever rules us from the shadows and fog would kill any one of us without a shred of remorse, if it served their interests and appetites. So, if it turns out they do indeed have a “weather machine”, add that to the long list of technical and financial weapons they already deploy for fun and profit. I have no doubt they would massacre us by the millions, if they thought they could get away with it.
Frankly, they already have. Massacred large numbers of us, I mean, not “get away with it.” Not yet, at least. The debts of the Covid years and other atrocities can still be squared. In fact, they must be squared; one way or the other. And if our military history is any judge, I know which tribe of human bioweapons will be called on to square it.
It reminds me of that old saying:
“I brought you into this world, and I can take you out of it.”
It’s not just that the regime loyalists of federal government agencies “don’t care” about the mountain men of Appalachia. It’s not even that they hate their fucking guts, although they clearly do.
It’s that they fear these savage warrior-poets of the borderlands, more than other people on Earth.
And they should.
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Or “Keeeeev”, as so many otherwise intelligent people were somehow reprogrammed overnight to pronounce it.
But never quite enough criticism, in my opinion, given the compelling evidence of not only lethal incompetence by the Army Corps of Engineers, but of a criminal conspiracy after the fact:
Lyndon was famously fond of the word “nigger”, delivered with the hardest-R imaginable. So fond that even his most slavish hagiographers have failed to whitewash it (so to speak).
Thanks to
for dredging up the perfect avatar for the snotty, know-nothing, neoliberal consciousness.Lyrics to Frankie and Johnny (various artists)
I broke my rules in sharing your post. It was that damn good. I never (almost) restack a post twice with a quote from within. I did this one three times. I also don't link anything with YT links inside (only in rare exceptions), but yours went up, again, 3x.
Great work man. Thanks.
Thank you for this, and also thank you for the intro to Starr of Apalachia. :)
I come from what some might call a "mixed" marriage... my mother's people are Scots Irish settled for many generations in the northern Alabama, southern Tennessee area. My father's people are New England/Maritime Canada Puritan stock. They themselves have conducted a graceful marriage (going on 65 years now, and counting). But the cultural differences I have always seen, between relatives on my mother's side and relatives on my father's side, are stark. It took me a very long time to work them out.