The Mask Keeps Slipping

For most people, the news is just a endless stream of unrelated stories, one little outrage after another. This is by design. The information comes in such an unrelenting torrent, aimed at people that have had their critical thinking skills and their attention spans ruined, resulting in complete overload.

It makes a lot of sense. If you see a guy in clown suit walking down the street, you will focus on him. If there are hundreds of clowns walking down the street, you won’t notice the lone clown.

For example, here is one story that seems unrelated to the next story but I will explain:

You read that right.

$4.5 BILLION.

That’s how much Ford is going to lose on its electric vehicles in the Year Of Our Lord 2023.

Climate Marxism isn’t a good business model, eh?

^{https://notthebee.com/article/fords-ceo-candidly-admits-that-charging-electric-vehicles-is-challenging-while-on-the-road}

The story references another piece:

“Charging has been pretty challenging,” Farley said, adding that at one stop it took him 40 minutes to charge his truck’s battery to just 40 percent. “It was a really good reality check — the challenges of what our customers go through.”

By contrast, my big van can hold almost 30 gallons of guzzolene if I get really low. I can get off the expressway, fuel it up and be back on the road in ten minutes and have over 400 miles of range until the next fill-up. Because Not The Bee is solidly a normiecon outlet, they are a little baffled as to why Ford would make EVs if they are losing money. Spoiler alert:

They aren’t.

Profit and loss for gynormous globohomo corporations is all a matter of accounting shenanigans. Between write-offs and incentives, I am confident Ford isn’t going to go under despite “losing” $4.5 billion. Even for my two small businesses with no employees the tax filing is very complex but for a company like Ford with $158 billion in revenue? Their accountants basically wrote the tax laws so you don’t need to worry about Ford CEO Jim Farley being able to pay his bills, the poor guy had total compensation of over $22 million in 2021, of which “Farley’s benefits included $830,305 for personal use of aircraft”. Almost a million bucks and that is for personal use of aircraft, in other words jetting around the world on vacation. If the guy is spending an average of $2,274 per day in personal use of aircraft, I assume private jets, how much does he spend on business travel? I didn’t go looking for that info, I was just looking for his total compensation. Yet this guy is driving around in an electric truck to save the environment? GTFOH. Fun fact, Ford’s Jim Farley is the cousin of deceased comedian Chris Farley.

The take-away: Ford isn’t really losing $4.5 billion and no one in the top echelon at Ford gives a shit about “the environment”. They are pushing electric vehicles as the cost of doing normal business in America, like companies that celebrate “Pride Month”. It isn’t because electric vehicles really “save the environment”….

Metals such as lithium and cobalt provide examples of the awkward issues that lie ahead, said Herrington. Both elements are needed to make lightweight rechargeable batteries for electric cars and for storing power from wind and solar plants. Their production is likely to increase significantly over the next decade – and that could cause serious ecological problems.

In the case of cobalt, 60% of the world’s supply comes from the Democratic Republic of the Congo where large numbers of unregulated mines use children as young as seven as miners. There they breathe in cobalt-laden dust that can cause fatal lung ailments while working tunnels that are liable to collapse.

^{https://archive.vn/w9HFd}

Little black kids dying in mines so an upper-middle class White woman in Alexandria, Virginia can virtue signal by driving an EV and They call me a racist. When a company lecture you about social responsibility while pushing vehicles powered by batteries that require enormous open pit mines and child labor, you know it is about something else.

A week later, we see this story….

This new “city” is going to wrap around California’s Travis Air Force base. Travis is apparently has the greatest volume of cargo and personnel of any military air terminal in the U.S. and also is home to a USAF teaching hospital. According to Zerohedge, the property totals around 55,000 acres. 55,000 acres is over 85 square miles.

With $800 million and counting, you can overpay for land. From the New York Times:

The company, which has little information public about its operations, has committed more than $800 million to secure thousands of acres of farmland, court documents show. One parcel after another, Flannery made offers to every landowner for miles, paying several times the market rate, whether the land had been listed for sale or not.

^{https://archive.vn/8wxbj}

This happens on a smaller scale around here. There are a surprising number of extremely wealthy Amish and they assume that any property is available for sale if they offer enough, so lots of property is sold before ever being listed and when it is publicly sold it often goes for upwards of $30,000 per acre, more than 2 1/2 times the average price of farmland in Indiana and quite a bit more than the property in California is selling for.

The people buying the property are not household names….

The company’s investors, whose identities have not been previously reported, are a who’s who of Silicon Valley, according to three people who were not authorized to speak publicly about the plans.

They include Mr. Moritz; Reid Hoffman, the LinkedIn co-founder, venture capitalist and Democratic donor; Marc Andreessen and Chris Dixon, investors at the Andreessen Horowitz venture capital firm; Patrick and John Collison, the sibling co-founders of the payments company Stripe; Laurene Powell Jobs, founder of the Emerson Collective; and Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross, entrepreneurs turned investors. Andreessen Horowitz is also a backer. It was unclear how much each had invested.

As is Their standard practice, these asshats are now suing the locals

The purchases burst into public view this spring when lawyers for Flannery filed a lawsuit in U.S. District Court, accusing landowners of colluding to inflate prices.

What they were doing is a blitzkrieg approach, hit everyone at once and offer to buy. When the landowners realized that their property was in demand, they started asking for more money so of course these billionaires then started suing them for “collusion”. The goal is pretty clear, They intend to either buy out or force out all of the current landowners to build a utopian little leftist society…..

Another question began with a description of a possible ballot initiative for a project that “would include a new city with tens of thousands of new homes, a large solar energy farm, orchards with over a million new trees, and over 10,000 acres of new parks and open space.”

I wonder what the demographics of the new glorious paradise will be? I suspect lots of Whites, Jews and Asians, and only enough carefully vetted and selected blacks and browns to tend the lawns and provide photo ops to show their “diversity”. The area sits about 45 miles northeast of San Francisco….

…and as mentioned it wraps around Travis Air Force base but something else I saw was interesting…

There is a lot of National forest areas around it, especially to the south. It is pretty much equidistant from San Francisco and Sacramento without being overly close to either one. It seems to me to be ideally situated to insulate one from the consequences of leftist policies and glorious, vibrant diversity while still being within driving distance of a several large airports. I assume the new city will have a private airfield so the rich and famous can hop on a chopper or Learjet, go to SFO and catch a bigger plane to jet off to some fabulous destination. The new leftist paradise will of course have a significant armed security presence to keep out undesirables and if the S really HTF? Why, you have a U.S. Air Force base sitting right in the middle of your city!

Silicon Valley is an analog solution, a concentration of high tech businesses that needed to be in one central location. Now that blazing fast internet is available everywhere, and you can be sure that fiber optic lines or whatever the latest and greatest connection might be will be one of the first things They run from SF to the new city, there is no need to be sitting in an area with mile after mile of corporate office buildings. Back in the day I had several clients in Silicon Valley and travelling to visit them meant passing one office complex after another. I bet most of those are empty these days as employees work remotely.

After that long wind-up, now comes the “So what?”. What does a story about the limited range of EVs have to do with billionaires buying up property to build a new city?

The main driving purpose of electric vehicles is not to “save the environment” but to make you transition to EVs. Sure it will make some people super wealthy but what it will also do is to increase your reliance and decrease your mobility. Everything They do is to increase Their control over you.

Teach your children to hate themselves and their heritage? Having no love for their own people makes them easier to control. Take away your guns and tell people to get air horns and wait for the cops? It makes you reliant on the government to protect you. Electric vehicles serve the same basic purpose as Amish horse-and-buggy: it restricts your range of travel. I wrote about this last year: Electric Vehicles: The New Horse And Buggy

It is part of their lifestyle that is slower paced and focused on the home and the local community. A horse and buggy limits how far from home you can go and how quickly you can get there. Families tend to cluster together so married daughters can get home to see their mom more readily. In our local community it is already over 20 miles from the extreme ends of the settlement and that is about too far for a horse to go. Some of the young adults who are “running around” (aka rumspringa) will go halfway, stop at a family member’s house to switch to a fresh horse and then keep going but 20 miles by horse and buggy is almost a two hour trip, each way. Unless you get a driver, you are pretty limited in how far you can travel. This is by design. 

Electric vehicles do the same thing. You can only go so far on a charge and recharging takes forever.

This is something I frequently bring up, the idea of forcing rural Americans to move into the cities where they can be monitored, controlled and become reliant on government services. De-ruralfication has been a major push of the Chinese Communists, getting peasants and farmers out of the countryside and into virtual slavery making widgets for American consumers, working by the hundreds of millions for a pittance while a small Chinese oligarchy becomes insanely wealthy. 

What the Amish do for religious and cultural reasons, eschewing driving cars, is being done for far more malevolent reasons in America. People being mobile and somewhat independent isn’t helpful for Their plans, but forcing people to move into cities where they can be monitored and controlled certainly is. EVs are not “saving the environment” but they are creating leashes to keep people tethered to population centers. 

Pretty soon you won’t even need a car. Why drive to work to sit in a cubicle doing meaningless work in front of your computer when you can do that from home in your pajamas? Why drive to a restaurant when you can have anything from steaks to Taco Bell delivered right to your home? Going to the movies? Many theaters are closed and you can watch endless hours of TV and movies on your phone. You don’t need to go to the store, anything and everything can be delivered often for “free” and within 48 hours. When you add in legalized pot, it can be easy to see why so many young men have opted out of adulthood, no jobs, no girlfriends, just smoking weed, playing games, watching movies and getting Burger King delivered.

Well, what happens to all of that land that people used to live on once they move to the cities? You guessed it, the oligarchs buy it all. Some of it will certainly go to building nice cities for the wealthy and the mandarin class to live in, away from the squalor of most urban areas. A lot of it will simply create enormous fiefdoms for the elite to live and play in, far away from the peasant class. Of course I have also written about this, way back in 2021: Like Feudalism Without The Peasants. A key feature of “The Great Reset” is the oft quoted line that you will own nothing and be happy, although the people with all of the money in the world sure like to own stuff. In fact billionaires are buying up huge tracts of land….

Back in the day, landed gentry owned most of the land and peasants worked the land for a pittance. That was how it worked. It wasn’t until fairly recently that people owned land of their own. At one time the U.S. was covered with small family farms but slowly over the years as agricultural practices grew more efficient and jobs in the city with regular hours and pay lured younger people away, the number of Americans involved in farming shrank even as fewer farmers fed a burgeoning population. Today the number and per capita percentage of people involved in farming is tiny. Not helping this situation is the ever increasing cost of farmland. Without careful succession planning, it is difficult for farms to stay in the family even as it remains very difficult to get younger people to pursue a career in production agriculture. Big farms snatch up smaller farms and get bigger and the cost of entry into agriculture skyrockets with each passing year in a vicious cycle. Rinse. Repeat.

A lot of the land they buy up is turned into “nature preserves” which allows the oligarchs to avoid paying as much in taxes on that land. Why do this?

Because They can.

In the post linked immediately above, I pointed out just how vast the holdings of some of these billionaires really are…

To put this in perspective, John Malone owns 2,200,000 acres of land. There are 640 acres in one square miles so Malone owns 3,437 square miles. Delaware is about 1,900 square miles of land and Rhode Island is 1,033 square miles counting just land. 

John Malone owns more land than the total area of the two smallest states combined.

Owning on a house an half an acre is considered to be a nice home. Owning a 500 acre farm is quite an accomplishment. Owning the equivalent of more than two entire states? That makes you into something quite different indeed. People on the Left think Orange Man Bad is their enemy but what about a guy who owns more land than two entire states? 

That is hard to even comprehend. My neighbor the pig famer owns, I am guessing, around 1000 acres and with local prices that is worth at least $25 million (before taxes). John Malone owns 2.2 million acres as of 2021. Who knows how much he owns today. He could never spend even a small amount of time on all of his property but he buys it because he can. A Monet is just a painting, diamonds are just small shiny rocks but 2.2 million acres is the start of an empire.

It all ties together and it all serves Their purpose. It isn’t a crackpot conspiracy, They are doing this right in front of us and daring us to notice.

What is worse is that in many ways, it is awfully appealing. I can see the appeal, there are many days when I would be content to never get up from my desk other than to get something to eat or use the crapper. Back when I was playing Eve Online more than I should, it wasn’t a stretch for me to spends hours wearing a headset engaged in fake space combat. As AI and virtual reality become more advanced, and the real world gets shittier, the temptation to retreat into cyberspace will grow until many of us are living like the people in Ready Player One, giant cities of people stacked on top of each other in crappy hovels and pods who spend every waking moment in an alternate online universe where life sucks a lot less.

This is the future They have in mind for us while they live in beautiful, clean, safe cities They build to keep us out.

They aren’t even hiding it anymore. What to do about it is a different topic but for right now, you should be doing whatever They tell you not to do.

The mask is slipping off. Let’s hope enough people figure it out to make Them regret trying to enslave us all.