I forgot who said it – I think it was William F. Buckley – but I paraphrase, “It’s not that you vote. It’s that you take your vote seriously.” Seriously means to have acquaintance with the issues, nominally or otherwise. Today, the mantra is to vote, vote, vote; never mind that you might have the issue-awareness of a comatose patient on life support.
September 14 is decision day on Gavin Newsom’s political career, and California is scattering ballots to the wind like our Fed at Democrat insistence is papering the world in dollars. The dollar as the word’s reserve currency, with Weimar Germany integrity, isn’t likely to survive as such any more than California’s election integrity will. Out the window goes the secret ballot. What’s secret – meaning, one voter is alone with one ballot – when 4 ballots land in a mail box, go behind the door, and are “harvested” a week later? And, even more troubling, everyone alive, dead, sentient, vegetative, moved, unmoved, caring, and uncaring gets one (maybe two). The state has a vote system that can’t help but rope in a lot of morons.
Vote by mail in South Carolina
Nothing is expected of the human being, not even breathing. You don’t have to break away from the Cheetos and the Xbox. You’re registered automatically under motor-voter. A ballot will come with the junk mail. Don’t bother with getting presentable and hunting down the car keys. Somebody will come by and pick it up, and maybe offer a little advice on how to fill it out.
It’s a system designed for the likes of Stacy Abrams, the goddess-avatar against “voter suppression”. Never mind that the Georgia race hustler doesn’t make a lick of sense. In her latest published screed, Our Time Is Now, she doubles down on stupid, or stupefying self-negation (Is there a difference?). Take a look at this glaring insult to logic from her book: “I watched in real time as the conflicts in our evolving nation became fodder for racist commercials, horrific suppression — and the largest turnout of voters of color in Georgia’s history.” Large turnouts of “voters of color” aren’t evidence of racist voter suppression any more than victory is defined by the enemy holding the ground and your troops are wiped out.
Stacy Abrams
It boggles the mind for what passes for “elite” opinion, or willful malpractice on the part of Holt & Reinhart editors. The mind is also left spinning when examining the latest turnout numbers in places like Georgia. The normally low-turnout 2018 midterms surpassed the 2016 presidential election. And 2020 exceeded Obama’s 2008. And proof of some kind of voter-ID is Jim Crow 2.0, something on the books in 35 states? The fact is, nobody – alive or dead – is impeded, especially when you’ve got a pandemic excuse at your disposal. Our elections are open sieves for votes from God-knows-where.
With that great vote sucking sound at open throttle in California, Newsom’s prospects look brighter than what they should be in a state with most of the nation’s homeless, eco-crazed forest management policies that reduced the woods to an open-air match factory, public schools geared for failure, COVID-panic as routine government policy, a cost of living that strangles the middle class and forces mass out-migration (and the loss of one House seat), tax rates that make the Socialist International glow in envy, and a neglected and obsolete water storage and delivery system as the state pursues trains-to-nowhere and inter-urban transit boondoggles suitable for Tokyo. What’s there to complain about?
Here’s my pet theory: As the number of registered voters approaches the number of human beings above room temperature, the proportion of morons in the vote totals increases exponentially. Newsom and Abrams are on the same wave length. Stacy’s prattle provides cover for a California election system that promises one-party control into the foreseeable future, like the one in North Korea that keeps the Kims in power with 95% approvals. The other 5% won’t be around next year.
Advantage Newsom, unless the Republicans become as adept as the Dems at improving their standing among the growing moron demographic. Believe me when I say that there are rich veins to be mined left, right, and center.
Biden and his announced cabinet, January 2021.“Ship of Fools”, A. N. Mironov
It’s August 31, September 1 in Afghanistan, and we’re gone, lock, stock and barrel. Biden, Trump, and the primetime lineup of Fox News got what they wanted.
The “Ship of Fools” allegory is from Plato’s “The Republic” in which a ship is run by a dysfunctional crew. Democracy can magnify the “fools” presence among the personnel. But so do the other forms of governance: the “fools” can be a subservient peasant class and their overseers born into privilege, or a group of belligerent oafs, fired up by half-witted utopian visions, and gaining power through the barrel of a gun. Such has been the lot of mankind. We should know this oft-repeated story well.
Look at what democracy gave us in November 2020. A majority rejected the man-of-many-mean-tweets and narcissistic demagogue (a tautology?), and chose a doddering old fool, obsequious to the ruling radical left of his party. The result is the ruination that the radical left has always given the people who sadly have to live under their edicts. Prime example: the Afgan bugout.
I turn to H.L. Mencken for sarcastic aphorisms on democracy. Here’s some for your edification (courtesy of Mark J. Perry of AEI). Enjoy.
H. L. Mencken. (Henry L. Mencken.), a writer for the Baltimore Sun from 1905 to 1948. (Baltimore Sun Staff File Photo by Robert F. Kniesche). (Baltimore Examiner and Washington Examiner OUT ORG XMIT: BAL0909101149453148)
The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.
Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance.
Democracy, too, is a religion. It is the worship of jackals by jackasses.
Democracy is the art and science of running the circus from the monkey cage.
Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard. (my personal favorite)
If a politician found he had cannibals among his constituents, he would promise them missionaries for dinner.
As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.
All government, of course, is against liberty.
That about sums it up. Elections are just as able to hand command of the rudder to fools as any other method.
CNN anchors with Brian Williams of MSNBC (l)MSNBC anchorsFox News anchors
Let me be clear, I’m not tarring everyone in our punditry and governing classes. Not everyone is this stone cold stupid. But much of the chatter is hooey, and the hooey is only getting worse.
First on the list of buffoons are the folks in legacy media and all those swirling in their social circles. You know, the people at CNN, MSNBC, the networks, and the big metro newspapers and magazines. They’re hooked on soiling themselves daily, and have for quite a few years. They are the PR department of the left-wing revolution.
Next, we’re confronted by the primetime lineup on Fox News who, along with certain elements in the Republican Party, have resuscitated the Charles Lindbergh wing of foreign policy. If you’ll recall, Lindbergh was the mouth of isolationism before the Fall of France and Pearl Harbor put the kibosh to the whole smear.
Charles Lindbergh speaking at America First Rally in 1941.
Tucker Carlson is an out-and-out isolationist. In a quip during one of his recent shows, he said, “Oceans matter”, or something to that effect. Yes, they do if you have to cross them. No, they aren’t if you want to kill Americans. Why do you think North Korea and Iran want ICBM’s? Why do you think the Russians and the CCP have them? Even if you can’t get your hands on one, box cutters at the throats of airline flight attendants and flight crews will suffice. Voilà, you’ve got a mammoth cruise missile that has the range of an ICBM. Bin-Laden showed the way. Oceans only become another geographic feature on the way to killing Americans.
If the fanatics are more interested in a hands-on approach to the mass killing of Americans – and since I don’t think Tucker is willing to drive the airlines, cruise lines, and shipping companies into the ether by cutting us off from the outside world – trying to keep out the goons at passport/visa checkpoints won’t guarantee anything. More overpaid TSA government workers aren’t reassuring. We’ve already experienced the government efficiency that resulted in flight training for foreign nationals not interested in landing.
After Tucker, Sean Hannity jumps in with his program of Trump-love. Nearly everything Biden does – agreed, most of it is horrible – is condemned with the follow-up, “Trump wouldn’t have done that.” It’s not just that Biden is dreadfully wrong. He is! It’s that Trump is a god to Hannity. Biden bad, Trump good. It’s that simple to the man from New York City, and soon to be living in a Florida seaside estate maybe next to Trump.
Batting third is Laura Ingraham. She was once a Reaganite in foreign policy but now has enlisted in the Lindbergh brigade. In her on-air confessional, she’s on the Trump train to paint “forever war” on any foreign engagement that might get sticky.
All of this buffoonery came to light in the days since our screens were awash in the abominable scenes in Kabul. Yep, this disaster is 100% Biden’s. No doubt. He carried out a Buster Keaton pullout. But don’t forget, they all wanted a pullout: Biden, Trump, and the telegenic celebrities in primetime Fox News. The left was preconditioned to be a booster of the bugout from W’s Bush-lied-people-died wars. This is something for which there is kumbaya between Code Pink and the Lindbergh wing at Fox News.
Biden concocted a dastardly bugout. Trump and his Trumpkin brigades, aping Trump’s “forever wars” lingo, wanted a nicer bugout. Either way, the timetable and the smoothness of the bugout will end in the same place: mass-casualty events.
In the end, as we’ll soon learn, the Taliban and Al-Qaeda are a revolving door. Regardless of Bush’s asinine and airy rhetoric about the universal aspirations of mankind and our efforts to export wokeness, we were in Afghanistan to kill terrorists, the kind that’ll cry “Allah Akbar” as they spray bullets in a night club.
Omar Mateen, the Orlando Pulse Nightclub killer.
The mission demands 10,000 troops on the ground, bases in-country and outside, roving special forces, Afghan allies, intelligence operations par excellence, and an Afghan government that won’t stand in the way. That indigenous government doesn’t have to be Switzerland, just functioning enough to stay out of the way.
Yes, kill ‘em before they get a ticket to the Iowa State Fair. That’s a real America First strategy.
If you’re worried about our sons and daughters in harm’s way, well, any place is in “harm’s way” if these fanatics get a haven to slaughter us. If we can tolerate 35,000 troops in Germany, we sure as hell can put up with 15,000 to kill those who would kill us, and have done so.
Taliban soldiers killed in a fire fight with US troops.
How’s that for speaking truth to power, media power?
Hot in the news is the flight from Afghanistan – not flight as in air travel but as in skedaddle. It’s so bad that only explanatory expletives do it justice. Simply put, we apparently have some of the world’s worst blank slates running the show in DC. In addition to the botch taking place in Afghanistan, this group of mediocrities is attempting to strangle the country in perpetual mutilation of life with unending COVID-variants as the excuse. It’s insane.
As we watch in real time the bungle in Kabul, Biden goes out Wednesday before cameras to announce threats to governors for refusing to countenance the suffocation of children behind masks. Vaccine ID papers are beginning to be required everywhere. Businesses not big enough to function in a warehouse (Costco, Walmart, Home Depot, etc.), that haven’t already gone defunct, will be pushed over the edge this time around. Terms of employment are being rewritten to conform to the hysteria. So, our “best and brightest” from the White House to the Pentagon to the CDC abandon us to the fate of psychotic killers in Kabul while those of us still at home face an existence that is beginning to resemble life under the jackboot in the waning days of the Soviet Union or the CCP’s hyper-surveillance state.
UC San Francisco researcher conducts COVID testing as part of neighborhood-wide testing and vaccination program in San Francisco.
The lunacy of the approach to the virus was apparent early on. We dither over fatalities rates – whether 1% or 1.5% – and transmissibility R factors and completely miss the obvious: bugs evolve because they will always find a host to incubate despite your best efforts at perfection, as in perfect compliance with the demands of our overseers. It’s impossible with 330 million people . . . and counting since our borders are open sieves. Variants bust out and off we go into the world of sci-fi fantasy.
The thing that transpires before your eyes as you walk outside in many locales is Franz Kafka’s imagination made real.
Scene from Orwell’s 1984: the Two minutes of Hate.
The rescue plan from this Kafkaesque existence was mistakenly based on a vaccine. Now it’s coming to light that the jabs have a shelf life of only six months. The booster becomes the next front in the campaign for coerced compliance. Of course, this will only be true till the next edition of the bug erupts. And it’s back to what didn’t work before. Remember the definition of insanity?
When will we grow up and realize that some periods require more perseverance than others? At a certain point, life must go on. Mitigate wherever practical, develop and utilize therapeutics, and balance the mitigations with the acknowledgement that humans can’t be stopped from being human. Safety-obsession leads to a life not worth living.
From Biden’s brain to Fauci’s and Gen. Mark Milley’s mouths, incompetence rules. How many times can a great country continue to take body blows and still stand? Our allies are running from us as fast as our citizens are running from our “experts”. Amazing, absolutely amazing, that things have come to this pass.
Pres. Biden, Sec. of Defense Lloyd Austin, and Gen. Mark Milley
Just think, a majority voted for this. This is popularly-elected incompetence.
While reading Ross Douthat’s (NYT film critic) review of Disney’s “Raya and the Last Dragon”, I was struck by how art may be imitating life, or vice versa. Honestly, I haven’t seen the movie, and won’t. But his depiction of the movie sheds light on what is happening on our streets and in power circles of the Democratic Party.
We are in a peculiar zeitgeist. The word “zeitgeist” became popular among poets (Goethe) and philosophers (Hegel) in the 1800’s to refer to the spirit of a time. How did we get to the zeitgeist of official neo-Marxist indoctrination of the kids (CRT, campaigns against systemic racism, etc.) and Green New Deal socialism? This is much more ambitious than simply punishing an individual political actor, party, or business. This political endeavor is a much, much grander thing: a revolution.
Ross Douthat
Douthat’s film review brings to light certain aspects at play in the newly constructed modern mind, especially amongst the people who dwell in our cultural commanding heights. He cites the fact that older Disney animated movies held to a particular set of plot devices that have disappeared from their newer offerings. Snow White, for instance, depicted an older fairy tale with a protagonist prince or princess, a romance, and a villain. The plot was simple and endearing.
What does Disney offer us today? The protagonist is still there, but the villain turns out to be an abstract threat, “some impersonal force, some moral or spiritual disturbance”. The romance is replaced by a sibling or platonic bond. These two characteristics speak volumes about today’s ethos.
The romance of man and woman is either reduced to pure physicality or, as in the case of “Raya”, gone. Why gone? Fear of the adjective “heteronormative”. Someone in the audience might be offended by the prevalence of the only sexual attraction tied to procreation. Let’s face it, LGBTQ is the chic victim group of our time. So, the man/woman attraction is replaced by something more neutral. In that way the prominence of heteronormativity is suppressed in order to raise the status of the other sexual arrangements.
Next, the absence of personalized evil – like a Simon Legree in Uncle Tom’s Cabin – in popular media. Evil is nebulous, in the form of “some impersonal force, some moral or spiritual disturbance”. A constant inundation of this plot device gets us into thinking of our alleged problems as the product of abstract forces. This might go a long way in explaining the resort to the abstract “system” in the scurrilous writings of the Anti-Racism crusaders Robin DeAngelo or Ibram X. Kendi. It’s the justification for the “systematic” reordering of the economy, and the omnipresent life associated with it, in the Green New Deal, and all of society in CRT. This is not reform, but revolution.
We probably got to the destination of our current Marxist moment with the assistance of popular entertainment. It’s easy to pour blood on a cop’s home, or maybe shoot him or her, or topple statues, or ransack a downtown business district if such actions are instrumental in bringing down the hypothetical, abstracted evil. It’s easier to push the nihilism through organs of the state if the population has been softened by a warped version of reality.
Bon Jovi’s ballad “Livin’ on a Prayer” (see below) is a story of a working-class couple struggling to make ends meet. The dream – synonymous with prayer in this usage – of them rising above their current circumstance keeps them going. Prayers, or dreams, come in many shapes and sizes. Some are unattainable fantasies and eventually lead to ruin. This darker side of illusory end-states riddles much of today’s political debates.
Dreams seek to become premises when cloaked in the jargon of “science” as in the cliché “follow the science”. To be clear, a premise is “a proposition antecedently supposed or proved as a basis of argument or inference” according to Webster. Emphasis is on “supposed” since many are unproven and unprovable, and therefore unscientific by definition, and more a statement of feeling than objective reality. A classic example is the trite qualifier “if it saves one life”. It’s a ticket to the straitjacket of complete risk-aversion if not balanced against the very real costs.
One such “dream” is the fallacy of interventions nearly eliminating risk, as in another clamp down against COVID. The dream of risk-aversion is king. The flat-lining of social and economic life is commonly the result. The toxicity in this latest drive to utopia is found in the rejection of life being a long series of trade-offs. The economist Thomas Sowell, an accomplished amateur photographer, would explain the concept to be like the contest between aperture and shutter speed. The taking of pictures is analogous to the balancing of risk of infection and prosperity. The elevation of concern for one depresses the other. That kind of mature thinking is jettisoned in the headlong rush to prevent anyone from getting the sniffles.
“If it saves one life” is the hidden mantra, and underlying premise. If that is the standard, why get up in the morning? We’ve known for quite some time that the virus, like all infections, carries greater dangers for the slender segments of the population with prior medical difficulties. The “saves one life” supposition is weaponized to eliminate any thought of the costs and off we go to eight-year-olds stuck as six-year-olds in academic maturity, lifetimes of personal fortunes destroyed in business closures, an evisceration of social life behind creepy masks and social distancing, and grandma’s hug being reduced to digibytes on a computer screen. It’s monstrous.
The delta variant is the excuse du jour for a return to a form of authoritarianism that’s beginning to awfully look like totalitarianism. It’s used to force people into taking the jabs (vaccine passports, threats of job loss, an end to travel and schooling). Any concerns about the vaccines or applicability to individual circumstances are officially suppressed as “bad thoughts”. The rallying of businesses to the cause carries the stink of fascism of early and mid-20th-century Germany or Italy.
It doesn’t stop there. The science of epidemiology is taking on the appearance of the “science” of race in National Socialist ideology. Totally disreputable, both are the gilding for a power grab and raw utopianism. Lost in the furor are some simple questions. Like, what is the difference between natural and man-made immunity? Is one more efficacious than the other? Pardon me, but isn’t a vaccine an attempt to replicate an infection in order to stimulate the body’s immune system, the one that God gave us? As such, the 99% COVID survival rate has produced a huge number of people with natural immunity. Is this swath of the population better protected than those with the jabs? Crickets by Jen Psaki.
The relative newness in historical terms of the current pandemic prevents many hard and fast answers. I wish that the folks at MSNBC would be more cautious about their bloviating. As for the natural vs. artificial immunity debate, a recent Cleveland Clinic study must be thrown into the hopper for consideration because it raises the scepter of equivalent if not better protection for the survival class. So, why the crisis-mongering for proof of vaccination if a good chunk of the population has equal if not better immunity without it?
More damage is incurred by the risk-averse obsessives in our public health bureaucracies when they resort to agitprop and end up soiling the very real advantages of the vaccines. The recent spike in hospitalizations is routinely characterized as a “pandemic of the unvaccinated”? The phrase is parroted with some glittery number like 97% of cases. I’m sorry but I’m skeptical, and they’ve earned it. On what numbers did they derive their percentage? Some have suggested that they are based on January to June figures, a period when few had the vaccine and thus skewing the result toward the unvaccinated. Conversely, other spot data might confirm the oft-repeated claim. However, the CDC’s Walensky recently let slip that they don’t have up-to-date numbers. Boasts of certainty under conditions of real uncertainty only besmirches the reputations of authority figures and their vaunted “experts”.
Anyway, much of this is an angel-waltz on the head of a pin. The discussion misses the critical issue: Is risk to be avoided at all costs? What are the limits to risk-aversion? Our public gurus act like the 1% – the flip side of the 99% survival rate – is grounds to suffocate civilization. It ignores the fact that some periods carry more dangers than others since nothing in nature is evenly distributed, including hazards. The manic attempt to make all of life for perpetuity equally safe will end in a cataclysm. The premise, or supposition – “if it saves one life” – isn’t a moral imperative. It’s a formula for disaster.
Another calamity awaits in the headlong rush to expunge the phantom threat of systemic racism. Like the fit over COVID, this one is founded on a supposition that, in good ol’ boy fashion, is a dog that won’t hunt. It can’t hunt because it has no legs. The allegory works because the idea has no proof to prop it up. The racism is assumed to exist and it’s off to the drive for wholesale indoctrination.
Under the guise of critical race theory (CRT) and other anti-racism programs, minds are shaped around an unfounded assertion, or premise, in ubiquitous shaming sessions. It’s a simple mental equation for the hustlers: unequal outcomes mean . . . RACISM! To avoid having to identify individual racist actors, it’s loudest barkers point to a shadowy, evil presence. It’s “systemic”, because in their minds unequal stats MUST derive from RACSISM. Not logical but it works politically. Making the malefactor spectral, clears them of having to identify individual racists, which would be hard to find in the upper echelons, or too few anywhere else. It’s a familiar tactic in administrative conflict avoidance: send out a mass memo to address the misbehavior of one or two.
Karl Marx
By making the problem the society, or “system”, the way is paved for revolution. That’s what they’re really after. Their soul mate, Karl Marx, wasn’t satisfied with waiting for another round of elections to impose socialism, something pushed by the Fabians and Mensheviks. He wanted to tear the whole thing down right now. So do they, the hucksters who provide the theoretical framework for the munchkins to tear down Portland. In their minds, after they’ve mangled logic, a corrupt system requires the overturning of an entire way of life root and branch. Imagine it, an entire way of life relegated to the historical ash heap for an empty premise.
The premise of inequality-equals-racism is a scandal to logic, but it doesn’t stop there. We are in the midst of a wrecking campaign for the American economy. Why are we trying to mass devastate livelihoods? This time, the culprit is “climate change”. The charge is that man has wrecked the climate with our grid, cars, and suburbs. It’s said to be crisis, but is it? Now that’s hard to tell, but “crisis” is certainly useful if you want to stampeded the public into draconian self-flagellation.
Faulty, jump-to-conclusions premises abound in this latest round of modern hysteria. What constitutes a “crisis”? Does the available evidence support a “crisis”? Who are the major purveyors of CO₂? Mind you, it isn’t the total amount of CO₂ but an accurate formulation relies on the number per unit of GDP. Would a single country, or state within that country (California for instance), make a dent? Would any of the suggested measures make much of a difference? And, going back to Sowell’s photography metaphor, what are the trade-offs? And costs there will be in a tunnel vision focus on warming.
Our giddy, 31-year-old sophomore class president now serving as the representative of NY’s 14th congressional district (the firebrand known by the moniker AOC) would have you believe that we have 12 more years – oops, 11 more years – before the Sahara covers the globe, Arizona becomes beachfront property, and the islands of the South Pacific have to be removed from maps like the old Soviet Union. John Kerry is tasked with the mission to recruit international converts to the self-mutilation as Biden executes a go-it-alone strategy. All for what, a degree Celsius in a century?
The goal is breathtaking with nothing much behind it but the premise of a crisis. For the true believers, all-too-often with as much scientific understanding as my border collies, it’s an absolute certainty that requires you to surrender your liberty to them. Never mind that the “crisis” lacks any observable clarity, that China and India with 36% of the total world population aren’t about to sign onto a return to life in the dirt, and that Americans won’t long tolerate a grid designed by the greenie wizards of California with California results.
Amazingly, the governing elites in rich countries, mostly the Anglospehere and western Europe, are stupid enough to go along, which says volumes about the state of education in the birthplace of Horace Mann and the modern university. We are flooded by advanced degrees but can’t master simple logic. Has education evolved into a grandiose system of befuddlement? Is education actually de-education?
Something must account for the ignorance of the scientific method and abandonment of sound reasoning. Today, the substitute for a sound education is a computer model. Computer algorithms, i.e. models, are the go-to approach to make certain what is uncertain. Data goes in and predictions pop out, trend lines and whatnot. But the models didn’t suddenly materialize from a burning bush. Humans construct them and play with them and their results. In other words, they are product of us, with all our biases. So, data is entered and weighed, more numbers pop out, and Al Gore jets off to Davos and more $50,000 speaking gigs.
Al Gore, the emissary of climate change apocalyptics
Loose premises are the stuff of many of our most influential political movements. Our schools haven’t inoculated us from the mental plague. Ironically, they function as super-spreader events. As a result, we lurch from the suffocation of our kids behind masks in our schools, businesses forced to operate on a knife’s edge, colossal public debt, to the psychological scarring of ritual shaming sessions under the guise of anti-racism commissars, to a wholesale bulldozing of an entire way of life in a sinister crusade to eliminate something that the rest of the world won’t forego to satisfy the greenie fixations of Santa Clara County.
These aren’t premises in the proper sense of the word. They are leaps of faith, leaps of a materialistic faith, like Marx’s dialectical materialism, and have nothing to do with the spiritual kind. In fact, this new faith appears to be the only kind increasingly congenial among a people who have abandoned the pew or prayer rug. But far from being enlightened, we’ve laid ourselves open to a new kind of sky god: the sky god of ourselves with all our hysterias, stunted cognitive development, and flights of pure fancy. Welcome to livin’ on a premise, and many a faulty one at that.
PolitiFact staff at the 2012 RNC in Tampa (submitted photo).
At the top of Politifact’s website lies the banner “Stand up for the Facts”. Hogwash! It is just another preening part of the progressive (meaning left-wing) blob.
Check this out: Politifact conjures a distinction without a distinction in an attempt to distance Biden and Harris from their 2020 campaign rhetoric. In 2020 Biden and Harris were in full campaign mode throwing aspersions on Trump and his administration’s efforts to develop a vaccine. The apparatchiks at Politifact tried to run interference for the Dem politicos by claiming that they weren’t vaccine deniers in the run up to the vote. According to the young techno-demigods at Politifact, Biden/Harris were merely smearing Trump, not the vaccine. Hogwash!
Harris trumpeted, with Biden rapping in similar words, “If Donald Trump tells us to take it, I’m not taking it.” With invective, she went after the medical scientists in Operation Warp Speed (OWS) by dismissing them as weak-kneed shills for Trump, saying they “will be muzzled, they will be suppressed, they will be sidelined, because he’s looking at an election coming up in less than 60 days. . . .”
Kamala Harris in September of 2020 declaring that she doesn’t trust Trump’s vaccine.
The lead OWS scientist was Moncef Slaoui and he countered her bombast by saying “the approach is 100 percent based on facts and data and nothing else.”
And to say, as Politifact does, that Biden/Harris weren’t disparaging the vaccine? How do you avoid smearing the vaccine when you go after the credibility of the people who produced it? Why else would Harris declare “I’m not taking it”?
The buffoonery of Politifact is amazing beyond belief. Now, our new potentates are trying to stampede the reluctant into taking the jabs by imposing many of the old lockdown measures. The bunglers running the show in DC want to take away our lives in order to achieve perfect compliance with a vaccine that 8 months before they were ridiculing.
And to think that this duo got 81 million votes. Now I see why. The usual suspects, like Politifact, were in the tank for them. You can read Politifact’s twaddle here.
Anti-racism – really critical race theory – indoctrination in an American classroom.
Young Pioneers: officially the Vladimir Lenin All-Union Pioneer Organization and abbreviated as the Young Pioneers; the main Soviet Communist Party youth organization for young activists aged 9-15 from 1922 to 1991.
Young Pioneers in Moscow parade.Young pioneers greeting Joseph Stalin, 1935. (Photo by Ivan Shagin)
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I’m afraid that too many adults use the schools as daycare. They go to work – or whatever – assuming that these mostly public employees, teachers and staff, will magically turn their offspring into well-balanced citizens. Little do they know that they are handing their kids to schools that increasingly resembles those in Castro’s Cuba or the Soviet Union. The curricula and pedagogy is geared to indoctrination for the Revolution. Their aim is to replicate something like the Young Pioneers of the Vladimir Lenin All-Union Pioneer Organization.
Bernie and his bros continually extol the virtues of Castro by citing the regime’s campaign for schools and universal literacy. But literacy for what? Literacy is just another means of mind control in the absence of a First Amendment. The politburo wants you to read, read only their stuff since nothing else is permitted. Would it be better in this context to be illiterate and thus freer from state mind control?
California is hurtling toward velvet-glove Castroism. As a 30-year teaching veteran of California public schools, I know of the many ukases for politicizing the curriculum. The “Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum” approved by the state’s education commissars is the newest one and full of interesting tidbits to further the permanent revolution. It’s the latest in a long line of faddish political radicalisms being injected into your child’s head.
For instance, the early Christian pilgrims are accused of “theocide”, the extermination of “indigenous epistemic and cultural futurity” (what impenetrable jargon). With the model curriculum comes model lesson plans. One calls for teacher-led chants to the Aztec god Tezkatlipoka, worshipped in the old days with human sacrifice and cannibalism. So, “theocide” consists of Christ’s Golden Rule – do unto others as you would have done to yourself – replacing the propitiation of nature spirits with human butchery. Hopefully, in the classroom, the rescue of the oppressed from cultural enslavement will be limited to chants.
Contemporaneous depiction of Aztec human sacrifice.
The one caveat is that this cranky lunacy was in the “proposed” draft. Whether it remained in the final edict is something that can’t be determined at this time, but the fact that it was included in the beginning says volumes about the goofs running your schools.
It makes one seriously consider pricing out a moving truck. For Cubans escaping Castro’s schools, the crossing of the Florida Straight is 90 miles by raft in shark-infested waters. It’s a bit longer, and safer, for most Californians to seek refuge beyond the reach of the commissars, but think of it as an investment in the sanity of your children.
“Before you become too entranced with gorgeous gadgets and mesmerizing video displays, let me remind you that information is not knowledge, knowledge is not wisdom, and wisdom is not foresight. Each grows out of the other, and we need them all.” — Sir Arthur C. Clarke and in the prologue of the documentary film, “The Creepy Line”
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I’m of a mixed mind on whether to post this. It’s about the whole gaggle of social media biggies and Google. They might flag it for “misinformation” and I’ll end up like Dennis Praeger or Jordan Peterson taking a timeout in the mass emptiness of internet cancellation.
Today’s film recommendation: “The Creepy Line” on Amazon Prime. The trailer is below. The title refers to the red line, once coined by Eric Schmidt of Google, that demarcates truly neutral internet platforms – like Facebook, Twitter, and Google profess to be – and censorship and manipulation of the mind. Have they crossed it? What’s happened post-2016 makes me wonder . . . a lot.
The film answers the question with a resounding “Yes”. The film proclaims that the internet giants engage in monstrous abuse of their legal immunity in Section 230c of the Communications Decency Act. Are they really “neutral” platforms or do they systematically engage in censorship and mind control through their algorithms, the biases of their staffs, and so-called policies? The film is a deep dive into Google and Facebook’s surveillance of our internet use for profit and, now, the direction of our preferences.
Their snooping, or surveillance, advances them far beyond the old Pinkerton Detective Agency, whose logo was the all-seeing eye, putting the “private” in private eye.
An even more troubling occurrence is the emerging alliance between their potential regulators, the federal government with its huge administrative state, and these tech monoliths. Press Secretary Jen Psaki let the cat out of the bag in a July 16 presser. She proclaimed, “… we work to engage with them to better understand the enforcement of social media platform policies [against “misinformation” about the vaccines] . . . . and of course promoting quality information algorithms”. Combine these comments with Mark Zuckerberg’s 2018 admission before Congress that Silicon Valley is an “extremely left-leaning place”. A deep bias at the service of the federal Leviathan should send shivers down the spine of any thoughtful person.
Many of us are so wedded to our devices that we blindly accept what Google, Facebook, and Twitter are flashing before our eyes. When their algorithms and interventions work both to reinforce a left-wing bias and obedience to the state, we have crossed over the red line and past the borders into Orwell’s Oceania.
I’ve previously mentioned my astonishment at the sudden embrace of extremist and exotic ideologies by powerful institutions in the Western world. The spittle-laced fulminations of college social justice warriors and the terrorist-clad thumpings of Antifa groupies are now mainstreamed. What’s happened?
What makes the commandant of the Marine Corps, Gen. Mark Milley, sound like AOC? Or corporate heads like Kimberly Boyd, Hasbro’s senior vice president of global brands, to say something really stupid to defend the removal of “Mr.” from “Mr. Potato Head”? She said,
“Culture has evolved. Kids want to be able to represent
their own experiences. The way the brand currently exists—
with the ‘Mr.’ and ‘Mrs.’—is limiting when it comes to both
gender identity and family structure.”
Everyone of any prominence is jumping on the bandwagon. Lunacy has become the new normal. It’s now everywhere. Your kids are getting it in kindergarten under the pretentious moniker “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” (DEI). Personally, I think that “Inclusion” should be moved to the middle to make for a more accurate acronym – DIE.
Soon, we’ll all be lunatics.
Once again, how did we get here? My answer: 2% runs the world. They don’t have to be talented; they just have to be opinionated. The clique is cloistered in high-rent zip codes and on Twitter and Instagram.
This came to mind when researching the relative size of the crowd on Twitter. According to the NY Post, 22% of Americans use the digital grapevine. Of that number, 10% account for 80% of the digital burps (tweets). That means that the rantings of 2% of the American population carry the potential for the jihad. (See the story here)
History confirms the dynamic. Do you think for one moment that the Russian Bolsheviks of 1917 were a popular movement? I don’t even think that they busted the threshold of 2% in popularity or even name recognition. Yet, a cadre of useful idiots and tightly organized zealots can count for more than the silent majority. It’s amazing that revolutions can be a march to ruin on so little.
