An older couple is playing in the annual club championship. They are playing in a playoff hole and it is down to a 6-inch putt that the wife has to make.
She takes her stance and her husband can see her trembling. She putts and misses; they lose the match.
On the way home in the car her husband is fuming, "I cannot believe you missed that putt! That putt was no longer than my dick."
The wife just looked over at her husband, smiled and said, "Yes dear, but it was much harder!"
*.*
We were helping customers when the store optometrist walked by and flirted with a co-worker.
Of course, we all had to stop what we were doing to tease her, but she quickly dismissed the notion of a budding romance.
"Can you imagine making out with an optometrist?" she asked. "It would always be, 'Better like this...or like this?'"
*.*
The world's leading expert on European wasps walks into a record shop...
He asks the assistant “Do you have ‘European Vespidae Acoustics Volume 2? I believe it was released this week.”
“Certainly,” replies the assistant. “Would you like to listen before you buy it?”
"That would be wonderful," says the expert, and puts on a pair of headphones.
He listens for a few moments and says to the assistant, “I'm terribly sorry, but I am the world's leading expert on European wasps and this is not accurate at all. I don't recognize any of those sounds. Are you sure this is the correct recording?”
The assistant checks the turntable, and replies that it is indeed European Vespidae Acoustics Volume 2. The assistant apologizes and lifts the needle onto the next track.
Again the expert listens for a few moments and then says to the assistant, "No, this just can't be right! I've been an expert in this field for 43 years and I still don't recognize any of these sounds."
The assistant apologizes again and lifts the needle to the next track.
The expert throws off the headphones as soon as it starts playing and is fuming with rage.
"This is outrageous false advertising! I am the world's leading expert on European wasps and no European wasp has ever made a sound like the ones on this record!"
The manager of the shop overhears the commotion and walks over.
"What seems to be the problem, sir?"
"This is an outrage! I am the world's leading expert on European wasps. Nobody knows more about them than I do. There is no way in hell that the sounds on that record were made by European wasps!"
The manager glances down and notices the problem instantly.
"I'm terribly sorry, sir. It appears we've been playing you the bee side."
*.*
Congrats to John and Phyllis Cook, who fell in love at an Ohio nursing home and got married. He's 100-years-old, she's 102.
Although, she undoubtedly gets kidded about robbing the hospital bed.
Heard they spent their honeymoon walking to the dining room.
And not a day goes by that they don't say those three words to each other: "What? Huh? What?"
*.*
Fear of that long awaited "Big One" has inspired panic buying in Southern California.
I know my mom and sister went out and cornered the bubble-wrap market.
Need to protect the earthquake wine supply.
Quote of the Times;
Some have asked, “who needs 100 rounds?” If 6 brave, trained, and alert police officers with professionally maintained weapons fired 58 rounds to subdue the Dayton shooter, I’d say my wife deserves at least that many chances to protect herself and my kids when I’m not home. - Thomas Massie (@RepThomasMassie) August 7, 2019
Link of the Times;
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazino_affair
Issue of the Times;
John McCain, Jeffrey Epstein, and Pizzagate by Ron Unz
The death of Sen. John McCain last August revealed some important truths about the nature of our establishment media.
McCain’s family had released word of his incurable brain cancer many months earlier and his passing at age 84 was long expected, so media outlets great and small had possessed all the time necessary for producing and polishing the packages they eventually published, and that was readily apparent from the voluminous nature of the tributes that they ran. The New York Times, still our national newspaper of record, allocated more than three full pages of its printed edition to the primary obituary, and this was supplemented by a considerable number of other articles and sidebars. I cannot recall any political figure other than an American president whose passing had ever received such an enormous wealth of coverage, and perhaps even some former residents of the Oval Office might have fallen short of that standard. Although I certainly didn’t bother reading all of the tens of thousands of words in the Times or my other newspapers, the coverage of McCain’s life and career seemed exceptionally laudatory across the mainstream media, liberal and conservative alike, with scarcely a negative word appearing anywhere outside the political fringe.
On the face of it, such undiluted political love for McCain might seem a bit odd to those who have followed his activities over the last couple of decades. After all, the Times and most of the other leading lights of our media firmament are purportedly liberal and claim to have become vehement critics of our disastrous Iraq War and other military adventures, let alone the calamitous possibility of an attack upon Iran. Meanwhile, McCain was universally regarded as the leading figure in America’s “War Party,” eagerly supporting all prospective and retrospective military endeavors with gleeful fury, and even making his chant of “Bomb, Bomb, Bomb Iran” the most widely remembered detail of his unsuccessful 2008 presidential campaign. So either our major media outlets somehow overlooked such striking differences on an absolutely central issue, or perhaps their true positions on certain matters are not exactly what they seem to be, and merely constitute elements of a Kabuki-performance aimed at deceiving their more naive readers.
Even more remarkable were the discordant facts airbrushed out of McCain’s history. As the winner of the Pulitzer Prize and two George Polk awards, the late Sydney Schanberg was widely regarded as one of the greatest American war correspondents of the twentieth century. His exploits during our ill-fated Indo-Chinese War had become the basis of the Oscar-winning film The Killing Fields, which probably established him as the most famous journalist in America after Woodward and Bernstein of Watergate fame, and he had also served as a top editor at The New York Times. A decade ago, he published his greatest expose, providing a mountain of evidence that America had deliberately left behind hundreds of POWs in Vietnam and he fingered then-presidential candidate John McCain as the central figure in the later official cover-up of that monstrous betrayal. The Arizona senator had traded on his national reputation as our best-known former POW to bury the story of those abandoned prisoners, permitting America’s political establishment to escape serious embarrassment. As a result, Sen. McCain earned the lush rewards of our generous ruling elites, much like his own father Admiral John S. McCain, Sr., who had led the cover-up of the deliberate 1967 Israeli attack on the U.S.S. Liberty, which killed or wounded over 200 American servicemen.
As publisher of The American Conservative, I ran Schanberg’s remarkable piece as a cover story, and across several websites over the years it has surely been read many hundreds of thousands of times, including a huge spike around the time of McCain’s death. I therefore find it rather difficult to believe that the many journalists investigating McCain’s background might have remained unaware of this material. Yet no hints of these facts were provided in any of the articles appearing in any remotely prominent media outlets as can be seen by searching for web pages containing “McCain and Schanberg” dated around the time of the Senator’s passing.
John McCain and the POW Cover-Up
SYDNEY SCHANBERG • MAY 25, 2010
Schanberg’s journalistic stature had hardly been forgotten by his former colleagues. Upon his death a couple of years ago, the Times ran a very long and glowing obituary, and a few months later I attended the memorial tribute to his life and career held at the New York Times headquarters building, which more than two hundred prominent journalists mostly from his own generation, including those of the highest rank. Times Publisher Arthur Sulzberger, Jr. gave a speech describing how as a young man he had always so greatly admired Schanberg and had been mortified by the unfortunate circumstances of his departure from the family’s newspaper. Former Executive Editor Joseph Lelyveld recounted the many years he had worked closely with the man he had long considered his closest friend and colleague, someone whom he almost seemed to regard as his older brother. But during the two hours of praise and remembrance scarcely a single word was uttered in public about the gigantic story that had occupied the last two decades of Schanberg’s celebrated career.
This same blanket of media silence also enveloped the very serious accusations regarding McCain’s own Vietnam War record. A few years ago, I drew upon the Timesand other fully mainstream sources to strongly suggest that McCain’s stories of his torture as a POW were probably fictional, invented to serve as a cover and an excuse for the very real record of his wartime collaboration with his Communist captors. Indeed, at the time our American media reported his activities as one of the leading propagandists of our North Vietnamese foes, but these facts were later flushed down the memory-hole. McCain’s father then ranked as one of America’s top military officers, and it seems likely that his personal political intervention ensured that the official narrative of his son’s wartime record was transmuted from traitor to war-hero, thereby allowing the younger McCain to later embark upon his celebrated political career.
John McCain: When “Tokyo Rose” Ran for President
RON UNZ • MARCH 9, 2015
The story of the abandoned Vietnam POWs and McCain’s own Communist propaganda broadcasts hardly exhaust the catalog of the major skeletons in the late Senator’s closet. McCain was regularly described by reporters as being remarkably hot-headed and having a violent temper, but the national press left it to the alternative media to investigate the real-life implications of those rather suggestive phrases.
In a September 1, 2008 Counterpunch expose later published online, Alexander Cockburn reported that interviews with two emergency room physicians in Phoenix revealed that around the time that McCain was sucked into the political maelstrom of the Keating Five Scandal, his wife Cindy was admitted to her local hospital suffering from a black eye, facial bruises, and scratches consistent with physical violence, and this same situation occurred two additional times over the next few years. Cockburn also noted several other highly suspicious marital incidents during the years that followed, including the Senator’s wife appearing with a bandaged wrist and her arm in a sling not long after she joined her husband on the 2008 campaign trail, an injury reported by our strangely incurious political journalists as being due to “excessive hand-shaking.” It’s an odd situation when a tiny leftist newsletter can easily uncover facts that so totally eluded the vast resources of our entire national press corps. If there were credible reports that Melania Trump had been repeatedly admitted to local emergency rooms suffering from black eyes and facial bruises, would our corporate media have remained so uninterested in any further investigation?
McCain had first won his Arizona Congressional seat in 1982, not long after he moved into the state, with his campaign bankrolled by his father-in-law’s beer-distributorship fortune, and that inheritance eventually elevated the McCain household into one of the wealthiest in the Senate. But although the Senator spent the next quarter-century in public life, even nearly upsetting George W. Bush for the 2000 Republican presidential nomination, only in late 2008 did I learn from the Times that the Phoenix beer-monopoly in question, then valued at around $200 million, had accrued to a man whose lifelong business partner Kemper Marley had long been deeply linked to organized crime. Indeed, close associates of that latter individual had been convicted by a jury of the car-bomb assassination of a Phoenix investigative crime reporter just a few years before McCain’s sudden triumphal entrance into Arizona politics. Perhaps such guilt-by-association is improper, but would our national press-corps have remained silent if the personal fortune of our current president were only a step or two removed from the car-bomb assassins of a nosy journalist who died while investigating mobsters?
As I gradually became aware of these enormities casually hidden in McCain’s background, my initial reaction was disbelief that someone whose record was so deeply tarnished in so many different ways could ever have reached such a pinnacle of American political power. But as the media continued to avert its eyes from these newly revealed facts, even those disclosed in the pages of the Times itself, I gradually began to consider matters in a different light. Perhaps McCain’s elevation to great American political power was not in spite of the devastating facts littering his personal past, but because of them. As I wrote a few years ago:
Today when we consider the major countries of the world we see that in many cases the official leaders are also the leaders in actuality: Vladimir Putin calls the shots in Russia, Xi Jinping and his top Politburo colleagues do the same in China, and so forth. However, in America and in some other Western countries, this seems to be less and less the case, with top national figures merely being attractive front-men selected for their popular appeal and their political malleability, a development that may eventually have dire consequences for the nations they lead. As an extreme example, a drunken Boris Yeltsin freely allowed the looting of Russia’s entire national wealth by the handful of oligarchs who pulled his strings, and the result was the total impoverishment of the Russian people and a demographic collapse almost unprecedented in modern peacetime history.
An obvious problem with installing puppet rulers is the risk that they will attempt to cut their strings, much like Putin soon outmaneuvered and exiled his oligarch patron Boris Berezovsky. One means of minimizing such risk is to select puppets who are so deeply compromised that they can never break free, knowing that the political self-destruct charges buried deep within their pasts could easily be triggered if they sought independence. I have sometimes joked with my friends that perhaps the best career move for an ambitious young politician would be to secretly commit some monstrous crime and then make sure that the hard evidence of his guilt ended up in the hands of certain powerful people, thereby assuring his rapid political rise.
In physics, when an object deviates from its expected trajectory for inexplicable reasons, we assume that some unknown force has been at work, and tracing the record of such deviations may help to determine the characteristic properties of the latter. Over the years, I’ve increasingly become aware of such strange ideological deviations in public policy, and although some are readily explained, others suggest the existence of hidden forces far beneath the surface of our regular political world. This same situation may have occurred throughout our history, and sometimes the political decisions that so baffled contemporaries eventually came to light decades later.
In The Dark Side of Camelot, famed investigative reporter Seymour Hersh claimed that secret blackmail evidence of JFK’s extra-marital affairs probably played a crucial role in having his administration overrule the unanimous verdict of all top Pentagon advisors and award the largest military procurement contract in U.S. history to General Dynamics instead of Boeing, thereby saving the former company from likely bankruptcy and its major organized-crime shareholders from devastating financial losses. Hersh also suggests that a similar factor likely explains JFK’s last-minute reversal in the choice of his Vice President, a decision that landed Lyndon Johnson on the 1960 ticket and placed him in the White House after Kennedy’s 1963 assassination.
As I recently mentioned, in the 1950s Sen. Estes Kefauver shifted the focus of his Organized Crime Hearings after the Chicago Syndicate confronted him with the photographs of his sexual encounter with two mob-supplied women. A decade later, California Attorney-General Stanley Mosk suffered much the same fate, with the facts remaining hidden for over twenty years.
Similar rumors swirl around events much farther back in history as well, sometimes with enormous consequences. Well-placed contemporary sources have claimed that Samuel Untermyer, a wealthy Jewish lawyer, purchased the secret correspondence between Woodrow Wilson and his longtime mistress, and that the existence of that powerful leverage may have been an important factor behind Wilson’s astonishingly rapid rise from president of Princeton in 1910 to governor of New Jersey in 1911 to president of the United States in 1912. Once in office, Wilson signed the controversial legislation establishing the Federal Reserve system in 1913 and also named Louis Brandeis as the first Jewish member of the U.S. Supreme Court despite the public opposition of nearly our entire legal establishment. Wilson’s swiftly changing views on American involvement in the First World War may also have influenced by such personal pressures rather than solely determined by his perceptions of the national interest.
Without naming any names, since 2001 it has been difficult to avoid noticing that one of the most zealous and committed supporters of the Neocon party-line on all Middle Eastern foreign policy matters has been a leading Republican senator from one of the most socially-conservative Southern states, a man whose rumored personal inclinations have long circulated on the Internet. The strikingly-sudden reversal of this individual on a major policy question certainly supports these suspicions. There have also been several other such examples involving prominent Republicans.
But consider the far different situation of Rep. Barney Frank of Massachusetts, who in 1987 became the first member of the Congress to voluntarily admit that he was gay. Not long afterward, a notorious scandal erupted when it was revealed that his own DC townhouse had been used by a former boyfriend as headquarters for a male-prostitution ring. Frank claimed to have had no knowledge of that sordid situation, and his liberal Massachusetts constituents apparently accepted that, since he was resoundingly reelected and went on to serve another 24 years in Congress. But surely if Frank had been a Republican from a socially-conservative district, anyone possessing such evidence would have totally controlled his political survival, and with Frank spending several years as Chairman of the very powerful House Financial Services Committee, the value of such a hold would have been enormous.
This demonstrates the undeniable reality that what constitutes effective blackmail material may vary tremendously across different eras and regions. Today, it is widely accepted that longtime FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover lived his life as a deeply-closeted homosexual and there seem to be serious claims that he also had some black ancestry, with the secret evidence of these facts probably helping to explain why for decades he stubbornly refused to admit the existence of American organized crime or focus his G-men on efforts to uproot it. But in today’s America, he surely would have proudly proclaimed his sexuality and racial ancestry in an New York Times Magazine cover-story, rightly believing that they enhanced his political invulnerability on the national stage. There are lurid rumors that the Syndicate possessed secret photos of Hoover wearing a dress and high-heels, but just a few years ago Rep. Mike Honda of San Jose desperately placed his eight-year-old transgendered grand-daughter front-and-center in his unsuccessful attempt to win reelection.
The decades have certainly softened the effectiveness of many forms of blackmail, but pedophilia still ranks as an extremely powerful taboo. There seems to be a great deal of evidence that powerful organizations and individuals have successfully managed to suppress credible accusations of that practice for very long periods of time if no group with substantial media influence chose to target the offenders for unmasking.
The most obvious example is the Catholic Church, and the failings of its American and international hierarchy in that regard have regularly made the front pages of our leading newspapers. But until the early 2000s and the breakthrough reporting of the Boston Globe as recounted in the Oscar-winning film Spotlight, the Church had routinely fended off such scandals.
Consider also the remarkable case of British television personality Sir Jimmy Savile, one of his country’s most admired celebrities, eventually knighted for his public service. Only shortly after his death at age 84 did the press begin revealing that he had probably molested many hundreds of children during his long career. Accusations by his young victims had stretched back across forty years, but his criminal activities had seemingly been protected by his wealth and celebrity, along with his numerous supporters in the media.
There is also the intriguing example of Dennis Hastert. As the longest serving Republican Speaker of the House in U.S. history, holding office during 1999-2007, Hastert was third in line to the Presidency and even ranked as our nation’s top Republican elected official during some of that period. Based upon my newspaper readings, he had always struck me as a rather bland and ordinary individual, with journalists sometimes even strongly hinting at his mediocrity, so that I occasionally wondered just how someone so unimpressive could have risen to such extremely high national office.
Then a few years ago, he was suddenly thrust back into the headlines, arrested by the FBI and charged with financial crimes relating to what apparently had been his past history of abusing young boys, at least one of whom had committed suicide, with the federal judge who sent him to prison denouncing him as “a serial child molester” at sentencing. Perhaps I’ve led an overly sheltered life, but my impression is that only a tiny sliver of Americans have had a long record of child molestation, and all things being equal, it seems rather unlikely that someone of such a background but who possesses no other great talents or skills would rise to near the absolute top of our political heap. So perhaps not all things were otherwise equal. If some powerful elements held the hard evidence that placed a particular elected official under their total control, making great efforts to elevate him to Speaker of the House would be a very shrewd investment.
At times the unwillingness of our national media to see major stories in front of their very noses reaches ridiculous extremes. During the summer of 2007, the Internet was ablaze with claims that Sen. John Edwards, a runner-up in the 2004 Democratic presidential primaries, had just fathered a child with his mistress, and those reports were backed by seemingly-credible visual evidence, including photos showing the married senator holding his new-born baby. Yet as the days and even the weeks went by, not a whiff of this salacious scandal ever reached the pages of any of my morning newspapers or the rest of the mainstream media although it was a top conversation topic everywhere else. Eventually, the National Enquirer, a notorious gossip tabloid, scored a journalistic first, by receiving a Pulitzer Prize nomination for breaking the story that no other outlet seemed willing to cover. Would our media have similarly averted its eyes from a newborn baby Trump coming from the wrong side of the bed?
Over the years, it became increasingly obvious to me that nearly all elements of our national media were often quite willing to enlist in a “conspiracy of silence” to minimize or entirely ignore stories of tremendous potential interest to their readership and major public importance. I could easily have doubled or tripled the number of such notable examples I provided above without much effort. Moreover, it is quite intriguing that so many of these cases involve the sort of criminal or sexual misbehavior that would be ideally suited for blackmailing powerful individuals who are less likely to be vulnerable to other influences. So perhaps many of the elected officials situated at the top of our democratic system merely reign as political puppets, dancing to invisible strings.
Given my awareness of this remarkable track-record of major media cover-ups, I’m ashamed to admit that I had paid almost no attention to the Jeffrey Epstein case until it exploded across our national headlines earlier this month, suddenly becoming one of the biggest news stories in our country.
For many years, reports about Epstein and his illegal sex-ring had regularly circulated on the fringes of the Internet, with agitated commenters citing the case as proof of the dark and malevolent forces that secretly controlled our corrupted political system. But I almost entirely ignored these discussions, and I’m not sure that I ever once clicked on a single link.
Probably one reason I paid so little attention to the topic was the exceptionally lurid nature of the claims being made. Epstein was supposedly an enormously wealthy Wall Street financier of rather mysterious personal background and source of funds, who owned a private island and an immense New York City mansion, both regularly stocked with harems of underage girls provided for sexual purposes. He allegedly hobnobbed on a regular basis with Bill Clinton, Prince Andrew, Harvard’s Alan Dershowitz, and numerous other figures in the international elite, as well as a gaggle of ordinary billionaires, frequently transporting those individuals on his personal jet known as “the Lolita Express” for the role it played in facilitating illegal secret orgies with young girls. When right-wing bloggers on obscure websites claimed that former President Clinton and the British Royals were being sexually serviced by the underage girls of a James Bond super-villain brought to life, I just assumed those accusations were the wildest sort of Internet exaggeration.
Moreover, these angry writers did occasionally let slip that the fiendish target of their wrath had already been charged in a Florida courtroom, eventually pleading guilty to a single sexual offense and receiving a thirteen month jail sentence, mitigated by very generous work-release provisions. This hardly seemed like the sort of judicial punishment that would lend credence to the fantastical accusations against him. If Epstein had already been investigated by law enforcement authorities and given the sentence one might expect for writing a bad check, I found it quite unlikely that he was actually the Goldfinger or Dr. No that deluded Internet activists made him out to be.
Then these same wild, implausible claims previously found only on anonymous comment-threads were suddenly repeated as solid fact on the front pages of theTimes and all my other morning newspapers, and the former federal prosecutor who had signed off on Epstein’s legal slap-on-the-wrist was forced to resign from the Trump Cabinet. Epstein’s safe had been found to contain a huge cache of child-pornography and other highly suspicious material, and he was quickly rearrested on charges that could send him to federal prison for decades. Prestigious media outlets described Epstein as the mastermind of a huge sex-trafficking ring, and numerous underage victims began coming forward, telling their stories of how he had molested, raped, and pimped them. The author of a long 2003 Epstein profile that had appeared in Vanity Fair explained that she had personally spoken to some of his victims and included their highly-credible accounts in her article, but that those portions had been stricken and removed by her timorous editors.
As presented by these media outlets, Epstein’s personal rise also seemed rather inexplicable unless he had benefited from some powerful network or similar organization. Lacking any college degree or credentials, he had somehow gotten a job teaching at one of New York City’s most elite prep schools, then quickly jumped to working at a top investment bank, rising to partner with astonishing speed until he was fired a few years later for illegal activity. Despite such a scanty and doubtful record, he was soon managing money for some of America’s wealthiest individuals, and keeping so much of it for himself that he was regularly described as a billionaire. According to newspaper accounts, his great specialty was “making connections for people.”
Obviously, Epstein was a ruthlessly opportunistic financial hustler. But extremely wealthy individuals must surely be surrounded by great swarms of ruthlessly opportunistic financial hustlers, and why would he have been so much more successful than all those others? Perhaps a clue comes from the offhand remark of Epstein’s now-disgraced prosecutor, saying that he had been told to go very easy on the sex-trafficker because he “belonged to intelligence.” The vague phrasing of that statement raises questions about whether the intelligence service may not have been one controlled by the U.S. government.
Philip Giraldi, a highly-regarded former CIA officer, put things very plainly when he suggested that Epstein had probably been working for the Israeli Mossad, operating “honey traps” to obtain blackmail information on all the wealthy and powerful individuals whom he regularly plied with underage girls. Indeed, longtime Canadian journalist Eric Margolis recounted his early 1990s visit to Epstein’s enormous NYC mansion, in which he had barely crossed the threshold before he was offered an “intimate massage” by one of the many young girls there, presumably in a bedroom well-stocked with hidden cameras.
Given my personal lack of interest in the Epstein case, then or now, perhaps a few of these details may be garbled, but it seems undeniable that he was exactly the sort of remarkable renegade often faced by Agent 007 in the movies, and the true facts will presumably come out at his trial. Or perhaps not. Whether he lives to see trial is not entirely clear given the considerable number of powerful individuals who might prefer that hidden facts remain hidden, and the Friday newspapers reported that Epstein had been found injured and unconscious in his prison cell.
When one seemingly implausible pedophilia scandal has suddenly jumped from obscure corners of the Internet to the front pages of our leading newspapers, we must naturally begin to wonder whether others might not eventually do the same. And a very likely candidate comes to mind, one that seemed to me far better documented than the vague accusations being thrown about over the last few years against a wealthy financier once given a thirteen-month jail sentence in Florida a decade earlier.
I don’t use Social Media myself, but near the end of the 2016 presidential campaign, I gradually began seeing more and more Trump supporters referring to something called “Pizzagate,” a burgeoning sexual scandal that they claimed would bring down Hillary Clinton and many of the top leaders of her party, with the chatter actually increasing after Trump was elected. As near as I could tell, the whole bizarre theory had grown up on the far-right fringe of the Internet, with the utterly fantastical plot having something to do with stolen secret emails, DC pizza parlors, and a ring of pedophiles situated near the top of the Democratic Party. But given all the other strange and unlikely things I’d gradually discovered about our history, it didn’t seem like something I could necessarily dismiss out of hand.
At the beginning of December, a right-wing blogger produced a lengthy exposition of the Pizzagate charges, which finally gave me some understanding of what was actually under discussion, and I soon made arrangements to republish his article. It quickly attracted a great deal of interest, and some websites pointed to it as the best single introduction to the scandal for a general audience.
Pizzagate
AEDON CASSIEL • DECEMBER 2, 2016
A couple of weeks later, I republished an additional article by the same writer, describing a long list of previous pedophilia scandals that had occurred in elite American and European political circles. Although many of these seemed to be solidly documented, nearly all of them had received minimal coverage by our mainstream media outlets. And if such political pedophile rings had existed in the relatively recent past, was it so totally implausible that there might be another one simmering beneath the surface of today’s Washington DC?
Precedents for Pizzagate
AEDON CASSIEL • DECEMBER 23, 2016
Those interested in the details of the Pizzagate Hypothesis are advised to read these articles, especially the first one, but I might as well provide a brief summary.
John Podesta had been a longtime fixture in DC political circles, becoming chief of staff to President Bill Clinton in 1998, and afterward remaining one of the most powerful figures in the Democratic Party establishment. While serving as as chairman of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign, his apparent carelessness with the password security of his Gmail account allowed it to easily be hacked, and tens of thousands of his personal emails were soon published on WikiLeaks. A swarm of young anti-Clinton activists began scouring this treasure-trove of semi-confidential information, seeking evidence of mundane bribery and corruption, but instead they came across some quite odd exchanges, seemingly written in coded language.
Now use of coded language in a supposedly secure private email account raises all sorts of natural suspicions regarding what might have been under discussion, with the most likely possibilities being illegal drugs or sex. But most of the references didn’t seem to fit the former category, and in our remarkably libertine era, in which political candidates compete for the right to be Grand Marshal at an annual Gay Pride Parade, one of the few sexual activities still discussed only in whispers would seem to be pedophilia, with some of the very strange remarks possibly hinting at this.
The researchers also soon discovered that his brother Tony Podesta, one of the wealthiest and most successful lobbyists in DC, had extremely odd taste in art. Major items of his very extensive personal collection seemed to represent tortured or murdered bodies, and one of his favorite artists was best known for paintings depicting young children being held captive, lying dead, or suffering under severe distress. Such peculiar artwork obviously isn’t illegal, but it might naturally arouse some suspicions. And oddly enough, arch-Democrat Podesta had long been a close personal friend of former Republican Speaker and convicted child-molester Dennis Hastert, welcoming him back into DC society after his release from prison.
Furthermore, some of the rather suspiciously-worded Podesta emails referred to events held at a local DC pizza parlor, greatly favored by the Democratic Party elite, whose owner was the gay former boyfriend of David Brock, a leading Democratic activist. The public Instagram account of that pizza-entrepreneur apparently contained numerous images of young children, sometimes tied or bound, with those images frequently labeled by hashtags using the traditional gay slang for underage sexual targets. Some photos showed the fellow wearing a tee-shirt bearing the statement “I Love Children” in French, and by a very odd coincidence, his possibly assumed name was phonetically identical to that very same French phrase, thus proclaiming to the world that he was “a lover of children.” Closely connected Instagram accounts also included pictures of young children, sometimes shown amid piles of high-value currency, with queries about how much those particular children might be worth. None of this seemed illegal, but surely any reasonable person would regard the material as extremely suspicious.
DC is sometimes described as “Powertown,” being the seat of the individuals who make America’s laws and govern our society, with local political journalists being closely attuned to the relative status of such individuals. And oddly enough, GQ Magazine had ranked that gay pizza parlor owner with a strange focus on young children as being one of the 50 most powerful people in our national capital, placing him far ahead of many Cabinet members, Senators, Congressional Chairmen, Supreme Court justices, and top lobbyists. Was his pizza really that delicious?
These few paragraphs provide merely a sliver of the large quantity of highly-suspicious material surrounding various powerful figures at the apex of the DC political world. A vast cloud of billowing smoke is certainly no proof of any fire, but only a fool would completely ignore it without attempting further investigation.
I usually regard videos as a poor means of imparting serious information, far less effective and meaningful than the simple printed word. But the overwhelming bulk of the evidence supporting the Pizzagate Hypothesis consists of visual images and screen shots, and these are naturally suited to a video presentation.
Some of the best summaries of the Pizzagate case were produced by a young British YouTuber named Tara McCarthy, whose work was published under the name of “Reality Calls,” and her videos were viewed hundreds of thousands of times. Although her channel was eventually banned and her videos purged, copies were later reloaded to other accounts, both on YouTube and BitChute. Some of the evidence she presents seemed rather innocuous or speculative to me and other elements were probably based upon her unfamiliarity with American society and culture. But a great deal of extremely suspicious material remains, and I would suggest that people watch the videos and decide for themselves.
Around the same time that I first became familiar with the details of the Pizzagate controversy, the topic also started reaching the pages of my morning newspapers, but in an rather strange manner. Political stories began giving a sentence or two to the “Pizzagate hoax,” describing it as a ridiculous right-wing “conspiracy theory” but excluding all relevant details. I had an eery feeling that some unseen hand had suddenly flipped a switch causing the entire mainstream media to begin displaying identical signs declaring “Pizzagate Is False—Nothing To See There!” in brightly flashing neon. I couldn’t recall any previous example of such a strange media reaction to some obscure Internet controversy.
Articles in the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times also suddenly appeared denouncing the entirety of the alternative media—Left, Right, and Libertarian—as “fake news” websites promoting Russian propaganda, while urging that their content be blocked by all patriotic Internet giants such as Facebook, Twitter, and Google. Prior to that moment, I’d never even heard the term “fake news” but suddenly it was ubiquitous across the media, once again almost as if some unseen hand had suddenly flipped a switch.
I naturally began to wonder whether the timing of these two strange developments was entirely coincidental. Perhaps Pizzagate was indeed true and struck so deeply at the core of our hugely corrupted political system that the media efforts to suppress it were approaching the point of hysteria.
Not long afterward, Tara McCarthy’s detailed Pizzagate videos were purged from YouTube. This was among the very first instances of video content being banned despite fully conforming to all existing YouTube guidelines, another deeply suspicious development.
I also noticed that mere mention of Pizzagate had become politically lethal. Donald Trump had selected Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, former head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, as his National Security Advisor, and Flynn’s son served as the latter’s chief of staff. The younger Flynn happened to Tweet out a couple of links to Pizzagate stories, pointing out that the accusations hadn’t yet been actually investigated let alone disproven, and very soon afterward, he was purged from the Trump transition team, foreshadowing his father’s fall a few weeks later. It seemed astonishing to me that a few simple Tweets about an Internet controversy could have such huge real-life impact near the top of our government.
The media continued its uniform drumbeat of “Pizzagate Has Been Disproven!” but we were never told how or by whom, and I was not the only individual to notice the hollowness of such denunciations. An award-winning investigative journalist named Ben Swann at a CBS station in Atlanta broadcast a short television segment summarizing the Pizzagate controversy and noting that contrary to widespread media claims, Pizzagate had neither been investigated nor debunked. Swann was almost immediately purged by CBS but a copy of his television segment remains available for viewing on the Internet.
There is an old wartime proverb that enemy flak is always heaviest over the most important target, and the remarkably ferocious wave of attacks and censorship against anyone broaching the subject of Pizzagate seems to raise obvious dark suspicions. Indeed, the simultaneous waves of attacks against all alternative media outlets as “Russian propaganda outlets” laid the basis for the continuing regime of Social Media censorship that has become a central aspect of today’s world.
Pizzagate may or may not turn out to be true, but the ongoing Internet crackdown has similarly engulfed topics of a somewhat similar nature but with vastly stronger documentation. Although I don’t use Twitter myself, I encountered the obvious implications of this new censorship policy following McCain’s death last August. The senator had died on a Saturday afternoon, and readership of Sydney Schanberg’s long 2008 expose quickly exploded, with numerous individuals Tweeting out the story and a large fraction of our incoming traffic therefore coming from Twitter. This continued until the following morning, at which point the huge flood of Tweets continued to grow, but all incoming Twitter traffic suddenly and permanently vanished, presumably because “shadow banning” had rendered those Tweets invisible. My own article on McCain’s very doubtful war record simultaneously suffered the same fate, as did numerous other articles of a controversial nature that we published later that same week.
Perhaps that censorship decision was made by some ignorant young intern at Twitter, casually choosing to ban as “hate speech” or “fake news” a massively-documented 8,400 word expose by one of America’s most distinguished journalists, a Pulitzer-prize winning former top editor at The New York Times.
Or perhaps certain political-puppeteers who had spent decades controlling that late Arizona senator sought to ensure that their political puppet-strings remained invisible even after his death.
Gate?
Later?
A woman visited a psychic of some local repute. In a dark and gloomy room, gazing at the Tarot cards laid out before her, the Tarot reader delivered the bad news: "There is no easy way to say this so I'll just be blunt: Prepare yourself to be a widow. Your husband will die a violent death this year."
Visibly shaken, the woman stared at the psychic's lined face, then at the single flickering candle, then down at her hands. She took a few deep breaths to compose herself. She simply had to know.
She met the Tarot reader's gaze, steadied her voice and asked, "Will I get away with it?"
*.*
Signs You've Chosen a "No Frills" Airline
You can't board the plane unless you have the exact change.
The Captain asks all the passengers to chip in a little for gas.
You ask the Captain how often their planes crash and he says, "Just once."
The Captain yells at the ground crew to get the cows off the runway.
No movie. Don't need one. Your life keeps flashing before your eyes.
You see a man with a gun, but he's demanding to be let off the plane.
All the planes have both a bathroom and a chapel.
*.*
SACRAMENTO, CA - In a special press conference called Friday, Governor Jerry Brown proudly announced the passing of brand new legislation that will allow the state to begin issuing fines on churches for each little plastic cup served during the Lord’s Supper.
The legislation forms a new Communion Enforcement Unit, which will visit churches undercover and fine pastors for every little plastic cup they serve in Communion.
“Once again, California shows itself to be at the forefront of both environmental and religious issues with the passing of this legislation,” Brown said as cameras flashed. “Other states are always playing catch-up with our fantastic laws as we move forward.”
Brown suggested that churches instead use one communal cup, a low-impact Starbucks coffee cup, or just pour the wine or juice into one large trough for easy access for all parishioners. “The time for common-sense Communion reform is now, and we’re happy to be pioneers on this issue.”
The governor also hinted that the Legislature may be close to passing fines on credobaptist churches for wasting so much water on immersion, when pouring or sprinkling would do just fine.
*.*
"Thanks for the harmonica you gave me for my birthday," little Joshua said to his uncle the first time he saw him after the holidays. "It's the best present I ever got!"
"That's great," said his uncle. "Do you know how to play it?"
"Oh, I don't play it," the little fellow said. "My mom gives me a dollar a day not to play it during the day and my dad gives me five dollars a week not to play it at night.
*.*
Yesterday, my wife and I enjoyed a quiet morning while our kids slept in.
Thank you, Ether Bunny!
Quote of the Times;
“Every third thought shall be my grave.”
Link of the Times;
https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2019/08/03/baltimore-cannot-account-millions-federal-funding/
Issue of the Times;
The Borg 30 Years Later, A Reflection From Miles O'Brien, Transporter Chief of USS Enterprise-D
Personal Log, stardate 72761.9.
Looking back, it's amazing we survived at all. Meeting the Borg, to paraphrase captain Jean Luc-Picard, jolted us out of our complacency. But our unpreparedness was our own fault.
We were silly enough to believe that the collapse of the Klingon Empire meant Starfleet no longer needed to maintain a strong military arm. It would be easy to blame the parasite conspiracy that infiltrated Starfleet Command, yet that would ignore the culture of appeasement in the decades following the Khitimar accords.
I witnessed it first hand while fighting against the Cardassian border incursions. Imagine watching the spoonheads commit genocide and enduring decades of attacks, and still refusing to rearm! (Having been inside the mind of a Section 31 operative, I suspect we have them to thank for the Bajoran resistance's success in tying down the Cardassians and for the Romulans' "matters more urgent" that kept those powers from attacking us with full force.)
But I never thought I'd find myself thankful to Q. I have to admit that we owe him an eternal debt of gratitude for what he did 30 years today.
Picard's confidence had turned to arrogance, so much so that he was willing to ignore Q's warning that the Federation was "moving faster than expected, further than they should" and that we were "not prepared" for what awaited us. Q told us: "You judge yourselves against the pitiful adversaries you have encountered so far. The Romulans, the Klingons. They are nothing compared to what's waiting. Picard, you are about to move into areas of the galaxy containing wonders more incredible than you can possibly imagine, and terrors to freeze your soul. I offer myself as guide only to be rejected out of hand."
Picard's answer was "we are resolute, we are determined, and your help is not required." Q had had enough. "We'll just have to see how ready you are," he said, and with a snap of his fingers he sent us to System J-25 - on the far end of the Beta Quadrant (two years, seven months away from the nearest starbase at maximum warp). As Q vanished, Picard turned to our enigmatic El-Aurian bartender, Guinan. "Your people have been in this part of the galaxy," he said, "what can you tell us?" "Only that if I were you," she responded, "I'd start back now."
To listen to Picard's log from that day is humorous, in a macabre way: "Captain's log, stardate 42761.9. Despite Guinan's warning, I feel compelled to investigate this unexplored sector of the galaxy before heading back." Guinan wasn't just some chatty talk show host. Her's was a voice of wisdom to be heeded, and she was terrified. But Picard decided to ignore her. We did indeed discover a Class M planet. "There is a system of roads on this planet," said Data, "which indicates a highly industrialized civilization. But where there should be cities there are only great rips in the surface." ("It is as though some great force just scooped all the machine elements off the face of the planet," added Worf.) This meant that whatever tore its way through the Neutral Zone with Romulus - leaving similar scars on the colonized planets - was nearby. It was at that very moment that a giant cube appeared onscreen. We asked Guinan if she recognized it. "My people encountered them a century ago," she said. They destroyed our cities. They scattered my people throughout the galaxy. They're called the Borg. Protect yourself, Captain, or they'll destroy you."
The next log states as follows: "Captain's log, supplemental. We have been attacked without provocation by an alien race which Guinan calls the Borg. It appears that we have neutralised their vessel. Commander Riker is leading an away team in an attempt to learn more about them." This was sent after the loss of eighteen shipmates before successfully blasting the Borg cube's cutting and tractor beams. Picard decided to once again ignore Guinan and beamed an away team over to the cube. The countless bipedal lifeforms with cybernetic implants were hooked into machines on the walls, while others roamed around paying no heed to the Enterprise crew.
Commander Riker reported on his discovery that "the Borg have developed the technology to link artificial intelligence directly into the humanoid brain" and "the Borg seem to be using their combined power to repair the ship." At this, the captain ordered me to beam the away team back to the Enterprise and "get the hell out of here."
The last log has a more familiar tone when dealing with Borg encounters - Panic and Fear. "Captain's log supplemental. We are unable to maintain the gap between the Enterprise and the Borg ship."
Q appeared on the Bridge to taunt us as we futilely tried to run for our lives. He told us: "They will follow this ship until you exhaust your fuel. They will wear down your defences. Then you will be theirs. Admit it, Picard. You're out of your league. You should have stayed where you belonged. You can't outrun them. You can't destroy them. If you damage them, the essence of what they are remains. They regenerate and keep coming. Eventually you will weaken, your reserves will be gone. They are relentless. Where's your stubbornness now, Picard, your arrogance? Do you still profess to be prepared for what awaits you? I'll be leaving now. You thought you could handle it, so handle it."
I have been critical of captain Picard throughout this log, but let it never be said that he didn't always come through for us in the end. With a fate worse than death closing in, Picard humbled himself before Q and begged him to save us: "You wanted to frighten us. We are frightened. You wanted to show us that we were inadequate. For the moment, I grant that. You wanted me to say I need you. I need you!"
With a snap of his finger, Q brought us back to where we started, safely out of range of the Borg. Reflecting on these events with Guinan, Picard expressed gratitude to Q. "Maybe Q did the right thing for the wrong reason," said the captain. "Perhaps what we most needed was a kick in our complacency, to prepare us for what lies ahead."
For a long time I did not want to admit it, but Q was right. We weren't ready, and we had to be forced to recognize that. Nevertheless, if I live to be 500 years old, I will never forget the first time I heard the harsh, collective voice of the Borg: "We have analyzed your defensive capabilities as being unable to withstand us. If you defend yourselves, you will be punished."
This begs the question: what if our "defensive capabilities" were able to withstand them? What if, instead of naive pseudo-pacifism, we had spent the previous decades continually working to improve our capacity to defend ourselves? What if, upon first contact, we were strong enough to blast those Borg bastards into space dust?
Consider: until they encountered Species 8472, the Borg never showed fear of anything. But faced with an enemy they couldn't defeat, the Borg ran scared. After they survived this encounter - thanks to Admiral Janeway - they never messed with 8472 again. But the Borg were not afraid of the Federation, because the Federation were pacifistic and lightly armed. Had Starfleet crushed the Borg at System J-25 - or at Wolf 359 - the Borg may well have left the Federation alone. But the military weakness caused by decades of pacifism signaled to the Borg that the Federation was vulnerable to invasion and assimilation. Had it not been the sheer luck of Voyager being lost in the Delta Quadrant and learning how to fight the Borg, the entire Alpha and Beta Quadrant would have fallen to the Collective.
Even after Wolf 359 we still had not learned our lesson! We were supposed to have had an entire Battlefleet of Defiant-class ships, but once the Borg threat momentarily subsided we dropped the project - and had only one prototype by the time the Dominion invaded.
And for all our Federation talk about no longer being "obsessed with the accumulation of things" and having "eliminated hunger, want, the need for possessions," to be faced with real existing collectivism was horrifying. In the future, captain Picard, who used to scoff at all things capitalistic, would be forcibly assimilated into the collective for just a short time, but long enough to be permanently traumatized when his individualism and free will were taken away.
When I visited my fellow history buff Dr. Bashir the other day, he showed me something from an old physical book he had. It was a quote from a 20th century leader at a war memorial of his fellow countrymen: "We will always be prepared, so we may always be free." Sure, we laugh at their intellectual "infancy" now, but maybe they were on to something.
Visibly shaken, the woman stared at the psychic's lined face, then at the single flickering candle, then down at her hands. She took a few deep breaths to compose herself. She simply had to know.
She met the Tarot reader's gaze, steadied her voice and asked, "Will I get away with it?"
*.*
Signs You've Chosen a "No Frills" Airline
You can't board the plane unless you have the exact change.
The Captain asks all the passengers to chip in a little for gas.
You ask the Captain how often their planes crash and he says, "Just once."
The Captain yells at the ground crew to get the cows off the runway.
No movie. Don't need one. Your life keeps flashing before your eyes.
You see a man with a gun, but he's demanding to be let off the plane.
All the planes have both a bathroom and a chapel.
*.*
SACRAMENTO, CA - In a special press conference called Friday, Governor Jerry Brown proudly announced the passing of brand new legislation that will allow the state to begin issuing fines on churches for each little plastic cup served during the Lord’s Supper.
The legislation forms a new Communion Enforcement Unit, which will visit churches undercover and fine pastors for every little plastic cup they serve in Communion.
“Once again, California shows itself to be at the forefront of both environmental and religious issues with the passing of this legislation,” Brown said as cameras flashed. “Other states are always playing catch-up with our fantastic laws as we move forward.”
Brown suggested that churches instead use one communal cup, a low-impact Starbucks coffee cup, or just pour the wine or juice into one large trough for easy access for all parishioners. “The time for common-sense Communion reform is now, and we’re happy to be pioneers on this issue.”
The governor also hinted that the Legislature may be close to passing fines on credobaptist churches for wasting so much water on immersion, when pouring or sprinkling would do just fine.
*.*
"Thanks for the harmonica you gave me for my birthday," little Joshua said to his uncle the first time he saw him after the holidays. "It's the best present I ever got!"
"That's great," said his uncle. "Do you know how to play it?"
"Oh, I don't play it," the little fellow said. "My mom gives me a dollar a day not to play it during the day and my dad gives me five dollars a week not to play it at night.
*.*
Yesterday, my wife and I enjoyed a quiet morning while our kids slept in.
Thank you, Ether Bunny!
Quote of the Times;
“Every third thought shall be my grave.”
Link of the Times;
https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2019/08/03/baltimore-cannot-account-millions-federal-funding/
Issue of the Times;
The Borg 30 Years Later, A Reflection From Miles O'Brien, Transporter Chief of USS Enterprise-D
Personal Log, stardate 72761.9.
Looking back, it's amazing we survived at all. Meeting the Borg, to paraphrase captain Jean Luc-Picard, jolted us out of our complacency. But our unpreparedness was our own fault.
We were silly enough to believe that the collapse of the Klingon Empire meant Starfleet no longer needed to maintain a strong military arm. It would be easy to blame the parasite conspiracy that infiltrated Starfleet Command, yet that would ignore the culture of appeasement in the decades following the Khitimar accords.
I witnessed it first hand while fighting against the Cardassian border incursions. Imagine watching the spoonheads commit genocide and enduring decades of attacks, and still refusing to rearm! (Having been inside the mind of a Section 31 operative, I suspect we have them to thank for the Bajoran resistance's success in tying down the Cardassians and for the Romulans' "matters more urgent" that kept those powers from attacking us with full force.)
But I never thought I'd find myself thankful to Q. I have to admit that we owe him an eternal debt of gratitude for what he did 30 years today.
Picard's confidence had turned to arrogance, so much so that he was willing to ignore Q's warning that the Federation was "moving faster than expected, further than they should" and that we were "not prepared" for what awaited us. Q told us: "You judge yourselves against the pitiful adversaries you have encountered so far. The Romulans, the Klingons. They are nothing compared to what's waiting. Picard, you are about to move into areas of the galaxy containing wonders more incredible than you can possibly imagine, and terrors to freeze your soul. I offer myself as guide only to be rejected out of hand."
Picard's answer was "we are resolute, we are determined, and your help is not required." Q had had enough. "We'll just have to see how ready you are," he said, and with a snap of his fingers he sent us to System J-25 - on the far end of the Beta Quadrant (two years, seven months away from the nearest starbase at maximum warp). As Q vanished, Picard turned to our enigmatic El-Aurian bartender, Guinan. "Your people have been in this part of the galaxy," he said, "what can you tell us?" "Only that if I were you," she responded, "I'd start back now."
To listen to Picard's log from that day is humorous, in a macabre way: "Captain's log, stardate 42761.9. Despite Guinan's warning, I feel compelled to investigate this unexplored sector of the galaxy before heading back." Guinan wasn't just some chatty talk show host. Her's was a voice of wisdom to be heeded, and she was terrified. But Picard decided to ignore her. We did indeed discover a Class M planet. "There is a system of roads on this planet," said Data, "which indicates a highly industrialized civilization. But where there should be cities there are only great rips in the surface." ("It is as though some great force just scooped all the machine elements off the face of the planet," added Worf.) This meant that whatever tore its way through the Neutral Zone with Romulus - leaving similar scars on the colonized planets - was nearby. It was at that very moment that a giant cube appeared onscreen. We asked Guinan if she recognized it. "My people encountered them a century ago," she said. They destroyed our cities. They scattered my people throughout the galaxy. They're called the Borg. Protect yourself, Captain, or they'll destroy you."
The next log states as follows: "Captain's log, supplemental. We have been attacked without provocation by an alien race which Guinan calls the Borg. It appears that we have neutralised their vessel. Commander Riker is leading an away team in an attempt to learn more about them." This was sent after the loss of eighteen shipmates before successfully blasting the Borg cube's cutting and tractor beams. Picard decided to once again ignore Guinan and beamed an away team over to the cube. The countless bipedal lifeforms with cybernetic implants were hooked into machines on the walls, while others roamed around paying no heed to the Enterprise crew.
Commander Riker reported on his discovery that "the Borg have developed the technology to link artificial intelligence directly into the humanoid brain" and "the Borg seem to be using their combined power to repair the ship." At this, the captain ordered me to beam the away team back to the Enterprise and "get the hell out of here."
The last log has a more familiar tone when dealing with Borg encounters - Panic and Fear. "Captain's log supplemental. We are unable to maintain the gap between the Enterprise and the Borg ship."
Q appeared on the Bridge to taunt us as we futilely tried to run for our lives. He told us: "They will follow this ship until you exhaust your fuel. They will wear down your defences. Then you will be theirs. Admit it, Picard. You're out of your league. You should have stayed where you belonged. You can't outrun them. You can't destroy them. If you damage them, the essence of what they are remains. They regenerate and keep coming. Eventually you will weaken, your reserves will be gone. They are relentless. Where's your stubbornness now, Picard, your arrogance? Do you still profess to be prepared for what awaits you? I'll be leaving now. You thought you could handle it, so handle it."
I have been critical of captain Picard throughout this log, but let it never be said that he didn't always come through for us in the end. With a fate worse than death closing in, Picard humbled himself before Q and begged him to save us: "You wanted to frighten us. We are frightened. You wanted to show us that we were inadequate. For the moment, I grant that. You wanted me to say I need you. I need you!"
With a snap of his finger, Q brought us back to where we started, safely out of range of the Borg. Reflecting on these events with Guinan, Picard expressed gratitude to Q. "Maybe Q did the right thing for the wrong reason," said the captain. "Perhaps what we most needed was a kick in our complacency, to prepare us for what lies ahead."
For a long time I did not want to admit it, but Q was right. We weren't ready, and we had to be forced to recognize that. Nevertheless, if I live to be 500 years old, I will never forget the first time I heard the harsh, collective voice of the Borg: "We have analyzed your defensive capabilities as being unable to withstand us. If you defend yourselves, you will be punished."
This begs the question: what if our "defensive capabilities" were able to withstand them? What if, instead of naive pseudo-pacifism, we had spent the previous decades continually working to improve our capacity to defend ourselves? What if, upon first contact, we were strong enough to blast those Borg bastards into space dust?
Consider: until they encountered Species 8472, the Borg never showed fear of anything. But faced with an enemy they couldn't defeat, the Borg ran scared. After they survived this encounter - thanks to Admiral Janeway - they never messed with 8472 again. But the Borg were not afraid of the Federation, because the Federation were pacifistic and lightly armed. Had Starfleet crushed the Borg at System J-25 - or at Wolf 359 - the Borg may well have left the Federation alone. But the military weakness caused by decades of pacifism signaled to the Borg that the Federation was vulnerable to invasion and assimilation. Had it not been the sheer luck of Voyager being lost in the Delta Quadrant and learning how to fight the Borg, the entire Alpha and Beta Quadrant would have fallen to the Collective.
Even after Wolf 359 we still had not learned our lesson! We were supposed to have had an entire Battlefleet of Defiant-class ships, but once the Borg threat momentarily subsided we dropped the project - and had only one prototype by the time the Dominion invaded.
And for all our Federation talk about no longer being "obsessed with the accumulation of things" and having "eliminated hunger, want, the need for possessions," to be faced with real existing collectivism was horrifying. In the future, captain Picard, who used to scoff at all things capitalistic, would be forcibly assimilated into the collective for just a short time, but long enough to be permanently traumatized when his individualism and free will were taken away.
When I visited my fellow history buff Dr. Bashir the other day, he showed me something from an old physical book he had. It was a quote from a 20th century leader at a war memorial of his fellow countrymen: "We will always be prepared, so we may always be free." Sure, we laugh at their intellectual "infancy" now, but maybe they were on to something.
Strategies?
If the IRS wanted to put something really useful on their website, how about a list of countries that don't have an extradition treaty with the U.S.?
*.*
KANDAHAR—A U.S. Navy pilot turned off his targeting computer during a bombing run and killed four hundred civilians, according to a recent statement issued by public relations.
Lt. Roger Himmelweg, an F/A-18 Super Hornet pilot, claims he was responding to urges to “trust his feelings” during a mission last week, which was supposed to be targeted at an arms cache being stocked by Taliban insurgents. Despite the fact that the highly advanced fighter/bomber aircraft had millions of dollars’ worth of sophisticated targeting hardware and software installed, Himmelweg believed he could drop his ordnance with greater accuracy using only his emotions and the low-toned urges of a distant old man.
“I don’t know what happened,” Himmelweg said in a post-mission debrief with international authorities. “I heard this voice in my head, you know, and it just kept telling me to do stuff. ‘Trust my instincts, let go.’”
“It seemed totally plausible at the time.”
“We spent a lot of money designing that shit,” Christopher Marzilli, Boeing’s Executive Vice President said in an interview. “Literally tens of thousands of man hours went into building and testing the targeting equipment on the F-18 so that we can drop bombs with centimeter accuracy. And this guy thinks he hears Jesus one time and decides to go Sodom and Gomorrah on a hospital. The weapons aren’t even supposed to fire without a target lock!”
This is not the first time the voices of deceased old men have caused problems in Afghanistan. In 2017, Green Beret Sergeant Victor Mullaghan opened fire in a crowded marketplace after hearing a voice tell him to “use the force,” resulting in over a dozen civilian casualties.
“I thought he was saying, you know, use the lethal force,” Mullaghan said afterwards. “The guy sounded like my commander. Old, wise, and like he was always trying to deliver some important life lesson even though he was just saying to wash your hands after you pee.”
“So I figured it was him over the radio. It was a shit ton easier than haggling with that guy over the price of his carpet, I’ll tell you that.”
*.*
From Facebook: Whenever I'm mad at someone, I bake them a batch of chocolate cookies and put in one raisin per cookie, just to mess with them.
A study says atheists are nicer to Christians than the other way around. Of course, atheists believe that. Then again, it's about the only thing they believe.
A man died from salmonella poisoning 10 days after eating a gecko on a dare at a party. He also no longer saves 15% on his car insurance.
*.*
One day during cooking class, the teacher, Mrs. Jones, was extolling her secrets for preparing perfect sauces. When she ordered us to the stoves to prepare our assignments, she said, "Don't forget to use wooden spoons."
As I stirred my sauce, I contemplated the physics behind the mystery of the wooden spoon and decided it must have something to do with heat conduction.
I approached Mrs. Jones to test my theory. "Why wooden spoons?" I asked.
"Because," she replied, "if I have to sit here listening to all your metal spoons banging against metal pots, I'd go nuts."
*.*
Being a literalist can sometimes be very helpful.
I can always respond to "Do these jeans make my ass look fat?" with a confident and honest "No."
But I dread the day when she rephrases it as "Does my ass look fat in these jeans?"
Quote of the Times;
From the deepest desires often come the deadliest hate. – Socrates
Link of the Times;
https://www.takimag.com/article/cracking-skulls-for-a-good-cause/
Issue of the Times;
The Six Laws of Survival: Strategies for Beating the Worst Case Scenario by Jeremiah Johnson
We just finished a series on how to escape from Bill Ayers’ Summer Reeducation Camp (or Gulag 17, depending on the situation). Now we will cover one of the most important elements of all: How to stay out of the “Happy” Camp. Best thing of all: do not go in. Easier said than done, however, there are some things you can do beforehand that will increase your chances of staying out of the Gulag.
These things are not complicated, however, they will require both willpower and action. They will not be things that happen on their own. In order to stay out of a camp, you must do something very important:
You must do things that others do not do, and you must not do what others do.
Let us run with this concept in a scenario:
You’re in bed…it’s a Saturday morning, and you don’t have to go to any of your 3 jobs today until noon. Your battery-powered clock seems to have stopped at 5:15 am. Puzzled you hear the drone of jet engines, and all of a sudden the house seems as if it is shaking. You jump up and run to the front door and as you walk onto the front porch, all hell is breaking loose.
Your mind is playing, “For Whom the Bell Tolls” by Metallica as you look up and see dozens of aircraft flying West to East, disgorging sesame seeds that sprout parachutes by the thousands, all coming down into your neighborhood. “Red Dawn” isn’t playing: it is happening, and you’re in it. Your neighbors didn’t bother to come wake you up; however, they’re working on starting their cars, with no success. The paratroopers are landing, and a large crowd of people is running down Main Street to the tune of automatic gunfire in the distance. Yep, you guessed it! America has been invaded, and chances are you are not going to be handing out a Slurpee this afternoon.
Now what? You must fall upon the six laws of survival or else all could be lost.
THE SIX LAWS OF SURVIVAL
In a survival scenario all bets are off and the following laws will keep you alive. These laws are rigid, but necessary. Harsh, but true. Keep your cards close and always have a plan.
Law 1: Wherever that crowd is running, do not join them.
This is not to say that they aren’t (initially) running in the right direction. But what of it? They are bound to be either captured en masse or worse (bombed, strafed, or shot). For the horror of the IHM (the Incredible Human Mob), look no further than “War of the Worlds” with Tom Cruise where he and his family are driving the passenger van…right up and into the mob. Look what happened there. You can’t defeat their numbers, and you will be captive to them…another steer in the herd.
Strike out on your own, you and your family, avoiding the main thoroughfares at all cost, and avoiding the IHM.
Law 2: You have to have a place (and places) to go.
This is where thinking outside of the general herd will pay off. We’re going to instruct by running through a checklist…. this will be a “handy-dandy” checklist that you can print out or run over in your mind to be able to follow rule #2.
• Did you preposition assets (food, weapons, money, etc.) at an initial safe location?
• Is that location within walking distance for you and your family?
• Once there, are you and your family secure for at least a 24 – 48-hour period?
• Safe from enemy troops/government “peacekeepers” on the hunt?
• Safe from fallout and/or NBC agents?
• Does it have a food and water supply to sustain all of you for 7 days?
• If your initial safe location has been compromised, is a duplicate location nearby?
• Do you have a farther (more remote) location that you can reach on foot in 3 days?
• A secure, sustainable location with supplies for at least a month?
• Do you and your family have a handheld method of communication for each member?
• Have you formulated short-term (initial contact, 48 hours, 7 days) plans?
• Have you made long-term (1 month and month-by-month; 6 months and 6-month continuous analysis; 1 year) plans?
Guys and gals, these are just basics. You must have these things in place in order to give you and your family a fighting chance. Whether or not it is a foreign invasion or a domestic communist takeover of the United States, you must leave your home in suburbia or you will be rounded up, bringing us forward:
Law 3: You will be leaving your home, permanently or for a long time.
This is survival. The majority of readers are not living in the mountains or in a remote location. If you follow these steps and practice them on a dry-run on a regular basis…it will give you the advantage that most people will not have. You must innovate: come up with ideas that others will not think of. Do you know of an abandoned warehouse on the outskirts of town? Chances are that 90% of others will think the same thing in a grid-down/Red Dawn survival scenario. You need to find the places that are off the beaten path. And if there are none? It may mean that you have to create a place.
How? By caching your supplies within the walking distances described for each part of the “safe” area. By finding tunnels, caves, or other sub-structures that can protect you from the elements and at least afford partial protection from radiation. By being who it is you imagine yourself to be: a prepper…a survivalist…or a survivor. When you enter any contest, do you enter it to lose? Do you strive for just “second place” or “second best” in this arena? Chances are the answer is “no,” but you have to arrive on that conclusion on your own. All of this is a challenge, and this underlines everything for you if it needs clarification:
Law 4: In survival, there is no silver medal: “second place” means death.
Forget that phrase in “The Hunger Games,” because if you are taken…the odds are not ever in your favor. We went through a 4-article series on how to escape from the Gulag where I reiterated how important it is for you to stay out of it. I stand by this concept. If you are taken captive, the odds aren’t in your favor of getting out…for the duration of it.
And then guess what? The Germans during WWII as the allies approached began to hide their transgressions by liquidating the camps…basically killing everyone that could bear any type of witness to the atrocities. Do not think for an instant that it will not happen again. Look at Holodomor in Ukraine and the starvation tactics the USSR used to follow after the Malthusian model. Our enemies have very little regard for human life, and the lives they value are of their own people. If the Chinese communists would run over their own people with tanks and sell their internal organs while they’re still alive, what will they do with us?
Which brings us to the “Malcolm X” rule:
Law 5: You must stay out and survive by any and all means necessary.
Some of you may think “JJ is a little harsh.” I would rather be hard and harsh now, and enable you, my countrymen, to have some tools at your disposal and a “sharp tack” under the figurative buttocks of your mind to give you the impetus to do something about the situation prior to its occurrence. The country is “long in the tooth,” and you have to grasp these concepts and act upon them now…not burn off the pages and save them in the survival archives…but use them to inculcate your own, individual plan of action now.
Rule #5 means resolving yourself to do what you must in order to protect yourself from the ravages (and not just possible, but probable death) inside of one of these camps. These are all basic, “generic” things to begin as a base for your preparations. This is a form of guerilla warfare! Avoid the occupiers/oppressors at all cost! These things will work for you…if you resolve yourself (ves) to do them. I’ll close with a note on OPSEC (operational security): you better build off of these basics and keep all of them to yourself.
JJ is giving you the basics that you need, without revealing everything of his own plans. Why? Because I earned them by paying for them with years of experience and suffering, and it means my family’s survival. Such measures would run you a lot of money and imagination; such measures come from years of practical experience and the willingness to take chances. This thought brings us to our final rule, the failure of which means compromise leading to death:
Law 6: Do not tip your hand or reveal your plans to anyone.
Next installment we will talk about life under occupation, be that by foreign invaders or by totalitarian state that has morphed out of a democracy. In the meantime, prepare and plan, and when you are reasonably sure, execute a dry run. The practice does make perfect and affords you a time and trials to iron out all of the glitches in your operations. Until next time be good to one another and keep up the fight!
Jeremiah Johnson is the Nom de plume of a retired Green Beret of the United States Army Special Forces (Airborne). Mr. Johnson was a Special Forces Medic, EMT and ACLS-certified, with comprehensive training in wilderness survival, rescue, and patient-extraction. Mr. Johnson is an ardent advocate for preparedness, self-sufficiency, and long-term disaster sustainability for families. He and his wife survived Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath. Cross-trained as a Special Forces Engineer, he is an expert in supply, logistics, transport, and long-term storage of perishable materials, having incorporated many of these techniques plus some unique innovations in his own homestead.
This article first appeared at Tess Pennington’s Ready Nutrition.com.
*.*
KANDAHAR—A U.S. Navy pilot turned off his targeting computer during a bombing run and killed four hundred civilians, according to a recent statement issued by public relations.
Lt. Roger Himmelweg, an F/A-18 Super Hornet pilot, claims he was responding to urges to “trust his feelings” during a mission last week, which was supposed to be targeted at an arms cache being stocked by Taliban insurgents. Despite the fact that the highly advanced fighter/bomber aircraft had millions of dollars’ worth of sophisticated targeting hardware and software installed, Himmelweg believed he could drop his ordnance with greater accuracy using only his emotions and the low-toned urges of a distant old man.
“I don’t know what happened,” Himmelweg said in a post-mission debrief with international authorities. “I heard this voice in my head, you know, and it just kept telling me to do stuff. ‘Trust my instincts, let go.’”
“It seemed totally plausible at the time.”
“We spent a lot of money designing that shit,” Christopher Marzilli, Boeing’s Executive Vice President said in an interview. “Literally tens of thousands of man hours went into building and testing the targeting equipment on the F-18 so that we can drop bombs with centimeter accuracy. And this guy thinks he hears Jesus one time and decides to go Sodom and Gomorrah on a hospital. The weapons aren’t even supposed to fire without a target lock!”
This is not the first time the voices of deceased old men have caused problems in Afghanistan. In 2017, Green Beret Sergeant Victor Mullaghan opened fire in a crowded marketplace after hearing a voice tell him to “use the force,” resulting in over a dozen civilian casualties.
“I thought he was saying, you know, use the lethal force,” Mullaghan said afterwards. “The guy sounded like my commander. Old, wise, and like he was always trying to deliver some important life lesson even though he was just saying to wash your hands after you pee.”
“So I figured it was him over the radio. It was a shit ton easier than haggling with that guy over the price of his carpet, I’ll tell you that.”
*.*
From Facebook: Whenever I'm mad at someone, I bake them a batch of chocolate cookies and put in one raisin per cookie, just to mess with them.
A study says atheists are nicer to Christians than the other way around. Of course, atheists believe that. Then again, it's about the only thing they believe.
A man died from salmonella poisoning 10 days after eating a gecko on a dare at a party. He also no longer saves 15% on his car insurance.
*.*
One day during cooking class, the teacher, Mrs. Jones, was extolling her secrets for preparing perfect sauces. When she ordered us to the stoves to prepare our assignments, she said, "Don't forget to use wooden spoons."
As I stirred my sauce, I contemplated the physics behind the mystery of the wooden spoon and decided it must have something to do with heat conduction.
I approached Mrs. Jones to test my theory. "Why wooden spoons?" I asked.
"Because," she replied, "if I have to sit here listening to all your metal spoons banging against metal pots, I'd go nuts."
*.*
Being a literalist can sometimes be very helpful.
I can always respond to "Do these jeans make my ass look fat?" with a confident and honest "No."
But I dread the day when she rephrases it as "Does my ass look fat in these jeans?"
Quote of the Times;
From the deepest desires often come the deadliest hate. – Socrates
Link of the Times;
https://www.takimag.com/article/cracking-skulls-for-a-good-cause/
Issue of the Times;
The Six Laws of Survival: Strategies for Beating the Worst Case Scenario by Jeremiah Johnson
We just finished a series on how to escape from Bill Ayers’ Summer Reeducation Camp (or Gulag 17, depending on the situation). Now we will cover one of the most important elements of all: How to stay out of the “Happy” Camp. Best thing of all: do not go in. Easier said than done, however, there are some things you can do beforehand that will increase your chances of staying out of the Gulag.
These things are not complicated, however, they will require both willpower and action. They will not be things that happen on their own. In order to stay out of a camp, you must do something very important:
You must do things that others do not do, and you must not do what others do.
Let us run with this concept in a scenario:
You’re in bed…it’s a Saturday morning, and you don’t have to go to any of your 3 jobs today until noon. Your battery-powered clock seems to have stopped at 5:15 am. Puzzled you hear the drone of jet engines, and all of a sudden the house seems as if it is shaking. You jump up and run to the front door and as you walk onto the front porch, all hell is breaking loose.
Your mind is playing, “For Whom the Bell Tolls” by Metallica as you look up and see dozens of aircraft flying West to East, disgorging sesame seeds that sprout parachutes by the thousands, all coming down into your neighborhood. “Red Dawn” isn’t playing: it is happening, and you’re in it. Your neighbors didn’t bother to come wake you up; however, they’re working on starting their cars, with no success. The paratroopers are landing, and a large crowd of people is running down Main Street to the tune of automatic gunfire in the distance. Yep, you guessed it! America has been invaded, and chances are you are not going to be handing out a Slurpee this afternoon.
Now what? You must fall upon the six laws of survival or else all could be lost.
THE SIX LAWS OF SURVIVAL
In a survival scenario all bets are off and the following laws will keep you alive. These laws are rigid, but necessary. Harsh, but true. Keep your cards close and always have a plan.
Law 1: Wherever that crowd is running, do not join them.
This is not to say that they aren’t (initially) running in the right direction. But what of it? They are bound to be either captured en masse or worse (bombed, strafed, or shot). For the horror of the IHM (the Incredible Human Mob), look no further than “War of the Worlds” with Tom Cruise where he and his family are driving the passenger van…right up and into the mob. Look what happened there. You can’t defeat their numbers, and you will be captive to them…another steer in the herd.
Strike out on your own, you and your family, avoiding the main thoroughfares at all cost, and avoiding the IHM.
Law 2: You have to have a place (and places) to go.
This is where thinking outside of the general herd will pay off. We’re going to instruct by running through a checklist…. this will be a “handy-dandy” checklist that you can print out or run over in your mind to be able to follow rule #2.
• Did you preposition assets (food, weapons, money, etc.) at an initial safe location?
• Is that location within walking distance for you and your family?
• Once there, are you and your family secure for at least a 24 – 48-hour period?
• Safe from enemy troops/government “peacekeepers” on the hunt?
• Safe from fallout and/or NBC agents?
• Does it have a food and water supply to sustain all of you for 7 days?
• If your initial safe location has been compromised, is a duplicate location nearby?
• Do you have a farther (more remote) location that you can reach on foot in 3 days?
• A secure, sustainable location with supplies for at least a month?
• Do you and your family have a handheld method of communication for each member?
• Have you formulated short-term (initial contact, 48 hours, 7 days) plans?
• Have you made long-term (1 month and month-by-month; 6 months and 6-month continuous analysis; 1 year) plans?
Guys and gals, these are just basics. You must have these things in place in order to give you and your family a fighting chance. Whether or not it is a foreign invasion or a domestic communist takeover of the United States, you must leave your home in suburbia or you will be rounded up, bringing us forward:
Law 3: You will be leaving your home, permanently or for a long time.
This is survival. The majority of readers are not living in the mountains or in a remote location. If you follow these steps and practice them on a dry-run on a regular basis…it will give you the advantage that most people will not have. You must innovate: come up with ideas that others will not think of. Do you know of an abandoned warehouse on the outskirts of town? Chances are that 90% of others will think the same thing in a grid-down/Red Dawn survival scenario. You need to find the places that are off the beaten path. And if there are none? It may mean that you have to create a place.
How? By caching your supplies within the walking distances described for each part of the “safe” area. By finding tunnels, caves, or other sub-structures that can protect you from the elements and at least afford partial protection from radiation. By being who it is you imagine yourself to be: a prepper…a survivalist…or a survivor. When you enter any contest, do you enter it to lose? Do you strive for just “second place” or “second best” in this arena? Chances are the answer is “no,” but you have to arrive on that conclusion on your own. All of this is a challenge, and this underlines everything for you if it needs clarification:
Law 4: In survival, there is no silver medal: “second place” means death.
Forget that phrase in “The Hunger Games,” because if you are taken…the odds are not ever in your favor. We went through a 4-article series on how to escape from the Gulag where I reiterated how important it is for you to stay out of it. I stand by this concept. If you are taken captive, the odds aren’t in your favor of getting out…for the duration of it.
And then guess what? The Germans during WWII as the allies approached began to hide their transgressions by liquidating the camps…basically killing everyone that could bear any type of witness to the atrocities. Do not think for an instant that it will not happen again. Look at Holodomor in Ukraine and the starvation tactics the USSR used to follow after the Malthusian model. Our enemies have very little regard for human life, and the lives they value are of their own people. If the Chinese communists would run over their own people with tanks and sell their internal organs while they’re still alive, what will they do with us?
Which brings us to the “Malcolm X” rule:
Law 5: You must stay out and survive by any and all means necessary.
Some of you may think “JJ is a little harsh.” I would rather be hard and harsh now, and enable you, my countrymen, to have some tools at your disposal and a “sharp tack” under the figurative buttocks of your mind to give you the impetus to do something about the situation prior to its occurrence. The country is “long in the tooth,” and you have to grasp these concepts and act upon them now…not burn off the pages and save them in the survival archives…but use them to inculcate your own, individual plan of action now.
Rule #5 means resolving yourself to do what you must in order to protect yourself from the ravages (and not just possible, but probable death) inside of one of these camps. These are all basic, “generic” things to begin as a base for your preparations. This is a form of guerilla warfare! Avoid the occupiers/oppressors at all cost! These things will work for you…if you resolve yourself (ves) to do them. I’ll close with a note on OPSEC (operational security): you better build off of these basics and keep all of them to yourself.
JJ is giving you the basics that you need, without revealing everything of his own plans. Why? Because I earned them by paying for them with years of experience and suffering, and it means my family’s survival. Such measures would run you a lot of money and imagination; such measures come from years of practical experience and the willingness to take chances. This thought brings us to our final rule, the failure of which means compromise leading to death:
Law 6: Do not tip your hand or reveal your plans to anyone.
Next installment we will talk about life under occupation, be that by foreign invaders or by totalitarian state that has morphed out of a democracy. In the meantime, prepare and plan, and when you are reasonably sure, execute a dry run. The practice does make perfect and affords you a time and trials to iron out all of the glitches in your operations. Until next time be good to one another and keep up the fight!
Jeremiah Johnson is the Nom de plume of a retired Green Beret of the United States Army Special Forces (Airborne). Mr. Johnson was a Special Forces Medic, EMT and ACLS-certified, with comprehensive training in wilderness survival, rescue, and patient-extraction. Mr. Johnson is an ardent advocate for preparedness, self-sufficiency, and long-term disaster sustainability for families. He and his wife survived Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath. Cross-trained as a Special Forces Engineer, he is an expert in supply, logistics, transport, and long-term storage of perishable materials, having incorporated many of these techniques plus some unique innovations in his own homestead.
This article first appeared at Tess Pennington’s Ready Nutrition.com.
Pronouns?
A customer at the counter of a lawn ornament shop; "Give me four of those pinwheels, two of those pink flamingos, two of the sunflowers, and one of those bent-over grandmas in bloomers."
Cashier replies; "That'll be eight dollars for the pinwheels, ten dollars for the flamingos, six dollars for the sunflowers, and an apology to my wife!"
*.*
If my body were a car, this is the time I would be thinking about trading it in for a newer model.
I've got bumps and dents and scratches in my finish and my paint job is getting a little dull, but that's not the worst of it.
My headlights are out of focus and it's especially hard to see things up close.
My traction is not as graceful as it once was.
I slip and slide and skid and bump into things even in the best of weather.
It takes me hours to reach my maximum speed.
My fuel rate burns inefficiently.
But here's the worst of it --
Almost every time I sneeze, cough or sputter.....either my radiator leaks or my exhaust backfires!
*.*
Random Thoughts
I planted some bird seed. A bird came up. Now I don't know what to feed it.
All I ask is a chance to prove that money can't make me happy.
They told me I was gullible ... and I believed them.
One nice thing about egotists: They don't talk about other people.
The cost of living hasn't affected its popularity.
How can there be self-help "groups"?
Is there another word for synonym?
The speed of time is one-second per second.
Is it possible to be totally partial?
If swimming is so good for your figure, how do you explain whales?
Show me a man with both feet firmly on the ground, and I'll show you a man who can't get his pants off.
*.*
Ocasio-Cortez announces bill to make electoral college tuition-free
The new face of the Democrat party and the youngest person ever elected to the House of Representatives, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, is making waves. In a press conference, the New York native has declared her intention to make the electoral college tuition free.
“People shouldn’t be riddled with student debt when they’re trying to bring about a socialist revolution after school—and that shouldn’t be any different for the electoral college graduates,” Ocasio-Cortez explained.
“It’s just not fair. I mean, what are there—five billion college students in the United States? They shouldn’t have to be in debt for the rest of their lives to pay for something as integral to society as a woman’s studies degree or a masters in underwater basket-weaving. The world could not survive without women or baskets.”
It was unclear whether the first-term congresswoman understood that the electoral college was not in fact an actual university.
“It shouldn’t matter if these students and graduates also vote for the president or whatever—they shouldn’t have billions of dollars in debt either.”
Ocasio-Cortez has made a name for herself by making bold claims like “The world is going to end in 12 years,” and “You can get 100% renewable energy by plugging an electrical extension into itself.”
*.*
Fred was unfortunate enough to be hit by a 10-ton truck and landed up in hospital in intensive care. His best friend Morris came to visit him.
Fred struggles to tell Morris, "My wife Sally visits me three times a day. She's so good to me. Every day, she reads to me at the bedside."
"What does she read?"
"My life insurance policy."
Quote of the Times;
An insult is like a drink, it affects one only is accepted. – Heinlein
Link of the Times;
https://heartiste.org/
Issue of the Times;
What Were Robespierre’s Pronouns? by Peggy Noonan
The French Revolution was led by sociopaths who politicized language, much like today’s Jacobins.
King Louis XVI of France is led to the guillotine. We often make historical parallels here. History doesn’t repeat itself but it does rhyme, as clever people say. And sometimes it hiccups. Here is a hiccup.
We start with the moral and political catastrophe that was the French Revolution. It was more a nationwide psychotic break than a revolt—a great nation at its own throat, swept by a spirit not only of regicide but suicide. For 10 years they simply enjoyed killing each other. They could have done what England was doing—a long nonviolent revolution, a gradual diminution of the power of king and court, an establishment of the rights of the people and their legislators so that the regent ended up a lovely person on a stamp. Instead they chose blood. Scholars like to make a distinction between the Revolution and the Terror that followed, but “the Terror was merely 1789 with a higher body count.” From the Storming of the Bastille onward, “it was apparent that violence was not just an unfortunate side effect. . . . It was the Revolution’s source of collective energy. It was what made the Revolution revolutionary.”
That is from Simon Schama’s masterpiece “Citizens,” his history of the revolution published in 1989, its 200th anniversary. It is erudite, elegant and heroically nonideological.
John Adams, across the sea in America, quickly understood what was happening in France and voiced alarm. In contrast his old friend Thomas Jefferson egged on the revolution and lent it his moral prestige. Faced with news of the guillotines, he reverted to abstractions. He was a genius with a true if hidden seam of malice, and rarely overconcerned with the suffering of others.
The revolution had everything—a ruling class that was clumsy, decadent, inert; a pathetic king, a queen beyond her depth, costly wars, monstrous debt, an impervious and unreformable administrative state, a hungry populace. The task of the monarchy was to protect the poor, but the king had “abdicated this protective role.” Instead of ensuring grain supplies at a reasonable price, Mr. Schama notes, the government committed itself to the new modern principle of free trade: “British textiles had been let into France, robbing Norman and Flemish spinners and weavers of work.” They experienced it as “some sort of conspiracy against the People.”
One does see parallels. But they’re not what I mean.
It was a revolution largely run by sociopaths. One, Robespierre, the “messianic schoolmaster,” saw it as an opportunity for the moral instruction of the nation. Everything would be politicized, no part of the citizen’s life left untouched. As man was governed by an “empire of images,” in the words of a Jacobin intellectual, the new régime would provide new images to shape new thoughts. There would be pageants, and new names for things. They would change time itself! The first year of the new Republic was no longer 1792, it was Year One. To detach farmers from their superstitions, their Gregorian calendar and its saints’ days, they would rename the months. The first month would be in the fall, named for the harvest. There would be no more weeks, just three 10-day periods each month.
So here is our parallel, our hiccup. I thought of all this this week because I’ve been thinking about the language and behavioral directives that have been coming at us from the social and sexual justice warriors who are renaming things and attempting to control the language in America.
There is the latest speech guide from the academy, the Inclusive Communications Task Force at Colorado State University. Don’t call people “American,” it directs: “This erases other cultures.” Don’t say a person is mad or a lunatic, call him “surprising/wild” or “sad.” “Eskimo,” “freshman” and “illegal alien” are out. “You guys” should be replaced by “all/folks.” Don’t say “male” or “female”; say “man,” “woman” or “gender non-binary.”
In one way it’s the nonsense we’ve all grown used to, but it should be said that there’s an aspect of self-infatuation, of arrogance, in telling people they must reorder the common language to suit your ideological preferences. There is something mad in thinking you should control the names of things. Or perhaps I mean surprising/wild.
I see in it a spirit similar to that of the Terror. There is a tone of, “I am your moral teacher. Because you are incapable of sensitivity, I will help you, dumb farmer. I will start with the language you speak.”
An odd thing is they always insist they’re doing this in the name of kindness and large-spiritedness. And yet, have you ever met them? They’re not individually kind or large-spirited. They’re more like messianic schoolmasters.
Offices and schools are forced to grapple with all the new gender-neutral pronouns. Here a handy guide from a website purporting to help human-resources departments in midsize businesses. It is headlined. “Gender Neutral Pronouns—What They Are & How to Use Them.”
He/She—Zie, Sie, Ey, Ve, Tey, E
Him/Her—Zim, Sie, Em, Ver, Ter, Em
His/Her—Zir, Hir, Eir, Vis, Tem, Eir
Himself/Herself—Zieself, Hirself, Eirself, Verself, Terself, Emself
It’s wrong, when you meet a new co-worker, to ask his pronouns. (We don’t say “preferred” pronouns—that “implies someone’s gender is a preference”!) You don’t want him wondering if you think he’s transgender or nonbinary. Instead, introduce yourself in a way that summons his pronouns: “Hi, I’m Jim and my pronoun is he/him.” Use “they” a lot. It’s gender neutral. Suggested sentence: “I spoke to the marketing director and they said they’d get back to me.”
This is grammatically incorrect but so what? Correct grammar, and the intelligibility it allows, is a small price to pay for inclusion and equality.
We are being asked to memorize all this, to change hundreds of years of grammar and usage, to accommodate the needs or demands of a group that perceives itself as beleaguered.
There’s a funny but painful spoof of all this on YouTube. A seemingly friendly but dogmatic teacher of adult immigrants in English as a Second Language class introduces them to the 63 new pronouns. They are understandably flummoxed. An Asian woman announces she identifies as a girl and then shrinks in fear this might not be allowed. A confused Eastern European man asks the pronoun of his desk. The Central American asks if the new pronouns mean gay. “You’re not learning English so you can be a bigot, are you?” the teacher demands.
And there are the office arguments about bathroom policy, which I gather are reaching some new peak. There can no longer be a men’s room and a women’s room, so we can have one expanded bathroom everyone can use. No, we’ll have three. But there may be a stigma to using the third, so keep two bathrooms but remove all designations. But the women don’t want to put on their makeup with men coming in and out. But the men don’t want women walking in on them—that’s a harassment suit waiting to happen!
It’s all insane. All of it.
But we’re moving forward, renaming the months and the sexes, reordering the language.
You wonder how the people who push all this got so much power. But then, how did Robespierre?
Cashier replies; "That'll be eight dollars for the pinwheels, ten dollars for the flamingos, six dollars for the sunflowers, and an apology to my wife!"
*.*
If my body were a car, this is the time I would be thinking about trading it in for a newer model.
I've got bumps and dents and scratches in my finish and my paint job is getting a little dull, but that's not the worst of it.
My headlights are out of focus and it's especially hard to see things up close.
My traction is not as graceful as it once was.
I slip and slide and skid and bump into things even in the best of weather.
It takes me hours to reach my maximum speed.
My fuel rate burns inefficiently.
But here's the worst of it --
Almost every time I sneeze, cough or sputter.....either my radiator leaks or my exhaust backfires!
*.*
Random Thoughts
I planted some bird seed. A bird came up. Now I don't know what to feed it.
All I ask is a chance to prove that money can't make me happy.
They told me I was gullible ... and I believed them.
One nice thing about egotists: They don't talk about other people.
The cost of living hasn't affected its popularity.
How can there be self-help "groups"?
Is there another word for synonym?
The speed of time is one-second per second.
Is it possible to be totally partial?
If swimming is so good for your figure, how do you explain whales?
Show me a man with both feet firmly on the ground, and I'll show you a man who can't get his pants off.
*.*
Ocasio-Cortez announces bill to make electoral college tuition-free
The new face of the Democrat party and the youngest person ever elected to the House of Representatives, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, is making waves. In a press conference, the New York native has declared her intention to make the electoral college tuition free.
“People shouldn’t be riddled with student debt when they’re trying to bring about a socialist revolution after school—and that shouldn’t be any different for the electoral college graduates,” Ocasio-Cortez explained.
“It’s just not fair. I mean, what are there—five billion college students in the United States? They shouldn’t have to be in debt for the rest of their lives to pay for something as integral to society as a woman’s studies degree or a masters in underwater basket-weaving. The world could not survive without women or baskets.”
It was unclear whether the first-term congresswoman understood that the electoral college was not in fact an actual university.
“It shouldn’t matter if these students and graduates also vote for the president or whatever—they shouldn’t have billions of dollars in debt either.”
Ocasio-Cortez has made a name for herself by making bold claims like “The world is going to end in 12 years,” and “You can get 100% renewable energy by plugging an electrical extension into itself.”
*.*
Fred was unfortunate enough to be hit by a 10-ton truck and landed up in hospital in intensive care. His best friend Morris came to visit him.
Fred struggles to tell Morris, "My wife Sally visits me three times a day. She's so good to me. Every day, she reads to me at the bedside."
"What does she read?"
"My life insurance policy."
Quote of the Times;
An insult is like a drink, it affects one only is accepted. – Heinlein
Link of the Times;
https://heartiste.org/
Issue of the Times;
What Were Robespierre’s Pronouns? by Peggy Noonan
The French Revolution was led by sociopaths who politicized language, much like today’s Jacobins.
King Louis XVI of France is led to the guillotine. We often make historical parallels here. History doesn’t repeat itself but it does rhyme, as clever people say. And sometimes it hiccups. Here is a hiccup.
We start with the moral and political catastrophe that was the French Revolution. It was more a nationwide psychotic break than a revolt—a great nation at its own throat, swept by a spirit not only of regicide but suicide. For 10 years they simply enjoyed killing each other. They could have done what England was doing—a long nonviolent revolution, a gradual diminution of the power of king and court, an establishment of the rights of the people and their legislators so that the regent ended up a lovely person on a stamp. Instead they chose blood. Scholars like to make a distinction between the Revolution and the Terror that followed, but “the Terror was merely 1789 with a higher body count.” From the Storming of the Bastille onward, “it was apparent that violence was not just an unfortunate side effect. . . . It was the Revolution’s source of collective energy. It was what made the Revolution revolutionary.”
That is from Simon Schama’s masterpiece “Citizens,” his history of the revolution published in 1989, its 200th anniversary. It is erudite, elegant and heroically nonideological.
John Adams, across the sea in America, quickly understood what was happening in France and voiced alarm. In contrast his old friend Thomas Jefferson egged on the revolution and lent it his moral prestige. Faced with news of the guillotines, he reverted to abstractions. He was a genius with a true if hidden seam of malice, and rarely overconcerned with the suffering of others.
The revolution had everything—a ruling class that was clumsy, decadent, inert; a pathetic king, a queen beyond her depth, costly wars, monstrous debt, an impervious and unreformable administrative state, a hungry populace. The task of the monarchy was to protect the poor, but the king had “abdicated this protective role.” Instead of ensuring grain supplies at a reasonable price, Mr. Schama notes, the government committed itself to the new modern principle of free trade: “British textiles had been let into France, robbing Norman and Flemish spinners and weavers of work.” They experienced it as “some sort of conspiracy against the People.”
One does see parallels. But they’re not what I mean.
It was a revolution largely run by sociopaths. One, Robespierre, the “messianic schoolmaster,” saw it as an opportunity for the moral instruction of the nation. Everything would be politicized, no part of the citizen’s life left untouched. As man was governed by an “empire of images,” in the words of a Jacobin intellectual, the new régime would provide new images to shape new thoughts. There would be pageants, and new names for things. They would change time itself! The first year of the new Republic was no longer 1792, it was Year One. To detach farmers from their superstitions, their Gregorian calendar and its saints’ days, they would rename the months. The first month would be in the fall, named for the harvest. There would be no more weeks, just three 10-day periods each month.
So here is our parallel, our hiccup. I thought of all this this week because I’ve been thinking about the language and behavioral directives that have been coming at us from the social and sexual justice warriors who are renaming things and attempting to control the language in America.
There is the latest speech guide from the academy, the Inclusive Communications Task Force at Colorado State University. Don’t call people “American,” it directs: “This erases other cultures.” Don’t say a person is mad or a lunatic, call him “surprising/wild” or “sad.” “Eskimo,” “freshman” and “illegal alien” are out. “You guys” should be replaced by “all/folks.” Don’t say “male” or “female”; say “man,” “woman” or “gender non-binary.”
In one way it’s the nonsense we’ve all grown used to, but it should be said that there’s an aspect of self-infatuation, of arrogance, in telling people they must reorder the common language to suit your ideological preferences. There is something mad in thinking you should control the names of things. Or perhaps I mean surprising/wild.
I see in it a spirit similar to that of the Terror. There is a tone of, “I am your moral teacher. Because you are incapable of sensitivity, I will help you, dumb farmer. I will start with the language you speak.”
An odd thing is they always insist they’re doing this in the name of kindness and large-spiritedness. And yet, have you ever met them? They’re not individually kind or large-spirited. They’re more like messianic schoolmasters.
Offices and schools are forced to grapple with all the new gender-neutral pronouns. Here a handy guide from a website purporting to help human-resources departments in midsize businesses. It is headlined. “Gender Neutral Pronouns—What They Are & How to Use Them.”
He/She—Zie, Sie, Ey, Ve, Tey, E
Him/Her—Zim, Sie, Em, Ver, Ter, Em
His/Her—Zir, Hir, Eir, Vis, Tem, Eir
Himself/Herself—Zieself, Hirself, Eirself, Verself, Terself, Emself
It’s wrong, when you meet a new co-worker, to ask his pronouns. (We don’t say “preferred” pronouns—that “implies someone’s gender is a preference”!) You don’t want him wondering if you think he’s transgender or nonbinary. Instead, introduce yourself in a way that summons his pronouns: “Hi, I’m Jim and my pronoun is he/him.” Use “they” a lot. It’s gender neutral. Suggested sentence: “I spoke to the marketing director and they said they’d get back to me.”
This is grammatically incorrect but so what? Correct grammar, and the intelligibility it allows, is a small price to pay for inclusion and equality.
We are being asked to memorize all this, to change hundreds of years of grammar and usage, to accommodate the needs or demands of a group that perceives itself as beleaguered.
There’s a funny but painful spoof of all this on YouTube. A seemingly friendly but dogmatic teacher of adult immigrants in English as a Second Language class introduces them to the 63 new pronouns. They are understandably flummoxed. An Asian woman announces she identifies as a girl and then shrinks in fear this might not be allowed. A confused Eastern European man asks the pronoun of his desk. The Central American asks if the new pronouns mean gay. “You’re not learning English so you can be a bigot, are you?” the teacher demands.
And there are the office arguments about bathroom policy, which I gather are reaching some new peak. There can no longer be a men’s room and a women’s room, so we can have one expanded bathroom everyone can use. No, we’ll have three. But there may be a stigma to using the third, so keep two bathrooms but remove all designations. But the women don’t want to put on their makeup with men coming in and out. But the men don’t want women walking in on them—that’s a harassment suit waiting to happen!
It’s all insane. All of it.
But we’re moving forward, renaming the months and the sexes, reordering the language.
You wonder how the people who push all this got so much power. But then, how did Robespierre?
Blessing?
Today, I was in the bathroom at a popular coffee chain. Someone wrote "What Would Jesus Do?" on the wall.
Another person wrote directly underneath that, "Wash His hands."
Then a third person wrote, "And your feet."
*.*
As the passengers settled in on a West Coast commuter flight, a flight attendant announced, "We'd like you folks to help us welcome our new co-pilot. He'll be performing his first commercial landing for us today, so be sure to give him a big round of applause when we come to a stop."
The plane made an extremely bumpy landing, bouncing hard two or three times before taxiing to a stop. Still, the passengers applauded.
Then the attendant's voice came over the intercom, "Thanks for flying with us. And don't forget to let our co-pilot know which landing you liked best."
*.*
What do you get when you roll a hand grenade across a kitchen floor?
Linoleum Blownapart.
*.*
An old prospector shuffled into the town of El Indio, Texas leading a tired old mule.
The old man headed straight for the only saloon in town, to clear his parched throat.
He walked up to the saloon and tied his old mule to the hitch rail.
As he stood there, brushing some of the dust from his face and clothes, a young gunslinger stepped out of the saloon with a gun in one hand and a bottle of whisky in the other.
The young gunslinger looked at the old man and laughed, saying, "Hey old man, can you dance?"
The old man looked up at the gunslinger and said, "No son, I don't dance . . . never really wanted to."
A crowd had gathered as the gunslinger grinned and said, "Well, you old fool, you're gonna dance now!" and started shooting at the old man's feet.
The old prospector, not wanting to get a toe blown off, started hopping around like a flea on a hot skillet.
Everybody standing around was laughing.
When his last bullet had been fired, the young gunslinger, still laughing, holstered his gun and turned around to go back into the saloon.
The old man turned to his pack mule, pulled out a double-barreled 12 gauge shotgun and cocked both hammers.
The loud clicks carried clearly through the desert air. The crowd stopped laughing immediately.
The young gunslinger heard the sounds too, and he turned around very slowly.
The silence was deafening. The crowd watched as the young gunman stared at the old timer and the large gaping holes of those twin 12 gauge barrels.
The barrels of the shotgun never wavered in the old man's hands, as he quietly said;
"Son, have you ever kissed a mule's bottom?"
The gunslinger swallowed hard and said, "No sir .. . . but . . . but I've always wanted to."
There are a few lessons for all of us here:
* Don't be arrogant.
* Don't waste ammunition.
* Whisky makes you think you're smarter than you are.
* Always make sure you know who is in control.
* And finally, don't mess around with old folks; they didn't get old by being stupid.
*.*
The minister gave his Sunday morning service, as usual, but this particular Sunday, it was considerably longer than normal.
Later, at the door, shaking hands with parishioners as they moved out, one man said, "Your sermon, Pastor, was simply wonderful - so invigorating and inspiring and refreshing."
The minister, of course, broke out in a big smile, only to hear the man say, "Why I felt like a new man when I woke up!"
Quote of the Times;
“If you are not prepared to use force to defend civilization, then be prepared to accept barbarism.” – Sowell
Link of the Times;
https://pjmedia.com/instapundit/335442/
Issue of the Times;
‘Oikophobia’ and #NeverTrump: How Can We ‘Secure the Blessings of Liberty’?
What has prompted our immigration crisis? Isn’t it the same sentiment that leads Democrats (and David French, but I repeat myself) to claim Ilhan Omar is a better American than anyone born here?
“Oikophobia,” a hatred of one’s native country (and of one’s fellow citizens) is the most remarkable proof that our elite class have become hopelessly degenerate. Consider David French’s argument that, unlike those of us who were born here, “immigrant citizens have actually done something to earn their status.” Well, what had Ilhan Omar done for America when she was naturalized at age 18? Less than my father did. Dad was an Alabama farmboy when he joined the Army at age 18 and he earned the Purple Heart in France in 1944. Is David French implying that being my father’s son makes me less worthy of American citizenship than Ilhan Omar? Isn’t this insulting insinuation at the heart of the open-borders argument, the idea that all immigrants are better than any America, because Americans are the worst people in the world?
If you are a native-born American — and especially if you are white — Democrats consider you infinitely inferior to Ilhan Omar. The tone of David French’s argument suggests he agrees with this assessment, and one does not persuade people by insulting them. Why can’t French, an intelligent man and an able lawyer who once did great work in the cause of academic freedom, see why his anti-Trump arguments fail?
The problem, I think, is that French has been swept along by the same floodtide of degeneracy that produces mobs of enraged anarchists on the streets of Portland and makes college campuses unsafe even for well-meaning liberals like Bret Weinstein. The election of Trump, and the rising populist sentiment that elected him, caught our elite by surprise. They were shocked to discover that a powerful plurality of Americans — nearly 63 million voted for Trump — had never accepted the notions of “progress” that prevail among the university-educated elite and in the urban communities where the elite reside. Among the core tenets of this elite weltanschauung is a belief in the superiority of immigrants. You might notice the way they quote Emma Lazarus’s poetry as if it had more authority than the Constitution, a reverence for the “huddled masses” being essential to what amounts to a religious faith among our otherwise godless elite. When I visited the campus of Harvard with Pete Da Tech Guy in the fall of 2017, we were immediately confronted on our arrival with a protest on behalf of so-called “dreamers.” Harvard students are not nowadays notable for their dedication to moral virtue — they get drunk and screw around quite shamelessly — but they are adamantly certain that it is morally wrong to deport illegal aliens.
Many years ago, Peter Brimelow pointed out that a major problem with U.S. immigration policy is that voters have seldom gotten a chance to express their preference at the ballot box. The elite of both parties seem generally agreed in preferring immigrants to native-born Americans, the Republicans beholden to corporate interests that want cheap labor and the Democrats seeing immigrants as future Democrat voters. Public opinion surveys indicate that most Americans see the issue of immigration as a matter of numbers. A majority would approve of accepting 250,000 new immigrants annually, and even if you bumped that number up to half a million, most people would be OK with it, but what we have had for the past 20 years is an unofficial policy of almost unlimited immigration. Our immigration laws are riddled with loopholes, and enforcement has been uneven and irregular, so that the combination of legal and illegal immigrants has amounted to more than 1 million every year since the mid-1990s. A majority of Americans oppose this, but prior to 2016, they never had a real chance to express their dissatisfaction at the ballot box. They had previously been offered no clear choice; choosing between open-borders Democrats and open-borders Republicans was no choice at all, as far as immigration policy was concerned, and some Republicans (including my late Cousin John) were worse than any Democrat on the issue. Trump’s blunt talk — “Build a wall!” — appealed to voters who had long been frustrated by the refusal of the political elite to address their concerns over our immigration policy (or non-policy, to be more accurate). The potency of that populist resentment startled not only the political class, but also the journalists and pundits who had acted as publicity agents for the elite’s open-borders consensus.
Much has been made of the harsh “tone” of President Trump’s rhetoric and of his mercurial temperament. His critics among the conservative commentariat make much of the “character” issue, saying that even though Trump has enacted many policies that conservatives have long advocated, he does not function as a role model, failing to represent the responsible and thoughtful character of a true conservative.
Trump’s coarse language and erratic behavior, however, are an integral part of his success. During the 2016 primary campaign, I compared him to the NFL legend Fran Tarkenton, a scrambling quarterback whose unpredictability made him an unsolvable riddle for opposing defenses. Trump seems to operate according to some internal gyroscope, an instinct that leads him to say and do things which no political consultant would suggest, but which nevertheless produce victory. Consider his tweetstorm last Sunday against “the Squad” of freshmen Democrat congresswomen who had been at war with Nancy Pelosi. Jumping into that fight seemed to contradict every sensible precept of effective politics, and even many Trump supporters were dismayed. Yet once again, Trump’s instinct was vindicated, as even many of his opponents agreed he had succeeded in making these four young left-wing radicals the “face” of the Democratic Party. In the process, not incidentally, Trump hijacked the news cycle for an entire week, so that nothing else (e.g., Joe Biden’s debut of his health-care proposals) had any real impact. And as we approach the next round of Democrat presidential debates, Trump is riding high in the polls (his latest result in an NBC poll matching his all-time best), and Democrats are becoming demoralized.
“Trump’s going to get re-elected, isn’t he?” people keep asking Thomas Friedman, and if his liberal friends are saying this to him, what does that suggest about the success of Trump’s methods?
That success only inspires the Trump-haters to louder shrieks of indignation, because to them it is wrong for him to keep winning this way. And yet it is not really the president they hate so much as the people who elected him. What David French and the other #NeverTrump Republicans don’t want to confront — what they cannot admit, not even to themselves — is that Trump’s success is a repudiation of their own weakness, a condemnation of their abject failure. The crowd of intellectuals at National Review and the now-defunct Weekly Standardconsidered themselves possessors of an authority that entitled them to prescribe policy and to anoint candidates for the Republican Party. Exercising this leadership prerogative, as an elite class as secure in its authority as any feudal aristocracy, our conservative intellectuals were always eager to claim credit when Republicans won elections, but when Republicans lost, they insisted that this was never their fault. Probably their zenith of prestige was in 2005, after Bush had been re-elected, which gave credence to Karl Rove’s talk of a “permanent Republican majority” based on a so-called “center-right” coalition. That hope quickly evaporated, with military disaster in Iraq followed by Democrats recapturing Congress in 2006 and then on to the economic catastrophe of 2008 followed by the election of Barack Hussein Obama.
Insofar as a Republican majority has been revived since that low ebb of 2008, it was first because of the Tea Party — a grassroots populist movement that powered the GOP House landslide of 2010 — and eventually the populist success of Trump’s campaign. If you were directly familiar with the Tea Party movement, as I was, you know that there is considerable overlap between those who attended rallies in 2009-2010 and those who are now the staunchest supporters of Trump. While immigration was not an issue the Tea Party concerned itself with, the movement’s prominent early supporters included Michelle Malkin, author of the 2002 book Invasion: How America Still Welcomes Terrorists, Criminals, and Other Foreign Menaces, and a leader in opposition to the John McCain-backed amnesty proposals. In general, the Tea Party’s populist sentiment was expressed as a distrust of the Beltway establishment in both parties, including those Republicans who had supported corporate bailouts in 2008.
Because the #NeverTrump Republicans refuse to accept any responsibility for the failures of Bush-era GOP policy — although all of them, including French, marched in lockstep in support of those policies — they are at a loss to explain how or why they have lost their influence as intellectual leaders of the conservative movement. Instead, they denounce the 63 million Americans who voted for Trump as ignorant racists, which prompts the question: Why would anyone support “conservative intellectuals” who so emphatically agree with Democrats?
(Pierre Omidyar could not be reached for comment.)
Four years ago, Vox Day observed that French and the #NeverTrump conservatives “haven’t grasped the fact that the demographic changes to the United States have not only changed the way the political game is played, but have changed the game itself.” The country that elected and re-elected Ronald Reagan by landslide margins has ceased to exist, replaced by one in which Republicans can win the White House only by razor-thin margins, and the most important reason for this change is immigration. The demographic changes that have so transformed our politics did not “just happen.” It wasn’t some impersonal trend which caused this, but rather it was a matter of policy, and National Review was on the side of open borders, having purged Alien Nation author Peter Brimelow and sidelined John O’Sullivan. Not only did National Review purge those who dissented from their open-borders agenda, but also treated as persona non grata anyone who lamented this purge. They will call you a racist if you don’t support open-borders Republicans whose policies make it impossible for Republicans to win elections. Why do the editors of National Review think we should be grateful for their services in denouncing Republican voters as racist, as if there is a shortage of Democrats willing to perform this service?
Americans have grown tired of being lectured about how racist they are. The white people delivering these lectures — e.g., Joe Scarborough, Chris Cuomo, David Brooks — seem to believe that their moral superiority to the rest of us is so self-evident that we will enjoy and be grateful for the opportunity to be “enlightened” by them. Yet they are telling us nothing we haven’t already been told a million times, long before anyone imagined Donald Trump running for president.
David French’s insistence that Ilhan Omar is better than any native-born American simply because she is an immigrant — that our inheritance as Americans is a stigma of inferiority — is insulting, and the fact that he thinks we are too stupid to notice this is even more insulting.
The authors of our Constitution explained that their purpose was to “secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity.” If we are the posterity of our nation’s Founders — if we would deserve to be known as their heirs — then we have inherited an obligation to ensure that “the blessings of liberty” are preserved intact, that they may be enjoyed by future generations of Americans. So-called “Justice Democrats” like Ilhan Omar are a threat to that heritage of liberty, and yet David French, who wishes us to believe he is a conservative, seems to think that it is “racist” to oppose them. I do not exercise any control over what President Trump puts on his Twitter feed nor do Trump supporters seek my advice on what they should chant at rallies, but I know that Donald Trump prevented Hillary Clinton from becoming president, and that his willingness to call out Omar and her “Squad” (and to be smeared as a racist for doing so) indicates a keen understanding of what it will take to prevent Democrats from taking back the White House in 2020.
Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe there is something to be gained by playing “Nice Guy” with the Democrats, but if being nice were the criterion of political success, Jeb Bush might be president. And he’s not.
Another person wrote directly underneath that, "Wash His hands."
Then a third person wrote, "And your feet."
*.*
As the passengers settled in on a West Coast commuter flight, a flight attendant announced, "We'd like you folks to help us welcome our new co-pilot. He'll be performing his first commercial landing for us today, so be sure to give him a big round of applause when we come to a stop."
The plane made an extremely bumpy landing, bouncing hard two or three times before taxiing to a stop. Still, the passengers applauded.
Then the attendant's voice came over the intercom, "Thanks for flying with us. And don't forget to let our co-pilot know which landing you liked best."
*.*
What do you get when you roll a hand grenade across a kitchen floor?
Linoleum Blownapart.
*.*
An old prospector shuffled into the town of El Indio, Texas leading a tired old mule.
The old man headed straight for the only saloon in town, to clear his parched throat.
He walked up to the saloon and tied his old mule to the hitch rail.
As he stood there, brushing some of the dust from his face and clothes, a young gunslinger stepped out of the saloon with a gun in one hand and a bottle of whisky in the other.
The young gunslinger looked at the old man and laughed, saying, "Hey old man, can you dance?"
The old man looked up at the gunslinger and said, "No son, I don't dance . . . never really wanted to."
A crowd had gathered as the gunslinger grinned and said, "Well, you old fool, you're gonna dance now!" and started shooting at the old man's feet.
The old prospector, not wanting to get a toe blown off, started hopping around like a flea on a hot skillet.
Everybody standing around was laughing.
When his last bullet had been fired, the young gunslinger, still laughing, holstered his gun and turned around to go back into the saloon.
The old man turned to his pack mule, pulled out a double-barreled 12 gauge shotgun and cocked both hammers.
The loud clicks carried clearly through the desert air. The crowd stopped laughing immediately.
The young gunslinger heard the sounds too, and he turned around very slowly.
The silence was deafening. The crowd watched as the young gunman stared at the old timer and the large gaping holes of those twin 12 gauge barrels.
The barrels of the shotgun never wavered in the old man's hands, as he quietly said;
"Son, have you ever kissed a mule's bottom?"
The gunslinger swallowed hard and said, "No sir .. . . but . . . but I've always wanted to."
There are a few lessons for all of us here:
* Don't be arrogant.
* Don't waste ammunition.
* Whisky makes you think you're smarter than you are.
* Always make sure you know who is in control.
* And finally, don't mess around with old folks; they didn't get old by being stupid.
*.*
The minister gave his Sunday morning service, as usual, but this particular Sunday, it was considerably longer than normal.
Later, at the door, shaking hands with parishioners as they moved out, one man said, "Your sermon, Pastor, was simply wonderful - so invigorating and inspiring and refreshing."
The minister, of course, broke out in a big smile, only to hear the man say, "Why I felt like a new man when I woke up!"
Quote of the Times;
“If you are not prepared to use force to defend civilization, then be prepared to accept barbarism.” – Sowell
Link of the Times;
https://pjmedia.com/instapundit/335442/
Issue of the Times;
‘Oikophobia’ and #NeverTrump: How Can We ‘Secure the Blessings of Liberty’?
What has prompted our immigration crisis? Isn’t it the same sentiment that leads Democrats (and David French, but I repeat myself) to claim Ilhan Omar is a better American than anyone born here?
“Oikophobia,” a hatred of one’s native country (and of one’s fellow citizens) is the most remarkable proof that our elite class have become hopelessly degenerate. Consider David French’s argument that, unlike those of us who were born here, “immigrant citizens have actually done something to earn their status.” Well, what had Ilhan Omar done for America when she was naturalized at age 18? Less than my father did. Dad was an Alabama farmboy when he joined the Army at age 18 and he earned the Purple Heart in France in 1944. Is David French implying that being my father’s son makes me less worthy of American citizenship than Ilhan Omar? Isn’t this insulting insinuation at the heart of the open-borders argument, the idea that all immigrants are better than any America, because Americans are the worst people in the world?
If you are a native-born American — and especially if you are white — Democrats consider you infinitely inferior to Ilhan Omar. The tone of David French’s argument suggests he agrees with this assessment, and one does not persuade people by insulting them. Why can’t French, an intelligent man and an able lawyer who once did great work in the cause of academic freedom, see why his anti-Trump arguments fail?
The problem, I think, is that French has been swept along by the same floodtide of degeneracy that produces mobs of enraged anarchists on the streets of Portland and makes college campuses unsafe even for well-meaning liberals like Bret Weinstein. The election of Trump, and the rising populist sentiment that elected him, caught our elite by surprise. They were shocked to discover that a powerful plurality of Americans — nearly 63 million voted for Trump — had never accepted the notions of “progress” that prevail among the university-educated elite and in the urban communities where the elite reside. Among the core tenets of this elite weltanschauung is a belief in the superiority of immigrants. You might notice the way they quote Emma Lazarus’s poetry as if it had more authority than the Constitution, a reverence for the “huddled masses” being essential to what amounts to a religious faith among our otherwise godless elite. When I visited the campus of Harvard with Pete Da Tech Guy in the fall of 2017, we were immediately confronted on our arrival with a protest on behalf of so-called “dreamers.” Harvard students are not nowadays notable for their dedication to moral virtue — they get drunk and screw around quite shamelessly — but they are adamantly certain that it is morally wrong to deport illegal aliens.
Many years ago, Peter Brimelow pointed out that a major problem with U.S. immigration policy is that voters have seldom gotten a chance to express their preference at the ballot box. The elite of both parties seem generally agreed in preferring immigrants to native-born Americans, the Republicans beholden to corporate interests that want cheap labor and the Democrats seeing immigrants as future Democrat voters. Public opinion surveys indicate that most Americans see the issue of immigration as a matter of numbers. A majority would approve of accepting 250,000 new immigrants annually, and even if you bumped that number up to half a million, most people would be OK with it, but what we have had for the past 20 years is an unofficial policy of almost unlimited immigration. Our immigration laws are riddled with loopholes, and enforcement has been uneven and irregular, so that the combination of legal and illegal immigrants has amounted to more than 1 million every year since the mid-1990s. A majority of Americans oppose this, but prior to 2016, they never had a real chance to express their dissatisfaction at the ballot box. They had previously been offered no clear choice; choosing between open-borders Democrats and open-borders Republicans was no choice at all, as far as immigration policy was concerned, and some Republicans (including my late Cousin John) were worse than any Democrat on the issue. Trump’s blunt talk — “Build a wall!” — appealed to voters who had long been frustrated by the refusal of the political elite to address their concerns over our immigration policy (or non-policy, to be more accurate). The potency of that populist resentment startled not only the political class, but also the journalists and pundits who had acted as publicity agents for the elite’s open-borders consensus.
Much has been made of the harsh “tone” of President Trump’s rhetoric and of his mercurial temperament. His critics among the conservative commentariat make much of the “character” issue, saying that even though Trump has enacted many policies that conservatives have long advocated, he does not function as a role model, failing to represent the responsible and thoughtful character of a true conservative.
Trump’s coarse language and erratic behavior, however, are an integral part of his success. During the 2016 primary campaign, I compared him to the NFL legend Fran Tarkenton, a scrambling quarterback whose unpredictability made him an unsolvable riddle for opposing defenses. Trump seems to operate according to some internal gyroscope, an instinct that leads him to say and do things which no political consultant would suggest, but which nevertheless produce victory. Consider his tweetstorm last Sunday against “the Squad” of freshmen Democrat congresswomen who had been at war with Nancy Pelosi. Jumping into that fight seemed to contradict every sensible precept of effective politics, and even many Trump supporters were dismayed. Yet once again, Trump’s instinct was vindicated, as even many of his opponents agreed he had succeeded in making these four young left-wing radicals the “face” of the Democratic Party. In the process, not incidentally, Trump hijacked the news cycle for an entire week, so that nothing else (e.g., Joe Biden’s debut of his health-care proposals) had any real impact. And as we approach the next round of Democrat presidential debates, Trump is riding high in the polls (his latest result in an NBC poll matching his all-time best), and Democrats are becoming demoralized.
“Trump’s going to get re-elected, isn’t he?” people keep asking Thomas Friedman, and if his liberal friends are saying this to him, what does that suggest about the success of Trump’s methods?
That success only inspires the Trump-haters to louder shrieks of indignation, because to them it is wrong for him to keep winning this way. And yet it is not really the president they hate so much as the people who elected him. What David French and the other #NeverTrump Republicans don’t want to confront — what they cannot admit, not even to themselves — is that Trump’s success is a repudiation of their own weakness, a condemnation of their abject failure. The crowd of intellectuals at National Review and the now-defunct Weekly Standardconsidered themselves possessors of an authority that entitled them to prescribe policy and to anoint candidates for the Republican Party. Exercising this leadership prerogative, as an elite class as secure in its authority as any feudal aristocracy, our conservative intellectuals were always eager to claim credit when Republicans won elections, but when Republicans lost, they insisted that this was never their fault. Probably their zenith of prestige was in 2005, after Bush had been re-elected, which gave credence to Karl Rove’s talk of a “permanent Republican majority” based on a so-called “center-right” coalition. That hope quickly evaporated, with military disaster in Iraq followed by Democrats recapturing Congress in 2006 and then on to the economic catastrophe of 2008 followed by the election of Barack Hussein Obama.
Insofar as a Republican majority has been revived since that low ebb of 2008, it was first because of the Tea Party — a grassroots populist movement that powered the GOP House landslide of 2010 — and eventually the populist success of Trump’s campaign. If you were directly familiar with the Tea Party movement, as I was, you know that there is considerable overlap between those who attended rallies in 2009-2010 and those who are now the staunchest supporters of Trump. While immigration was not an issue the Tea Party concerned itself with, the movement’s prominent early supporters included Michelle Malkin, author of the 2002 book Invasion: How America Still Welcomes Terrorists, Criminals, and Other Foreign Menaces, and a leader in opposition to the John McCain-backed amnesty proposals. In general, the Tea Party’s populist sentiment was expressed as a distrust of the Beltway establishment in both parties, including those Republicans who had supported corporate bailouts in 2008.
Because the #NeverTrump Republicans refuse to accept any responsibility for the failures of Bush-era GOP policy — although all of them, including French, marched in lockstep in support of those policies — they are at a loss to explain how or why they have lost their influence as intellectual leaders of the conservative movement. Instead, they denounce the 63 million Americans who voted for Trump as ignorant racists, which prompts the question: Why would anyone support “conservative intellectuals” who so emphatically agree with Democrats?
(Pierre Omidyar could not be reached for comment.)
Four years ago, Vox Day observed that French and the #NeverTrump conservatives “haven’t grasped the fact that the demographic changes to the United States have not only changed the way the political game is played, but have changed the game itself.” The country that elected and re-elected Ronald Reagan by landslide margins has ceased to exist, replaced by one in which Republicans can win the White House only by razor-thin margins, and the most important reason for this change is immigration. The demographic changes that have so transformed our politics did not “just happen.” It wasn’t some impersonal trend which caused this, but rather it was a matter of policy, and National Review was on the side of open borders, having purged Alien Nation author Peter Brimelow and sidelined John O’Sullivan. Not only did National Review purge those who dissented from their open-borders agenda, but also treated as persona non grata anyone who lamented this purge. They will call you a racist if you don’t support open-borders Republicans whose policies make it impossible for Republicans to win elections. Why do the editors of National Review think we should be grateful for their services in denouncing Republican voters as racist, as if there is a shortage of Democrats willing to perform this service?
Americans have grown tired of being lectured about how racist they are. The white people delivering these lectures — e.g., Joe Scarborough, Chris Cuomo, David Brooks — seem to believe that their moral superiority to the rest of us is so self-evident that we will enjoy and be grateful for the opportunity to be “enlightened” by them. Yet they are telling us nothing we haven’t already been told a million times, long before anyone imagined Donald Trump running for president.
David French’s insistence that Ilhan Omar is better than any native-born American simply because she is an immigrant — that our inheritance as Americans is a stigma of inferiority — is insulting, and the fact that he thinks we are too stupid to notice this is even more insulting.
The authors of our Constitution explained that their purpose was to “secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity.” If we are the posterity of our nation’s Founders — if we would deserve to be known as their heirs — then we have inherited an obligation to ensure that “the blessings of liberty” are preserved intact, that they may be enjoyed by future generations of Americans. So-called “Justice Democrats” like Ilhan Omar are a threat to that heritage of liberty, and yet David French, who wishes us to believe he is a conservative, seems to think that it is “racist” to oppose them. I do not exercise any control over what President Trump puts on his Twitter feed nor do Trump supporters seek my advice on what they should chant at rallies, but I know that Donald Trump prevented Hillary Clinton from becoming president, and that his willingness to call out Omar and her “Squad” (and to be smeared as a racist for doing so) indicates a keen understanding of what it will take to prevent Democrats from taking back the White House in 2020.
Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe there is something to be gained by playing “Nice Guy” with the Democrats, but if being nice were the criterion of political success, Jeb Bush might be president. And he’s not.
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And someone shot a duck.
An Images & Ideas, Inc. Service.
No Vegans were harmed in the making of this site. We're looking for a new provider.