British fashion magnet Gok Wan's bisexual brother is doing a book signing and, for every book sold this week, Gok is adding his signature too.
It's Bi Wan, Gok Wan free.
*.*
A man who hadn't attended church in years suddenly began attending faithfully on Sunday mornings instead of going fishing as was his normal habit.
The pastor was highly gratified and at the end of service one morning told him, "How wonderful it makes me feel to see you at services with your good wife!"
"Well, Preacher," said the fisherman, "Quite honestly, it's a matter of choice. I'd much rather hear your sermon than hers."
*.*
Three men were buried under a landslide in China.
They're inside a car when it happened, and miraculously still have cell phone connection.
The first man made a phone call to the police:
"I'm a good citizen and husband, please come save us!"
The police tell him they will come for them in 24 hours
The second man made a phone call to the army:
"Comrade, I served the country as you do, please get me out of here!"
The soldier tell him they will come for them in 12 hours
The final man made a phone call to someone, and made a whisper which the other two man can't hear
Within an hour, the men were dug out and rescued
A group of police officer walks up to the weary men:
"Alright, which one of you said Taiwan is a country?"
*.*
According to sources, beloved North Korean tyrant and lover of doughnuts Kim Jong Un is now attending Columbia University, a prestigious Ivy League school, to learn new brainwashing techniques for his regime.
"I thought I knew all there was to know about communist indoctrination, but I was wrong," said the ruthless dictator to reporters after sitting through a 2-hour lecture on why fidget spinners are a remnant of Western patriarchal oppression. "Your American college professors have this down to an art!"
Kim Jong Un then waddled over to the food court for all-you-can-eat frozen yogurt, whistling a merry tune as he went.
According to experts, Ivy League schools in America boast the world's finest anti-Western propaganda and brainwashing techniques. The North Korean dictator expressed hope that his newfound knowledge would help him make his citizens more robotically obedient.
"We still have our troublemakers, but with these Ivy League techniques, I'll have them eating out of my hand in no time!" he said.
The murderous leader of North Korea plans to go back to his home country and start his own Ivy League school: Kim Jong UNiversity.
*.*
A man inserted an 'ad' in the classifieds: "Wife wanted."
Next day he received hundreds of letters.
They all said the same thing... "You can have mine!"
Quote of the Times;
Private Property No Longer Exists. (Director of the CDC) Rochelle Walensky is now in charge. She has now nationalized American rental properties. Millions of them from Maine to California. Tenants are no longer required to pay their rent. Property owners cannot evict them under any circumstances. Making someone pay to live on your property is now a federal crime. Try it and you can end up in prison with hundred's of thousands in fines. But the property owners are still required to pay the banks their mortgages. There are no moratoriums on mortgages. Why? Because the Banks are massive Democrat donors, and they are getting the treatment that they paid for. – Carlson
Link of the Times;
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2021/08/codemonkeyz-bombshell-dominion-whistleblower-speaks-releases-admin-password-proving-remote-access-video/
Issue of the Times;
A Day in the Life of a Low-Information Voter by Mark Ellis
The low-information voter begins his or her day largely unaware that any snippets of news they consume are likely to be spun leftward. Many don’t know any better, but some, with guarded comprehension, don’t want to know any better. They’ve subsisted on a diet of mainstream and Big Tech news for so long that biased reportage has become their media comfort zone.
A glance at Zuckerberg’s feed. Yahoo News. They may prepare for work with the montage of a major network morning show as background: cookbook authors and studies that show transgenderism in rhesus monkeys. The LIV’s sources are completely devoid of solid conservative content.
At their midmorning break they get another dose of fake news they don’t know any better than to believe in. They spent over a year absorbing Adam Schiff and Eric Swalwell sound bites to the effect that President Trump had colluded with the Russians. In truth it was the candidate they likely voted for, Hillary Clinton, who had.
At noon the LIV mind remains firmly closed. If they get any news at all, it comes in drips from Facebook’s censorious ministry of truth or Biden-propping major network radio affiliate news directors. They know mostly that Republicans and conservatives “seem” bad (and Donald Trump the worst) and are exposed only to informational items that blatantly or subliminally reinforce that. As the media circus moves in a blur past their coopted consciousness, they register that Liz Cheney is the hero, a brave herald attempting to right the GOP ship.
They hear an elected Democrat suggest that January 6th was worse than 9/11, and feel the force of the statement even while grasping on some level that it is intrinsically false. Yes, they think, while waiting in the drive-thru at Wendy’s, a thorough investigation of Matt Gaetz is warranted. Hunter Biden never makes the feed.
The LIV is never privy to buried media corrections. When a purported white supremacist defacement of a notable African-American’s statue is shown to have been a Jussie Smollett-style hoax, they never get the update, and thus believe there’s a white supremacist living on every block. The LIV is blissful in his/her ignorance, but it may be dawning on the periphery of their minds that Biden’s installment in the White House is a disaster for them and the nation. They’re paying more for pretty much everything, and the school their children attend is experiencing an uptick in immigrant students whose vaccination status is unknown. They’ve been vaccinated, but are keeping a package of disposable masks in the car because they heard George Stephanopoulos warning about “variants.” They go on believing, as they catch headlines while surfing for “COVID guidelines in Scranton restaurants,” that sacrifice is necessary. The small business that provided them with a paycheck and benefits went out of business in August 2020, but they are soldiering on.
Everything has to be better now, doesn’t it, now that the Evil One, the mean one, the heartless one, the racist one, is out of office?
They are hearing what they have been conditioned to hear, lies about everything from January 6th to election integrity. Like jurisdictional courthouses across the land–all the way up to the Supreme Court–they are not interested in delving too deeply, or at all, into what happened on Election Day 2020.
As night falls, unlike committed leftists who glory in the alleged coup, LIVs might experience brief pangs of worry. They’ve heard things through inadvertent backchannels: was the election stolen?
They are not the heart of the new Democrat Socialist Party. Those people have plenty of information, and are looking to control the flow of information. Those people know how bad things are getting, and why it has to get bad: to bring down existentially racist, capitalist America as founded.
No, the low-information voter, content with a faux understanding of the way things are, is a pawn in the game. While there is such a thing as a Republican LIV, Democrat LIVs round out the base of the Democrat Party. Lose them, and Democrats would never win again.
The great Rush Limbaugh often used the term “low-information voter” on his show to describe masses who are only exposed to liberal viewpoints and are thus woefully misinformed and in lazy lockstep with cultural liberalism. They are spoon-fed, undernourished people who have been propagandized into a mode of reactionary anti-Americanism.
Interestingly, unlike confirmed socialists who are ideologically honest, they think they love America, and at the same time may describe themselves as “not really political.” But the vision of this nation they think they love is a media-crafted abomination.
They’re pretty sure they don’t want open borders, but would never vote for a Republican Freedom Caucus member who advocates for sane immigration policy. They regard shills like Chuck Todd as credible journalists. They perceive politicians like Maxine Waters as “out there,” but essentially sympathetic. They hopefully cling to the idea that Biden won, despite mounting evidence the lays the question on every kitchen table in the nation.
They turn away from networks like Newsmax, or radio shows like Hannity, appalled, but left to wonder what would happen if they allowed themselves to take such media in, and consider alternate viewpoints and positions.
The LIV beds down at night with a look-in at the late local news, typically devoid of all but the “progressivism” of hard-left programming directors. Even the weather report is manipulatively laced with sleepy half-truths about climate change.
News of the Times;
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9853429/Third-Capitol-cop-commits-suicide-Officer.html
https://www.theepochtimes.com/4th-police-officer-who-was-at-jan-6-capitol-breach-dies-by-suicide_3930825.html
https://thecritic.co.uk/issues/june-2021/no-babies-no-more-nazis/
https://www.rt.com/usa/530741-cdc-vaccine-delta-study-masks/
https://www.wnd.com/2021/07/carlson-unmasking-reveals-biden-using-intel-target-political-enemies/
https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/teslas-big-battery-fire-highlights-growing-risks-related-lithium-ion-power-storage
https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2021/07/29/republican-staffers-defy-pelosi-maskless-beer-pong-cigars-in-capitol-hallway/
http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/10-signs-that-things-are-getting-better-in-america/
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2021/07/exclusive-second-eye-witness-steps-forward-confirms-capitol-hill-police-killed-trump-supporter-rosanne-boyland-attacked-tried-save-video/
https://summit.news/2021/08/02/paypal-co-founder-warns-financial-giant-is-creating-de-facto-no-buy-list-by-banning-dissidents/
https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/08/aoc_in_middle_of_a_packed_crowd_dons_a_mask_when_the_cameras_start_rolling.html
https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2021/08/03/cuomo-called-for-zero-tolerance-policy-for-sexual-harassment-years-before-investigation-determined-he-sexually-harassed-women/
https://redstate.com/jenniferoo/2021/08/03/mo-gov-mike-parson-pardons-mark-and-patricia-mccloskey-of-gun-charges-n420938
https://resistthemainstream.org/metoo-group-helped-cuomo-draft-letter-smearing-accuser-bombshell-report-finds/
https://nationalfile.com/mask-tyrant-nevada-commissioner-tick-segerblom-caught-on-maskless-pub-crawl/
Low?
Fanatics?
I never got along well with my dad.
Kids used to come up to me and say, "My dad can beat up your dad."
I'd just say, "Yeah, when?"
*.*
Front page of BBC News: Man who drowned at beach was amazing, says family.
Clearly not at swimming he wasn't.
*.*
In England, The Labour Party have put the protection of children from Islamic grooming gangs as their top priority.
They've started handing out condoms to Muslim men in Rochdale.
*.*
A local charity had never received a donation from the town’s banker, so the director made a phone call. “Our records show you make $500,000 a year, yet you haven’t given a penny to charity,” the director began. “Wouldn’t you like to help the community?”
The banker replied, “Did your research show that my mother is ill, with extremely expensive medical bills?”
“Um, no,” mumbled the director.
“Or that my brother is unemployed? Or that my sister’s husband left, leaving her broke with four kids?”
“I … I … I had no idea.”
“So,” said the banker, “if I don’t give them any money, why would I give any to you?”
*.*
I don't usually brag about going to expensive places...
But I just left the gas station.
Quote of the Times;
Christopher Columbus going ashore in the Antilles, was struck by the profound well-being of the island Arawak. He called them indios, not because he imagined them to be inhabitants of (which in the fifteenth century was still called Hindustan) but because he recognized that these friendly, generous Taino people, soon to be extinct, lived in blessed harmony with their surroundings - "una gente in Dios, "a People in God. – Means
Link of the Times;
https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/07/most-devastating-video-internet-frontpagemagcom/
Issue of the Times;
Fanatics by Leighton Woodhouse
Politics has become a religion.
It’s not hard to see why wokeness is so frequently compared to a religion. The metaphors are everywhere: the washing of feet, the prostrations, the proclamations of faith, the sacraments, the martyrs, the confessions, the heretics, the hallowed ground, the Original Sin, the evangelism. Last summer’s protests for racial justice often had the look of a religious movement. Many of its practitioners saw it explicitly in those terms. Even the snarky phrase for this moment of mass political enlightenment, “The Great Awokening”, is derived from the name of an early American religious revival.
Like its eighteenth century namesake, our current awokening has arrived at a time of increasing secularization in the United States. While still a comfortable majority, the percentage of Americans who identify as Christian has dropped by double digits in the last decade, while the percentage who are unaffiliated with any religion has risen by nearly ten points. The biggest drop in religiosity by far has been among liberals.
If religion gives meaning to the lives of the faithful, there are a lot more Americans now who lack that meaning than there used to be, and they’re concentrated on the left side of the political spectrum. It’s not difficult to imagine these people seeking the kind of meaning that religion would otherwise have provided them — a sense of belonging to a larger community; a feeling of collective purpose; an affiliation with a temporal reality that transcends the duration of a single human lifespan — in other things. In their politics, for example.
The problem is that politics is, in important ways, the very antithesis of religion, and in a democratic society, the more politics takes on the shape of faith, the more intractable and dysfunctional it becomes. That’s because politics, when put to its proper use, is the search for what disparate groups share in common, and the bargaining over their differences. Religion is practically its inverse; at its root, it’s tribal. And so as our politics have taken on the character of religion, they have become tribal, too.
As a cultural invention of the United States, woke ideology bears a specifically American religious stamp: that of Calvinism. The Calvinists believed in Predestination. From the moment of your birth, they were convinced, you were destined for Heaven or Hell, and you could do nothing over the course of your life to change that. As the German sociologist Max Weber explained in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, this doctrine bred in the Calvinists of the early United States an obsession with discerning who among them was saved and who was damned. They surveilled each other constantly, searching for signs of who did and who did not belong to God’s “elect.” They policed their own behavior relentlessly, guarding against any possible indication, both to themselves and to others, that they stood outside of God’s grace and were hellbound. Desperate to reassure themselves, they became ostentatious in their displays of austerity, humility, the sacrifice of their egos to a higher calling, and other visible signals of their devotion to God. Their lives became a performance of piety and virtuousness, born of constant, pervasive dread.
Nobody believes in Predestination anymore. Many of us don’t believe in God. But the cultural residues of Calvinism and other puritanical Protestant sects remain with us, in our binary moralism, which divides humanity between the virtuous and the damned, in our scrutinizing of ourselves and others for ethical imperfections, and in our use of public shaming to enforce moral conformity. All of these tendencies fit as comfortably into American left-wing social justice culture as they did in right-wing Christian evangelical culture in the 1990s. Liberal Twitter in 2021 is one big digital Calvinist village, everyone trying to out-virtue-signal one another to prove their ever-tenuous membership in an amorphous club of the morally elite, picking over everyone else’s tweets for signs of political heresy, and calling them out to the mob in a desperate attempt to deflect scrutiny from themselves. The same political culture prevails on college campuses, media outlets, and the non-profit industrial complex. Increasingly, it is becoming the norm in Congress.
Weber once wrote that politics is the “strong and slow boring of hard boards” (the phrase from which Matthew Yglesias, who coined “The Great Awokening,” derived the name of his substack). By that he meant it is tedious and incremental, not an activity for those who dream of heroic feats, of quick and radical change, or of utopian outcomes. It is the business of transaction and deal-brokering over profane and parochial interests. It is not the arena for saving souls. But from Obama to Bernie to Trump, a politics of salvation is the bill of goods we’ve been sold. And it’s what the most rabid political partisans have come to expect, whether they’re MAGA or DSA, as politics has come to supplant religion as the way we imagine communities of kinship into being.
In “The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life,” Émile Durkheim, the early 20th century French sociologist, analyzed the patterns of ancient tribal religious rites in order to ascertain the social function of religion. Durkheim focused in particular on the traditional rituals of Australian aboriginal tribes, whose cultures developed largely in an age that predated a modern division of labor. Today we live in an infinitely complex network of relationships of production and exchange. As soon as we get out of bed and make ourselves a cup of coffee, we are relying on the labor of a thousand strangers: the farmers who grew the coffee beans, the shippers who brought them to us, the municipal workers who maintain our supply of water, the plumber who installed our pipes, et cetera. In pre-modern times, by contrast, each individual, along with his or her immediate family members, had to tend to each life-sustaining task by themselves: dig the well, grow the crops, carry the water, build the fire. This meant that although they belonged to a tribe, each tribal member led a fundamentally solitary existence. Aside from self-defense in the event of an invasion, there was no material reason for the mass of individuals in a geographical area to come together as a group, much less to identify themselves with that collective. How, Durkheim wondered, did a society emerge out of this bunch of disconnected individuals living isolated day-to-day lives?
Religious rites and rituals, Durkheim argued, stood in the breach of the absence of bonds of material necessity. The Australian aborigines worshipped the divine by participating in intensely physical rituals, such as long, frenetic dances around bonfires, in the presence of totemic objects. These rituals sent their participants into ecstatic convulsions. Durkheim called this experience of hypnotic group enchantment “collective effervescence.”
While in that state, individual members of the tribe ceased to perceive themselves as individuals. They transcended their mundane sense of selfhood, feeling themselves viscerally connected to one another, on a higher plane of existence. They saw themselves as one. They regarded that realm, that experience of collective being, as the realm of the sacred, and they conferred that sanctity upon the totem, which represented this intangible sacred entity known as the tribe. They worshipped the sacred totem, but in doing so they were really worshipping themselves — their existence as a social collective.
When they returned to their homes, they carried the experience of this transcendental collective existence, this sacred identification with the tribe, with them back to their isolated lives. Over time, the intensity of these emotional attachments would fade, and it would be time to gather again to recreate it anew. This is how religious ritual generated and re-generated, from discrete individuals, the social reality of the tribe.
As societies became larger, denser, and more urbanized, material production and exchange became more complex, and work became specialized. Vast and intricate networks of material interdependency emerged. This division of labor created a material basis for social cohesion; accordingly, the need for religious ritual as a mechanical means of generating the collective dissipated, and modern societies became increasingly secular.
But collective effervescence never vanished entirely. We see it every time chants and costumes and choreographed motion are used to generate a collective spirit, to transform disparate individuals into a unitary group identity. We see it, of course, in churches, but also at football games, political protests, and military marches, at raves, cosplay conventions, Phish shows, Burning Man festivals and Juggalo gatherings. And, I would argue, we see something akin to it in digital format on Twitter.
Over the last year, we have suffered through as profound an experience of mass social isolation as global civilization has ever undergone. Locked down in our homes, we turned to the internet to recreate our stymied lives online. With internet usage jacked up by 40%-100%, we experienced one of the most chaotic periods of political tumult in living memory largely through our computer screens. Trump, pandemic, Black Lives Matter, riots, impeachment, a presidential election, the January 6 “insurrection” — all of this melodrama processed through the polarization-inducing algorithms of Facebook and Twitter. If our politics were already moving toward tribalism, the pandemic turbocharged our velocity along that trajectory.
For the Aboriginal tribes, the ecstatic rituals that engendered in individuals’ minds the consciousness of the collective served to obviate their sense of social isolation. But they also did something else: they allowed tribal members to conceive not just of their in-group, but of their out-group. In a region populated by people who looked, sounded and lived not too dissimilarly from one another, religious rituals forged distinctive social groupings out of demographically uniform populations.
But later religions found other, negative ways to generate the same effect: through prohibition and exile. By regulating social behavior, condemning the heathens and executing the heretics, Christian sects starkly delineated the boundaries of their communities of faith. In so doing, they reified the community as such. By designating who lay outside of it, even by entirely arbitrary standards, they constituted the in-group as a social reality.
It’s a dynamic that’s familiar to anyone who has tested the ever-constricting boundaries of permissible speech on Twitter. By perpetually improvising new, often arbitrary rules of language and belief, ideologues on Twitter generate the in-group of those who willingly abide by those rules by banishing the out-group of those who are either ignorant of the rules or who defy them knowingly. These rules and protocols are sufficiently elaborate and non-intuitive to guarantee that the only people really capable of following them are those who are already intimately acculturated to the particular social milieu from which they stem. Upon those who are in the know is thus conferred a select social status, masquerading as political virtue — not unlike the Calvinists who secured their social prestige by proving their standing among God’s favored by way of ostentatious shows of righteous living and religious conviction. It’s elitism, but it looks like piety.
The Twitter dogpile is the political equivalent of the banishing of the heathens — perhaps not in the gravity of its consequences, but in the function it serves of reproducing the community of the elect. And given the sadistic glee with which so many partake in it, it may also serve as a virtual experience of collective effervescence. We revel in the ritual of casting out the sinner, because it affirms the existence of the Tribe of the Woke, and our membership within it.
Do we actually care whether or not @MissLibra1984 believes that trans women are women, or whether @DonkeyKongNYC is indeed a bootlicker? Is that why we heap scorn upon them — because it does a thing to improve the lives of trans people, or to hold the police accountable? Is it the gratification of protecting the marginalized that makes it so fun to join the mob, pick up a stone and chuck it at the poor sap who didn’t know the rules? Is it in the service of our political principles that we @ some Karen’s employer and demand she be fired from her job? Is it our commitment to creating a better world that inclines us to laugh at her misfortune when we read about it in The Daily Beast? Is she really the asshole? Or are we?
Once upon a time, politics served the purpose of weaving together livable compromises out of divergent interests and values. We didn’t rely on political identities to give our lives meaning. Political parties, factions, and institutions were merely the instrumental means through which we brokered a relatively peaceful co-existence with those who didn’t see eye-to-eye with us. Occasionally, and often heroically, it was the basis upon which we mobilized opinion to annihilate those with truly anti-social agendas. But ultimately, it was the toolset with which we built a practical working peace.
Today, politics is a competition for tribal allegiance, the means by which we proudly declare our intractable differences with others. Like religion, it is an instrument we use to forge communities of kinship with one another, but only by declaring war on those who lie outside of them. It is no longer the basis for co-existence in a pluralist society, but the stick with which we draw our battle lines. It is the domain of sectarian holy war. In a democratic society, it will be the vehicle for our undoing.
News of the Times;
https://americanlookout.com/surprise-hunter-bidens-art-dealer-has-ties-to-china/
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2021/07/top-democrat-indicted-nm-house-majority-leader-charged-embezzlement-total-may-top-954000/
https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/cascade-consequences
https://hotair.com/ed-morrissey/2021/07/26/la-times-maybe-we-shouldnt-follow-californias-example-on-electric-cars-n404705
http://www.ronpaulinstitute.org/archives/featured-articles/2021/july/26/the-jan-6th-show-trials-threaten-all-of-us/
https://americanmind.org/salvo/the-conservative-case-for-cyberbullying-americas-generals/
https://www.dailywire.com/news/5-times-more-children-died-by-suicide-than-died-from-covid-in-the-uk
https://americanmind.org/salvo/the-end-of-merit/
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/lightfoot-absolutely-exclude-white-journalists-interviews-again
https://www.thecollegefix.com/harvard-downplays-role-in-no-whites-allowed-music-seminar-sponsored-by-nike/
https://www.commentary.org/noah-rothman/americas-deep-divisions-that-werent/
https://videos.whatfinger.com/2021/07/28/the-truth-about-simone-biles-paul-joseph-watson/
https://coloradopeakpolitics.com/2021/07/26/aurora-officials-wave-magic-wand-to-invalidate-city-charter-provision/
https://bucksexton.com/2021/07/the-cdcs-mask-reversal-is-bull-and-everybody-knows-it/
https://justthenews.com/politics-policy/coronavirus/cdc-justified-new-mask-guidance-based-vaccine-study-listed-failing-peer
Kids used to come up to me and say, "My dad can beat up your dad."
I'd just say, "Yeah, when?"
*.*
Front page of BBC News: Man who drowned at beach was amazing, says family.
Clearly not at swimming he wasn't.
*.*
In England, The Labour Party have put the protection of children from Islamic grooming gangs as their top priority.
They've started handing out condoms to Muslim men in Rochdale.
*.*
A local charity had never received a donation from the town’s banker, so the director made a phone call. “Our records show you make $500,000 a year, yet you haven’t given a penny to charity,” the director began. “Wouldn’t you like to help the community?”
The banker replied, “Did your research show that my mother is ill, with extremely expensive medical bills?”
“Um, no,” mumbled the director.
“Or that my brother is unemployed? Or that my sister’s husband left, leaving her broke with four kids?”
“I … I … I had no idea.”
“So,” said the banker, “if I don’t give them any money, why would I give any to you?”
*.*
I don't usually brag about going to expensive places...
But I just left the gas station.
Quote of the Times;
Christopher Columbus going ashore in the Antilles, was struck by the profound well-being of the island Arawak. He called them indios, not because he imagined them to be inhabitants of (which in the fifteenth century was still called Hindustan) but because he recognized that these friendly, generous Taino people, soon to be extinct, lived in blessed harmony with their surroundings - "una gente in Dios, "a People in God. – Means
Link of the Times;
https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/07/most-devastating-video-internet-frontpagemagcom/
Issue of the Times;
Fanatics by Leighton Woodhouse
Politics has become a religion.
It’s not hard to see why wokeness is so frequently compared to a religion. The metaphors are everywhere: the washing of feet, the prostrations, the proclamations of faith, the sacraments, the martyrs, the confessions, the heretics, the hallowed ground, the Original Sin, the evangelism. Last summer’s protests for racial justice often had the look of a religious movement. Many of its practitioners saw it explicitly in those terms. Even the snarky phrase for this moment of mass political enlightenment, “The Great Awokening”, is derived from the name of an early American religious revival.
Like its eighteenth century namesake, our current awokening has arrived at a time of increasing secularization in the United States. While still a comfortable majority, the percentage of Americans who identify as Christian has dropped by double digits in the last decade, while the percentage who are unaffiliated with any religion has risen by nearly ten points. The biggest drop in religiosity by far has been among liberals.
If religion gives meaning to the lives of the faithful, there are a lot more Americans now who lack that meaning than there used to be, and they’re concentrated on the left side of the political spectrum. It’s not difficult to imagine these people seeking the kind of meaning that religion would otherwise have provided them — a sense of belonging to a larger community; a feeling of collective purpose; an affiliation with a temporal reality that transcends the duration of a single human lifespan — in other things. In their politics, for example.
The problem is that politics is, in important ways, the very antithesis of religion, and in a democratic society, the more politics takes on the shape of faith, the more intractable and dysfunctional it becomes. That’s because politics, when put to its proper use, is the search for what disparate groups share in common, and the bargaining over their differences. Religion is practically its inverse; at its root, it’s tribal. And so as our politics have taken on the character of religion, they have become tribal, too.
As a cultural invention of the United States, woke ideology bears a specifically American religious stamp: that of Calvinism. The Calvinists believed in Predestination. From the moment of your birth, they were convinced, you were destined for Heaven or Hell, and you could do nothing over the course of your life to change that. As the German sociologist Max Weber explained in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, this doctrine bred in the Calvinists of the early United States an obsession with discerning who among them was saved and who was damned. They surveilled each other constantly, searching for signs of who did and who did not belong to God’s “elect.” They policed their own behavior relentlessly, guarding against any possible indication, both to themselves and to others, that they stood outside of God’s grace and were hellbound. Desperate to reassure themselves, they became ostentatious in their displays of austerity, humility, the sacrifice of their egos to a higher calling, and other visible signals of their devotion to God. Their lives became a performance of piety and virtuousness, born of constant, pervasive dread.
Nobody believes in Predestination anymore. Many of us don’t believe in God. But the cultural residues of Calvinism and other puritanical Protestant sects remain with us, in our binary moralism, which divides humanity between the virtuous and the damned, in our scrutinizing of ourselves and others for ethical imperfections, and in our use of public shaming to enforce moral conformity. All of these tendencies fit as comfortably into American left-wing social justice culture as they did in right-wing Christian evangelical culture in the 1990s. Liberal Twitter in 2021 is one big digital Calvinist village, everyone trying to out-virtue-signal one another to prove their ever-tenuous membership in an amorphous club of the morally elite, picking over everyone else’s tweets for signs of political heresy, and calling them out to the mob in a desperate attempt to deflect scrutiny from themselves. The same political culture prevails on college campuses, media outlets, and the non-profit industrial complex. Increasingly, it is becoming the norm in Congress.
Weber once wrote that politics is the “strong and slow boring of hard boards” (the phrase from which Matthew Yglesias, who coined “The Great Awokening,” derived the name of his substack). By that he meant it is tedious and incremental, not an activity for those who dream of heroic feats, of quick and radical change, or of utopian outcomes. It is the business of transaction and deal-brokering over profane and parochial interests. It is not the arena for saving souls. But from Obama to Bernie to Trump, a politics of salvation is the bill of goods we’ve been sold. And it’s what the most rabid political partisans have come to expect, whether they’re MAGA or DSA, as politics has come to supplant religion as the way we imagine communities of kinship into being.
In “The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life,” Émile Durkheim, the early 20th century French sociologist, analyzed the patterns of ancient tribal religious rites in order to ascertain the social function of religion. Durkheim focused in particular on the traditional rituals of Australian aboriginal tribes, whose cultures developed largely in an age that predated a modern division of labor. Today we live in an infinitely complex network of relationships of production and exchange. As soon as we get out of bed and make ourselves a cup of coffee, we are relying on the labor of a thousand strangers: the farmers who grew the coffee beans, the shippers who brought them to us, the municipal workers who maintain our supply of water, the plumber who installed our pipes, et cetera. In pre-modern times, by contrast, each individual, along with his or her immediate family members, had to tend to each life-sustaining task by themselves: dig the well, grow the crops, carry the water, build the fire. This meant that although they belonged to a tribe, each tribal member led a fundamentally solitary existence. Aside from self-defense in the event of an invasion, there was no material reason for the mass of individuals in a geographical area to come together as a group, much less to identify themselves with that collective. How, Durkheim wondered, did a society emerge out of this bunch of disconnected individuals living isolated day-to-day lives?
Religious rites and rituals, Durkheim argued, stood in the breach of the absence of bonds of material necessity. The Australian aborigines worshipped the divine by participating in intensely physical rituals, such as long, frenetic dances around bonfires, in the presence of totemic objects. These rituals sent their participants into ecstatic convulsions. Durkheim called this experience of hypnotic group enchantment “collective effervescence.”
While in that state, individual members of the tribe ceased to perceive themselves as individuals. They transcended their mundane sense of selfhood, feeling themselves viscerally connected to one another, on a higher plane of existence. They saw themselves as one. They regarded that realm, that experience of collective being, as the realm of the sacred, and they conferred that sanctity upon the totem, which represented this intangible sacred entity known as the tribe. They worshipped the sacred totem, but in doing so they were really worshipping themselves — their existence as a social collective.
When they returned to their homes, they carried the experience of this transcendental collective existence, this sacred identification with the tribe, with them back to their isolated lives. Over time, the intensity of these emotional attachments would fade, and it would be time to gather again to recreate it anew. This is how religious ritual generated and re-generated, from discrete individuals, the social reality of the tribe.
As societies became larger, denser, and more urbanized, material production and exchange became more complex, and work became specialized. Vast and intricate networks of material interdependency emerged. This division of labor created a material basis for social cohesion; accordingly, the need for religious ritual as a mechanical means of generating the collective dissipated, and modern societies became increasingly secular.
But collective effervescence never vanished entirely. We see it every time chants and costumes and choreographed motion are used to generate a collective spirit, to transform disparate individuals into a unitary group identity. We see it, of course, in churches, but also at football games, political protests, and military marches, at raves, cosplay conventions, Phish shows, Burning Man festivals and Juggalo gatherings. And, I would argue, we see something akin to it in digital format on Twitter.
Over the last year, we have suffered through as profound an experience of mass social isolation as global civilization has ever undergone. Locked down in our homes, we turned to the internet to recreate our stymied lives online. With internet usage jacked up by 40%-100%, we experienced one of the most chaotic periods of political tumult in living memory largely through our computer screens. Trump, pandemic, Black Lives Matter, riots, impeachment, a presidential election, the January 6 “insurrection” — all of this melodrama processed through the polarization-inducing algorithms of Facebook and Twitter. If our politics were already moving toward tribalism, the pandemic turbocharged our velocity along that trajectory.
For the Aboriginal tribes, the ecstatic rituals that engendered in individuals’ minds the consciousness of the collective served to obviate their sense of social isolation. But they also did something else: they allowed tribal members to conceive not just of their in-group, but of their out-group. In a region populated by people who looked, sounded and lived not too dissimilarly from one another, religious rituals forged distinctive social groupings out of demographically uniform populations.
But later religions found other, negative ways to generate the same effect: through prohibition and exile. By regulating social behavior, condemning the heathens and executing the heretics, Christian sects starkly delineated the boundaries of their communities of faith. In so doing, they reified the community as such. By designating who lay outside of it, even by entirely arbitrary standards, they constituted the in-group as a social reality.
It’s a dynamic that’s familiar to anyone who has tested the ever-constricting boundaries of permissible speech on Twitter. By perpetually improvising new, often arbitrary rules of language and belief, ideologues on Twitter generate the in-group of those who willingly abide by those rules by banishing the out-group of those who are either ignorant of the rules or who defy them knowingly. These rules and protocols are sufficiently elaborate and non-intuitive to guarantee that the only people really capable of following them are those who are already intimately acculturated to the particular social milieu from which they stem. Upon those who are in the know is thus conferred a select social status, masquerading as political virtue — not unlike the Calvinists who secured their social prestige by proving their standing among God’s favored by way of ostentatious shows of righteous living and religious conviction. It’s elitism, but it looks like piety.
The Twitter dogpile is the political equivalent of the banishing of the heathens — perhaps not in the gravity of its consequences, but in the function it serves of reproducing the community of the elect. And given the sadistic glee with which so many partake in it, it may also serve as a virtual experience of collective effervescence. We revel in the ritual of casting out the sinner, because it affirms the existence of the Tribe of the Woke, and our membership within it.
Do we actually care whether or not @MissLibra1984 believes that trans women are women, or whether @DonkeyKongNYC is indeed a bootlicker? Is that why we heap scorn upon them — because it does a thing to improve the lives of trans people, or to hold the police accountable? Is it the gratification of protecting the marginalized that makes it so fun to join the mob, pick up a stone and chuck it at the poor sap who didn’t know the rules? Is it in the service of our political principles that we @ some Karen’s employer and demand she be fired from her job? Is it our commitment to creating a better world that inclines us to laugh at her misfortune when we read about it in The Daily Beast? Is she really the asshole? Or are we?
Once upon a time, politics served the purpose of weaving together livable compromises out of divergent interests and values. We didn’t rely on political identities to give our lives meaning. Political parties, factions, and institutions were merely the instrumental means through which we brokered a relatively peaceful co-existence with those who didn’t see eye-to-eye with us. Occasionally, and often heroically, it was the basis upon which we mobilized opinion to annihilate those with truly anti-social agendas. But ultimately, it was the toolset with which we built a practical working peace.
Today, politics is a competition for tribal allegiance, the means by which we proudly declare our intractable differences with others. Like religion, it is an instrument we use to forge communities of kinship with one another, but only by declaring war on those who lie outside of them. It is no longer the basis for co-existence in a pluralist society, but the stick with which we draw our battle lines. It is the domain of sectarian holy war. In a democratic society, it will be the vehicle for our undoing.
News of the Times;
https://americanlookout.com/surprise-hunter-bidens-art-dealer-has-ties-to-china/
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2021/07/top-democrat-indicted-nm-house-majority-leader-charged-embezzlement-total-may-top-954000/
https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/cascade-consequences
https://hotair.com/ed-morrissey/2021/07/26/la-times-maybe-we-shouldnt-follow-californias-example-on-electric-cars-n404705
http://www.ronpaulinstitute.org/archives/featured-articles/2021/july/26/the-jan-6th-show-trials-threaten-all-of-us/
https://americanmind.org/salvo/the-conservative-case-for-cyberbullying-americas-generals/
https://www.dailywire.com/news/5-times-more-children-died-by-suicide-than-died-from-covid-in-the-uk
https://americanmind.org/salvo/the-end-of-merit/
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/lightfoot-absolutely-exclude-white-journalists-interviews-again
https://www.thecollegefix.com/harvard-downplays-role-in-no-whites-allowed-music-seminar-sponsored-by-nike/
https://www.commentary.org/noah-rothman/americas-deep-divisions-that-werent/
https://videos.whatfinger.com/2021/07/28/the-truth-about-simone-biles-paul-joseph-watson/
https://coloradopeakpolitics.com/2021/07/26/aurora-officials-wave-magic-wand-to-invalidate-city-charter-provision/
https://bucksexton.com/2021/07/the-cdcs-mask-reversal-is-bull-and-everybody-knows-it/
https://justthenews.com/politics-policy/coronavirus/cdc-justified-new-mask-guidance-based-vaccine-study-listed-failing-peer
American?
I noticed Amy Winehouse died 10 years ago.
I reckon she looks better today than 10 years ago.
*.*
You think you’re having a bad day?
At least you didn’t lose to France at basketball.
*.*
My husband and I were dressed and ready to go out for a lovely evening of dinner and theatre.
Having been burgled in the past, we turned on a night light and the answering machine then put the cat out in the backyard. When our cab arrived, we walked out our front door and our rather tubby cat scooted between our legs inside, then ran up the stairs. Because our cat likes to chase our budgie we really didn’t want to leave them un-chaperoned so my husband ran inside to retrieve her and put her in the backyard again.
Because I didn’t want the taxi driver to know our house was going to be empty all evening, I explained to him that my husband would be out momentarily as he was just bidding goodnight to my mother. A few minutes later he hot into the cab all hot and bothered and said (to my growing horror and amusement) as the cab pulled away.
“Sorry it took so long, but the stupid bitch was hiding under the bed and I had to poke her ass with a coat hanger to get her to come out! She tried to take off so I grabbed her by the neck and wrapped her in a blanket so she wouldn’t scratch me like she did last time. But it worked! I hauled her fat arse down the stairs and threw her into the backyard… she had better not shit in the vegetable garden again.”
The silence in the taxi was defining.
*.*
What has two butts and kills people?
An assassin.
*.*
I watched the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games with a group of mates and we decided to drink a small glass of sake every time we heard the word 'diversity' mentioned.
When I regained consciousness this morning, I discovered three of my friends had died.
Quote of the Times;
Can anybody believe that the Cleveland Indians, a storied and cherished baseball franchise since taking the name in 1915, are changing their name to the Guardians? Such a disgrace, and I guarantee that the people who are most angry about it are the many Indians of our Country. Wouldn’t it be an honor to have a team named the Cleveland Indians, and wouldn’t it be disrespectful to rip that name and logo off of those jerseys? The people of Cleveland cannot be thrilled and I, as a FORMER baseball fan, cannot believe things such as this are happening. A small group of people, with absolutely crazy ideas and policies, is forcing these changes to destroy our culture and heritage. – Trump
Link of the Times;
https://www.unz.com/article/mary-phagans-family-opposes-exoneration-of-sex-killer-leo-frank/
Issue of the Times;
Why the Left Has to Lie About American History by Scott Centorino
As the left vainly tries to deceive Americans into accepting the toxic reign of identity politics, they are forced time and again to contort American history and falsify heroic stories from our past because a truthful telling would reveal the mendacity of their narrative and the bankruptcy of their agenda. The forgotten tales of two Americans—both named James—are the perfect reminder of why.
Born in the 18th century, James Forten worked odd jobs along Philadelphia’s waterfront to support his mother and sister after his father died. By 1781, he was fifteen and old enough to volunteer to join the Continental Navy.
In his first taste of combat, he demonstrated his physical courage. But it took getting captured to demonstrate his moral courage.
A British warship, the Amphion, captured his ship’s crew off the coast of Virginia. The British captain quickly sensed his intelligence and made Forten a generous offer.
In exchange for freeing Forten from life as a prisoner of war, Forten would serve the British captain at his country estate in England.
Forten didn’t hesitate. He turned it down.
He told the British captain, “I have been taken prisoner for the liberties of my country and never will prove a traitor to her interest.” Instead of a comfortable life tutoring the captain’s sons, Forten re-joined his crewmates in a prison ship, waiting for freedom for himself and his country.
James Forten didn’t want comfort. He wanted to serve his nation.
Two centuries later, in 1961, Jim Zwerg joined his Fisk University classmate, John Lewis, to participate in bus trips through the Deep South to fight segregation.
These ‘freedom riders’ challenged the real Jim Crow, not what progressive activists today label as Jim Crow with shameful nonchalance. In a time of segregated drinking foundations, targeted fire hoses, and brutal killings, the real Jim Crow meant real risk.
Jim Zwerg accepted that risk gladly. He later said that “my faith was never so strong as during that time. I knew I was doing what I should be doing.”
When Zwerg’s Greyhound bus pulled into Montgomery, Alabama, the bus station appeared empty. Then the ambush came. From his window on the bus, Zwerg could see young white men outside holding baseball bats and chains.
The police had left. Their protection had abandoned the area.
But Zwerg stood up from his seat anyway, walked down the aisle, and got off the bus.
The crowd did what it came to do. It smashed Zwerg’s face with his suitcase, pinned his head down, and methodically knocked teeth out of his mouth. He only regained consciousness two days later. Newspapers published pictures of his bruised face and shocked the nation.
James Forten and Jim Zwerg shared courage, a sense of purpose, and a love for the promise of America.
But these attributes have seeded the American experience for centuries. What makes their stories so special, aside from their common name and age?
You might have guessed that James Forten and Jim Zwerg did not have race in common. One was white. One was black.
But it might surprise you to learn that James Forten, the Revolutionary War sailor, was black and Jim Zwerg, the civil rights activist, was white.
For each, their race made them singular targets in their time.
Every time James Forten sailed into a southern port, he risked seizure for chained slavery. Forten’s acceptance of that risk for the sake of the American cause as it existed then would befuddle the woke mob today, addicted as they are too crude and distorted history, as exemplified by the 1619 Project.
Jim Zwerg, on the other hand, knew the mob in Montgomery would treat him more harshly than his fellow passengers.
The stories of these two brave men do not conform to the identity politics narrative that has taken over our culture.
Remembering these tales—and others like them—can help bring our culture closer to Martin Luther King’s ideal, in which every individual is treated as a unique person with dignity and a soul that transcends their ethnic or racial identity.
If the antidote for tribalism is individualism, individuals like James Forten and Jim Zwerg show us the way.
News of the Times;
https://electroverse.net/arctic-summers-were-warmer-back-in-the-1950s-60s/
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2021/07/gary-g-kohls/the-covered-up-crimes-of-vaccine-maker-pfizer-just-another-too-big-to-fail-american-corporation/
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2021/07/15/malthusian-myth-busting-easter-island-edition/
https://rumble.com/vjx7fs-tucker-why-is-lunatic-mark-milley-still-in-charge-of-the-military.html
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2021/07/michigan-gov-whitmer-stripped-emergency-powers/
https://nypost.com/2021/07/16/isaiah-stokes-who-appeared-on-law-and-order-indicted-for-brazen-nyc-murder/
https://www.wnd.com/2021/07/crime-statistics-skewed-transgenders/
https://www.pollution.news/2021-05-20-wisconsin-liquify-dead-flush-sewers-food-farms.html
https://www.the-sun.com/news/3304811/google-admits-recording-converstations-assistant/
https://www.bizpacreview.com/2021/07/20/accused-murderer-set-free-after-st-louis-county-prosecutors-fail-to-show-up-but-found-time-for-mccloskeys-1106327/
http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/now-they-are-saying-that-the-republican-party-is-the-1-national-security-threat-to-the-united-states-of-america/
https://vdare.com/articles/national-data-yes-the-border-influx-is-disastrous-but-june-jobs-data-shows-american-worker-displacement-immigrant-workforce-population-on-rise-too
https://www.wnd.com/2021/07/biden-blurts-anti-gun-agenda/
https://resistthemainstream.org/donald-trump-responds-to-cleveland-changing-mlb-team-name/
https://www.oann.com/dhs-cancels-2-texas-border-wall-projects/
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/why-did-china-buy-airstrip-texas
I reckon she looks better today than 10 years ago.
*.*
You think you’re having a bad day?
At least you didn’t lose to France at basketball.
*.*
My husband and I were dressed and ready to go out for a lovely evening of dinner and theatre.
Having been burgled in the past, we turned on a night light and the answering machine then put the cat out in the backyard. When our cab arrived, we walked out our front door and our rather tubby cat scooted between our legs inside, then ran up the stairs. Because our cat likes to chase our budgie we really didn’t want to leave them un-chaperoned so my husband ran inside to retrieve her and put her in the backyard again.
Because I didn’t want the taxi driver to know our house was going to be empty all evening, I explained to him that my husband would be out momentarily as he was just bidding goodnight to my mother. A few minutes later he hot into the cab all hot and bothered and said (to my growing horror and amusement) as the cab pulled away.
“Sorry it took so long, but the stupid bitch was hiding under the bed and I had to poke her ass with a coat hanger to get her to come out! She tried to take off so I grabbed her by the neck and wrapped her in a blanket so she wouldn’t scratch me like she did last time. But it worked! I hauled her fat arse down the stairs and threw her into the backyard… she had better not shit in the vegetable garden again.”
The silence in the taxi was defining.
*.*
What has two butts and kills people?
An assassin.
*.*
I watched the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games with a group of mates and we decided to drink a small glass of sake every time we heard the word 'diversity' mentioned.
When I regained consciousness this morning, I discovered three of my friends had died.
Quote of the Times;
Can anybody believe that the Cleveland Indians, a storied and cherished baseball franchise since taking the name in 1915, are changing their name to the Guardians? Such a disgrace, and I guarantee that the people who are most angry about it are the many Indians of our Country. Wouldn’t it be an honor to have a team named the Cleveland Indians, and wouldn’t it be disrespectful to rip that name and logo off of those jerseys? The people of Cleveland cannot be thrilled and I, as a FORMER baseball fan, cannot believe things such as this are happening. A small group of people, with absolutely crazy ideas and policies, is forcing these changes to destroy our culture and heritage. – Trump
Link of the Times;
https://www.unz.com/article/mary-phagans-family-opposes-exoneration-of-sex-killer-leo-frank/
Issue of the Times;
Why the Left Has to Lie About American History by Scott Centorino
As the left vainly tries to deceive Americans into accepting the toxic reign of identity politics, they are forced time and again to contort American history and falsify heroic stories from our past because a truthful telling would reveal the mendacity of their narrative and the bankruptcy of their agenda. The forgotten tales of two Americans—both named James—are the perfect reminder of why.
Born in the 18th century, James Forten worked odd jobs along Philadelphia’s waterfront to support his mother and sister after his father died. By 1781, he was fifteen and old enough to volunteer to join the Continental Navy.
In his first taste of combat, he demonstrated his physical courage. But it took getting captured to demonstrate his moral courage.
A British warship, the Amphion, captured his ship’s crew off the coast of Virginia. The British captain quickly sensed his intelligence and made Forten a generous offer.
In exchange for freeing Forten from life as a prisoner of war, Forten would serve the British captain at his country estate in England.
Forten didn’t hesitate. He turned it down.
He told the British captain, “I have been taken prisoner for the liberties of my country and never will prove a traitor to her interest.” Instead of a comfortable life tutoring the captain’s sons, Forten re-joined his crewmates in a prison ship, waiting for freedom for himself and his country.
James Forten didn’t want comfort. He wanted to serve his nation.
Two centuries later, in 1961, Jim Zwerg joined his Fisk University classmate, John Lewis, to participate in bus trips through the Deep South to fight segregation.
These ‘freedom riders’ challenged the real Jim Crow, not what progressive activists today label as Jim Crow with shameful nonchalance. In a time of segregated drinking foundations, targeted fire hoses, and brutal killings, the real Jim Crow meant real risk.
Jim Zwerg accepted that risk gladly. He later said that “my faith was never so strong as during that time. I knew I was doing what I should be doing.”
When Zwerg’s Greyhound bus pulled into Montgomery, Alabama, the bus station appeared empty. Then the ambush came. From his window on the bus, Zwerg could see young white men outside holding baseball bats and chains.
The police had left. Their protection had abandoned the area.
But Zwerg stood up from his seat anyway, walked down the aisle, and got off the bus.
The crowd did what it came to do. It smashed Zwerg’s face with his suitcase, pinned his head down, and methodically knocked teeth out of his mouth. He only regained consciousness two days later. Newspapers published pictures of his bruised face and shocked the nation.
James Forten and Jim Zwerg shared courage, a sense of purpose, and a love for the promise of America.
But these attributes have seeded the American experience for centuries. What makes their stories so special, aside from their common name and age?
You might have guessed that James Forten and Jim Zwerg did not have race in common. One was white. One was black.
But it might surprise you to learn that James Forten, the Revolutionary War sailor, was black and Jim Zwerg, the civil rights activist, was white.
For each, their race made them singular targets in their time.
Every time James Forten sailed into a southern port, he risked seizure for chained slavery. Forten’s acceptance of that risk for the sake of the American cause as it existed then would befuddle the woke mob today, addicted as they are too crude and distorted history, as exemplified by the 1619 Project.
Jim Zwerg, on the other hand, knew the mob in Montgomery would treat him more harshly than his fellow passengers.
The stories of these two brave men do not conform to the identity politics narrative that has taken over our culture.
Remembering these tales—and others like them—can help bring our culture closer to Martin Luther King’s ideal, in which every individual is treated as a unique person with dignity and a soul that transcends their ethnic or racial identity.
If the antidote for tribalism is individualism, individuals like James Forten and Jim Zwerg show us the way.
News of the Times;
https://electroverse.net/arctic-summers-were-warmer-back-in-the-1950s-60s/
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2021/07/gary-g-kohls/the-covered-up-crimes-of-vaccine-maker-pfizer-just-another-too-big-to-fail-american-corporation/
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2021/07/15/malthusian-myth-busting-easter-island-edition/
https://rumble.com/vjx7fs-tucker-why-is-lunatic-mark-milley-still-in-charge-of-the-military.html
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2021/07/michigan-gov-whitmer-stripped-emergency-powers/
https://nypost.com/2021/07/16/isaiah-stokes-who-appeared-on-law-and-order-indicted-for-brazen-nyc-murder/
https://www.wnd.com/2021/07/crime-statistics-skewed-transgenders/
https://www.pollution.news/2021-05-20-wisconsin-liquify-dead-flush-sewers-food-farms.html
https://www.the-sun.com/news/3304811/google-admits-recording-converstations-assistant/
https://www.bizpacreview.com/2021/07/20/accused-murderer-set-free-after-st-louis-county-prosecutors-fail-to-show-up-but-found-time-for-mccloskeys-1106327/
http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/now-they-are-saying-that-the-republican-party-is-the-1-national-security-threat-to-the-united-states-of-america/
https://vdare.com/articles/national-data-yes-the-border-influx-is-disastrous-but-june-jobs-data-shows-american-worker-displacement-immigrant-workforce-population-on-rise-too
https://www.wnd.com/2021/07/biden-blurts-anti-gun-agenda/
https://resistthemainstream.org/donald-trump-responds-to-cleveland-changing-mlb-team-name/
https://www.oann.com/dhs-cancels-2-texas-border-wall-projects/
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/why-did-china-buy-airstrip-texas
Giant?
I went to the paint store to get thinner.
It didn't work.
*.*
While using the step ladder, someone asked me "Why do you need that ladder?"
I replied, "I never knew my real ladder. This is just my step ladder, but he raised me nevertheless."
*.*
Local homeless man Bobby Duphrane has not picked up his white privilege check in months. As a result, he has been forced to beg for money to buy food to eat and is forced to sleep vertically on park benches.
“I see Bobby in the park every day. He clearly hasn’t showered in the last couple months and he reeks of alcohol,” Beverly Black, who works nearby, said. “I can’t believe he hasn’t just picked up his white privilege check!”
Duphrane’s story isn’t rare. Millions of destitute and homeless people across the country haven’t picked up or cashed their white privilege check all year leading to a ballooning repository of white privilege capital in Washington DC.
As of the time of this writing, the white privilege repository has climbed to $4.3 billion in unclaimed funds.
“People, just go to the local white privilege office and pick up your check. It’s not hard! Your ancestors paid the price to give you a life of luxury. You should take advantage of it!” Black said.
*.*
Farmers Brown & Jones had adjoining farms for years and didn't get along at all.
One night after supper, Farmer Brown knocked on Farmer Jones's door. When Farmer Jones answered the door, Farmer Brown said, "I know we don't talk often, but I wanted you to know that our mule just died today."
Farmer Jones replied, "I'm certainly sorry to hear that, but I am wondering why you came over here to tell me?"
"Because," Farmer Brown said, "you're always supposed to notify the next of kin."
*.*
After finishing our Chinese food, my husband and I cracked open our fortune cookies.
Mine read, “Be quiet for a little while.”
His read, “Talk while you have a chance.”
Quote of the Times;
Few men have virtue to withstand the highest bidder. - Washington
Link of the Times;
https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/2021/07/anti-solomonic-decision-uk-shows-cruelty-daniel-greenfield/
Issue of the Times;
China: Fragile Giant by James Rickards
I’ve made many visits to China over the past thirty years and have been careful to move beyond Beijing (the political capital) and Shanghai (the financial capital) on these trips.
My visits have included Chongqing, Wuhan (the origin of the coronavirus outbreak), Xian, Nanjing, new construction sites to visit “ghost cities,” and trips to the agrarian countryside.
My trips included meetings with government and Communist Party officials and numerous conversations with everyday Chinese people.
These trips have been supplemented by reading an extensive number of books on the history, culture and politics of China from 3,000 BC to the present. This background gives me a much broader perspective on current developments in China.
In short, my experience with China goes well beyond media outlets and talking heads.
An objective analysis of China must begin with its enormous strengths. China has the third-largest territory in the world, with the world’s largest population (although soon to be overtaken by India).
China also has the fifth-largest nuclear arsenal in the world, with over 280 nuclear warheads. This is about the same as the U.K. and France but well behind Russia (6,490) and the U.S. (6,450). China is the largest gold producer in the world at about 500 metric tonnes per year.
Its economy is the second-largest economy in the world — behind only the U.S. China’s foreign exchange reserves (including gold) are the largest in the world.
By these diverse measures of population, territory, military strength and economic output, China is clearly a global super-power and the dominant presence in East Asia. Yet, these blockbuster statistics hide as much as they reveal.
China’s per capita income is under $12,000 per person compared to per capita income of about $64,000 in the United States. Put differently, the U.S. is only 38% richer than China on a gross basis, but it is 500% richer than China on a per capita basis (of course the massive economic fallout from the coronavirus will have an impact).
China’s military is growing stronger and more sophisticated, but it still falls short against the U.S. military when it comes to aircraft carriers, nuclear warheads, submarines, fighter aircraft and strategic bombers.
Most importantly, at under $12,000 per capita GDP, China is stuck squarely in the “middle income trap” as defined by development economists.
The path from low income (about $5,000 per capita) to middle-income (about $10,000 per capita) is fairly straightforward and mostly involves reduced corruption, direct foreign investment and migration from the countryside to cities to pursue assembly-style jobs.
The path from middle-income to high-income (about $20,000 per capita) is much more difficult and involves creation and deployment of high-technology and manufacture of high-value-added goods.
Among developing economies (excluding oil producers), only Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore and South Korea have successfully made this transition since World War II. All other developing economies in Latin America, Africa, South Asia and the Middle East including giants such as Brazil and Turkey remain stuck in the middle-income ranks.
China remains reliant on assembly-style jobs and has shown no promise of breaking into the high-income ranks.
To escape the middle income trap requires more than cheap labor and infrastructure investment. It requires applied technology to produce high-value added products. This explains why China has been so focused on stealing U.S. intellectual property.
China has not shown much capacity for developing high technology on its own, but it has been quite effective at stealing such technology from trading partners and applying it through its own system of state-owned enterprises and “national champions” such as Huawei in the telecommunications sector.
But the U.S. and other countries are cracking down on China’s technology theft and China cannot generate the needed technology through its own R&D.
In short, and despite enormous annual growth in the past twenty years, China remains fundamentally a poor country with limited ability to improve the well-being of its citizens much beyond what has already been achieved. And that has serious implications for China’s leadership…
China’s economy is not just about providing jobs, goods and services. It is about regime survival for a Chinese Communist Party that faces an existential crisis if it fails to deliver.
It’s an illegitimate regime that will remain in power only so long as it provides jobs and a rising living standard for the Chinese people. The overriding imperative of the Chinese leadership is to avoid societal unrest.
News of the Times;
https://thepostmillennial.com/watch-man-buttless-rainbow-monkey-costume-literacy
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2021/07/denver-blm-leader-accused-sexually-abusing-62-children-resumes-duties-school-board/
https://www.menofthewest.net/a-short-sermon-on-hate/
https://hotair.com/john-s-2/2021/07/14/41-of-baltimore-high-schoolers-have-a-gpa-below-1-0-n402274
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-9779781/Climate-change-Just-25-mega-cities-emit-52-cent-worlds-urban-greenhouse-gases.html
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/stunning-numbers-record-number-americans-died-drug-overdoses-during-2020
https://archive.ph/DNMpw
https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/11/hollywood-sex-grooming-gang-les-moonves-harvey-weinstein/
https://www.dailyveracity.com/2021/07/15/south-africa-supply-chain-on-brink-of-collapse-as-country-descends-into-total-race-war/
https://pjmedia.com/eddriscoll/2011/02/15/the-samizdat-remains-the-same-n253477
https://www.sfgate.com/news/article/New-York-takes-conservative-approach-counting-16311428.php
https://www.menofthewest.net/every-villain-a-sob-story/
https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/paging-greta-china-release-10-million-tonnes-highly-polluting-coal-reserves
https://notthebee.com/article/basketball-player-uses-nationally-televised-cbs-interview-to-show-of-his-free-the-uyghurs-t-shirt-and-i-bet-you-can-guess-how-much-coverage-this-got-from-the-mainstream-media
https://mishtalk.com/economics/sick-of-westie-whites-blatant-anti-white-anti-asian-racism-in-schools
It didn't work.
*.*
While using the step ladder, someone asked me "Why do you need that ladder?"
I replied, "I never knew my real ladder. This is just my step ladder, but he raised me nevertheless."
*.*
Local homeless man Bobby Duphrane has not picked up his white privilege check in months. As a result, he has been forced to beg for money to buy food to eat and is forced to sleep vertically on park benches.
“I see Bobby in the park every day. He clearly hasn’t showered in the last couple months and he reeks of alcohol,” Beverly Black, who works nearby, said. “I can’t believe he hasn’t just picked up his white privilege check!”
Duphrane’s story isn’t rare. Millions of destitute and homeless people across the country haven’t picked up or cashed their white privilege check all year leading to a ballooning repository of white privilege capital in Washington DC.
As of the time of this writing, the white privilege repository has climbed to $4.3 billion in unclaimed funds.
“People, just go to the local white privilege office and pick up your check. It’s not hard! Your ancestors paid the price to give you a life of luxury. You should take advantage of it!” Black said.
*.*
Farmers Brown & Jones had adjoining farms for years and didn't get along at all.
One night after supper, Farmer Brown knocked on Farmer Jones's door. When Farmer Jones answered the door, Farmer Brown said, "I know we don't talk often, but I wanted you to know that our mule just died today."
Farmer Jones replied, "I'm certainly sorry to hear that, but I am wondering why you came over here to tell me?"
"Because," Farmer Brown said, "you're always supposed to notify the next of kin."
*.*
After finishing our Chinese food, my husband and I cracked open our fortune cookies.
Mine read, “Be quiet for a little while.”
His read, “Talk while you have a chance.”
Quote of the Times;
Few men have virtue to withstand the highest bidder. - Washington
Link of the Times;
https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/2021/07/anti-solomonic-decision-uk-shows-cruelty-daniel-greenfield/
Issue of the Times;
China: Fragile Giant by James Rickards
I’ve made many visits to China over the past thirty years and have been careful to move beyond Beijing (the political capital) and Shanghai (the financial capital) on these trips.
My visits have included Chongqing, Wuhan (the origin of the coronavirus outbreak), Xian, Nanjing, new construction sites to visit “ghost cities,” and trips to the agrarian countryside.
My trips included meetings with government and Communist Party officials and numerous conversations with everyday Chinese people.
These trips have been supplemented by reading an extensive number of books on the history, culture and politics of China from 3,000 BC to the present. This background gives me a much broader perspective on current developments in China.
In short, my experience with China goes well beyond media outlets and talking heads.
An objective analysis of China must begin with its enormous strengths. China has the third-largest territory in the world, with the world’s largest population (although soon to be overtaken by India).
China also has the fifth-largest nuclear arsenal in the world, with over 280 nuclear warheads. This is about the same as the U.K. and France but well behind Russia (6,490) and the U.S. (6,450). China is the largest gold producer in the world at about 500 metric tonnes per year.
Its economy is the second-largest economy in the world — behind only the U.S. China’s foreign exchange reserves (including gold) are the largest in the world.
By these diverse measures of population, territory, military strength and economic output, China is clearly a global super-power and the dominant presence in East Asia. Yet, these blockbuster statistics hide as much as they reveal.
China’s per capita income is under $12,000 per person compared to per capita income of about $64,000 in the United States. Put differently, the U.S. is only 38% richer than China on a gross basis, but it is 500% richer than China on a per capita basis (of course the massive economic fallout from the coronavirus will have an impact).
China’s military is growing stronger and more sophisticated, but it still falls short against the U.S. military when it comes to aircraft carriers, nuclear warheads, submarines, fighter aircraft and strategic bombers.
Most importantly, at under $12,000 per capita GDP, China is stuck squarely in the “middle income trap” as defined by development economists.
The path from low income (about $5,000 per capita) to middle-income (about $10,000 per capita) is fairly straightforward and mostly involves reduced corruption, direct foreign investment and migration from the countryside to cities to pursue assembly-style jobs.
The path from middle-income to high-income (about $20,000 per capita) is much more difficult and involves creation and deployment of high-technology and manufacture of high-value-added goods.
Among developing economies (excluding oil producers), only Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore and South Korea have successfully made this transition since World War II. All other developing economies in Latin America, Africa, South Asia and the Middle East including giants such as Brazil and Turkey remain stuck in the middle-income ranks.
China remains reliant on assembly-style jobs and has shown no promise of breaking into the high-income ranks.
To escape the middle income trap requires more than cheap labor and infrastructure investment. It requires applied technology to produce high-value added products. This explains why China has been so focused on stealing U.S. intellectual property.
China has not shown much capacity for developing high technology on its own, but it has been quite effective at stealing such technology from trading partners and applying it through its own system of state-owned enterprises and “national champions” such as Huawei in the telecommunications sector.
But the U.S. and other countries are cracking down on China’s technology theft and China cannot generate the needed technology through its own R&D.
In short, and despite enormous annual growth in the past twenty years, China remains fundamentally a poor country with limited ability to improve the well-being of its citizens much beyond what has already been achieved. And that has serious implications for China’s leadership…
China’s economy is not just about providing jobs, goods and services. It is about regime survival for a Chinese Communist Party that faces an existential crisis if it fails to deliver.
It’s an illegitimate regime that will remain in power only so long as it provides jobs and a rising living standard for the Chinese people. The overriding imperative of the Chinese leadership is to avoid societal unrest.
News of the Times;
https://thepostmillennial.com/watch-man-buttless-rainbow-monkey-costume-literacy
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2021/07/denver-blm-leader-accused-sexually-abusing-62-children-resumes-duties-school-board/
https://www.menofthewest.net/a-short-sermon-on-hate/
https://hotair.com/john-s-2/2021/07/14/41-of-baltimore-high-schoolers-have-a-gpa-below-1-0-n402274
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-9779781/Climate-change-Just-25-mega-cities-emit-52-cent-worlds-urban-greenhouse-gases.html
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/stunning-numbers-record-number-americans-died-drug-overdoses-during-2020
https://archive.ph/DNMpw
https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/11/hollywood-sex-grooming-gang-les-moonves-harvey-weinstein/
https://www.dailyveracity.com/2021/07/15/south-africa-supply-chain-on-brink-of-collapse-as-country-descends-into-total-race-war/
https://pjmedia.com/eddriscoll/2011/02/15/the-samizdat-remains-the-same-n253477
https://www.sfgate.com/news/article/New-York-takes-conservative-approach-counting-16311428.php
https://www.menofthewest.net/every-villain-a-sob-story/
https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/paging-greta-china-release-10-million-tonnes-highly-polluting-coal-reserves
https://notthebee.com/article/basketball-player-uses-nationally-televised-cbs-interview-to-show-of-his-free-the-uyghurs-t-shirt-and-i-bet-you-can-guess-how-much-coverage-this-got-from-the-mainstream-media
https://mishtalk.com/economics/sick-of-westie-whites-blatant-anti-white-anti-asian-racism-in-schools
Ugly?
I forgot my internet banking password and had to use my security question.
It was stupid to have 'what is your internet banking password?' as the question.
*.*
I was at the hardware store to get a duplicate of my car key made when the store clerk said, “You’re a model?”
It was exactly what a woman in her mid-30’s wanted to hear. “Well, no, I’m not,” I said, blushing. “But, I’m flattered that...“
He stopped me right there, pointed to my car keys and slowly repeated, “Year…and…model?”
*.*
It's been so hot in Seattle, the Space Needle is now officially sterilized.
So hot, I went fishing and the trout I caught was poached.
Scientists are saying that this Northwest heat wave is a once-in-a-thousand-year event. They better be right. I know where those scientists live.
So, after a once in a hundred years pandemic, followed by a once in a thousand year heat wave, heading into 2022's once every 10,000 years event I might have to buy comet insurance.
*.*
The soldiers are tired and lonely after spending weeks in enemy territory. To entertain them the Major called for this HOT number from the nearby town.
She came, danced and when the first dance was done, the soldiers went mad. They clapped for 5 minutes.
For her second number she stripped and danced in sheer bra and G strings. This time the applause went for 10 minutes.
The next number she danced topless, and this time the applause went on and on. The Major had to come on stage and ask them to quiet down for the grand finale.
For her last number, she was to strip completely and dance naked. The Major expected the soldiers to make enough noise to bring the roof down. But ten minutes later, there is no clapping and the dancer comes backstage.
The Major asks her, "What happened? How come there was no clapping this time?"
She replied, "Major, how do you expect those poor boys to clap with one hand?"
*.*
My wife always takes a run right after we have sex.
Some people.
You give them an inch and they take a mile.
Quote of the Times;
I never considered a difference of opinion in politics, in religion, in philosophy, as cause for withdrawing from a friend. - Jefferson
Link of the Times;
https://www.rt.com/news/528745-austria-feminists-protest-media-rape/
Issue of the Times;
How Trump voters formed an ugly, and accurate, view of America’s ruling regime by Martyr Made
I’ve had discussions at this point with a wide range of Trump supporters who believe the 2020 election was fraudulent. I think I can extract a general theory about their perspective. It is also the perspective of most of the people who were at the Capitol on January 6, and probably even that of Trump himself.
Most of these people believe some or all of the various theories involving midnight ballots, voting machines, etc. But what you find when you talk to them is that, while they’ll defend those positions with information they got from Hannity or Breitbart or various other sources, they’re not particularly attached to them. If the theories were disproven, it wouldn’t disprove the fraud for them. That’s because there are far more important facts—actual, confirmed facts—that shape their perspective. Here they are:
A Glimpse Behind the Curtain
To begin with, the FBI and other intelligence agencies spied on the 2016 Trump campaign using evidence manufactured by the Clinton campaign. We now know that all involved knew this evidence was fake from Day One (see just for one example: this memo from July of 2016 by former CIA director John Brennan).
Many of the people who believe in fraud are Tea Party people. The types who give their kids a pocket Constitution for their birthday and have Founding Fathers memes in their bios. To them, the intel community spying on a presidential campaign using fake evidence (including falsified documents) is a big deal. Everyone involved lied about their involvement as long as they could. This was true with everyone, from Brennan and Representative Adam Schiff—who were on TV saying they’d seen clear evidence of collusion with Russia, while admitting under oath behind closed doors that they hadn’t—all the way down the line. In the end we learned that it was all fake. But we only learned key information—including that the DNC paid for the manufactured evidence—because of a court order. James Comey denied on TV knowing the DNC paid for it, when we have emails from a year earlier proving that he knew.
At first, many Trump supporters were worried there must be some collusion, because every media and intelligence agency wouldn’t make it up out of nothing. When it was clear that they had made it up, people expected a reckoning. When that didn’t happen, they shed many illusions about their government.
We also know, as fact:
That the fraudulent Steele Dossier was the sole evidence used to justify spying on the Trump campaign,
That the FBI knew the Steele dossier was a DNC op,
That Steele’s source told the FBI the info was unserious, and
That they did not inform the court of any of this and kept spying.
Trump supporters know this collusion case front and back. They went from worrying the collusion must be real, to suspecting it might be fake, to realizing it was a scam. Then they watched as every institution—agencies, the press, Congress, academia—gaslit them for another year.
Worse, collusion was used to scare people away from working in the administration. They knew their entire lives would be investigated. Many quit because they were being bankrupted by legal fees. The Department of Justice, press, & government destroyed lives and actively subverted an elected administration throughout the whole affair.
This is where people whose political identity was largely defined by a naïve belief in what they learned in Civics class began to see the outline of a Regime that crossed all institutional boundaries. Because it had stepped out of the shadows to unite against an interloper.
The Lies
GOP propaganda still has many of these Trump supporters thinking in terms of partisan binaries. But a whole lot of them see that the Regime is not partisan. They all know that the same institutions would have taken opposite sides if it was a Tulsi Gabbard vs. Jeb Bush election. It’s hard to describe to people on the Left, who are used to thinking of the American government as a conspiracy (see for example, Watergate, COINTELPRO, the Weapons of Mass Destruction, etc.) how shocking and disillusioning this was for people who encourage their sons to enlist in the Army, and who are appalled when others don’t stand for the Anthem.
They could have managed that shock if it only involved the government. But the behavior of the corporate press is really what radicalized them. They hate journalists more than they hate any politician or government official, because they feel most betrayed by them. The idea that the press is driven by ratings and sensationalism became untenable. If that were true, they’d be all over the Jeffrey Epstein story. The corporate press is the propaganda arm of the Regime they now see in outline. Nothing anyone says will ever make them unsee that, period.
This is profoundly disorienting. Many of them don’t know for certain whether ballots were faked in November 2020, but they know for absolute certain that the press, the FBI, etc., would lie to them if there was. They have every reason to believe that, and it’s probably true. They watched the press behave like animals for four years. Tens of millions of people will always see Brett Kavanaugh as a gang rapist, based on nothing, because of CNN. And CNN seems proud of that. They led a lynch mob against a high school kid. They cheered on a summer of riots.
Trump supporters always claimed the media had liberal bias. Fine, whatever: they still thought the press would admit truth if they were cornered. They don’t think that anymore. It’s a different thing to watch them invent stories whole cloth in order to destroy regular lives and spark mass violence. Time magazine told us that during the 2020 riots, there were weekly conference calls involving—among others—leaders of the protests, the local officials who refused to stop them, and media people who framed them for political effect. In Ukraine we call that a color revolution.
Then, throughout the summer, establishment governors took advantage of COVID to change voting procedures. It wasn’t just the mail-ins: they also lowered signature matching standards, got rid of voter ID and notarization requirements, and much more. Forget the ballot conspiracies. It’s a fact that governors used COVID to unconstitutionally alter election procedures (the Constitution states that only legislatures can do so) and help Biden to make up for a massive enthusiasm gap by gaming the mail-in ballot system.
At this point Trump people had lived through not only the collusion scam but also a fake impeachment. We now know that Trump’s request for Ukraine to cooperate with the Department of Justice regarding Biden’s financial activities in Ukraine was in support of an active investigation being pursued by the FBI and Ukraine Attorney General at the time, and so a completely legitimate request. So Trump people expected shenanigans by now.
Then you get the Hunter Biden laptop scandal. Big Tech ran a full-on censorship campaign against a major newspaper to protect a political candidate. Period. Everyone knows it, all of the Tech companies now admit it was a “mistake“—but, ya know, the election’s over, so who cares? It hardly needs saying that if the New York Times had Don, Jr.’s laptop, full of pics of him smoking crack and engaging in group sex, lots of lurid family drama, emails describing direct corruption and backed up by the CEO of the company they were using, the New York Times would not have been banned.
So now think back: Stories about Trump being pissed on by Russian prostitutes and blackmailed by Putin were promoted as fact, and the only evidence was a document paid for by his opposition and disavowed by its source. And then the New York Post was banned for reporting on true information.
The reaction of Trump people to all this was not, “no fair!” That’s how they felt about Romney’s “binders of women” in 2012. This is different. Now they see, correctly, that every institution is captured by ppl who will use any means to exclude them from the political process. And yet they showed up in record numbers to vote. He got 13 million more votes than in 2016—10 million more than Hillary Clinton. As election night dragged on, Trump supporters allowed themselves some hope.
But when the four critical swing states (and only those states) went dark at midnight, they knew.
The Aftermath
Over the ensuing weeks, they got shuffled around by grifters and media scam artists selling them conspiracy theories. They latched onto one, then another increasingly absurd theory as they tried to put a concrete name on something very real. Media and Tech did everything to make things worse. Everything about the election was strange—the changes to procedure, unprecedented mail-in voting, the delays, etc.—but rather than admit that and make everything transparent, they banned discussion of it (even in DMs!).
Everyone knows that, just as Don, Jr.’s laptop would’ve been the story of the century, if everything about the election dispute was the same, except the parties were reversed, suspicions about the outcome would’ve been Taken Very Seriously. See 2016 for proof.
Even the courts’ refusal to hear the fraud case gets nowhere with those who have seen these truths, because the opposition embraced mass political violence. Trump supporters say, with good reason: What judge will stick his neck out for Trump knowing he’ll be destroyed in the media as a violent mob burns down his house?
It’s a fact, according to Time, that mass riots were planned in cities across the country if Trump won. Sure, they were “protests,” but they were planned by the same people as during the summer, and everyone knows what it would have meant. Judges have families, too.
Trump voters knew the changes to election law were unconstitutional, it’s right there in plain English. But they knew the cases wouldn’t see court until after the election. And what judge will toss millions of ballots because a governor broke the rules? The threat of mass riots wasn’t implied, it was direct.
The entrenched bureaucracy and security state subverted Trump from Day One. The press was part of the operation. Election rules were changed. Big Tech censored opposition. Political violence was legitimized and encouraged. And Trump was banned from social media. People are putting these things together into a very ugly—and quite accurate—account of how their country works.
Trump voters were led down some rabbit holes. But they are absolutely right that their government is monopolized by a Regime that believes they are beneath representation, and will observe no limits to keep them from getting it. Trump fans should be happy he lost. It might’ve kept him alive.
News of the Times;
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2021/07/new-video-black-clad-hoodlums-first-stairs-first-smash-windows-us-capitol-fbi-refuses-look-weird-huh/
https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/matt-margolis/2021/07/08/flashback-when-the-media-blew-off-joe-bidens-cancel-worthy-racist-comments-about-black-students-n1460470
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/ignore-no-soliciting-signs-use-your-script-vaccine-door-knocking-documents-revealed
https://www.unz.com/article/34-black-on-white-homicides-june-2021-another-month-in-the-death-of-white-america-which-biden-is-bringing-to-a-suburb-near-you/
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-china-bgi-dna-idUSKCN2ED1A6
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/07/covid_began_far_earlier_than_we_were_told.html
https://thenewamerican.com/revealed-the-average-covid-death-age-is-greater-than-average-lifespan/
https://www.louderwithcrowder.com/white-privilege-new-hampshire-letter
https://nypost.com/2021/07/08/a-world-of-crack-urine-and-catatonia-welcome-to-washington-square-park/
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/saskatoon/historic-catholic-church-burns-near-redberry-lake-1.6096132
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2021/07/creepy-andrew-weissmann-slips-inadvertently-shares-feds-spying-whoever-want-sharing-results-within-doj/
https://donsurber.blogspot.com/2021/07/black-parents-abandon-public-schools.html
It was stupid to have 'what is your internet banking password?' as the question.
*.*
I was at the hardware store to get a duplicate of my car key made when the store clerk said, “You’re a model?”
It was exactly what a woman in her mid-30’s wanted to hear. “Well, no, I’m not,” I said, blushing. “But, I’m flattered that...“
He stopped me right there, pointed to my car keys and slowly repeated, “Year…and…model?”
*.*
It's been so hot in Seattle, the Space Needle is now officially sterilized.
So hot, I went fishing and the trout I caught was poached.
Scientists are saying that this Northwest heat wave is a once-in-a-thousand-year event. They better be right. I know where those scientists live.
So, after a once in a hundred years pandemic, followed by a once in a thousand year heat wave, heading into 2022's once every 10,000 years event I might have to buy comet insurance.
*.*
The soldiers are tired and lonely after spending weeks in enemy territory. To entertain them the Major called for this HOT number from the nearby town.
She came, danced and when the first dance was done, the soldiers went mad. They clapped for 5 minutes.
For her second number she stripped and danced in sheer bra and G strings. This time the applause went for 10 minutes.
The next number she danced topless, and this time the applause went on and on. The Major had to come on stage and ask them to quiet down for the grand finale.
For her last number, she was to strip completely and dance naked. The Major expected the soldiers to make enough noise to bring the roof down. But ten minutes later, there is no clapping and the dancer comes backstage.
The Major asks her, "What happened? How come there was no clapping this time?"
She replied, "Major, how do you expect those poor boys to clap with one hand?"
*.*
My wife always takes a run right after we have sex.
Some people.
You give them an inch and they take a mile.
Quote of the Times;
I never considered a difference of opinion in politics, in religion, in philosophy, as cause for withdrawing from a friend. - Jefferson
Link of the Times;
https://www.rt.com/news/528745-austria-feminists-protest-media-rape/
Issue of the Times;
How Trump voters formed an ugly, and accurate, view of America’s ruling regime by Martyr Made
I’ve had discussions at this point with a wide range of Trump supporters who believe the 2020 election was fraudulent. I think I can extract a general theory about their perspective. It is also the perspective of most of the people who were at the Capitol on January 6, and probably even that of Trump himself.
Most of these people believe some or all of the various theories involving midnight ballots, voting machines, etc. But what you find when you talk to them is that, while they’ll defend those positions with information they got from Hannity or Breitbart or various other sources, they’re not particularly attached to them. If the theories were disproven, it wouldn’t disprove the fraud for them. That’s because there are far more important facts—actual, confirmed facts—that shape their perspective. Here they are:
A Glimpse Behind the Curtain
To begin with, the FBI and other intelligence agencies spied on the 2016 Trump campaign using evidence manufactured by the Clinton campaign. We now know that all involved knew this evidence was fake from Day One (see just for one example: this memo from July of 2016 by former CIA director John Brennan).
Many of the people who believe in fraud are Tea Party people. The types who give their kids a pocket Constitution for their birthday and have Founding Fathers memes in their bios. To them, the intel community spying on a presidential campaign using fake evidence (including falsified documents) is a big deal. Everyone involved lied about their involvement as long as they could. This was true with everyone, from Brennan and Representative Adam Schiff—who were on TV saying they’d seen clear evidence of collusion with Russia, while admitting under oath behind closed doors that they hadn’t—all the way down the line. In the end we learned that it was all fake. But we only learned key information—including that the DNC paid for the manufactured evidence—because of a court order. James Comey denied on TV knowing the DNC paid for it, when we have emails from a year earlier proving that he knew.
At first, many Trump supporters were worried there must be some collusion, because every media and intelligence agency wouldn’t make it up out of nothing. When it was clear that they had made it up, people expected a reckoning. When that didn’t happen, they shed many illusions about their government.
We also know, as fact:
That the fraudulent Steele Dossier was the sole evidence used to justify spying on the Trump campaign,
That the FBI knew the Steele dossier was a DNC op,
That Steele’s source told the FBI the info was unserious, and
That they did not inform the court of any of this and kept spying.
Trump supporters know this collusion case front and back. They went from worrying the collusion must be real, to suspecting it might be fake, to realizing it was a scam. Then they watched as every institution—agencies, the press, Congress, academia—gaslit them for another year.
Worse, collusion was used to scare people away from working in the administration. They knew their entire lives would be investigated. Many quit because they were being bankrupted by legal fees. The Department of Justice, press, & government destroyed lives and actively subverted an elected administration throughout the whole affair.
This is where people whose political identity was largely defined by a naïve belief in what they learned in Civics class began to see the outline of a Regime that crossed all institutional boundaries. Because it had stepped out of the shadows to unite against an interloper.
The Lies
GOP propaganda still has many of these Trump supporters thinking in terms of partisan binaries. But a whole lot of them see that the Regime is not partisan. They all know that the same institutions would have taken opposite sides if it was a Tulsi Gabbard vs. Jeb Bush election. It’s hard to describe to people on the Left, who are used to thinking of the American government as a conspiracy (see for example, Watergate, COINTELPRO, the Weapons of Mass Destruction, etc.) how shocking and disillusioning this was for people who encourage their sons to enlist in the Army, and who are appalled when others don’t stand for the Anthem.
They could have managed that shock if it only involved the government. But the behavior of the corporate press is really what radicalized them. They hate journalists more than they hate any politician or government official, because they feel most betrayed by them. The idea that the press is driven by ratings and sensationalism became untenable. If that were true, they’d be all over the Jeffrey Epstein story. The corporate press is the propaganda arm of the Regime they now see in outline. Nothing anyone says will ever make them unsee that, period.
This is profoundly disorienting. Many of them don’t know for certain whether ballots were faked in November 2020, but they know for absolute certain that the press, the FBI, etc., would lie to them if there was. They have every reason to believe that, and it’s probably true. They watched the press behave like animals for four years. Tens of millions of people will always see Brett Kavanaugh as a gang rapist, based on nothing, because of CNN. And CNN seems proud of that. They led a lynch mob against a high school kid. They cheered on a summer of riots.
Trump supporters always claimed the media had liberal bias. Fine, whatever: they still thought the press would admit truth if they were cornered. They don’t think that anymore. It’s a different thing to watch them invent stories whole cloth in order to destroy regular lives and spark mass violence. Time magazine told us that during the 2020 riots, there were weekly conference calls involving—among others—leaders of the protests, the local officials who refused to stop them, and media people who framed them for political effect. In Ukraine we call that a color revolution.
Then, throughout the summer, establishment governors took advantage of COVID to change voting procedures. It wasn’t just the mail-ins: they also lowered signature matching standards, got rid of voter ID and notarization requirements, and much more. Forget the ballot conspiracies. It’s a fact that governors used COVID to unconstitutionally alter election procedures (the Constitution states that only legislatures can do so) and help Biden to make up for a massive enthusiasm gap by gaming the mail-in ballot system.
At this point Trump people had lived through not only the collusion scam but also a fake impeachment. We now know that Trump’s request for Ukraine to cooperate with the Department of Justice regarding Biden’s financial activities in Ukraine was in support of an active investigation being pursued by the FBI and Ukraine Attorney General at the time, and so a completely legitimate request. So Trump people expected shenanigans by now.
Then you get the Hunter Biden laptop scandal. Big Tech ran a full-on censorship campaign against a major newspaper to protect a political candidate. Period. Everyone knows it, all of the Tech companies now admit it was a “mistake“—but, ya know, the election’s over, so who cares? It hardly needs saying that if the New York Times had Don, Jr.’s laptop, full of pics of him smoking crack and engaging in group sex, lots of lurid family drama, emails describing direct corruption and backed up by the CEO of the company they were using, the New York Times would not have been banned.
So now think back: Stories about Trump being pissed on by Russian prostitutes and blackmailed by Putin were promoted as fact, and the only evidence was a document paid for by his opposition and disavowed by its source. And then the New York Post was banned for reporting on true information.
The reaction of Trump people to all this was not, “no fair!” That’s how they felt about Romney’s “binders of women” in 2012. This is different. Now they see, correctly, that every institution is captured by ppl who will use any means to exclude them from the political process. And yet they showed up in record numbers to vote. He got 13 million more votes than in 2016—10 million more than Hillary Clinton. As election night dragged on, Trump supporters allowed themselves some hope.
But when the four critical swing states (and only those states) went dark at midnight, they knew.
The Aftermath
Over the ensuing weeks, they got shuffled around by grifters and media scam artists selling them conspiracy theories. They latched onto one, then another increasingly absurd theory as they tried to put a concrete name on something very real. Media and Tech did everything to make things worse. Everything about the election was strange—the changes to procedure, unprecedented mail-in voting, the delays, etc.—but rather than admit that and make everything transparent, they banned discussion of it (even in DMs!).
Everyone knows that, just as Don, Jr.’s laptop would’ve been the story of the century, if everything about the election dispute was the same, except the parties were reversed, suspicions about the outcome would’ve been Taken Very Seriously. See 2016 for proof.
Even the courts’ refusal to hear the fraud case gets nowhere with those who have seen these truths, because the opposition embraced mass political violence. Trump supporters say, with good reason: What judge will stick his neck out for Trump knowing he’ll be destroyed in the media as a violent mob burns down his house?
It’s a fact, according to Time, that mass riots were planned in cities across the country if Trump won. Sure, they were “protests,” but they were planned by the same people as during the summer, and everyone knows what it would have meant. Judges have families, too.
Trump voters knew the changes to election law were unconstitutional, it’s right there in plain English. But they knew the cases wouldn’t see court until after the election. And what judge will toss millions of ballots because a governor broke the rules? The threat of mass riots wasn’t implied, it was direct.
The entrenched bureaucracy and security state subverted Trump from Day One. The press was part of the operation. Election rules were changed. Big Tech censored opposition. Political violence was legitimized and encouraged. And Trump was banned from social media. People are putting these things together into a very ugly—and quite accurate—account of how their country works.
Trump voters were led down some rabbit holes. But they are absolutely right that their government is monopolized by a Regime that believes they are beneath representation, and will observe no limits to keep them from getting it. Trump fans should be happy he lost. It might’ve kept him alive.
News of the Times;
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2021/07/new-video-black-clad-hoodlums-first-stairs-first-smash-windows-us-capitol-fbi-refuses-look-weird-huh/
https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/matt-margolis/2021/07/08/flashback-when-the-media-blew-off-joe-bidens-cancel-worthy-racist-comments-about-black-students-n1460470
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/ignore-no-soliciting-signs-use-your-script-vaccine-door-knocking-documents-revealed
https://www.unz.com/article/34-black-on-white-homicides-june-2021-another-month-in-the-death-of-white-america-which-biden-is-bringing-to-a-suburb-near-you/
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-china-bgi-dna-idUSKCN2ED1A6
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/07/covid_began_far_earlier_than_we_were_told.html
https://thenewamerican.com/revealed-the-average-covid-death-age-is-greater-than-average-lifespan/
https://www.louderwithcrowder.com/white-privilege-new-hampshire-letter
https://nypost.com/2021/07/08/a-world-of-crack-urine-and-catatonia-welcome-to-washington-square-park/
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/saskatoon/historic-catholic-church-burns-near-redberry-lake-1.6096132
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2021/07/creepy-andrew-weissmann-slips-inadvertently-shares-feds-spying-whoever-want-sharing-results-within-doj/
https://donsurber.blogspot.com/2021/07/black-parents-abandon-public-schools.html
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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.