I keep reading analyses of the economy, of the upcoming election, of the political landscape. For example, J. Robert Smith in an astute article in American Thinker, presents a fact-based, highly hopeful recitation of why it is that the GOP should win big in November.
It doesn’t matter.
Way too many otherwise thinking people will vote based on nonsense like the debt forgiveness plan, the “inflation reduction” bill, “Republicans are mean,” “Orange Man Bad”, and celebrity politics, as usual. Or, they’ll lazily vote the way they always have. That includes voters of all stripes.
No one thinks anymore. No one considers the knock on effects of their vote. People are driven by what “feels right”, by what is popular, by what will make them feel virtuous. The facts about what the Democrats and Biden have done to our country simply don’t compute for them. We can cite facts till we’re blue in the face. They will not be HEARD much less considered. The Media (see my August 25th post) will cover up the idiocy, will with world-class production values twist perception and reality to gaslight and brainwash lazy, non-thinking lemmings into thinking all is well, that failures are successes, that bad is good, that what we see with our eyes and hear with our ears are not real…that what they SHOW and SAY is what’s real.
The outcome of the November election will turn on the perceptions created by the Media in the last couple of weeks before November 8th. The only thing that will win back this country are charismatic, inspiring, so-good-they-can’t-be-ignored, made-for-Hollywood or by Hollywood personalities who will repeat slogans that will pull at heart strings, make sycophants feel valued, goad the angry, feed the egos of the dumbed-down sheeple, all the while giving sanctuary to every American whether Democrat, Republican or Independent, who cares about traditional values and returning our country to what it once was and could be again.
Is that personality De Santis? Jim Jordan? Devin Nunes? Tom Cotton? Ted Cruz? Mike Pompeo? A reformed and more statesmanlike Trump? While we have many qualified and charismatic women Republicans, I believe we need a kick-ass, take-names, testosterone-filled but articulate MAN for the next several iterations.
I truly hope that the inflation, shortages, international disrespect, internecine fighting, gaslighting, border invasion, education perversions, history destruction, get properly ascribed and attributed to Democrat policies and that Americans of all persuasions wake up by November 8th. I’m hopeful but not confident.
Chaos is, well, chaotic. Let’s face it, the Left has succeeded in screwing things up so royally that their strategy of creating chaos so as to make the most people dependent on them as possible is working. While some are just getting back to some sense of normalcy after the “pandemic”, getting used to responding to an alarm clock and heading back to on-site work, others are still cowering in kitchens and walking around in masks. There are still virtue signaling “Hate hath no home here” and “We Believe” signs on some lawns but they’re now cockeyed (Occasionally I see a Biden-Harris sticker although it’s usually on a Prius driven by a recycled hippie.) For the moment, gas is available though getting more and more expensive by the day. The truck convoy has been moved to the back pages of the media, and cat food is still hard to come by in the stores. Few at this moment are dutifully counting the number of illegal aliens slipping across our southern border. News channels compete for how “breaking”, how bloody their coverage is. Never has the slogan, “follow the money” been more apt. Even philanthropies are trying to exploit the chaos by flooding us with an unprecedented number of phone calls, text messages, snail and email. Selfishness and self-centeredness, “looking out for number one” have taken over.
It’s a mess.
With instant communication via the internet and social media, ANYONE can shape perception, thus reality. But how much more adept at “creating” reality are the pros in politics, government, Hollywood and the media than the average snowflake photoshopping an image to create a meme?
No matter how erudite the source, not one institution, organization or entity has a grasp of the totality of what’s going on. Politicians still pontificate, with even greater breathlessness and ever more shallow and poll-tested, made-for-the-cameras commentary. Never has the slogan “if it bleeds it leads” been more apt. And never before has information been so colored, absent or FAKE as it is right now.
What’s happening in Ukraine is overshadowing everything at the moment. It may not tomorrow, when Ebola is announced in Santa Barbara or murder hornets are found in Barrington, but this morning it’s Ukraine Ukraine Ukraine.
We all can absorb and assimilate only so much input, so fast. Trying to sort out what’s real, what’s relevant, what’s actionable and what’s just entertainment takes too much time, time we might spend more usefully doing things that will give us greater growth, prosperity, security and meaning.
In 1931 the president of Columbia University voiced the categorization that “The vast population of this earth, and indeed nations themselves, may readily be divided into three groups. There are the few who make things happen, the many more who watch things happen, and the overwhelming majority who have no notion of what happens.” Doomsday Preppers are stocking their shelves for the Apocalypse. Snowflakes are creating “apps” to hold and collectively wring their hands. Others bitch and moan and drink and return to their old routines.
So, what to make of all this?
Our recommendation is to stop, take a breath and re-dedicate yourself to the tried and true principle of critical thinking. Rather than define this principle myself, I’ll borrow from the description found here.
“Critical thinking is an approach to gathering data and making inferences about the world. It advocates an approach of data acquisition and rational assessment. When applying critical thinking, the goal is to collect as much relevant data as possible, assess that data for accuracy, and finally use the data to arrive at the most justified conclusions possible.
Critical thinking is an ongoing process, and even ideas that one feels are well supported need to be occasionally reevaluated to see if new information might change one’s mind. For example, critical thinking eventually showed that Copernicus was correct in claiming that the Sun was the center of the solar system, even though many people believed this to be false at the time. However, this didn’t make him completely correct either, since more critical thinking showed that he was wrong on other things (he also thought that the Sun was the center of the universe).
Critical thinking uses many aspects of formal logic and informal logic. It also focuses on discovering bias, propaganda, delusion and deception (more generally, logical fallacies) both in the sources of one’s information and one’s own views and approaches to reasoning problems out.
Leftists conflate critical thinking with critical race theory and postmodernism, the latter by using verbiage that implies one needs to look out for meanings behind words and determining for oneself what occurs, while at the same time advocating that all reality is fictional and that one can create their own ideas and reality.”
In short, be a skeptic of EVERYTHING. Remember Grumps’ First Law of Experts:
“On any subject one can find a minimum of twelve, world-renowned experts who can cite documented, empirical, irrefutable evidence to support arguments that are diametrically opposed to one another.” Translation: “Use critical thinking, form and trust your own judgment.”
I’m going to be uncharacteristically charitable and start with the premise that the Left (choak) and the Right truly believe in their positions, both ideological and political. Further, I’m going to argue that people’s behavior is a function of their perception, that perception is reality and perception derives from experience. In other words, I’m going to suggest that because of their life experience peoples’ reality is that everything that’s happening in our country is, in the case of the Left, just peachy keen and in the case of the Right, diabolical and destructive. And both honestly and sincerely believe their views of the world are correct.
Here’s the well-known exercise that demonstrates what I’m talking about with respect to perception. Look at the following picture:
You see a young woman.
Now look at this picture.
You see an old hag.
Now, the way this experiment actually works, an audience is divided in two and each half is shown ONLY one or the other picture. This is the EXPERIENCE.
The entire audience is then shown the following picture.
The argument that ensues is that one half of the audience can only see a young woman and the other an old hag in the composite picture.
I submit the Right has a life experience that is diametrically opposed to that of the Left. The Right has grown up and experienced the good in tradition, virtue, self-determination, self-reliance, hard work, meritocracy, limited government, strong national defense, preservation of life, and so on. The Left has grown up seeing big government, authority, the State, collectivism, globalism, atheism, self-indulgence, insolence, indolence, the means justify the ends, pleasure over pain, narcissism, and so on.
How do these experiences happen?
For some, it is actual, physical experience. The traditionalist/conservative who grew up in a happy home, was taught and earned the rewards of hard work, etc. inevitably sees the world one way. The Leftist who was raised in a broken home, or in a so-called ‘alternative lifestyle’, taught throughout his or her life that the world was an oppressive place filled with people out to get them, that they are entitled to the fruits of ALL labor, taught to follow their heart strings rather than their heads; they see the world the opposite way just as the two halves of the audience are certain they see either the young woman or the old hag in the third picture above.
Since the advent of the Internet, for many experience is vicarious. By that I mean that their lives have been impacted not by actual experience, but by what they’ve heard from people with loud and popular voices (actors, actresses, politicians, etc.), read in the paper, seen on television, heard on the radio, absorbed from clicking on social media. This “experience” is just as impactful as real experience. Witness, for example, the impact teachers preaching Critical Race Theory or pushing the LGBTQ deviance and similar ideologies is having on our children. The kids are repeating things at the dinner table that are revolting and abhorrent to traditional parents. But the kids’ “experience” is coloring what they see and believe, and day by day it is becoming reality to them. For example, see: https://www.newsmax.com/newsfront/warner-media-cartoons-woke/2021/09/15/id/1036621/. For the record, I’m revolted and repulsed by this blatant indoctrination.
It’s dismissed as silly that “it’s the Media’s fault.” BUT in large part, IT IS! The ‘Media’ creates what I’ll call “substitute” experience for many people, perhaps even most people, and thus determines both perception and reality. Because the Media preys on the baser instincts of human nature such as approbation and validation, sex, peer pressure, gluttony, pleasure, leisure, the herd/lemming instinct, etc. and generates revenues and profits from it, it creates a reality that feeds on itself and grows. By feeding on itself I’m suggesting that those who control and direct the media are themselves, addicted to and invested in the memes and reality they’ve created. And like any addiction, the lives they concoct get more and more perverse and masochistic until the people who believe them to be reality blow up, for example, by suicide or drug overdose. Think about all the violence, destruction, homicides, suicides, that so many have actually or vicariously experienced and how it escalates. Think about teen character destruction and the pandemic of them taking their own lives, of anger stemming from depression and lack of self-worth resulting in gang violence, drug abuse, sex trafficking. All of this can be attributed to the perceptions created by the Media and those who control it. And so long as revenues and profits persist, so too will the junk reality being put out by the Media.
The antidote?
Change perception and we change reality. We can’t just eliminate or eradicate evil from our lives. It has to be replaced by stuff that appeals to those baser instincts of human nature in a productive, positive way. An extremely tall order. Many conservative/traditionalist media outfits have tried and God bless ’em, continue to try. There seems to be some evidence that the tide is turning, but we have a long way to go!
The assault by the predominantly Leftist Media and the grip Leftist politicians now have on the minds and hearts of approximately half of our population is so strong that it can’t be broken by fiat or legislation. Overturning Roe v. Wade, for example, will not end abortion. It will just drive it underground. Counter the “my body my decision” position with enough “life begins at conception and is precious” using the same techniques and production values that the Left uses to push its agenda and we might have a chance of changing reality for so many who have been indoctrinated and brainwashed by the Left that abortion is just a procedure used in lieu of contraception or continence.
As I’ve noted many times before, we need new heroes. We need attractive, articulate, persuasive, actors, actresses, politicians, leaders who can inspire and persuade those who believe their Leftist reality is ok that there is a better, happier and more satisfying reality than what they’re experiencing.
Many on the Left are seeing where things are heading and at least starting to scratch their heads. Unfortunately, the tsunami of Leftist reality is so strong and so pervasive in our society today, the peer pressure so great, that it’s a tough war. Many of my generation are giving up and suggesting that “it’s their world now.” I, however, feel it a responsibility and duty to try to move the two generations behind me to a course that thousands of years of history and REAL experience has taught is better than the one society is currently following.
We’ll never reverse the decline to destruction of our civilization unless we can change hearts and minds. For whatever time I have left on this planet, I will keep trying.
TODAY IS
Thursday November 21, 2024
Quips & Quotes
January 2, 2024 "As we enter 2024, there is widespread public agreement about two things: (1) something big is about to happen, and (2) whatever that something is, it sure as hell won’t be pretty! While it may get pretty ugly pretty fast, though, there is an upside to what’s coming: as a country, we can finally pull this disgusting Band-Aid off, face reality for what it is, and stop pretending. However bad this year might prove to be, it might also be tremendously liberating.
Why? Because, one way or another, things will soon change. For too long, those who “run” America have had two things in common: (1) a hatred for individual freedoms, and (2) an even deeper hatred for the one country on the planet explicitly founded on their protection. As a national security surveillance State superseded the U.S. Constitution, leftists have controlled academia, journalism, the legal system, and entertainment. They have shoved anyone with a working brain out the door while assuring themselves that they deserve their privileged social positions and unearned accolades. They tell themselves that they are smart and enlightened, but anybody capable of self-examination knows this not to be true. Leftists are not happy people. They have not figured out any special meaning to life because, to them, life is meaningless. In other words, for too many years, a collection of the most depressed, least curious, morally relativistic, and intellectually homogenous people on the planet have been given pampered positions in exchange for acting as nihilistic and narcotic-dependent sea vessel captains willing to steer America into an iceberg of decline and failure." J.B. Shurk, American Thinker, January 2, 2024 "Do We Hit the Iceberg or Finally Change Course?"
November 3, 2023 "There’s a subtext to nearly all American political trends today. It’s hardly ever spoken about overtly and explicitly. But the topic is nonetheless always there. All insiders know about it. It’s also the central and critical debate concerning America’s future.
The question is as follows. Will the United States continue the present system whereby representative democracy persists as a mere veneer to keep the public distracted and defocused on the real rulers in the nation? Or will something dramatic be achieved whereby the swamp is truly drained, the administrative state gutted, the agencies disempowered, and we return to an actual constitutional system in which the people truly rule themselves through their elected representatives?
These are the two paths. It’s one or the other. They’re mutually incompatible." Jeffrey A. Tucker, November 3, 2023, Epoch Times, p A22, "Are You an Institutionalist or Anti-Institutionalist?"
October 30, 2023 "If you want an indicator of how lost Western civilization has become, go to your kids’ school and check their rules on fighting. Most likely, you’ll find out if two kids get into a fight, both get suspended, regardless of whether one was a punk bully who started it and the other was simply defending himself or some little kid. This is a moral disaster, of course – violence in the defense of what is right is a moral obligation and a symbol of a greater rot within society."
"The world's true nature is that good is forever pitted against evil."
"We must learn again to be ruthless in defeating our enemies. The big lie that Western civilization tells itself is that there are no real enemies, that there are no bad people – except the people of the West themselves, who bear some sort of original sin for not being corrupt and inept Third World barbarians."
"We have forgotten our strength and our courage. We have forgotten that we survive not through gentle hugging but through sword-swinging.The idea that Israel should somehow give these Hamas barbarians food, water, and electrical power even if it surrounds Gaza and prepares to attack is mind-boggling insanity. The moral illiteracy of expecting Israel to care more about the Palestinian people than other Palestinians do is simply bizarre."
"The hard truth is that the world contains bad people who must be crushed through ruthless violence, which shocks and horrifies modern sensibilities. But it is reality nonetheless. When people want to kill you, you are at a decision point. You can either let them kill you or stop them. But stopping them often involves aesthetically displeasing actions, such as blowing them into little bits with bombs or shoving a bayonet into their guts and watching them die in agony. And it necessarily means inflicting death and damage on the noncombatant camp followers around them. That’s why they say war is hell. And that’s why starting one is probably not a good idea. But when someone else starts one, you have to choose them or you. Someone’s going to die badly, and you know, I propose it is those other guys."
October 16, 2023 "Though around the world sociopaths stabbed some folks, the Day of Jihad fizzled in America – how many bummed patriots slammed in a mag hoping some mutant was going to choose his small town to prove Jason Aldean right? But it is only a matter of time. When you allow millions of military-aged males to come unvetted into your country, including many from bizarre hellholes where hatred for Americana is more common than food and indoor plumbing, there is a non-zero chance that some of them are part of sleeper cells waiting for the signal to murder Americans here at home." Kurt Schlichter, Town Hall, October 16, 2023, "We Are Sitting Ducks And Our Leaders Do Not Care"
August 22, 2023 "When arguing in federal court in HI in 2020, I had to get permission from the governor to enter his precious state to argue that his silly COVID lockdowns violated the Constitution. I lost. This same state, in real life, has shown how little respect for life its leaders really have. My perfectly healthy clients were not allowed to travel from one island to another to visit their own property. American citizens were turned away at the airport because they got the wrong COVID test on the mainland. The hotel gave me “parole” from the one way card key rule only to do my legal business and leave. I could not call an Uber or take a taxi at the airport. The National Guard met me at the gate to escort me to Hawaii COVID immigration to provide my information, which they verified with the hotel. I was to keep my phone on at all times so that they could track my location. This same police state didn’t turn the water on in Lahaina, didn’t have sirens, can’t begin to tell you how many children died from their incompetence. Or begin to explain it. Remember all this the next time you are asked to comply with farcical, unjust “laws” made by dictators. They are lying when their lips are moving about how much they care about you and your little life and your paper constitutional rights. Americans are beginning to realize how much we are on our own. Such a betrayal." Harmeet K. Dhillon, on "X", 8/22/23 12:44 AM
August 17, 2023 - A MUST READ!!!! The following is a transcription of Newt Gingrich's comments on Hannity last night. "“I think what you’re seeing tonight is one tree in a forest, and I think we are drifting towards the greatest Constitutional crisis since the 1850s, uh, and the rise of secession and the Civil War. I don’t mean that as hyperbole. Uh, if you read Andy McCarthy’s remarkable book, Ball of Collusion, which came out in 2019, he makes very clear that it is Barack Obama who corrupts the Justice Department, it is Hillary Clinton who routinely breaks the law and gets away with it. And now we have Joe Biden who’s learned, he’s learned from Obama that is doesn’t matter what you do, if you’re a liberal Democrat, you will not be prosecuted. He learned from Hillary that a person in high public office can get millions and millions of dollars. And they learned from watching Donald Trump that a true outsider, willing to take on the entire system, could destroy their entire machine. So what you’re seeing across the country, is a desperate, last-ditch effort by a corrupt machine to destroy their most dangerous opponent in a way which not only breaks the Constitution, destroys the rule of law, and establishes a moment of bitterness, uh, which I think will last for a generation or more. I think this is gonna be a horrendous period and we just need to understand: The people who want to control America and dictate to the rest of us will break any law, lie about any topic, and manipulate the system any way they can, and that includes a lot of the elite news media.”
August 10, 2023 "The fact that young men are getting more conservative is a cause for optimism. Remember, if you grew up male in the last ten years or so, every institution has been deployed against you. You’ve been told you are bad and horrible and evil and worthless. In contrast, every girl is an empowered girlboss ready to take her rightful place at the pinnacle of society. And to facilitate that, they must displace the dudes. And it’s no secret – that displacement, that consignment of men to second-class status, is not merely admitted but celebrated by our trash ruling class." Kurt Schlichter, August 10, 2023, Town Hall, "Angry Young Men Are Going To Disrupt The Garbage Paradigm"
Articles/Writings We Think Are A Must Read
Who Will Say No More to the Current Madness?
Once again, Victor Davis Hanson has nailed it. In his article there is a list of the most egregious crimes and failings of the Left and this Administration. Stronly urge readers to read the whole article. Here’s an excerpt of the most salient points:
“America is in existential danger.
The Biden administration has utterly destroyed the southern border — and immigration law with it.
Biden green lighted 7 million illegal aliens swarming into the U.S. without legal sanction or rudimentary audit.
China spies inside and over the U.S. with impunity. Beijing has never admitted to its responsibility for the gain-of-function COVID virus that killed a million Americans.
President Joe Biden printed $4 trillion at exactly the wrong time of soaring post-COVID consumer demand and supply shortages. No wonder he birthed the worst inflation in 40 years.
In response, interest rates tripled, gas prices doubled.
Our military is thousands of recruits short. It lacks sufficient munitions.
Following Biden’s humiliating pullout from Afghanistan, vast troves of arms were abandoned in Kabul. Billions more in scarce weapons were sent to Ukraine.
The Pentagon’s woke agenda trumps meritocracy in promotions and advancement.
Our enemies — Russia, China, Iran, North Korea — are on the move, while the U.S. seems listless.
The Biden renegade Department of Justice, CIA and FBI have become weaponized. Ideology, politics, and race — not the law — more often guide their investigations, intelligence operations and enforcement.
The downtowns of our once majestic major cities are becoming unlivable.
They are mired in refuse and trash, violent crime and homelessness. Stores and businesses leave. Millions each year flee the blue urban coasts to the red west and south.
To even say there are still two biological genders, that global warming may not be entirely manmade or necessarily destroying the planet, or that class, not race, is the proper barometer of inequality is to face ostracism and career cancellation.
The public assumes that Biden is severely cognitively challenged, likely corrupt, and a serial fabricator.
Most know what must be done, but few will tell the truth: Balance the budget. Return to legal only immigration. Restore a well-funded, but unwoke Pentagon.
Insist on racial unity. Curb the overweening administrative state. Enforce the rule of law.
Produce more gas and oil. Reestablish civic education. Insist universities protect free speech and due process — and stop proselytizing.
In other words, restore what until recently made America the strongest, most prosperous, and freest nation in the world. And quit undoing all the great good that eight generations of prior Americans bequeathed to us.”
Victor Davis Hanson saying it better than anyone. Perfectly describes the childish, impetuous behavior of the Left. A quick and incredibly accurate take on everything we see before our eyes.
An excerpt:
“Cry-baby tantrums won’t win over the public. These nonstop puerile meltdowns have turned off most Americans who tire of whiny narcissistic hypocrites.”
Strongly recommend the artful summary of what the Left is trying to do with the Disinformation Governance Board canard written by Michael Walsh in “The Pipeline”, May 2, 2022. You’ll find the whole article here. Some excerpts:
“So now the mask has dropped and, for the first time, the American people can see the modern Left in all its hateful, unadorned, vituperative, spiteful glory. Case in point: the announcement last week that the Department of Homeland Security—one of the excrescences of the Bush administration, cobbled together in its panic over 9/11—has created the “Disinformation Governance Board” in order to combat what it has, via its hitherto little-known Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, already dubbed “mis-, dis-, and mal-information.” Otherwise known as alternative points of view, but shut up, citizen.”
“Let us now remind ourselves of the late historian and Soviet scholar Robert Conquest’s third law of politics: “The simplest way to explain the behavior of any bureaucratic organization is to assume that it is controlled by a cabal of its enemies.” At this point in American history, that is not only a theory but a fact. Having narrowly “won” the 2020 election by stealing it fair and square, the Left is putting pedal to the metal to accomplish as much of its anti-foundational agenda as it can before the clock runs out on its tiny congressional majorities this fall.”
On the Subject of “Things happening in the background to purge the illicit Biden administration“
The article in American Thinker by Dr. Brian Joondeph entitled: “Nothing Can Stop What is Coming. What if Nothing is Coming?” lays out the case for the increasingly skeptical that anything is going to halt the Leftist Leviathan. Strongly recommend this article not to throw cold water on all the hope so many of us have of there being some justice on the horizon, but to lay out the stark possibility that it’s all wishful thinking and we’re stuck with what we’ve got at least until January 2023.
On Climate Change Fraud
One of the best debunking articles/videos I’ve seen recently on the revolting fraud being perpetrated by the climate alarmists. In very calm, easy to understand terms the author shows how graphs and picking the right starting point for data visualization is being used to create the narrative that they rely on for their funding, their power, their nefarious attempts to alter society and our world. This same manipulation occurs with ALL kinds of data and the Left is expert in obscuring truth, altering perception and brainwashing a lazy, non-thinking mass of sheep to believe what they want them to believe. Strongly recommend watching this…12 minutes long and a must see!
Featured Friends
Straight Line Logic
Robert Gore’s blog. I put Gore up there with Victor Davis Hanson, Jordan Peterson and Thomas Sowell. His theses are chock full of substance.
The Burning Platform
Unabashedly conspiracy-theory driven, but thoughtfully so and well-written. Makes one think, “could this really be what’s happening?”
