Progress, Marketing, Culture, Privilege

If you have not been exposed to this little piece of propaganda yet, take a look. Amazingly it seems to be flowing around rather freely on social media. "Fake News" isn't nearly the threat to to life that long term propaganda and mind control are -- we need the all powerful Administrative State to "investigate"!

First, when you see a video like this, THINK! It is exactly like "Tastes Great, Less Filling", "Hope and Change", or "Make America Great Again"! It is MARKETING -- it is selling you a narrative. A story that someone wants you to put in your brain. Again -- "marketing" isn't bad in itself, it is WHAT is being marketed and WHY!

I'm old enough to remember the 1960s when the "progressives" were pushing birth control, free love and divorce as the way to happiness. One would not want to raise kids in a home where there was no "passion" between mom and dad! You "owed it to them" to get divorced so they could live in a "loving home". "True love" (good sex in the liberal parlance) conquers all! Agape? What does that mean? Seems like an awfully difficult Greek word for people to even think about!

It is sadly laughable that today's leftys make the first element of  supposed "privilege" to be living  in a traditional family, and the second being having a "father figure" in the family .,.. forget "ACTUAL father", that is just TOO far out in the wondrous "progressive" (regressive) world which the left has given us! Your parents failed to buy what we were selling in the 1960's, so please listen to us while we sell you "privilege" now!  In 1960, 73% of kids had that kind of "privilege", today only 46% do. Marketing works!

80-90% of the "privilege" is right there -- living with your birth parents! Such families are much better off economically -- something in the 40-60% range of our "income inequality" is due to children out of wedlock and broken homes. Thanks "progressives"!

Many of the "privilege steps" are even MORE laughable. I had no access to private education, but that was before the progressives destroyed the public schools! They threw out prayer, moral teaching, discipline, academic rigor and STANDARDS, and replaced it with social engineering, union/political proselytizing, and putting condoms on cucumbers. YES, that makes private schools a huge advantage! Thanks "progressives"!

Having a computer and a cell phone are more like DISadvantages without really good parents -- they are much like the "advantage" of birth control -- tools that require much more responsibility than youth can possibly muster, thus putting even MORE load on the vanishing traditional family. Helping mom and dad with the bills is also an ADVANTAGE -- learning the value of money and RESPONSIBILITY!

They don't quite have the chutzpah to mention it, but a sense of responsibility for your own self and action is a HUGE "privilege" -- however, then you would be unlikely to blame "privilege", because to the extent it existed, it would just drive you to overcome it! NOT what "progressives" sell!

In what universe is having the level of athletic ability to have your college covered NOT a "privilege"? Sure you worked hard, however without God given talent that you were blessed with through no merit of your own, you don't get full-ride college scholarships! Thanks be to God!

I'm not going to bother to keep going.  The narrative being marketed here is meaninglessness and state control. CULTURE WORKS! Or at least did work, so it must be destroyed and replaced by a culture of dependence on the state! The "progressive" left has been at war with the family for 60 years -- they have turned 73% being "privileged" into 46% being "privileged" to grow up with their parents, and now they want the survivors of the culture wars to feel guilty about surviving! Why?

It is so extremely simple it is hard to imagine the BOistani ability to think even a tiny bit critically has been so damaged. THEY WANT TO GET TO A 100% MINDLESS DEPENDENT POPULATION THAT BELIEVES THIS!

If you train young minds to feel guilty about coming from the tatters of a culture that worked, and that there is no merit in the personal responsibility and hard work they no doubt are building and doing,  then their efforts are meaningless! At the same time, the "progressives" convince those that are not performing as well that it is all due to the "privilege" that they lack, so there is therefore "nothing they can do about it" -- please stop working, you are too far behind!

The saddest part of this propaganda is the sick attempt to align it with Christian values at the end. The people driving this HATE GOD AND CHRIST, you know it because they are in constant warfare with any hint of religion in the public square, and labor tirelessly to destroy any hint of values and decency in the society. They don't want you to PERSONALLY do anything to help others, they want you to outsource your money and power to THEM, so they can continue to destroy the culture!

I'm proud to be the kind of fool that looks critically at all that man has to say -- especially when they throw in a Bible verse at the end. Hopefully you will look at me just as critically, so here is my verse.

Proverbs 26:11 "Like a dog that returns to his vomit is a fool who repeats his folly".

They sold you the broken family already. Are you going to call it "privilege" when parents resisted, and now buy into them telling us that the "privilege" you supposedly got from parents who resisted makes hard work and personal responsibility null and void?

THINK! Thinking, reading your Bible, praying, working hard, being responsible, delaying gratification, staying married, etc -- that is the eternal "resistance"! If you do those things you WILL get out and help others PERSONALLY, because you will have the MEANS in character and maybe money, and most importantly, the love of Christ will be in your heart!

Moore, The Wet Paper Bag Party

The Moore miasma | Power Line:

Either  more of the the Republican party will eventually "grow a set", or it will continue to fade. I sat in a cafe this AM and the TV was 100% various hand wringing about the 35+ year old "acusations" aginst Roy Moore. A couple of weeks ago we had FBI documentation that the Clinton's and BO sold 20% of our urainum reserves to the Russians for north of $100 million to the Clintons alone, plus a bunch of sordid kickbacks, payoffs, etc. Not really MSM newsworthy -- certainly no wall to wall coverage.

Then we had other FBI information showing that the DNC paid to work with Russians to dig up dirt on Trump to influence the election -- the DNC in fact admitted it. Not really newsworthy -- certainly not a "scandal".

Slick Willie received much fresher charges of RAPE, along with all sorts of groping, dropping trou, etc, etc, but all those were of no concern because they were "just sex". God only knows what he did decades prior to being Arkansas governor -- nobody really cares. He is a D. Oh ... and he as been on the "Lolita Express" a whole bunch, but that is just "circumstantial" ... he has certainly never shown any pattern of liking younger women! Oh, the Lolita Express thing isn't really "news", because it is only on "biased sites" .... and we KNOW that the MSM is not biased!

Can Trump manage to fashion a party that at least folds like damp cardboard rather than like a wet paper bag? Certainly I don't expect that one would even want to create a party as shameless as the D's, but does it REALLY damage you to AT LEAST question accusations that are over 35 years old and have never surfaced before?

The ONLY thing that the RNC ought to care about in Alabama is JUST WIN BABY! Trump campaigned for Moore's primary opponent. Look at the charges, decide if Moore still has the best chance or not, and then DECIDE!

Under NO CIRCUMSTANCES however does it make sense to run like 14 year old girls from 35+ year old charges. What were Democrat Senators doing 35 years ago? Hey, go out and at least make up a charge so they can deny it! Politics is STILL not bean bag!

Remember, Teddy Kennedy left his soon to be deceased secretary in his car parked upside down under water and didn't bother to report it until morning,  **AND** HE STAYED IN THE SENATE AND WAS RE-ELECTED MULTIPLE TIMES. **THAT** is the Democrat "standard" -- + Slick Willie + a whole bunch of others that we hardly hear about.

Should Republicans have "higher standards"? SURE! But unless they are killing their current young secretaries, that really isn't much of a bar to get over is it?

Oh the sanctimony --- you CAN'T be a "Christian / Conservative / principled / etc" if you don't rush out and gratuiously castigate Roy Moore even if you don't live within a thousand miles of Alabama! Really? Do Republican idiots REALLY want to subscribe to the "standard" that 35 year old charges that have never shown up before and can't possibly be "proven" are an appropirate litmus test for a candidate???

Who amoung us is secure from some woman coming forward and making such a charge? Remember, she would be a DEMOCRAT -- the sort of women that said they would be happy to give Bill Clinton a blow job anytime while he was being charged with a long list of harrassment charges. Do you REALLY think that such a woman is going to pause for one second to make an old charge against an R to take them down? Who is even going to run for a party stupid enough to throw in the towel because "the charges sound bad" ?

The Democrat party is PROUD to have ZERO standards other than WIN! We just need an opposition party that sets the bar higher than proven sex at the office, killing your secretary,  and not selling major US assets to our enemies for payoffs.

Is that really somehow hard to understand?

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The Mythical CBO World

Monkey business at the CBO? | Power Line:



Why is our nation $20 Trillion in debt? One of the big reasons is the "Non-Partisan CBO".



Why is it "non-partisan"? Well, because the media almost always puts that lable on it! It MUST be so!



The following paragraph shows how the sausage gets made -- or not made, in DC.

"Because the CBO has very likely overestimated the coverage loss associated with repealing the mandate, the alleged several hundred billion dollars of savings might well be mostly mythical. However, Congress operates in the CBO’s imaginary universe, as Levin puts it. If CBO estimates are to used authoritatively in the Obamacare debate to pump up the lost coverage numbers, it’s fair to use them authoritatively in the tax reform debate to pump up the savings numbers. Indeed, it would be unfair not to."

In the original BOcare scoring, the "non-partisan" CBO used 10 years of revenues to fund 6 years of benefits to show that BOcare was "deficit neutral" ... so the sentate could pass it with 50 votes.



So the Republicans would like to use the current estimate of the huge number of people that the CBO says would be using the BOcare subsidy to save money by cutting the subsidy. Small problem -- the CBO no longer stands by it's estimate -- it isn't being used to advance their agenda, so it is no longer "real".



Until the worldwide government debt bubble bursts, we live in a fantasy where electricity can be generated from unicorn farts and money falls from the sky just as valuable as the sort worked for by the sweat of the brow.



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Political Parties As Religion

Guns were last straw for me with GOP - CNN.com:

Here we have CNN doing a "conversion story" for a local person in Tucson  based on the Giffords shooting that is a couple of years old.

Growing up in a Baptist Church, the "testimony" was a major part of religion, and especially good if you were formerly extra bad in your former life -- drunk, drug addict, jail would be excellent. Extra points for having a tattoo.

So why would a political party be like that? Especially in the US, a country that was to be as close to freedom FROM politics as was possible? At most, parties should be like products, or maybe even closer, "brands". ANY US poltical party should have total support for the Constitution -- especially the 1st Amendment and the 2nd Amendment which makes the first real. The "conversion" would be like going from "Miller to Bud".

I was a Republican at the time, but less than one week after the buyback, I chose to switch parties. I believe there is a centrist element among the rank and file in the GOP, but the leadership is led by the far right and openly beholden to the NRA and the gun lobby. It is that rigid ideology that is driving the party into irrelevancy.

This post is from 2013 -- I just never hit "publish" until I ran into it today, 4 years later. In 2013 CNN and the author of the peice were convinced that pro-gun was becoming "irrelevant". Today? I'd guess not so much.

If EITHER party wants to change the 2nd Amendment (or other parts), there is a known procedure called Constitutional Amendment. In America, if you wanted the Constitution amended, but knew that your amendment would not pass, then you kept SELLING  -- looking for an actual "reasonable compromise". Not so in BOistan -- you seek to bypass the clear text with all manner of infringements and then seek to overturn it using the SCOTUS as an extra-Constititional power. That is what lawlessness looks like.

Hopefully the column author is still smugly enjoying his "conversion" to the party with no rule of law.

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Paul, Vegas, The Motivationless Human

Rand Paul’s neighbors dispute “property dispute” reports | Power Line:

One of the big problems with Artificial Intelligence (AI) is motivation. What is it that AI would be motivated by? We sincerely hope it would not be stamping out competitors in the field of "intelligence" -- - our parochial view being "we have some of that!".

Perhaps AI would question if our existence was actually "real"  ... sort of like many humans like to question the existence of a creator and assume they "just happened" ... but I digress.

The Vegas shooting, and now the attack on Rand Paul seem to be somewhat of a watershed in "action without motivation". Even more amazing, the speed with which our media can determine with complete certainty that the action at least lacked any POLITICAL motivation is a scientific breakthrough! We can understand human motivation instantly -- I'm guessing it is a new kind of brain scan? Perhaps the "MET" rather then the "PET"? "Motivation Emission Tomography".

It has gotta be extra special technology -- given Vegas, it must work even on a deceased brain! Wonderful!

I've heard of people being friends, or even married for years, and not having complete awareness of their political thoughts. I once questioned how the powers that be were so able to get people to work in the "NON-PARTISAN CBO"! Where did all these non-partisans come from?  and why don't we meet more of them? How did they become non-partisan? Were they raised by wolves in an apolitical family? Were they sequestered from mass media at birth?

There MUST be a way -- because NPR (in whom we trust) never says "CBO" without the non-partisan label!

Now, we have a Vegas shooter who was certified to have no political or religious motivations less than 24 hours after anyone at the national level had become aware of his existence! Then, only a little over a month later, Rand Paul is attacked by a neighbor who has posted MANY vehement political opinions on social media, however, he suddenly decided to blindside his neighbor over a "long standing minor (non-political) issue" with enough force to break 5 ribs.

The biggest news to me is that 5 broken ribs is a "minor injury". I've had a mere 3 broken ribs and found it extremely debilitating for over 2 months. Reporters are so strong. I'd enjoy breaking 5 ribs on one of them so they could confirm to me that it was a "minor injury" ... nothing here folks, move along.

I'm trying to imagine if a Democrat Congressman had been gunned down over the summer by a Republican voter who was specifically targeting Republicans (Scalaise), and then a Republican neighbor of a sitting  Democrat US Senator attacked them on their lawn and broke 5 ribs, what the media outcry would look like?

We have a pretty good idea -- some of us can remember back to Gabby Giffords and the "chilling" effect of the Tea Party having the gall to protest people being forced by law to purchase health insurance, and yearly deficits of $1.5+ Trillion dollars! The idea of opposing the policies of the duly elected president was nigh on treason in '09-'10!

I wonder what changed? Perhaps we could "MET scan" a couple reporters?
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Killing Children, Oh the Humanity

What Explains U.S. Mass Shootings? International Comparisons Suggest an Answer - The New York Times:

It amazing how much honesty you can find even in the NY Times. The rest of the article is typical trash that mixes suicide and murder, doesn't even consider the effect of the big US Democrat controlled murder cities. We don't really have a gun or a murder problem, in GENERAL, we have a Democrat problem.

Here is the unexpected (and unintended) honesty:

"“In retrospect Sandy Hook marked the end of the US gun control debate,” Dan Hodges, a British journalist, wrote in a post on Twitter two years ago, referring to the 2012 attack that killed 20 young students at an elementary school in Connecticut. “Once America decided killing children was bearable, it was over.”"

Indeed it was ... Roe V Wade, January 22, 1973.

Once the government sanctioned the killing of children and went  so far to DEMAND by law that all 50 states participate, and then increasingly pay for it, "it was over".  Roe marked the end of the debate on respect for life -- the SCOTUS decided NOT to respect life, and demanded that every state participate in the mass slaughter on the altar of convienience. Respect for life was NOT ALLOWED!

When you are willing to kill the completely innocent for convienience, and even celebrate it as essentially a secular human sacrament, there are no remaining acts too evil to contemplate.

Roe is one of the major milestones on the way to BOistan. A "Christian Nation" would never allow such evil to consume 60 million innocent babes with the endless death toll rising every day. Hitler was a complete amatuer, and actually much more decent than BOistan. Hitler KNEW that what he was doing was wrong and worked very hard to hide it -- BOistan celebrates it's Holocaust!

If sanity, empathy, morality, law, decency, etc ever rise again, everyone will look at videos like this, build memorials to the 10's of millions slaughtered, and celebrate the few survivors! We might even re-create something like America if this ever comes to pass!

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Sutherland Springs , I Don't Understand, But I Know My God Does!

A few powerful words from Pastor Frank Pomeroy after 26 people in his church are killed by a gunman, including his 14 year old daughter.


Christ is going to be lifted up
And that’s what I am telling everyone.

You lean in to what you don’t understand,
You lean into the Lord.

I would submit this to everyone—my family here and you guys there
Whatever life brings to you, lean on the Lord, rather than your own understanding.

I don’t understand….but I know my God does.
And that’s where I’ll leave that.

Pastor Frank Pomeroy, First Baptist Church

The sermon  from the week before was on Proverbs 3:5 "Trust in the LORD with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding;"

It starts about 28 min in ...

I don't understand, and I know that my God does. Strong words to both live and die by. 

The DNC, Our True Leadership

The Blabbermouth angle | Power Line:

The Donna Brazile book gives us more insight into how BOistan actually runs.

The "narrative" is that BOistan was "attacked" by the nefarious Russians working in concert with the Trump campaign to subvert our previously sacrosanct elections -- you know, the ones you don't need to show an ID to vote in because ... er, well, because it might be "chilling" to show an ID to vote even though you have to show one to get on a plane, check into a hotel, get a cell phone, send something UPS, cash a check, etc, etc.

Our Deep State is totally controlled by "The Party" (TP-D), and they are major players in this "plot". How do we know they are controlled by TP?

Former Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson testified to the House Intelligence Committee this past June that the DNC declined help from the FBI after it was hacked.

Got that? The Deep State is hot on getting to the bottom of this nefarious Russian plot, but the DNC "declined help", so the FBI never looked at the servers that the horrible Russians hacked.

So who does the FBI work for? Obviously, it works for TP -- as all of us do. TP said no, so the answer is no, and not the media, nor certainly the Deep State is even remotely interested in changing the way things work. We are all "wet fish" and have no idea we are wet with TP corruption.When TP speaks, we all just listen -- but some of us like to pretend otherwise.

"Elections"?   I would be completely unsurprised if the Russians, the Chinese, or just about anyone had hacked our elections (especially the DNC) -- my guess is that TP has had their finger heavily on the outcomes for a long time and trying to make a case for "Russian interference" makes the obvious conclusion a bit foggy. Good thing if you are cheating! 

I covered the excellent "Stealing Elections" by John Fund back in 2005. It explains how Gore nearly "won" FL quite nicely. In Palm Beach county, 15k Republicans apparently came out and voted a Republican ticket, yet failed to vote for Bush -- OR, someone took a bunch of ballots and shoved a rod through the Gore punch. When you do that, you either insure a vote for Gore, **OR** you create an "overvote" if the voter voted for someone else. There were 19K "overvotes" in Palm Beach county.

"Stealing Elections" documents a pretty good case that Democrats have been stealing elections for a LONG time. Naturally, their efforts are heavily centered in urban areas, so when you look at the BOistan red/blue maps, it is easy to understand why you see what you see. Their weakness -- as is so often the case, is the Constitution and the founders wisdom in not making this a "pure Democracy" (The electoral college, congressional districts, 2 senators from each state).

The point is that if stealing elections is possible, it is possible in a lot of ways -- including ways that even TP is not aware of.

The really funny part is that TP is so powerful and embedded in all our alphabet agencies, the media, education, etc, that the DNC just said no and that was that. 99.9% of us don't question what we see relative to things like this because "that is just the way things are".





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Borking, The History Of Ending America

The Wages of Borking | Power Line:

An excellent column that helps us remember that killing America had a history -- Bork was 30 years ago this fall, in 2019 it will be 50 years since Chappaquiddick, which should have ended Teddy Kennedy and prevented the "Borking" wound to America from ever happening. React to Chappaquiddick as a nation with any morals, and Borking never happens -- perhaps the horror of Roe is even overturned 30 years ago, millions of unborn survive, law, decency and life are honored, Slick and BO never happen, and America lives. My thesis is that America didn't HAVE to die, it died by CHOICE ... a number of them, with Roe being a gigantic one.

America was a great nation, so it didn't die suddenly. The following paragraph shows the lie that Bork was "out of the mainstream", no matter what Teddy Kennedy thought -- Teddy was wrong on a lot of things beyond where he last left his car parked upside down under water with his young secretary in it.

During his tenure on the DC Circuit Bork had written or joined 416 opinions, many of them on the same side as fellow DC Circuit Judge Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Bork’s three-judge panels were unanimous 90 percent of the time, and Bork was in the majority 95 percent of the time. The Supreme Court had reversed not a single majority opinion Bork wrote or joined, while in six cases the Supreme Court had adopted a dissenting opinion of Bork’s. Bork’s critics said he was hostile to minorities and civil rights, yet he sided with minority plaintiffs in seven out of eight cases that came before him as a judge. As political scientist Aaron Wildavsky noted, “How could a superb legal craftsman be outside the mainstream when he was one of the leaders in determining what constituted excellence in legal reasoning [as a professor at Yale Law School and Solicitor General of the United States]? How could a judge who had written some 150 opinions, and had never been reversed by a higher court, be outside the mainstream?”

The whole concise column is well worth the read -- "Borking" was a point at which "The Party" (TP-D) flexed it's connection with the corrupt groups whose thirst for sexual gratification was partially slaked by the sacrifice of millions of unborn on the altar of "choice". The Constitution said that the president was allowed to appoint qualified men to the court, but Teddy and the TP cabal said otherwise, and they won!

The application of TP power to trump law, decency, comity, tradition, etc was a giant step toward BOistan. Evil won the day, and the soul of America turned blacker.

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The Solipsistic Sanity Bubble, Cab Kitty Speaks

Democratic National Committee & Hillary Clinton -- Democrats Still Making the Same Mistakes | National Review:

Solipsism is the theory that only The Ferocious Cabadocious Kitty can be proven to exist -- sometimes generalized by foolish humans to be "the self is all that can be proven to exist", which Cab will promptly DISprove by biting the fool who asserts that!

Cab exists, and you are a figment of his rather fertile imagination. He is the foremost feline authority on all topics philosophical, with epistemology -- the study of why Cab knows everything, and how he knows it, being his foremost area of expertise!

BO now has his own "Foundation", or as I like to call them ... "funds", because what they really do is provide massive amounts of tax free cash, living expenses, private jets, etc for those whose name heads up the "foundation", or "fund".  The linked article touches on a nice kickoff meeting in Chicago with BO himself there -- a place for the elite self-satisfied to believe they were in the "sanity bubble"

The sanity bubble! What a perfect label for the environs of the self-satisfied and righteous, the elegantly appointed ballrooms where the high and mighty, silhouetted in magenta up-lighting, nod reverentially at clichés mouthed by the latest faddish “thought leader,” before tucking into, say, a caprese salad with arugula and pesto, followed by spinach and gorgonzola tortelloni with caramelized pears and bleu cheese cream. Within the sanity bubble life is pleasant, comfortable, and agreeable, its niceties and pleasures and fixed ideas interrupted by only the maelstrom of political and economic change outside.

I live in the bubble. Always have, even if I have come to disagree with what my college professors would call the “hegemonic discourse” of postmodern liberalism, and to gag at the vanity and solipsism of many of my fellow residents. But never, especially after the 2016 campaign, would I mistake the confines of the bubble for the whole of reality. That is the mistake Hillary Clinton made when she decided that she could win the presidency without the support of a white working class mangled by economic stagnation, family breakdown, and drug addiction. And it is the same mistake the Democrats at the Obama Foundation and on Capitol Hill are making now, in real time, as they wrap themselves in the illusions that growing minority populations will carry them ineluctably to power, and that identity politics is somehow an electoral winner.

The Davos controlled beltway denizens and the Administrative State have no time for the "Bitter Clingers" or "Basket of Deplorables" ... they only acknowledge the existence of such people through denigration. While Cab is picky, he will tend to acknowledge all who feed him or properly pet him -- although, he may well bite the in the next second -- Cab and fate have that in common.

The elite are certain they are of ultimate importance, but Cab would be happy to bite them to make their "sanity bubble" just a tiny bit more "sane"!

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100 Years, 100 Million Dead

100 Years of Communism—and 100 Million Dead - WSJ:



Godless Communism, merciless killing -- 100 years of it, and we still have China, North Korea and Cuba.



I've covered this a lot, however anniversaries of disasters that kill 100 million people should not be forgotten. Would legalized abortion ever have happened in this country without the influence of Godless Communism? I doubt it ... add 60 million of the most innocent of lives there, plus not doubt a coulpe hundred million more across China and the old USSR.



Communism -- destroyer of life, morality, faith, families, intellectual honesty, and so much more. A grim anniversary indeed.

But the Bolsheviks’ influence was not limited to these countries. In the West, communism inverted society’s understanding of the source of its values, creating political confusion that persists to this day. 

In a 1920 speech to the Komsomol, Lenin said that communists subordinate morality to the class struggle. Good was anything that destroyed “the old exploiting society” and helped to build a “new communist society.” 

This approach separated guilt from responsibility. Martyn Latsis, an official of the Cheka, Lenin’s secret police, in a 1918 instruction to interrogators, wrote: “We are not waging war against individuals. We are exterminating the bourgeoisie as a class. . . . Do not look for evidence that the accused acted in word or deed against Soviet power. The first question should be to what class does he belong. . . . It is this that should determine his fate.”

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The Russian Insanity Summarized

Donald Trump & Mueller Investigation – Embarrassment to America | National Review:

I've covered the insanity of the Urainium 1, Fusion GPS, Clinton, Comey and Mueller gyrations -- the following paragraph is about as good a summary of the tangled web as I have seen.

Even the most febrile conspiracy theorist could not make up such a convoluted story. It is bunk, rubbish, a Babylonian ziggurat of pompous and officious suppositions and confections that, when it is explained in its correct sequence as above and as simply as possible, no sane person could take seriously. One candidate paid for a smear job by a group of foreigners on her opponent, lost the election, and now screams of collusion by the foreigners she has been paying to defame her opponent; the FBI chief who saved her candidacy by not prosecuting her for serious offenses, when fired, after leaking an unprobative and self-serving memo, secures the appointment of a special counsel to investigate her opponent’s relations with the country with which she has collaborated, and that investigation is conducted by the very same mentor of the fired FBI chief who whitewashed her in her latest and greatest controversy (emails), after he and the person who appointed him had whitewashed the losing candidate in the greatest previous controversy of her career (Uranium One). (This leaves out of contention for that distinction the latest allegations that Mrs. Clinton arranged her selection as Democratic nominee by violations of the Federal Election Campaign Act in rigged primaries, as claimed by a former party chairman: the imposing but unfeasible Donna Brazile, who had been such a fervent supporter that — while acting in a journalistic capacity — she passed Mrs. Clinton questions in advance of a presidential debate.)

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Gelernter’s Trump

Gelernter’s Trump | Power Line:

I have a huge respect for Gelernter and his work. He is a brilliant and world renouned computer scientist who was injured by the unibomber, has written a number of excellent books, and who I have a 2nd hand personal connection with (covered here if you have an interest).

To anyone with intelligence that is left wing, Gelernter is a big problem -- he is brilliant, AND he generally supports Trump, for the simple reason that if you care about freedom, you had and have no rational other choice.

I'll copy the transcript of the Gelernter comments in an interview with Bill Bennet here ... it is self explanatory.

People on the left find Trump not merely objectionable on principle but they hate him as a person. They find him grating and annoying and he drives them crazy. I understand that. He often drives me crazy. Obama had the same properties….He was such a pain. I think there is nothing worse than a combination of patronizing arrogance and insincerity. Whenever he opened his mouth, your stomach turned over. It was painful to hear him talk. Now I understand that people — my friends on the left — have the same reaction to Trump, but the remarkable thing is what this says about the way the country swings and why did we elect Trump? The left and academia [are] too busy hating him to ask why their countrymen were

The American people know perfectly well what is due to the office of the presidency. I think Trump is undignified in a lot of ways. I think Trump falls short in a lot of ways and I think that is absolutely as clear to a farmer in Alabama or a cowboy in Wyoming as it is to the Washington Post.

People were driven to elect Trump not because they deemed him a perfect candidate to be president but because they were angry, they were incensed, they couldn’t stand where the country was going and the analysis that should follow upon that isn’t there. I mean, it goes on in conservative circles but it ought to be the number one topic in the study of American government, in the study of American history all over the world, and it’s not, of course. Needless to say.

I remain absolutely a supporter and a sympathizer of Trump. And you know, no president checks every box. I think his virtues far outweigh his faults. I do wish he would take the office and the history of the office more seriously than he does…

Just the fact of getting elected was an extraordinary accomplishment. I mean, you could say it was the most culturally democratic moment in the history of the world. Never before has a great power spurned everything the elite — the intellectual and the social elite — knows, left and right, about who should be running the country. Never before has a great power said to hell with that. The dignity of the country is important and has a lot to do with the power of the country, but this is an emergency and we’re going to make use of the best candidate who’s out there. And the implications are enormous. The left believes that, since it refuses to report on the right, the right doesn’t really exist, that it’s just a bunch of uncollected morons with no serious thought.

We all know this. We’ve reached a point where the left’s blindness is aiding the collapse of the intellectual structure built up since the rise of Marxism….The left is too arrogant, too complacent, too self-satisfied to notice it or do anything about it — I hope.

And I pray ...



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No Family, No Country, Identity Politics

The Primal Scream of Identity Politics | The Weekly Standard:

This one is definitely worth the read -- it falls one "parent" short, GOD, but it hits the earthly target very well. I'd argue that killing "god" in the Nietzchean sense was definitely on the road to killing daddy, mommy, and family in general. A people that still honored God could not have legalized abortion, dishonored their parents, and abandoned their children in the name of earthly sexual pleasure and other "progress".

I'm about 1/3 of the way through "The Secular Age" by Charles Taylor. It tells the story of how the west went from a fully enchanted world at the time of the Reformation, to the nearly totally DISenchanted world we live in today. Everyone believed that the Cosmos was ordered with a sacred purpose that included each of us -- embedded in our family, church, community, nation, and yes, an ordered cosmos where everything included elements of the spiritual, the sacred.

Today, we are DISembedded and disenchanted --

The legalization of same-sex marriage, as observers both for and against the 2015 Obergefell decision came to agree, owed most to one factor: empathy for the moral claim that attraction to one’s own sex is like pigmentation or DNA, immutable and immune to change. Yet a split cultural second later, exactly the opposite case has come to be made for the intersex, transgendered, and other sexual minorities: that identity is fluid, indeterminate, perhaps even recalcitrant, rather than born that way. 

In this head-on collision of purported creation stories about sexual and gender identity that cannot possibly both be true, we see once more that the question Who am I? is the most fraught of our time. It has become like a second skin: something that can’t be sloughed off, or even scratched, without excruciating pain to the subject—reason and logic and the rest of persuasion-as-usual be damned.

As we have attempted to make "meaning" a material thing, it is not all that surprising that we would have completely incompatable "required views" on one of the most basic elements of our identity, our gender. Science says there are two genders, society says there are 50 some and more every day.

So why have we become "tribal"?

It’s not that “America Wasn’t Built for Humans,” as the title of Sullivan’s piece has it. It’s rather that America, like other civilizations, was built for humans who learned community not from roving bands of unrelated nomads, but from those around them—beginning in the small civilization of the family.

Our macro-politics have gone tribal because our micro-politics are no longer familial. This, above all, is what’s happened during the five decades in which identity politics went from being unheard of to ubiquitous.

Pretty much all of us understand this at some level. Our "families" almost all now involved 2nd, 3rd, etc marriages, and often many sorts of other relations. In the Bible we hear "who is my neighbor", today we hear "Who is my Daddy? my Mommy? my Sister? my Grandparent ... etc, etc". Clearly, lots of the people we know have decided that "what THEIR heart says" is what must be truth.

Jerimiah 17:9 says "The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it?"

Naturally, when God was supposedly killed, such ancient wisdom became foolish. Today we "follow our hearts", and attack those who fail to agree with our own godlike view of "truth".

When a mob of young men attack a 74-year-old man and a middle-aged woman, as happened at Middlebury College in March in the case of Charles Murray and Allison Stanger, something deeper is afoot than American individualism run amok. When debate after campus debate is preemptively shut down due to social media threats of violence, reasoned talk of a “Reagan Dispensation” doesn’t begin to capture the menace there. Berkeley spent $600,000 on “security” for a visit by the conservative author and pundit Ben Shapiro. Non-progressive speakers who have nothing to do with racism or supremacism are regularly harassed, threatened, disinvited, and shouted down on campuses across the country. To ascribe these transgressions to identitarian narcissism alone is to miss what’s truly novel about them. And most chilling.

Many of the 4500 and rising posts in this blog call out the horror that we have (mostly) unwittingly unleashed. I could link you to MANY, however, I think "Darwin's Cathedral" is key ... a short excerpt from that post, all from page 228 of that book.

" It is true that many religious beliefs are false as literal descriptions of the real world, but this merely forces us to recognize two forms of realism; a factual realism based on literal correspondence, and a practical realism based on behavioral adaptiveness."  

"Rationality is not the gold standard on which all other forms of thought are to be judged. Adaptation is the gold standard against which rationality must be judged, along with all other forms of thought."  

and then ... "... factual realists detached from practical reality were not among our ancestors. It is the person who elevates factual truth above practical truth who must be accused of mental weakness from an evolutionary perspective". 

We pretty much all actually operate on a practical realism based on adaptiveness ... and we pretty much all think that OUR tribe really operates on a factual realism based on literal correspondence, and the other tribe is a bunch of evil lying "progressives", or "deploreables" depending on which tribe we identify with. The core problem is that without any transcendent meaning in our lives, "pleasure" tends to cloud our judgement, and any perceived threat to our determination of "truth" becomes ever harder for us to face with maturity.

Maybe that cultural scream of “mine!” is issuing from souls who did have something taken from them—only something more elemental than the totemic objects now functioning as figurative blankies for lost and angry former children. As of today, less than 65 percent of American children live with both biological parents, even as other familial boughs have broken via external forces like the opioid crisis, criminality and incarceration, and globalization. Maybe depression and anxiety have been rising steadily among children and teenagers for a reason. Maybe the furor over “appropriation” unveils the true foundation of identity politics, which is pathos.

The columns closing paragraph is powerful, and WAY too true in the world I see around me. I'll be reading some of the links and I'll continue to howl at the despair of our broken modern world with the only thing which I believe can save us individually or collectively -- The Grace of Jesus Christ through Faith Alone! On this 500th year of the Reformation, revive us again Lord Jesus!

Anyone who’s ever heard a coyote in the desert, separated at night from the pack, knows the sound. Maybe the otherwise-unexplained hysteria of today’s identity politics is just that: the collective human howl of our time, sent up by inescapably communal creatures who can no longer identify their own.

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The Final Days of Trump, Halloween 2016

The Final Days of Trump’s Unprecedented Campaign:

Unless you are really really into history, schadenfreude or both, reading the whole thing is useless. A year ago the MSM was as confident as they are today that they knew and know everything. They are never wrong -- what they count on is this ...

“His view is the American public has a two-to-three-week attention span. He may be right about that."

Well, yes, the 24x7 media spin machine, mass marketing, shallow, inane "entertainment" that is closer to mind control than anything else, the media certainly, and maybe even Trump, count on the reality that most of the BOistan public has AT BEST a couple of weeks of attention span.

So most people still believe a lot of what they read in the "news" ... like this paragraph, from a year ago this week.

"In recent weeks, the mood at Trump Tower has veered between despair and denial—with a hit of resurgent glee when the news broke that the FBI was looking into more of Clinton’s emails. When I asked one senior Trump adviser to describe the scene inside, he responded: “Think of the bunker right before Hitler killed himself. Donald’s in denial. They’re all in denial.” (As Times columnist Ross Douthat put it, in a tweet, “In Trumpworld as Hitler’s Bunker terms,” the FBI investigation is “like when Goebbels thought FDR’s death would save the Nazi regime.”)"

Yes folks, that is "real news", from the mainstream media -- it's WRONG to call it "Fake News", your attention span is supposed to be MUCH shorter than this!

Hey, and Ross "Doubt That" is still writing NY Times columns!

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