The Joint Chiefs Should Salute – Then Follow

You Want a Leader? Here’s a Leader

I am sure that Lt Col. Sheller knew that he was literally calling on his superiors to can him. His point is that all of the Joint Chiefs and many below them knew better than to do what the failed, corrupt politicians wanted them to do. THEY SHOULD HAVE RESIGNED rather than carry out the plan.But Milley et al showed themselves to be vile careerist toadies not leaders of integrity. Eisenhower warned us about this in his farewell address. Those compliant generals and admirals will retire to corporate board positions and wallow in wealth every dollar of which is tainted with the blood of fine, idealistic men like Stuart Scheller.

Those who are concentrating on blaming the addled crook in the White House and his coterie of Progressive sappers are missing a more important point. The Joint Chiefs are more guilty than they. We know what those political charlatans are. We should have been able to rely on good generals to fall on their swords and retire before obeying such obviously idiotic orders. They knew they were putting this disaster into motion and sent those people into harm’s way knowing there would be murder. What makes it worse is that they did it out of careerist greed. They want to live out their their corrupt lives with sinecures in the military industrial complex. That is the reason so many active and retired officers are so spinelessly woke. They sold out the people they lead. It only remains to see how many will die. Unless we stand up and insist on justice they will retire, take corporate or government positions and never have a thought for those whose blood taints every dollar and stock option.

Someone Must Pay

Max Soviak

The squared away young man in this picture is Max Soviak. I didn’t know Max but I know a young man very like him. I have a son who graduated high school the same year as Max. My son has a picture exactly like this one. All Navy Corpsmen do. It’s the picture they send home to their parents when they graduate from basic training.

I was overwhelmed with pride when I got my copy. So now, I have just a tiny inkling of what Max’s parents might be feeling on the news that Max has been murdered. He has been murdered in the worst possible way. I am not talking only about the savage explosion and hail of gunfire in the sneak attack and suicide bombing. I am referring to the murderously idiotic approach President Biden and his incompetent military stooges in the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

This is not complicated. The withdrawal from Afghanistan as it has been carried out is the disastrous equivalent of sawing off a tree limb while you, your family and all your friends are sitting on the limb. They killed Max and countless others with whom I do not have such a reason to identify.

Make no mistake. for all his befuddled statements about hunting down those who did this, Joe Biden has no intention of really owning his incompetence and resposibility. Biden, The Generals and Admirals and the Democrat party as a whole have now either destroyed The United States of America or we must hold them all to account for this.

Mr. “You Didn’t Build That” Throws a Party

You might have heard that there was a party on Martha’s Vineyard over the weekend. While many commentators have made good, well reasoned points about the incongruity of the maskless celebration of privilege, the flagrant hypocrisy and unselfconscious opulence of the occasion, I think the greatest irony has been, largely, missed.
You see, Mr Obama has turned the ultimate trick of the socialist oppressor. Has spent his public career telling hard working productive people (Joe the Plumber was only the prototype for you and me) that they don’t deserve to keep all of what they earn and create because we need to “share the wealth”. All the while, he has risen to the very pinnacle of status and wealth without ever having built anything himself. Having been handed everything in his career, from affirmative action educational opportunities, to a no-show, no-publish editorial post at the Harvard Law Review, up to and including two terms as the guilt-offering, Nobel Prize for showing up, worst ever (until his addled puppet, Biden!) president of the United States, he now, has somehow come by millions upon millions of dollars and basks in the adulation of sophisticates, performers and socialist agitators.
Just think on that the next time you look at the FICA column on your pay stub, or write your quarterly estimated payment to the IRS. For that matter, how about when you pay inflated prices for the gasoline you need to get to work because they hate fossil fuels. Think about it especially when you watch as our citizenship is cheapened, diluted and stolen by uncontrolled immigration. Don’t you resent it when any reasonable complaint you have results in you being accused of being a racist- or do you just try to ignore it? Do you even feel, anymore, the indignity of being forced to wear a mask, put unreliably tested bio-active vaccinations into your body and forego your parties and funerals? Have you given up resenting that you have to fight to protect the rights that our constitution granted us at the founding of the nation?
“You didn’t build that”, Obama and his party people did. And now he has everything and you don’t. That, my friend, is what socialism does. Party On!

Red Sun Rising

https://wgntv.com/weather/weather-blog/heres-why-the-sun-looks-red-this-week/

There has been a chilling avatar in the sky here in Boston and all along the northern swath of the U.S.. The midday sun has been turned red and the sky filled with a foul haze due to the huge wild fires out west. They (you know who they are) try to blame it on climate change whereas the real cause is the ignorant, emotionally infantile management of forestry that has held sway as Progressives have assumed the arrogant position that they can control everything – including nature. They have put out and suppressed the small brush fires so long that there is now enough fuel built up to incinerate the trees and the soil itself. This is the perfect metaphor for what is happening to our politics. The whole January 6th inquisition and the destruction of civic order and republican balance of the last year are burning off the very soil in which the republic is rooted. There is indeed a red sun rising.
The saddest thing is that even they don’t believe in these absurd and nihilistic ideas they stand behind. They are pathetic self hating careerists. As with the communist apparatchiks of Russia and China and the Nazis of the Third Reich, most of them are internally humiliated by the lies and idiocies (equity, CRT, BLM, open borders, diversity is our strength, pregnant fighter pilots, transgender bathroom access, etc..,) they repeat. They are demeaning themselves for personal gain and power- and then projecting the hatred and pain outward. It’s not that they don’t care about our Western Civilization its that they hate what they have become and blame the culture that set them free to become it.

This is covered elsewhere at American Digest and Neo Neo Con

Beware the Ideology Pimps

The politicians, corporation executives, media personalities and activists who are trying to move the United States toward Globalism and Democratic Socialism are heartless careerists and power hungry con artists. they are selling collectivism. Call it what you like, social justice, anti-fascism or woke, all forms of collectivism are just suave modern cousins to murderous Communism (Maoism, Stalinism, Khmer Rouge, North Korea’s Kim family), brutal Socialism (Nazism, Mussolini) and blood- thirsty Islamofascism.

They are all Utopian, New Man/New World Order ideologies that deny the realities of human nature. They intend to destroy the family and replace religion as the sacred belief system. The process begins with economic control and ends with mind control. The most important similarity, though is often overlooked. 

That thing they all have in common is the Pimp(s). Behind every one of these road maps to dystopia, past present and future, are a type of charlatan that I call Ideology Pimps. They call themselves Progressives. They want you to believe they are the smartest person in the room, so as to be able to force you to accept and live by their socialist dream; if you don’t, they are willing to rob you of your human dignity, deprive you of your possessions and turn society (and even your own children) against you. Once they assume unchallenged leadership, they will have the power to beat you into submission. If they can’t they might ultimately kill you.

They claim to be acting for the “The Greater Good” so you will have to agree- not just comply. You will have to say that you love it and betray your very core of values and self-esteem. But that’s what needs to be sacrificed for the greater good- and you must pretend not to notice that the pimp is just taking whatever wealth, power or social position they think they need- because they are only really after greater goodies.

An Ideology Pimp is, simply put, a grifter, a con-artist; a person who had nothing of productive value to offer in life but who has been able to identify an idea or accusation that enables them to galvanize others (sometimes vast numbers of others) to perpetuate their grift. They will use anything- racism, equity, patriarchy, sexism, fascism, capitalism anything that raises emotions and sets people against each other- the angrier, the better. They do not  care what is destroyed or who is hurt in the process.

The most successful of these grifters are the ones who manage to convince their followers that they are honest, self-sacrificing “Public Servants” or “intellectuals” who are only interested in doing what is “good and right”. It is a trick- a racket. These people are nothing more than ordinary human beings. Moreover, they are mostly emotionally damaged power seekers and singularly untalented in practical ways, unable to make a living by useful trades or occupations. Yet, they managed to have hit upon a way to support themselves -even create wealth and power- through ideology and artifice. They are human just like the rest of us- but they succeed by appealing to the many followers who mistake the brazenness of their lying and bullying for confidence and conviction. If they were truly servants, they would care about our lives and needs, listen to our opinions and not insist on being immune from our doubts or questions.

A recent terrifying example would be the way the media, and much of the left wing political elite fell in love with Michael Avenatti when he burst on the scene. The simpering  adoration among the progressive politicians and media was so blind and unseemly that it revealed to anyone with the ability to discern it that his promoters and followers were just as self-promoting, delusional and concupiscent as he is. There was even serious talk of him running for president in 2020. If there is anything that could make the choice of Joe Biden look better, that would be it.

Politicians, as Mr Biden did, often get elected once on the merest fluke of electoral luck. With sufficient luck, pandering and brazenness, they can then ply careers as incumbents- analogous to tenure in academia- forever after. The fund-raising power and the spurious claims they make to inside knowledge, selfless dedication and superior moral character that they receive through the office they occupy helps insure their survival.

The Democrat Party of today has declared itself free of facts, logic and the will of its own constituents. That’s not to say that there are not many Pimps in the Republican Party but it is the Democrat Party that has been entirely colonized. These grifters will sacrifice anything to gain and retain power. They will stop at nothing:

• They spend tax receipts until they use up all YOUR money and then raise taxes yet again.
• They use vast amounts of that taxpayer money to subsidize the mass migration of illegal aliens to compete with low-skilled and young citizens for employment.
• They manipulate corporate governance and government policy to allow your jobs to go to other countries and then blame you for being irate, despondent or both. All the while, China, other countries and multinational corporations find ways to make them and their families rich.
• They introduce divisive, demonstrably false ideological “education” (1619 Project and Critical Race Theory) into public schools, Federal agencies- and even the military resulting in the wrecking of moral, increase of racism and blurring of focus.
• By allowing public restroom access for those with “gender dysphoria” and bizarre sex education in K-12 schools, they will enable the molestation and humiliation of your children.
• They use exemptions from the law, fraud, graft and insider information to become fabulously wealthy while claiming to have nothing but altruistic and high-minded intent.
• The current Democrat leadership are an entrenched collection of aged careerists who, in moments of honesty reveal their megalomaniacal tendencies  (Schumer: “Now we take Georgia, then we change the world”), ignorant disregard for the effect of their actions on people  (Pelosi: “We have to pass the bill top see what’s in it”), addled, crooked and pliable “never weres” ( Joe Biden: “We have put together, I think, the most extensive and inclusive voter fraud organization in the history of American politics…”) and that they are so out of touch and condescending (Kamala Harris: “Because in some people’s mind, that means you’re going to have to Xerox or photocopy your ID to send it in to prove who you are. Well, there are a whole lot of people, especially people who live in rural communities, who don’t – there’s no Kinkos, there’s no OfficeMax near them”)
• They have allied themselves with the “intelligence apparatus” and the federal law enforcement agencies. whose power, Chuck Schumer warned President Trump and us about 5 years ago (“…they have six ways from Sunday of getting back at you”).
• They de-fund, handicap or even take away your police and then want to take away your right to own a gun; leaving you unprotected and vulnerable.
• The squelching of the best and most promising economic boom in more than thirty years (remember Ronald Reagan?) has revealed a willingness- even an eagerness to create a precedent whereby the government can force the population to submit to a whole spectrum of unconstitutional and extralegal restrictions even though they favor big businesses over small businesses, sacrifice the mental health and education of a generation of children, increase the dependence of a larger proportion of the population on government welfare (financed by a shrinking and increasingly hard pressed group that is still working) all of this, ultimately, only to limit the spread of a virus that is primarily a danger to the segment of the population that is actually already older than the average life-expectancy. 

Then, in the final insult to your human dignity, they insist that you limit your vocabulary to “correct” words, disregard your own observations and declare that you find them all honorable and trustworthy, that you agree with all of their unsuccessful policies, illogical ideas and scurrilous allegations. If you show any reluctance to humiliate yourself in this way, They will get you. If you are too much work to imprison or commit to a mental institution, they just dismiss you as a racist, a white supremacist a right wing terrorist- or worse yet, a Trump supporter. It is despicable and heartless. Given the lives damaged and lost in the quest for power, it is, really, a form of Human Sacrifice.

It is time- past time- to understand these are only people. You can dress them up in any title you want, they are just as greedy and dishonest as anyone else; all the more so because the less you hold them accountable the bolder and greedier they get. They are the very people The Founders warned us about.

The fundamental innovation of the American experiment is the universal truth that people are never to be trusted with unlimited power. But power is the only goal of the Pimp- the more the better. And now, they are openly seeking ways to eliminate the checks on their ambitions and the balances on their power. If we allow them to continue to “evolve” the constitution (pack the court) and our system of government (get rid of the filibuster) it will mean the end of government by the people for the people.

There really is no excuse for anyone to still be confused about what today’s Democrat party actually stands for- It beggars the imagination that even the most doggedly loyal and thickest liberal has not seen that the Democrat party is no longer a liberal political party in the old sense but a vehicle of enrichment and power for the elderly elite, their corrupted, coddled, idiot progeny (eg Hunter Biden, Chelsea Clinton!) and their young sycophants. To continue to amass that power they will sacrifice anything and anyone.

Between Two Childhood Plagues

In the fall of 1954 I was five years old. It was a plague year, not unlike this year. It was also a politically dangerous year. ’54 was the year I scared my parents very badly. Well, to be fair I was pretty frightening from the outset. I was very premature. It was touch and go for a week or so. I was born with what they now call Infant Respiratory Distress I had a gnarled- almost clubbed- foot and pronounced strabismus in my left eye. The doctor who delivered me told my parents that If I defied the odds and lived, I would probably never walk normally. Fortunately for me, Mom did not buy it.

She got me leg braces to straighten my feet out, walked me around as soon as I could stand, got me corrective lenses and then coached and hectored me mercilessly to exercise and practice with all my defective and dis-unified parts. By the time I was three, I was up and around and terrorizing everyone with my level of activity and impulsive behavior. It was about then that she realized that she a had enabled a monstrously hyperactive boy to express himself fully, in the most kinetic possible way.

But, I digress, back to 1954. As I said, ’54 was a plague year. It was not so much a twin to 2020-2021 but a mirror image- a perverse reversal. As there are now, there were two plagues stalking the land. One plague was Polio. Poliomyelitis, we also knew it as Infantile Paralysis, was rampant and the population most at risk were the children while Covid 19 is more of a threat to the elderly. Newspapers and magazines often featured horrifying pictures of rooms full of machines- giant gleaming steel tubes mounted on wheels with a child’s little head protruding from one end of each. They were called Iron Lungs and they were the only way to keep the children who were worst effected by the virus alive.
One of the odd symmetries between the two plagues is that in many states (New York and Massachusetts for example) 2020 many of the vulnerable elderly were shut into nursing homes with sick patients and healthy ones unsegregated leading to wild infection and death rates in that group. In the 1950’s schools and summer camps were open about as usual filling up more Iron Lungs with little heads.

So, I didn’t end up in an Iron Lung, but I did give my parents the biggest scare I ever could have without Polio. But they were scared for themselves. As I mentioned, I am “a Hyperactive”. I’ll make the case that Hyperactives are often well-meaning as kids. They just take a lot of joy in life and do not get stifled easily in that joy. As adults do, we learn to compensate with age and experience. We “get serious” and “fit in”.

My problem in 1954 was that at 5 years old, I passed an IQ test with a high enough score that my parents were able to place me in public school a year earlier than usual. So, there I was, I was not only hyperactive, I was a silly baby among older, more mature classmates.
It was not easy. Early in the school year, I got myself blacklisted by McCarthyism. Every morning, we all stood and recited The Pledge of Allegiance. This one morning, I stood with the rest of the class put my hand over my heart and began to repeat the words. I actually remember what happened next all these years later.

Everyone around me was facing the flag. I suddenly thought it would be great fun to turn around and face the back of the classroom while still reciting the pledge. The next thing I remember was the look on my teacher’s face as she came at me with the other, still reciting children scattering before her. She was angry and afraid.

The rest is a blur. I was taken out of class and sent to the principal. My parents were called and my mother came and got me. I remember the horror on my mother and father’s face as they tried to explain to me how very wrong and dangerous what I had done was. How people lost their jobs because of a careless word or action. I don’t remember most of the details but the sense of foreboding and my father saying the phrase “ruin your life” echoes through my memory.

It was an infantile parody of what was happening to untold numbers of people in America back then- I was blacklisted.

Blacklisting did ruin lives. People lost careers and were prevented from making a living. Many were shunned by their friends and families. There were suicides, addiction and broken souls. I was lucky- only suspended from school for a week. After being questioned closely again by the principal on my return, I was then released back into the Polio ravaged school.

The “other” plague beside Polio in 1954, you see, was a political one; McCarthyism.
If Polio was a mirror image of today’s Covid19, McCarthyism was the same for today’s Progressivism and its evil avatar, Wokeness. This plague is sweeping innocent people before it. It is carrying our nation, actually, our whole culture to the very brink of totalitarianism.

It is an ironic mirror image in which McCarthyism, which was an overzealous crusade against socialism and communism, now is replaced by the political proponents of collectivism socialism and communism. They camouflage their intentions under the banner of Progressivism but it fools no one who is paying attention this is not progress.
“Progress”, like all the rest of their words is a barbed hook hidden inside an enticing idea. Subscribe to their idea of progress and you have unwarily taken the hook. Once hooked, they can play you mercilessly.

The wonderful words they have baited! Take Social Justice – as if the word Justice needed to be further defined. Justice should be a purity in and of itself. When combined with “social” it becomes just another postmodern ambivalence to be debated and harangued.
Then there is “gun violence” by which they pander to people’s fear and insecurity. The expression implies the violence is caused by the guns and would not exist without them. It’s very telling that ever since the Ferguson riots were allowed to burn that city and the Philadelphia rioters were encouraged to “express themselves”, record-breaking numbers of Americans have bought firearms for the first time. They know that “progress” is now defined to mean that some people will be coddled and allowed to run riot while others will have their businesses burned and neighborhoods destroyed. They see the police being defunded, hamstrung and leaving the profession in large numbers. So, now they see that they have to take bottom line responsibility for their own safety and that of their loved ones.

Equality has perhaps the cruelest hook of all. It is the very heart of the socialist/communist argument. America’s shining achievement is that our constitution has provided the greatest equality of opportunity and justice in the history of the human race. But now, the hook of equality of outcome has been embedded in the national conversation. The only way to insure that, as has been proven time after time in country after country, is to diminish the results for everyone to the lowest denominator.

They argue that they can find ways in which America fails in her lofty goals and pretend that they have the remedies for the problems. Justice in America is not perfect, equality in America is not perfect, America is not perfect; but for them, the perfect is the enemy of their enemy..

This is a progress that calls for crushing everything in its way and destroying the lives of people who even so much as question the soundness of the movement, And Social Justice, I’ve seen it before and I don’t want it. Disguised as “social justice” and “progress” it is bent on the “cancellation” of anyone who does not faithfully subscribe to the dogma- and the dogma shifts relentlessly in one direction.

We have slowly lost our moorings in reality. People who do not work or contribute in any way to society are “entitled” to a dignified existence at the expense of others. Citizenship is no longer a privilege for legal citizens but a debased commodity for anyone who can sneak across the border. Men can pretend to be women and never be denied access to rooms that used to be private and safe for biological women. Male athletes can compete “equally” with females and no-one dares defend the rights of high school girls who have their achievements taken from them.

That way lies the destruction of order, logic, reason and everything that ennobles existence. It is also the opposite of the thing that our children need to nourish their souls and build their character. If the things that are good and bad, male and female, logical and illogical can change places so easily, immature minds become disoriented, lost. Much has been made ( and not much proven) of the Covid epidemic and the possibility that it is causing an epidemic of suicide and mental breakdown among teens and children, but there is little or no discussion of how the insanely counter-intuitive progressive ideology, the utter, bigoted savagery of social media and the cancelation of our cultural heritage, are robbing them of solid intellectual and emotional ground to stand on. It should surprise no one that diseases of despair are sky rocketing among our young- teen suicide has been rising steadily – it has quadrupled in the past ten years!

In the time of Polio the children were the canary in the coal mine. The adults had more to fear from McCarthy. Now it’s reversed. The politics are more dangerous for the children while the elderly are being swept away by the disease. To rescue the children, we need a national resistance movement to the progressive agenda. We need to vaccinate them with a love of liberty and sense of purpose. We need to honor reality, nature and God by not avoiding the hard fact that what we are and what we see around us cannot be changed by tricks of illogic and false language.

We need to reinstall our honorable value of “All men are created equal” as in our Declaration of Independence and remove “equity of outcome”. We need to teach them Justice- not pettifogging “social justice”.

Teens need a healthy, world of wholesome ideas and understanding for the natural urges and needs of their minds and bodies; not a censorious mental catechism without gender or authentic attraction, without greater rewards for their finer talents and hard work. They need the dignity of self-reliance, and the learned respect for loyalty, patriotism and courage. In short, they need someone like my mother who knew how to help a kid stand up for himself, pull himself together and grow up.

Note to the cancel culture: I’ve been blacklisted before- It will not happen again.

Lincoln, for Trump, For the People

Abraham Lincoln would be on Trump’s side. In his address to Congress on the third of December, 1861 Lincoln outlined how he saw the cultural forces that were dividing The Union. He was crystal clear on what was at stake. As he put it. “It continues to develop that the insurrection is largely, if not exclusively, a war upon the first principle of popular government,—the rights of the people.”

What leaps off the page for me is the universality of his message- and it’s direct reflection for us in this newly tattered Union of the United States in 2021. Lets start with the defamation of what is derided as “populism” but used to be known as government by the people. Lincoln says of The South and its sympathizers in the press:“Conclusive evidence of this is found in the most grave and maturely considered public documents, as well as in the general tone of the insurgents. In those documents we find…, laboured arguments to prove that large control of the people in government is the source of all political evil. Monarchy itself is sometimes hinted at, as a possible refuge from the power of the people.”

Today we face not intimations of Monarchy, but the social and cultural hegemony of an “expert elite class” who want to tell us what we can and cannot do or think- but the effect is the same. The freezing out and manipulation of the “will of the people.”
Lincoln continues, “In my present position, I could scarcely be justified were I to omit raising a warning voice against this approach of returning despotism.”

To identify the root motivation of the forces of despotism he to the central conflict we are witnessing he continues, “It is the effort to place capital on an equal footing with, if not above, labour, in the structure of government. It is assumed that labour is available only in connection with capital; that nobody labours, unless somebody else, owning capital, somehow, by the use of it, induces him to labour. This assumed, it is next considered whether it is best that capital shall hire labourers, and thus induce them to work by their own consent, or buy them and drive them to it without their consent. Having proceeded thus far, it is naturally concluded that all labourers are either hired labourers, or what we call slaves. And further, it is assumed that whoever is once a hired labourer is fixed in that condition for life.”

In one fell swoop, he has both made a powerful argument against the labor abuses of the early industrial age and set the stage (many months later) for the Emancipation Proclamation. Keep in mind, that he is not using the terms “capital” and “Labour” in the modern sense that was heavily influenced by Marxist Theory. In Labour, he is actually talking about the human dimension of what people can do themselves for themselves- each man or woman is an entrepreneur of their own production and can choose how to work to his own advantage. By capital he means both the (acceptable) ability to hire and the (unacceptable) ability to enslave. He makes that clear next:“Now, here is no such relation between capital and labour as assumed, nor is there any such thing as a free man being fixed for life in the condition of a hired labourer. Both these assumptions are false, and all inferences from them are groundless.”

Lincoln’s great genius was his combination of intellect and humanity. His intellectual understanding of the interactions of wealth, power and human nature are faultless and yet he also sees that it is really about the people and the relationships. He cuts to the core of wealth and labour and speaks to the ultimate origin of the wealth of the United States- the small, independent business- the ultimate human dimension:

“Men with their families—wives, sons, and daughters—work for themselves, on their farms, in their houses, and in their shops, taking the whole product to themselves, and asking no favours of capital on the one hand, nor of hired labourers or slaves on the other…, there is not, of necessity, any such thing as the free hired laborer being fixed to that condition for life. Many independent men everywhere in these States, a few years back in their lives, were hired laborers. The prudent, penniless beginner in the world, labors for wages awhile, saves a surplus with which to buy tools or land for himself; then labors on his own account another while, and at length hires another new beginner to help him. This is the just, and generous, and prosperous system, which opens the way to all—gives hope to all, and consequent energy, and progress, and improvement of condition to all. No men living are more worthy to be trusted than those who toil up from poverty—none less inclined to take, or touch, aught which they have not honestly earned. Let them beware of surrendering a political power which they already possess, and which, if surrendered, will surely be used to close the door of advancement against such as they, and to fix new disabilities and burdens upon them, till all of liberty shall be lost.”

Lincoln would be dismayed today to see the state of so many of our young people who leave colleges with their lives mortgaged so heavily by student debt, so neutered by the social and political correctness and so pathetically untrained in useful skills that they seemed doomed to corporate servitude -if not slavery. The expert elite have subjugated a great number of drones with easy college loans, post modern education and financial manipulation.

A couple of other points from earlier in this same speech draw the comparison to our situation much closer. In laying out the threat to the nation he begins with this chilling insight.“The principal lever relied on by the insurgents for exciting foreign nations to hostility against us, as already intimated, is the embarrassment of commerce. ” What he means in his speech, clearly is that The South’s attempts to coerce the support of other nations for their cause by using “King Cotton” as a bludgeon. 

The elites of the present day have no such obvious bludgeon as the slavery-produced cotton fibre that once ruled the textile industries of the world. They have something more imposing and subtle. Today, they have a computer driven information and control monopoly that manipulates everything from what information you can receive about anything to the way votes are counted in elections. And the foreign nation they have chosen to ally with against us is China.

 China has co-opted our ruling elites, ransacked our manufacturing sector, filched our intellectual property, poured addictive drugs across our borders and sent a plague upon our population. Our elites don’t respond. They think that have turned the tables on humanity- as the saying goes- “You are not the customer, you are the product.”
The ultimate “embarrassment of commerce” is happening to us and only a few are objecting. I am referring to the devastation of small businesses and family companies that is the Covid 19 lockdowns. 

Never, in Abraham Lincoln’s worst nightmares, did he ever imagine a danger to the soul of this nation as pervasive and evil as the unscientific, illogical, massive, prejudicial, immoral and extra-legal holocaust of independent businesses that has been enforced in this past critical year of 2020. Lincoln knew that the life’s opportunity provided by one’s own labor is the very foundation of our form of government he said as much in this speech of his. It is the very source of motivation. This is not just a matter of broken lives, bankrupted families and shattered dreams. It is an attack on personal independence and populism a cynical attempt to deal a mortal blow to government of the people, by the people and for the people.

The South and its sympathizers in his day, called Lincoln all kinds of names, uncouth, rude, idiot … They made fun of his appearance. They said he looked like a gorilla a simpleton. It was was partly because they had no answer for his ideas and arguments but mostly because he was not one of them- not one of the power elite of the day. One of them finally put a bullet in his brain but it was too late for “The Cause”. The same kind of insults and unreasoned hatred have been aimed at President Trump – instead of shooting him, they have tried to steal the election from him – that must not be allowed to pass.
If we allow the theft of elections, the destruction of independent businesses and the demoralization of our young to go on unanswered, the blame for it goes to the cynical elites but the shame is ours- all of ours. I’ll let Lincoln have the last word:

“The struggle of today, is not altogether for today—it is for a vast future also. With a reliance on Providence, all the more firm and earnest, let us proceed in the great task which events have devolved upon us.”

The Fight Will Continue

Note: This Post is live on American Thinker- With thanks to AT!

The presidential election of 2020 has revealed America’s present state of social and spiritual chaos. It has also cast light on the paths we might choose going into the future. While we wait for the Georgia senatorial runoff that will begin that future in earnest, here is where we are right now.

There are two different world views in competition. The one that seems to be on the ascendant, calls itself by many names so it is hard to pin it down. Let me try. All of these various names have aggregated themselves under the “big tent” of the Democrat party. There is a kaleidoscope of ideologies from the Muslim Brotherhood to Greens and Communists but the three largest and most often cited groups are liberals, progressives and socialists. Leaving aside the serious and unresolved argument that liberal is not the correct term in any way for what passes for the ideologies that predominate in that party, there is one core belief that they all have in common. In one way or another, they believe that human life can be perfected through government. 

They make it sound good by painting the benefits of government control with soothing words — equality, security justice — they leave out the part about the government the bullying involved. Liberals think that Social Justice can be achieved by passing laws to govern every aspect of social and personal interaction. Socialists believe that it is a legitimate governmental responsibility to see that no matter how hard one works, how intelligent one is or even how lucky one has been, that person must not have a vastly better position or wealth than anyone else.

Progressives just want to decide what is progress and what isn’t. They all, in their own way, want to increase the role of government in your life. When push comes to shove, to achieve any of that, government is a blunt instrument, a bully.

That is the nature of government. Our American system of government was created to protect the individual whose rights were endowed by God — to make life better by setting rules and keeping things fair. Our Constitution is the rule book and its best rule is that government should be limited. Government that is not limited is a jealous monster that wants more and more control all the time until it devours the people. There is a fine line between being governed and being ruled. 

That’s not to say the Republican Party is in any way ideal. It has been an unreliable ally, a fair-weather friend, to the cause of liberty. Many Republicans, Mitt Romney, Jeff Flake, Mike Lee and many others are either part of or have sold themselves to the corporate and high tech finance and influence sectors. They paint themselves as entrepreneurs, but they are really careerists of the most hypocritical kind. The irony is that even though they think of themselves as entrepreneurs, they also believe that government is the ultimate answer to all problems. They just believe in somewhat different goals. Without Donald Trump as the disruptor, The Republican Party would have continued on the path to irrelevancy that it scurried back to after the Reagan years.

The Trump presidency, above all, championed the idea that individuals can run their own lives and make decisions about what is right. To have freedom of (not from) religion. Businesses of all sizes should be able to take risks and create jobs without overbearing, senselessly inefficient regulation and confiscatory taxation by the government. It has been, above all, about returning the role of the individual and his aspirations to the central role in public life.

So, what was the election about, then, and what is at stake in the Georgia runoff? According to an Economist/YouGov poll, 75% of registered voters believe that there was voter fraud and that 40% believe that there was enough fraud to change the outcome. There is even a poll that shows that a significant number of Biden voters believe there was fraud. As the lawsuits and evidence pile up, this understanding will only grow. The more the media and Democrats argue with that growing understanding, the more they expose their need to govern our thoughts as well as our actions. This is the point at which being governed is no longer by consent — it is where being governed takes the fatal slide into being ruled over..

The people who pulled this theft off think that our history of peaceful transfers of power in the past is their guarantee that their theft will succeed. Like an over-confident bank robber, they have taken our Constitution hostage with this brazen heist and are now holding a gun to its head. “One false move,” they are in effect saying, “and we kill this thing and take over.” 

But it is clear that they intend to kill the Constitution whether we act or not. They have already declared that this is their aim. Now they are only using our reverence for it to quell us — to, in effect, coerce us into beginning our captivity voluntarily. Like the passengers on flight 93, we are being hijacked. If we don’t do anything, they will do what they want with us, take our guns first, confiscate our property through taxation and worse.

Most humiliating of all, they will force us to repeat their absurdities and lies. We will have to mouth the words that we believe that there are any number of genders that they can imagine — that men can chose to be women who can chose to be men. They will take our children away from us with indoctrination in public schools, and universities. They will force us to agree that we are irredeemable racists. They have already begun — just ask any of the several people fired from their jobs for so much as privately expressing support for President Trump. In short, they mean to rule over us, body, heart and mind in every humiliating way.

That is what the fight about the 2020 election fraud is about. It is about us, the more than 74 million people who understand this at some level, those who voted for President Trump. We cannot turn a blind eye to the theft of our rights. We know in our hearts this is wrong. We are the first and most fully aware victims of the downhill slide toward tyranny. There are many more though. There are polls that show that significant numbers, even of Democrat voters who think that there was significant fraud. 

We are right to be proud of being a nation of laws. The peaceful transfer of power has been one of the hallmarks of that civilized orderliness. We must do our best to keep it peaceful, but it does not have to be orderly or passive. Neither is it the most vital element of rule of law. 

The most important cornerstone of our rights and responsibilities in our system is the vote of the individual. If our votes are changed, discarded, diluted or negated in any way we have been betrayed. This is the result of the 2020 election all arguments about order and law are irrelevant if this is not addressed, investigated and the culprits punished. 

The founders defied the tyranny of Great Britain even though most of them had wanted to be good “subjects” of the king for most of their lives. They revolted, finally, because they were galvanized by the humiliation of knowing that being “subjects” of a king that lived on a different continent and ruled without consent was a form of slavery. They and so many generations of patriots risked everything to escape that servitude. We are now facing the gravest challenge to the survival of the Union since Lincoln’s day.

“The fiery trial through which we pass, will light us down, in honor or dishonor, to the latest generation. We say we are for the Union. The world will not forget that we say this. We know how to save the Union. The world knows we do know how to save it. We — even we here — hold the power, and bear the responsibility. In giving freedom to the slave, we assure freedom to the free — honorable alike in what we give, and what we preserve. We shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last best hope of earth. Other means may succeed; this could not fail.” –Abraham Lincoln, Address to Congress, delivered two months before the Emancipation Proclamation.

That Union, in the sense that Abraham Lincoln knew it was then and is still “the last best hope of earth”. That last best hope depends upon the primacy of liberty and the rights of the individual as expressed by the vote.

Statistically and from eyewitness accounts, we know that we so far surpassed the Democrats’ arrogant expectations of victory in 2016 that they could not cheat enough at the last minute to turn us back. This time, they were more prepared. They began months before the election, putting in place illegal mail-in ballot schemes and crooked machines. Even so, we outvoted them to such a vast degree that their cheating had to become too desperate and huge to hide — in spite of the best efforts of their lackeys in the media. The Biden “victory” is a lie that should not be allowed to stand. Its continued acceptance is corrosive and shameful to our very core.

The fight is not over; it goes on in the courts. If the courts fail us, it will continue in Georgia. I pray that Georgia will stand in the breach for us but if they don’t, the fight must go on, to the House of Representatives voting by state delegation.  This is still The United States of America. It is up to us, We the People, to remember why this is the greatest country ever- the last best hope. Lincoln outlined the choice, it is between nobly saving it or meanly losing it. 

The oaths of our military begin with the promise “…to protect and defend the constitution of The United States” first and above all other loyalties. If that is the last line of defense we must call on our military to defend us. God Bless the United States and the Constitution that created it.

Who Are We Now?

Who Are We Now?

Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.

Eric Hoffer

Eric Hoffer had it right about great movements but he need not have limited the idea only to great movements. There is a movement afoot in America today that has been a Racket from its very inception. This movement has declared itself to be in opposition to greatness. It has slandered greatness, calling it racism, white-supremacy, xenophobia, and theft. It is a movement cloaked in mystery. It has intentionally hidden its real meaning from the world. The Democrat party is at the center of that cloud of mystery. The Obama campaign characterized it as “Hope and Change”. Hope for what and Change to what were never specified. Hillary was too specific in the “I’m With Her” slogan. The Biden campaign called it “Build Back Better” the alliteration of nothingness. In any case, the Democrat Party has demanded that we believe that they are “Who We Are”.

As it turns out, all this movement needs do to smear and destroy anyone who opposes its “progress”, is to say “That’s not who we are”. That insidious non-sequitur has been used to compel huge numbers of people to at least pretend to believe that some very normal and reasonable beliefs that were universally accepted only years of months ago are not just wrong but outside the pale of acceptable humane ideation- “not who we are”. Here is a partial list of those ideas:

1. It is the right of a sovereign nation to maintain control of its borders 
2. There are two genders, male and female not withstanding a natural range of gender confidence or dysphoria 
3. The wish to have a means to keep public washrooms from being used by sexual predators to prey on women and children
4. That people who work hard to succeed should be able to keep, protect and enjoy the fruits of their efforts
5. Not every black male that is shot by a policeman is a victim of systemic racism even if he was in the act of endangering other black people, black police officers or even white people
6. Looting of retail stores and violent vandalism against public monuments are not “understandable reactions” and need to be punished
7. Small and privately owned businesses should never be driven out of business and otherwise sacrificed to test unproven and unscientific theories of pandemic management
8. The educational system from top to bottom should be a place of free exchange of ideas not indoctrination and safe spaces from scary ideas.

If any of these ideas in this list makes you in the least bit uneasy, you are not “who we are”. 

This is an artificially created “Movement” that is designed to already be a racket without having to evolve as Hoffer described. You don’t feel comfortable with the government raising your taxes to pay for medical care, food and shelter for millions of people who came and will continue to come to this country illegally? Well, THAT”S NOT WHO WE ARE, you xenophobe! 

If it seems illogical, that these ideas might be championed by our leaders and elites, then you are not seeing through the mystery they have cloaked it in.

This is how it works. You get to feel ashamed as they take your money and control more and more until they are overseeing every aspect of your life. Oh, and they get rich by thievery, collusion and scratching each other’s backs without any fear of punishment or, even embarrassment. That will be “who we are”- if we allow it to continue.

I do believe that enough of us saw this all clearly enough in this last election that we did give president Trump a big victory and that the victory was fraudulently perverted by those racketeers in the media, elites and governmental establishment who want to determine and control who we are. If the election cannot be salvaged legally, we are in for a rough time. Because I am hoping that accepting that theft really is not “Who We Are” yet.

When Liars Figure

The computer model is not God. After I got my MS in Statistical Analysis and Research Methodology, I was involved with all manner of “modeling” for a number of years. I can tell you, computer models are nothing more than a “black box” containing somebody’s theories and (and this is not an unimportant consideration) future career prospects. That black box has crank on it. When the crank is turned, a set of data (which in itself might have been collected in a biased way) is ground through an analytical process according to that somebody’s understanding of the universe. 

Computer models, in short, are made by people and they can only magnify the good or bad in the people that make them. Meteorologists, for instance, used to be called “weathermen” back in the days before their predictions reached a level of accuracy that inspired any confidence at all. Now, after developing their information gathering equipment and fine tuning their understanding of actual weather conditions, they are somewhere close to correct most of the time. Most of their biggest mistakes nowadays grow out of what is sometimes referred to as the “abundance of caution”. That is to say, if there is a possibility of extreme and dangerous weather, no matter how small, the weight given to that possibility in their predictions is subject to magnification for reasons other than “science”. Of course, that does not stop those predictions from being pumped up with more urgency. Media hysteria and governmental edicts often ensue.

So, if extremely accurate information about how present conditions, analyzed in the light of long term, meticulously collected and curated knowledge about those conditions, might effect the next 18 to 48 hours of local weather sometimes fail, how much faith should we put in predictions that stretch far into future weeks, months, years and decades. This is especially true if those predictions are made by models that are built on poorly collected data and run through a black box of assumptions that are no more than guesses and opinions. Even more so, when those predictions are mixed with social opinion and political priorities why would we have any trust in them at all?

We should not trust them. The track record of all of the most notable computer models used by politicians (mostly on the left) to make changes in our government and our lives have all proved out to be complete failures. Of the 50 reliably predicted catastrophes  generated by “scientific” modeling since 1967, not a single one has actually happened. In the sixties it was world wide famine by 1970. In the seventies it was the “coming ice age”. In the eighties it was “Peak Oil”. Now, Global warming has drifted into climate change.

It is an evil racket of politicians (who are only interested in getting reelected year after year) leveraging the avarice and self-interest of corrupted scientists (who live from government grant to government grant) that gives fodder to the elitist and biased media (who survive the collapse of real information by pimping bad information in exchange for “access”, punditry positions and more bad information). 

This is what you get when there is more in it for everyone to “scratch each other’s backs” than to stand up for some form of integrity or truth. Panic and fear are being used to reinforce the authority of entirely self-interested charlatans who pose as concerned saviors and (where have we heard this before) public servants. 

Just consider the naked hypocrisy of a Barak Obama buying a multi-million dollar waterfront home a scant few yards above sea level. He made that kind of money, in  large part, by sounding the alarm for years about the rise of sea levels predicted by computer models, that in turn were based on computer models of “global warming”. 

It’s not just a political game they are playing because they believe in socialism. These are hypocrites and fools of the first degree. It is careerism and greed in a very short-sighted and destructive form. They are constantly pushing narratives that are harmful to the nation and to the people who live here for their own purposes.

Two days ago, we saw the computer models stripped entirely of their scientific divinity. The pollsters failed utterly. The blue wave turned into a purple trickle. The defeat of Republican senators predicted by vast margins was actually truer in the reverse. Most of the contests were not even close. Far from increasing their hold on the House of Representatives, as so confidently predicted, the Democrats lost two seats. While the presidential election is still contested, the huge margins of defeat predicted for president Trump on a state by state basis were shown to be lies and now seem only to be supported at all by wholesale voter fraud.

It used to be true that “figures don’t lie”. That was in a time when the figures were as honest as possible and you could see whether numbers were collected honestly and then put into simple, forms like lists and cross-tabulations. Now there is an entire industry based on collecting biased data and grinding it through advanced statistical models that are too complicated to understand and where one assumption builds on the next. A single tiny shift in basic assumptions can twist the theoretical model until it represents a universe of apocalyptic dangers where none exist. This is the time when liars figure and the figures lie.