Coronavirus isn't Trumps Fault. Ebola wasn't Obama's Fault. SARS wasn't Bush's fault.
And only a handful of cases of herpes were Clinton's fault.
*.*
Two elderly couples were enjoying friendly conversation when one of the men asked the other, "Fred, how was the memory clinic you went to last month?"
"Outstanding," Fred replied. "They taught us all the latest psychological techniques, like visualization, association, and so on. It was great. I haven't had a problem since."
"Sounds like something I could use. What was the name of the clinic?"
Fred went blank. He thought and thought, but couldn't remember.
Then a smile broke across his face and he asked, "What do you call that flower with the long stem and thorns?"
"You mean a rose?"
"Yes, that's it!"
He turned to his wife, "Hey Rose, what was the name of that memory clinic?"
*.*
WASHINGTON, D.C. - Joe Biden has committed to wearing a mask in public to be a good example and to prevent the spread of COVID-19. Aides were disappointed and a little frightened, however, when Biden immediately cut a large hole in the middle of the mask so he could continue to invade people's personal space and sniff their hair, necks, and faces.
Staffers usually don't let Biden play with sharp objects, but he managed to find some safety scissors stashed behind the Metamucil in his campaign bus. Using the purple plastic scissors, he cut a large hole and then fitted the mask to his face, confident that he was protecting himself and others from the virus.
"That's better," he said as he cut a big hole for his schnoz. "Now I'm protecting against infection and I'm still able to give the ladies a good sniff. You know, in my day, I wore a mask just like this, as was the fashion at the time. All the kids at the pool would ask to play with the mask, and they'd run their fingers through it. In fact, one time, a gangster named CornPop was about to go cause some trouble at the sock hop, and I put some rocks in my mask and started swinging it around like a sling. You know, real Daniel and Goliath type stuff. He looked at me, tears in his eyes, and promised never again to go out and cause a ruckus."
"Anyway, that's why I'm your best choice for senator of the Roman Empire. Vote for Joe!" Biden said suddenly coming to and realized he was standing in a Walmart parking lot talking to a hobo.
*.*
What do Green Eggs and Ham and Fifty Shades of Grey have in common?
They both encourage people who can barely read to try new things.
*.*
My grandfather’s last wish was that we convert his ashes into a diamond.
That’s a lot of pressure.
Quote of the Times;
The debate over immigration is over: restriction wins. The debate over borders is over: they are needed. The debate over globalization is over: the era of autarky begins. The debate over Europe is over: it is a geographic expression, not a polity. The debate over global warming is over: it is irrelevant. The debate over international institutions is over: only nations matter. The debate over the People’s Republic of China is over: it is a menace to the community of nations, not a member in good standing. Crisis is clarity. This has been an era of clarification.
Link of the Times;
https://conservativebase.com/600-million-terrorist-money-trail-that-leads-straight-to-barack-obama
Issue of the Times;
Team Trump to Jim Acosta: Here’s Your Examples of Mail-In Voter Fraud by Charlie Spierling
President Donald Trump’s re-election campaign on Wednesday responded to CNN reporter Jim Acosta, who demanded evidence of the president’s claims of voter fraud.
“You’ve been talking about voter fraud since the beginning of this administration and where is the evidence of it?” Acosta asked during the White House press briefing, insisting that “all the experts say voter fraud is rare.”
Trump replied, “I think there’s a lot of evidence, but we’ll provide you with some, okay?”
The president’s re-election campaign responded quickly to Acosta’s request, noting there were nine people charged in the Rio Grande Valley in Texas with “vote harvesting” and mail ballots, a political operative in New York stealing and submitting absentee ballots, and a resident in Pennsylvania receiving seven separate ballots in the mail.
The campaign also shared a Heritage Foundation document of over 1,000 proven cases of vote fraud.
“Democrats and the mainstream media always scoff at claims of voter fraud, but then completely ignore evidence from across the country,” Trump 2020 campaign manager Brad Parscale said in a statement. “The obvious reason is that Democrats are just fine with the possibility of voter fraud. And many in the media just see the world their way.”
The Trump campaign also quoted an election expert in the New York Times who said although election fraud was rare, “the most common type of such fraud in the United States involves absentee ballots” through the mail.
President Trump cited ongoing legal action from Judicial Watch forcing states to clear millions of ineligible voter registrations within 90 days as proof of voter fraud.
The White House also shared details of 2005 commission led by President Jimmy Carter and George W. Bush’s secretary of state James A. Baker III that concluded mail-in ballots “remain the largest source of potential voter fraud.”
“Outside those in the establishment media who are more interested in attacking the President than the facts, there’s a clear consensus that universal mail-in voting would be vulnerable to fraud,” a White House source told Breitbart News in a statement.
News of the Times;
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/04/consider-possibility-trump-right-china/609493/
https://hotair.com/archives/john-s-2/2020/04/03/additional-evidence-coronavirus-accidentally-released-chinese-lab/
https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2020/04/06/gop-gears-up-for-next-relief-fight-democrats-want-the-federal-government-to-take-over-elections/
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/china-floods-europe-defective-covid-19-fighting-medical-equipment
https://hotair.com/archives/john-s-2/2020/04/03/venezuelan-naval-vessel-sank-picking-fight-cruise-ship/
https://thefederalist.com/2020/03/31/the-real-coronavirus-chronology-shows-trump-was-on-top-of-it-while-biden-was-mocking-the-danger/
https://www.redstate.com/sister-toldjah/2020/04/06/in-which-new-york-times-morphs-into-a-total-propaganda-tool-for-chinas-communist-government/
https://dailycaller.com/2020/04/06/trump-china-phoenix-tv-reporter-hong-kong/
https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/04/theres_another_side_to_the_story_of_the_fired_navy_captain.html
https://www.breitbart.com/the-media/2020/04/09/cbs-news-caught-broadcasting-fake-hospital-footage-second-time/
https://pjmedia.com/lifestyle/jussie-smollett-in-scrubs-cbs-story-of-crying-nurse-who-claimed-no-covid-19-protection-just-crumbled/
https://www.standard.co.uk/news/crime/three-jailed-enfield-rape-imprisonment-wood-green-crown-court-a4406911.html
https://www.unz.com/sbpdl/her-name-is-emily-jones-white-seven-year-old-brutally-stabbed-to-death-by-somalian-immigrant-in-british-park/
https://www.breitbart.com/clips/2020/04/06/home-depot-co-founder-congress-should-have-been-investigating-the-pandemic-not-impeaching-trump/
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/due-process-alyssa-milano-uses-conservative-argument-from-kavanaugh-hearings-to-defend-joe-biden
Examples?
Could?
After the COVID-19 pandemic winds down, we should honor truck drivers with a national holiday on October 4th.
A big 10-4, if you will.
*.*
After a long, dry sermon, the minister announced that he wished to meet with the church board following the close of the service. However, the first man to arrive was a total stranger.
"You misunderstood my announcement. This is a meeting of the board," said the minister.
"I know," said the man, "but if there is anyone here more bored than I am, I'd like to meet him."
*.*
Man wakes up in a slum with no memory of how he got there.
He wanders around aimlessly before he finds even one person who will talk to him. Some ratty beggar on the street turns out to be nice enough to explain where he is.
"You're in the afterlife!" he tells the man, "But you must have been a real shithead when you were alive, because this is the fourth ring, and only the worst people come here."
All of a sudden, a siren goes off, one of those air-raid things. The man is terrified but the beggar gets up calmly and leads him to a big, dilapidated warehouse where thousands of other similarly unkempt souls are gathering. When the man asks why they're all here, the beggar points to a line of folding tables against the wall. Each table has some moldy bread, cups of dingy water, and some bowls of broth so thin they could have just run out of cups. Only then does the man realize how hungry he is. A guard in heavy body armor blows a whistle and all the people arrange themselves into three lines.
The beggar is helpful enough to explain them for the man. "That one's the bread line, that's the broth line, and that's the water line. All the food here is free, but if you want to get out of this maggot hole, you've got to work, because the gate guards into the third ring ask five hundred dollars to get through. I've heard the food is better there."
So the man gets his food. It's abominable, and right then and there, he vows to make five hundred dollars and get into the third ring. Unfortunately for him, very few people need work in the afterlife, especially when all of them are saving up to emigrate. Even still, after ten years of hard work, eating the moldy bread and indistinguishable soup and water, he finally saves up enough money. The guards let him through and he finds himself in the third ring. It's nothing too fancy, if anything, it's a bit below average for a real city, but to his eyes it is paradise. All the guards look much friendlier, and the houses and buildings, while not spacious or lavish, are at least up to code. And to his surprise, he runs right into a familiar former beggar as he crosses the street.
"What are the odds?" they both ask and they get to conversing. The beggar, it turns out, only managed to make it in himself a few months back. Their conversation is interrupted, however, by what sounds like a school bell. When the man seems confused, the beggar leads him to what looks like a giant gymnasium. Here, people are gathering once again, and the man begins to understand. On a line of folding tables against one wall are stacks of hot dogs, big bowls of salad, and solo cups full of fresh lemonade. A cop shouts for everyone's attention and directs them all to stand in three lines. The beggar smiles at the man's wonder and points to each line in turn. "That's the hot dog line, that's the salad line, and that's the lemonade line." The man gets in each line in turn and gets himself his lunch.
While he's eating, basking in joy at not being stuck with old bread and water, the beggar encourages him, "The best part is, halfway through the year, they switch from hot dogs, salad, and lemonade to chicken, chili, and hot chocolate. You can never get tired of it!"
Sadly, this proved not to be true. After only a few days, the man did again get tired of the same meal every day. But he knew firsthand that he could change his lot, so one day he went up to the wall of the second circle. This time the guards were asking for ten thousand dollars. Well, the man didn't like it, but he figured he had his whole afterlife ahead of him now that he was out of the fourth circle, and he could certainly take some time to save up. After ten years of hard work, it wasn't too difficult for him to keep up the work ethic, and only twenty years later, he went back to the guards of the second ring with the money in hand. He went through the gate and found himself in a glittering, clean city full of glass and steel.
And wouldn't you know it, but there, standing across the street was the same beggar, only now he was wearing a well-fitted suit. The man greeted the beggar as an old friend and they started talking again. Once again, their conversation was interrupted, only this time it was by beautiful church bells. "Come," the beggar told him, "I'll take you to the evening meal." So the man followed and they entered a glamorous ballroom filled with beautiful attendees. Even the cops here looked good, dressed in suits and sunglasses like bodyguards. And sure enough, piled onto platters on huge mahogany tables against the far wall were plates of steak, bowls of the most delicious seafood soups, and glasses of champagne. One of the bodyguards cleared his throat loudly and politely requested that the attendees line up. Three lines were formed and the beggar pointed each line out in turn. "That's the steak line, that's the soup line, and that's the champagne line," and then he added, "and apparently here, they change the meals FOUR times a year!"
The man rejoiced, ate, and was happy, and for once felt that nothing was lacking. Four changes a year was enough for him. But one day, out of curiosity, he went up to the bodyguards that guarded the gate into the first and final ring of the afterlife and found they were asking for a million dollars to pass. Well the man was a bit disturbed by this, after all, the second ring seemed perfect to him. "What is it," he thought, "that could possibly be more wonderful than what I have here?" That question haunted him for weeks until he came to a conclusion. He was used to working hard and he had all of eternity to save up, so he wanted, just once to see what he could possibly be missing in the first ring.
Fifty years later, he returned to the guards with a million dollars. When he stepped into the first ring he fell to his knees. The architecture was glorious and inhuman, and the bodyguard had turned into shining angels. To his surprise, someone helped him up off the street and when he looked, he realized he recognized who it was--it was the beggar he met in the fourth ring, adorned in a golden robe and glowing, and when he looked down at himself he realized he looked much the same.
The beggar laughed jovially. "I got here only three years ago myself, but somehow I knew you would be right here behind me. I've come back to this gate every day waiting for you to make it in!" Suddenly, the air was filled with the sound of angelic choirs and the beggar led the man off to a gigantic palace made of crystal and cloud. The room was filled with radiant citizens of the first circle and angels prepared everything. Sure enough, there was a line of massive altars against one wall, spilling over with glistening golden dragon meat, a pudding refined from clouds and dew and silk, and an ice cold tub of ambrosia and nectar ladled out individually into blindingly beautiful crystalline chalices. An angel fluttered from the ceiling and bowed silently to the assembled mass, who bowed respectfully back and then broke themselves into their lines on their own.
Smiling at the tradition, the beggar pointed to the first line. "That's the line for the dragon meat," he said before turning to the next line, "and that's the line for angeldust stew," then he paused, confused.
"What is it?" the man asked his old friend.
The beggar replied, "There appears to be no punch line."
*.*
Back in the U.S.S.R.
An old Jew is on his deathbed. With weak voice he asks to call for a partorg because before his death he wants to join the Communist Party. A happy partorg rushes to him with filled out membership form to sign and a ready Party membership card. As the Jew signs the form he carefully takes the membership card and presses it against his heart.
In a peaceful and happy voice he whispers: "Today one more communist will die"
*.*
Yesterday I watched a match of women's volleyball, and 10 minutes into the game there was a wrist injury.
But by tomorrow I should be fine.
Quote of the Times;
“In just ten days, we discovered that neither the tampon issue, nor the participation of transsexuals in the Olympic Games, nor the climate emergency were real problems, nor emergencies, nor anything of the sort. They were just fictitious problems, the pastimes of a generation that hadn’t known tragedy.” - Diaz
Link of the Times;
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2020/03/29/the_medias_top_lies_and_spins_about_covid-19.html
Issue of the Times;
Spygate Could Make Watergate Look Like A Third-Rate Burglary by Chris Farell
The Spygate scandal is shaping up to be the most significant political abuse of government power in history. And it may be even larger than people expect.
The investigation by U.S. Attorney John Durham into the origins of the FBI’s Russian collusion investigation – or as President Trump prefers to call it, the witch hunt – continues to expand. Durham reportedly opened criminal investigations last fall. And unlike the narrow Justice Department Inspector General’s review of the abuse of the FISA process, Durham is looking into the questionable activities of other government agencies, in particular the CIA and its former director John Brennan.
The widening scope involves not only the agencies being investigated, but who was being targeted and why. Earlier last week Sharyl Attkisson reported that, based on her sources in the intelligence and law enforcement communities, the authorizations to spy on Trump functionaries such as Carter Page or former campaign manager Paul Manafort were actually pretexts for a much more expansive web of surveillance that could include anyone in contact with Page, or even anyone twice removed from the ostensible target. Hence, thousands of people could have been unknowingly caught up in the Spygate web and are still unaware that their privacy had been violated under the severely compromised FISA process.
This ties into the whirlwind of “unmaskings” during the 2016-17 transition period. Names of people inadvertently caught up in this expansive web, which ordinarily would be classified and their privacy interests protected, were revealed and information sent to Democratic allies in Capitol Hill for “safe keeping.” Judicial Watch has chronicled how Obama’s United Nations Ambassador Samantha Power and National Security Adviser Susan Rice, among others, colluded in this effort to bolster the “insurance policy” to hobble the Trump presidency.
There is also the matter of President Obama finalizing rules in the closing days of his administration that opened the raw, unedited information feeds collected by the National Security Agency to all of the 16 other agencies in the Intelligence Community before any privacy protections are implemented. This ill-considered and unnecessary rule change vastly expanded the potential for abuse in the system and was a curious move for Obama to make in the waning days of his presidency.
However, it makes perfect sense if you believe that Obama officials were doing their utmost to put in place a bureaucratic infrastructure seeking to undermine the Trump administration before it began. Also, factor in the distrust of NSA head Admiral Michael S. Rogers, who met with President-elect Trump in November 2016 and allegedly blew the whistle on the Trump Tower wiretapping.
Essentially, Obama’s rule change took Rogers out of the equation and gave other agency heads like Brennan and former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper the freedom to spread around whatever information the NSA was scooping up, whether relevant to Russia or not.
Thus, the people peripheral to Donald Trump who were the initial targets served principally as gateways to justify a massive domestic spying operation. And the ultimate target of this illicit activity was clearly Trump himself. It says a lot that given this unprecedented abuse of domestic spying, with the coup cabal having unfettered access to the virtually unlimited information collected by the Intelligence Community, and after two years of brutal investigation by the Mueller team, the effort to show ties between Trump and Russia came up empty. But the insurance policy at least achieved part of its objective in severely damaging the Trump administration in its first years.
Hopefully the Durham investigation will reveal the true extent of the spying operation, and how many innocent Americans had their rights violated and their privacy compromised. Another important question yet to be resolved is when Spygate started. For example, George Papadopoulos was being targeted by foreign intelligence services like Australia, perhaps at Brennan’s behest, months before Donald Trump was the Republican nominee. This raises the question, were members of other then-still active Republican campaigns being targeted in this time frame as well? Was this part of a general push to begin weaving the Russian collusion story against any potential GOP 2016 nominee, and not just Trump? If the answer to that question is yes, then it will be clear that the entire enterprise was not an intelligence operation at all but a criminal political conspiracy of unprecedented scope and impact. It would indeed make Watergate look like a third-rate burglary.
Chris Farrell is director of investigations and research for Judicial Watch, a nonprofit government watchdog. Chris is a former military intelligence officer who specialized in human intelligence.
News of the Times;
https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2020-3-28-china-makes-itself-a-laughingstock
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2020/04/outrageous-dr-birx-went-bill-gates-funded-coronavirus-model-sits-gates-funded-foundation-board/
https://spectator.org/the-orange-man-bad-disease/
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2020/03/new-revelations-about-woman-who-accidentally-poisoned-her-husband-to-death-with-fish-tank-cleaner-raises-eyebrows/
https://americanmind.org/features/the-coronacrisis-and-our-future-discontents/make-america-autarkic-again/
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/goldman-sachs-buys-2-luxury-private-jets-main-street-verge-collapse
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2020/03/flashback-former-joe-biden-secret-service-agent-we-had-to-protect-women-from-him-weinstein-level-stuff/
https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2020/04/03/donald-trump-i-think-a-lot-of-people-cheat-with-mail-in-voting/
https://gizmodo.com/man-tries-to-ram-train-into-u-s-navy-hospital-ship-do-1842645529?utm_source=digg
https://townhall.com/tipsheet/juliorosas/2020/04/02/gov-andrew-cuomo-has-not-accepted-remingtons-offer-ppe-ventilators-n2566211
https://pjmedia.com/trending/report-mueller-hid-evidence-exonerating-don-jr-over-infamous-trump-tower-meeting/
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2020/04/cdc-tells-hospitals-list-covid-19-cause-death-even-assumed-caused-contributed-death-lab-tests-not-required/
https://www.redstate.com/bonchie/2020/04/03/michigans-governor-tries-to-troll-trump-with-a-t-shirt/
https://www.wnd.com/2020/04/fellow-wh-correspondent-slams-acostas-style-not-opposition-party/
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2020/04/revealed-areas-hit-hardest-coronavirus-voted-trump-helps-anyways/
A big 10-4, if you will.
*.*
After a long, dry sermon, the minister announced that he wished to meet with the church board following the close of the service. However, the first man to arrive was a total stranger.
"You misunderstood my announcement. This is a meeting of the board," said the minister.
"I know," said the man, "but if there is anyone here more bored than I am, I'd like to meet him."
*.*
Man wakes up in a slum with no memory of how he got there.
He wanders around aimlessly before he finds even one person who will talk to him. Some ratty beggar on the street turns out to be nice enough to explain where he is.
"You're in the afterlife!" he tells the man, "But you must have been a real shithead when you were alive, because this is the fourth ring, and only the worst people come here."
All of a sudden, a siren goes off, one of those air-raid things. The man is terrified but the beggar gets up calmly and leads him to a big, dilapidated warehouse where thousands of other similarly unkempt souls are gathering. When the man asks why they're all here, the beggar points to a line of folding tables against the wall. Each table has some moldy bread, cups of dingy water, and some bowls of broth so thin they could have just run out of cups. Only then does the man realize how hungry he is. A guard in heavy body armor blows a whistle and all the people arrange themselves into three lines.
The beggar is helpful enough to explain them for the man. "That one's the bread line, that's the broth line, and that's the water line. All the food here is free, but if you want to get out of this maggot hole, you've got to work, because the gate guards into the third ring ask five hundred dollars to get through. I've heard the food is better there."
So the man gets his food. It's abominable, and right then and there, he vows to make five hundred dollars and get into the third ring. Unfortunately for him, very few people need work in the afterlife, especially when all of them are saving up to emigrate. Even still, after ten years of hard work, eating the moldy bread and indistinguishable soup and water, he finally saves up enough money. The guards let him through and he finds himself in the third ring. It's nothing too fancy, if anything, it's a bit below average for a real city, but to his eyes it is paradise. All the guards look much friendlier, and the houses and buildings, while not spacious or lavish, are at least up to code. And to his surprise, he runs right into a familiar former beggar as he crosses the street.
"What are the odds?" they both ask and they get to conversing. The beggar, it turns out, only managed to make it in himself a few months back. Their conversation is interrupted, however, by what sounds like a school bell. When the man seems confused, the beggar leads him to what looks like a giant gymnasium. Here, people are gathering once again, and the man begins to understand. On a line of folding tables against one wall are stacks of hot dogs, big bowls of salad, and solo cups full of fresh lemonade. A cop shouts for everyone's attention and directs them all to stand in three lines. The beggar smiles at the man's wonder and points to each line in turn. "That's the hot dog line, that's the salad line, and that's the lemonade line." The man gets in each line in turn and gets himself his lunch.
While he's eating, basking in joy at not being stuck with old bread and water, the beggar encourages him, "The best part is, halfway through the year, they switch from hot dogs, salad, and lemonade to chicken, chili, and hot chocolate. You can never get tired of it!"
Sadly, this proved not to be true. After only a few days, the man did again get tired of the same meal every day. But he knew firsthand that he could change his lot, so one day he went up to the wall of the second circle. This time the guards were asking for ten thousand dollars. Well, the man didn't like it, but he figured he had his whole afterlife ahead of him now that he was out of the fourth circle, and he could certainly take some time to save up. After ten years of hard work, it wasn't too difficult for him to keep up the work ethic, and only twenty years later, he went back to the guards of the second ring with the money in hand. He went through the gate and found himself in a glittering, clean city full of glass and steel.
And wouldn't you know it, but there, standing across the street was the same beggar, only now he was wearing a well-fitted suit. The man greeted the beggar as an old friend and they started talking again. Once again, their conversation was interrupted, only this time it was by beautiful church bells. "Come," the beggar told him, "I'll take you to the evening meal." So the man followed and they entered a glamorous ballroom filled with beautiful attendees. Even the cops here looked good, dressed in suits and sunglasses like bodyguards. And sure enough, piled onto platters on huge mahogany tables against the far wall were plates of steak, bowls of the most delicious seafood soups, and glasses of champagne. One of the bodyguards cleared his throat loudly and politely requested that the attendees line up. Three lines were formed and the beggar pointed each line out in turn. "That's the steak line, that's the soup line, and that's the champagne line," and then he added, "and apparently here, they change the meals FOUR times a year!"
The man rejoiced, ate, and was happy, and for once felt that nothing was lacking. Four changes a year was enough for him. But one day, out of curiosity, he went up to the bodyguards that guarded the gate into the first and final ring of the afterlife and found they were asking for a million dollars to pass. Well the man was a bit disturbed by this, after all, the second ring seemed perfect to him. "What is it," he thought, "that could possibly be more wonderful than what I have here?" That question haunted him for weeks until he came to a conclusion. He was used to working hard and he had all of eternity to save up, so he wanted, just once to see what he could possibly be missing in the first ring.
Fifty years later, he returned to the guards with a million dollars. When he stepped into the first ring he fell to his knees. The architecture was glorious and inhuman, and the bodyguard had turned into shining angels. To his surprise, someone helped him up off the street and when he looked, he realized he recognized who it was--it was the beggar he met in the fourth ring, adorned in a golden robe and glowing, and when he looked down at himself he realized he looked much the same.
The beggar laughed jovially. "I got here only three years ago myself, but somehow I knew you would be right here behind me. I've come back to this gate every day waiting for you to make it in!" Suddenly, the air was filled with the sound of angelic choirs and the beggar led the man off to a gigantic palace made of crystal and cloud. The room was filled with radiant citizens of the first circle and angels prepared everything. Sure enough, there was a line of massive altars against one wall, spilling over with glistening golden dragon meat, a pudding refined from clouds and dew and silk, and an ice cold tub of ambrosia and nectar ladled out individually into blindingly beautiful crystalline chalices. An angel fluttered from the ceiling and bowed silently to the assembled mass, who bowed respectfully back and then broke themselves into their lines on their own.
Smiling at the tradition, the beggar pointed to the first line. "That's the line for the dragon meat," he said before turning to the next line, "and that's the line for angeldust stew," then he paused, confused.
"What is it?" the man asked his old friend.
The beggar replied, "There appears to be no punch line."
*.*
Back in the U.S.S.R.
An old Jew is on his deathbed. With weak voice he asks to call for a partorg because before his death he wants to join the Communist Party. A happy partorg rushes to him with filled out membership form to sign and a ready Party membership card. As the Jew signs the form he carefully takes the membership card and presses it against his heart.
In a peaceful and happy voice he whispers: "Today one more communist will die"
*.*
Yesterday I watched a match of women's volleyball, and 10 minutes into the game there was a wrist injury.
But by tomorrow I should be fine.
Quote of the Times;
“In just ten days, we discovered that neither the tampon issue, nor the participation of transsexuals in the Olympic Games, nor the climate emergency were real problems, nor emergencies, nor anything of the sort. They were just fictitious problems, the pastimes of a generation that hadn’t known tragedy.” - Diaz
Link of the Times;
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2020/03/29/the_medias_top_lies_and_spins_about_covid-19.html
Issue of the Times;
Spygate Could Make Watergate Look Like A Third-Rate Burglary by Chris Farell
The Spygate scandal is shaping up to be the most significant political abuse of government power in history. And it may be even larger than people expect.
The investigation by U.S. Attorney John Durham into the origins of the FBI’s Russian collusion investigation – or as President Trump prefers to call it, the witch hunt – continues to expand. Durham reportedly opened criminal investigations last fall. And unlike the narrow Justice Department Inspector General’s review of the abuse of the FISA process, Durham is looking into the questionable activities of other government agencies, in particular the CIA and its former director John Brennan.
The widening scope involves not only the agencies being investigated, but who was being targeted and why. Earlier last week Sharyl Attkisson reported that, based on her sources in the intelligence and law enforcement communities, the authorizations to spy on Trump functionaries such as Carter Page or former campaign manager Paul Manafort were actually pretexts for a much more expansive web of surveillance that could include anyone in contact with Page, or even anyone twice removed from the ostensible target. Hence, thousands of people could have been unknowingly caught up in the Spygate web and are still unaware that their privacy had been violated under the severely compromised FISA process.
This ties into the whirlwind of “unmaskings” during the 2016-17 transition period. Names of people inadvertently caught up in this expansive web, which ordinarily would be classified and their privacy interests protected, were revealed and information sent to Democratic allies in Capitol Hill for “safe keeping.” Judicial Watch has chronicled how Obama’s United Nations Ambassador Samantha Power and National Security Adviser Susan Rice, among others, colluded in this effort to bolster the “insurance policy” to hobble the Trump presidency.
There is also the matter of President Obama finalizing rules in the closing days of his administration that opened the raw, unedited information feeds collected by the National Security Agency to all of the 16 other agencies in the Intelligence Community before any privacy protections are implemented. This ill-considered and unnecessary rule change vastly expanded the potential for abuse in the system and was a curious move for Obama to make in the waning days of his presidency.
However, it makes perfect sense if you believe that Obama officials were doing their utmost to put in place a bureaucratic infrastructure seeking to undermine the Trump administration before it began. Also, factor in the distrust of NSA head Admiral Michael S. Rogers, who met with President-elect Trump in November 2016 and allegedly blew the whistle on the Trump Tower wiretapping.
Essentially, Obama’s rule change took Rogers out of the equation and gave other agency heads like Brennan and former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper the freedom to spread around whatever information the NSA was scooping up, whether relevant to Russia or not.
Thus, the people peripheral to Donald Trump who were the initial targets served principally as gateways to justify a massive domestic spying operation. And the ultimate target of this illicit activity was clearly Trump himself. It says a lot that given this unprecedented abuse of domestic spying, with the coup cabal having unfettered access to the virtually unlimited information collected by the Intelligence Community, and after two years of brutal investigation by the Mueller team, the effort to show ties between Trump and Russia came up empty. But the insurance policy at least achieved part of its objective in severely damaging the Trump administration in its first years.
Hopefully the Durham investigation will reveal the true extent of the spying operation, and how many innocent Americans had their rights violated and their privacy compromised. Another important question yet to be resolved is when Spygate started. For example, George Papadopoulos was being targeted by foreign intelligence services like Australia, perhaps at Brennan’s behest, months before Donald Trump was the Republican nominee. This raises the question, were members of other then-still active Republican campaigns being targeted in this time frame as well? Was this part of a general push to begin weaving the Russian collusion story against any potential GOP 2016 nominee, and not just Trump? If the answer to that question is yes, then it will be clear that the entire enterprise was not an intelligence operation at all but a criminal political conspiracy of unprecedented scope and impact. It would indeed make Watergate look like a third-rate burglary.
Chris Farrell is director of investigations and research for Judicial Watch, a nonprofit government watchdog. Chris is a former military intelligence officer who specialized in human intelligence.
News of the Times;
https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2020-3-28-china-makes-itself-a-laughingstock
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2020/04/outrageous-dr-birx-went-bill-gates-funded-coronavirus-model-sits-gates-funded-foundation-board/
https://spectator.org/the-orange-man-bad-disease/
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2020/03/new-revelations-about-woman-who-accidentally-poisoned-her-husband-to-death-with-fish-tank-cleaner-raises-eyebrows/
https://americanmind.org/features/the-coronacrisis-and-our-future-discontents/make-america-autarkic-again/
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/goldman-sachs-buys-2-luxury-private-jets-main-street-verge-collapse
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2020/03/flashback-former-joe-biden-secret-service-agent-we-had-to-protect-women-from-him-weinstein-level-stuff/
https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2020/04/03/donald-trump-i-think-a-lot-of-people-cheat-with-mail-in-voting/
https://gizmodo.com/man-tries-to-ram-train-into-u-s-navy-hospital-ship-do-1842645529?utm_source=digg
https://townhall.com/tipsheet/juliorosas/2020/04/02/gov-andrew-cuomo-has-not-accepted-remingtons-offer-ppe-ventilators-n2566211
https://pjmedia.com/trending/report-mueller-hid-evidence-exonerating-don-jr-over-infamous-trump-tower-meeting/
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2020/04/cdc-tells-hospitals-list-covid-19-cause-death-even-assumed-caused-contributed-death-lab-tests-not-required/
https://www.redstate.com/bonchie/2020/04/03/michigans-governor-tries-to-troll-trump-with-a-t-shirt/
https://www.wnd.com/2020/04/fellow-wh-correspondent-slams-acostas-style-not-opposition-party/
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2020/04/revealed-areas-hit-hardest-coronavirus-voted-trump-helps-anyways/
Dakota?
Imagine if Americans switched from pounds to kilograms overnight.
There would be mass confusion.
*.*
Lines:
I'm not addicted to coffee, it's more of a committed relationship.
I run like the winded.
Scientists are warning AI superintelligence is on the verge of "destroying civilization." I'm looking around at what's going on in the world right now and the words, "too late?" pop into my mind.
Joe Coulombe, the founder of Trader Joe's, has died at the age of 89. So much for healthy eating.
Matthew Stafford and his wife are expecting their 4th child together. Yes, another completed pass.
Woody Allen has an autobiography coming out titled, "Apropos of Nothing" because the title "Not without my daughter" was taken.
A group of scientists are predicting that, due to climate change, half of the world's beaches will disappear by the year 2100. Then again, that means that half of the world's beaches will be new!
I'm trying to be positive about this whole coronavirus thing. I suppose we should be grateful it's not the corona-extra-virus.
China is cracking down on "sexual innuendo" and "celebrity gossip" under new censorship rules: Hey, "Nice set"… of regulations.
Iran has temporarily freed 54,000 prisoners to combat coronavirus. I'm trying to figure out how you ‘temporarily free' prisoners. "OK, you guys, I want you back here a week from Thursday!"
364 pound lineman Mekhi Becton ran a 5.10 40-yard dash at the NFL Combine. However, we're not sure where he is now as he was unable to stop.
*.*
Two engineers were standing at the base of a flagpole, looking at its top. A blonde walked by and asked what they were doing.
"We're supposed to find the height of this flagpole," said Sven, "but we don't have a ladder."
The woman took a wrench from her purse, loosened a couple of bolts, and laid the pole down on the ground. Then she took a tape measure from her handbag, took a measurement and announced, "Twenty one feet, six inches," and walked away.
One engineer shook his head and laughed, "Typical blonde! We ask for the height and she gives us the length!"
*.*
More lines:
Little League teams across the country are dropping the name Astro's because of the cheating scandal. In a related story, the Jetsons have dropped their dog off at the shelter.
Cleveland Browns tackle Greg Robinson was arrested with 156 pounds of pot in his vehicle. In his defense, he plays for the Cleveland Browns.
Roger Federer will miss the French Open after knee surgery, eliminating one of the easiest names to pronounce in the tournament.
The world's oldest man has died at the age of 112. I tell you, that title is cursed.
Former presidential candidate and spiritual guru Marianne Williamson is endorsing Bernie Sanders. The guy just can't get a break.
How we know we're getting old; we're just one away from going from The Monkees to The Monkee.
Supervisor: Why do I always have to come looking for you? Me: Because a good employee is hard to find.
I don't really mind getting older, but my body seems to mind.
The only thing Flat-Earthers fear is Sphere itself!
*.*
I went a wise man the other day for advice, and he said, "He who knows and knows he knows, knows not. He who knows not and knows he knows not, knows."
I don't know who's going to do my taxes next year, but I know it won't be him again.
Quote of the Times;
When a man is in a healthy state, his life is a constant creative process. He is inundated by feelings of love, of oneness with other human beings. The oneness is the awareness that he is not different from others. He wants to help them; he identifies with them; he senses that anything that is happening to them is happening to himself. A healthy person has a positive direction in his life. He wills his life in a positive direction, and he is successful – in business, in this thinking, in his feelings of contentment with himself. In that state there is little or no sickness and no evil. – Pierrakos
Link of the Times;
https://summit.news/2020/04/03/who-director-was-top-member-of-violent-ethiopian-communist-party/
Issue of the Times;
A Victory for Intellectual Diversity in South Dakota by Jon Schaff
South Dakota’s experience with intellectual diversity legislation is a case study for the nation.
During its 2019 session the South Dakota legislature passed H.B. 1087, a bill intended to promote intellectual diversity on the state’s six public university campuses. As signed by Gov. Kristi Noem, the bill accomplishes various goods. It ensures the right of controversial speakers to access campus space, protects the free speech rights of student groups, and sets up various reporting requirements intended to monitor intellectual diversity on campuses. An earlier version of the bill contained a curriculum requirement mandating that all South Dakota university students take at least one course in American History and one course in American Government. (Sadly, this provision was stricken from the final bill.)
Unsurprisingly, the state’s Board of Regents, the body that governs the six institutions, opposed the bill. Defense of the status quo and bureaucratic independence from political control typify the Board’s activity. The claims made by the Board included complaints about unfunded mandates and overly vague language regarding what counts as speech. While I would contend that these were weak arguments, the Board’s opposition was nearly successful. H.B. 1087 looked to be going down in defeat when near the end of session a group at the University of South Dakota sponsored a Hawaiian Day festivity as a way of breaking South Dakota’s winter monotony. University bureaucrats, though, determined “Hawaiian Day” potentially offensive, leading to the renaming of the event as “Beach Day.”
This bureaucratic silliness rekindled legislative debate and put wind in the sails of H.B. 1087’s supporters, as one of their complaints had been the metastasizing of university “diversity” bureaucracy. The bill ultimately passed. The state then held hearings in June of 2019 to gain input on how to implement some of the law’s provisions. I was pleased to work with Heterodox Academy in offering some suggestions. As of this writing, compliance is largely through reporting requirements on any infractions against free speech and cataloging outside speakers who come to campus.
A Stacked Deck
South Dakota’s experience with intellectual diversity legislation is a case study for the nation. We are in a position similar to those of many other states. South Dakota is a deep “red” state. Its entire congressional delegation (one House member, two Senators) is Republican. Republicans dominate the state legislature, outnumbering Democrats by a six to one margin. There has not been a Democratic governor since the 1970s, and the last time the state voted Democrat for president was the Lyndon Johnson landslide of 1964.
Yet, as is the case in the rest of the country, the universities are deeply “blue.” While it is fair to say that the worst of campus radicalism has not hit South Dakota, still the academic left is far overrepresented at the state’s institutions of higher education. A recent report from the National Association of Scholars notes that at the state’s two largest institutions of higher education, the University of South Dakota and South Dakota State University, the ratio of Democrat to Republican registration among faculty is about 5:1 and 3:1 respectively.
While party registration is an imperfect measure of faculty ideology, and South Dakota fares better than the national average (about 8:1), this is still far from parity. And the figures do not get to the power of administration and “diversity” bureaucracy to skew the university’s agenda. One is left wondering why the state’s conservative majority should shovel millions of taxpayer dollars to institutions that hold the majority’s beliefs in contempt.
South Dakota’s legislature, then, is to be commended for taking a proactive rather than reactive response to campus radicalism. H.B. 1087 was meant to be a prophylactic, not a corrective. While it is a shame that legislative action is required on these matters, the lack of intellectual diversity comes from within higher education, so it is hard to believe that the solution will also come from within. South Dakota is a microcosm of issues that have arisen all over the country, often in more serious form. Note the power of “diversity” staff, especially those on the student affairs side of the university.
One also cannot discount the nefarious influence of accrediting bodies. The Higher Learning Commission chided the University of South Dakota for its lack of attention to “diversity.” This accrediting wrist-slap explains in part the rise of “diversity” infrastructure within the state. Of course, for HLC “diversity” means everything but intellectual diversity. As in university assessment and accreditation, the way to appease complaints is to create offices with budgets and staff to show you are “addressing the problem.” The federally protected cartel which is university accreditation gives enormous power to these unaccountable bureaucratic forces that, like most of higher education, have drunk deeply from the draught of identity and diversity politics. The growing power of “diversity” officers has not been lost on the South Dakota legislature.
The original instincts of H.B. 1087’s sponsors were sound. The way to increase intellectual diversity is primarily through the curriculum, although the other provisions of the bill are laudable. I testified in favor of H.B. 1087 in front of the House Education committee, obviously speaking only for myself. There I noted that over the last two decades the state university system has gone through various curricular reforms, virtually all of them dumbing down the curriculum. For example, Western Civilization, once required of all students, is now simply one of a smorgasbord of courses that fulfill a humanities requirement. At this point, most South Dakota university students can graduate without taking a single course in history, government, economics, philosophy, or literature.
True Learning
To be sure, most students actually take courses in one or more of these fields. But this is by happy accident. We do not praise the blind man for inadvertently choosing the right road. Also, given recent changes to K-12 curriculum, the last time the State of South Dakota requires its students to take a history course on the American Founding is in the eighth grade when, as a friend notes, students are not far beyond the “draw a turkey with your hand” stage. So one can graduate from a South Dakota high school and then a South Dakota university without taking a single American history course beyond the age of twelve. We will call this person “educated” and then wonder why our populace is so civically illiterate.
The response to H.B. 1087 by South Dakota education bureaucrats has been to slow-walk compliance. It is an ill-concealed strategy by the Board of Regents and member schools to do as little as possible, trusting that other matters will inevitably distract our part-time legislature. The permanent executive branch generally exerts little control over the Board of Regents, which is nominally responsible to the governor but in practice tends to operate as an independent agency. Without pressure, it is difficult to see the system and individual institutions who opposed H.B. 1087 complying in anything but the most perfunctory manner.
One notes that of the six public four-year institutions in the state, only one (Dakota State University) names academic freedom or intellectual diversity as part of its mission. Only one (University of South Dakota) expresses a commitment to liberal education. It is a fair summary of the six university mission statements that vague references to “diversity” and “inclusion” dominate over any idea of academic excellence, preserving our civilization’s heritage, or placing intellectual diversity at the heart of the academic experience.
Those who wish for more ideological diversity on campus and a defense of the study of Western Civilization should avoid the temptation to bean counting. The point is not how many speakers hold what views or the ratio of right-leaning faculty to left-leaning faculty, although we could improve on these matters. The goal is to create a place where those who wish to challenge academia’s left-wing orthodoxies can do so with without fear of repercussion.
The Campus Expression Survey created by Heterodox Academy may be useful to this end. As NAS suggested in its own recommendations to South Dakota, intellectual diversity and “diversity offices” are often at odds. This may require minimizing if not eliminating offices and academic departments whose very reason for existence is ideological. In addition, students who wish to study the foundations of their civilization in a traditional manner need to have a place where they can do so.
This might mean curricular adjustments, namely requiring rather than suggesting certain fundamental courses. Universities can create centers like the Kinder Institute at University of Missouri, the Center for Freedom and Western Civilization at Colgate, the School for Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership at Arizona State, or the Center for American Founding Principles at Mercer. These are safe havens, so to speak, where students, parents, and funders (including legislatures) can be assured that the Western and American tradition is studied free of the ideological biases that dominate higher education.
South Dakota is in the process of implementing its legislation. In doing so, it just may set a model for the nation. But this will only happen if those who care about these matters remain vigilant.
News of the Times;
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2020/03/29/the_medias_top_lies_and_spins_about_covid-19.html
https://www.infowars.com/media-bleating-about-muslim-rape-gangs-takes-focus-away-from-islamophobia/
https://pjmedia.com/trending/what-the-media-isnt-telling-you-about-the-united-states-coronavirus-case-numbers
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2020/03/venezuelan-general-is-extradited-to-us-second-general-surrenders-after-us-puts-bounty-on-leaders-of-criminal-socialist-maduro-regime/
https://greenworldtips.com/tucker-carlson-savagely-obliterates-ilhan-omar-suggests-she-should-never-have-been-granted-citizenship/
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2020/03/good-guy-with-a-gun-stops-woman-who-allegedly-opened-fire-on-customers-at-tulsa-shopping-plaza/
https://jcpa.org/palestinian-authority-still-insists-on-paying-salaries-to-terrorists/
https://unclevladdi.wordpress.com/2013/04/05/moslem-criminal-appoints-ontarios-judges/
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/joe-biden-believe-all-women-except-one-accusing-me-sexual-assault
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/how-bill-de-blasio-botched-nycs-response-covid-19
https://jonathanturley.org/2020/03/28/you-will-see-darkness-meltdown-of-rep-haley-stevens-shows-how-hysteria-can-be-fueled-by-politicians/
https://economicprism.com/boeings-bean-counter-culture-and-mass-financialization/
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2020/03/cdc-is-now-tracking-millions-of-americans-by-using-cell-phone-data-but-dont-worry-because-you-can-trust-the-govt-to-not-spy-on-innocent-americans/
https://hbg100.com/2020/03/29/city-councilman-incites-blm-riot-during-covid-19-shutdown-in-newburgh-n-y-after-police-shooting/
https://breaking911.com/over-a-dozen-child-predators-nabbed-in-undercover-sting-in-florida/
There would be mass confusion.
*.*
Lines:
I'm not addicted to coffee, it's more of a committed relationship.
I run like the winded.
Scientists are warning AI superintelligence is on the verge of "destroying civilization." I'm looking around at what's going on in the world right now and the words, "too late?" pop into my mind.
Joe Coulombe, the founder of Trader Joe's, has died at the age of 89. So much for healthy eating.
Matthew Stafford and his wife are expecting their 4th child together. Yes, another completed pass.
Woody Allen has an autobiography coming out titled, "Apropos of Nothing" because the title "Not without my daughter" was taken.
A group of scientists are predicting that, due to climate change, half of the world's beaches will disappear by the year 2100. Then again, that means that half of the world's beaches will be new!
I'm trying to be positive about this whole coronavirus thing. I suppose we should be grateful it's not the corona-extra-virus.
China is cracking down on "sexual innuendo" and "celebrity gossip" under new censorship rules: Hey, "Nice set"… of regulations.
Iran has temporarily freed 54,000 prisoners to combat coronavirus. I'm trying to figure out how you ‘temporarily free' prisoners. "OK, you guys, I want you back here a week from Thursday!"
364 pound lineman Mekhi Becton ran a 5.10 40-yard dash at the NFL Combine. However, we're not sure where he is now as he was unable to stop.
*.*
Two engineers were standing at the base of a flagpole, looking at its top. A blonde walked by and asked what they were doing.
"We're supposed to find the height of this flagpole," said Sven, "but we don't have a ladder."
The woman took a wrench from her purse, loosened a couple of bolts, and laid the pole down on the ground. Then she took a tape measure from her handbag, took a measurement and announced, "Twenty one feet, six inches," and walked away.
One engineer shook his head and laughed, "Typical blonde! We ask for the height and she gives us the length!"
*.*
More lines:
Little League teams across the country are dropping the name Astro's because of the cheating scandal. In a related story, the Jetsons have dropped their dog off at the shelter.
Cleveland Browns tackle Greg Robinson was arrested with 156 pounds of pot in his vehicle. In his defense, he plays for the Cleveland Browns.
Roger Federer will miss the French Open after knee surgery, eliminating one of the easiest names to pronounce in the tournament.
The world's oldest man has died at the age of 112. I tell you, that title is cursed.
Former presidential candidate and spiritual guru Marianne Williamson is endorsing Bernie Sanders. The guy just can't get a break.
How we know we're getting old; we're just one away from going from The Monkees to The Monkee.
Supervisor: Why do I always have to come looking for you? Me: Because a good employee is hard to find.
I don't really mind getting older, but my body seems to mind.
The only thing Flat-Earthers fear is Sphere itself!
*.*
I went a wise man the other day for advice, and he said, "He who knows and knows he knows, knows not. He who knows not and knows he knows not, knows."
I don't know who's going to do my taxes next year, but I know it won't be him again.
Quote of the Times;
When a man is in a healthy state, his life is a constant creative process. He is inundated by feelings of love, of oneness with other human beings. The oneness is the awareness that he is not different from others. He wants to help them; he identifies with them; he senses that anything that is happening to them is happening to himself. A healthy person has a positive direction in his life. He wills his life in a positive direction, and he is successful – in business, in this thinking, in his feelings of contentment with himself. In that state there is little or no sickness and no evil. – Pierrakos
Link of the Times;
https://summit.news/2020/04/03/who-director-was-top-member-of-violent-ethiopian-communist-party/
Issue of the Times;
A Victory for Intellectual Diversity in South Dakota by Jon Schaff
South Dakota’s experience with intellectual diversity legislation is a case study for the nation.
During its 2019 session the South Dakota legislature passed H.B. 1087, a bill intended to promote intellectual diversity on the state’s six public university campuses. As signed by Gov. Kristi Noem, the bill accomplishes various goods. It ensures the right of controversial speakers to access campus space, protects the free speech rights of student groups, and sets up various reporting requirements intended to monitor intellectual diversity on campuses. An earlier version of the bill contained a curriculum requirement mandating that all South Dakota university students take at least one course in American History and one course in American Government. (Sadly, this provision was stricken from the final bill.)
Unsurprisingly, the state’s Board of Regents, the body that governs the six institutions, opposed the bill. Defense of the status quo and bureaucratic independence from political control typify the Board’s activity. The claims made by the Board included complaints about unfunded mandates and overly vague language regarding what counts as speech. While I would contend that these were weak arguments, the Board’s opposition was nearly successful. H.B. 1087 looked to be going down in defeat when near the end of session a group at the University of South Dakota sponsored a Hawaiian Day festivity as a way of breaking South Dakota’s winter monotony. University bureaucrats, though, determined “Hawaiian Day” potentially offensive, leading to the renaming of the event as “Beach Day.”
This bureaucratic silliness rekindled legislative debate and put wind in the sails of H.B. 1087’s supporters, as one of their complaints had been the metastasizing of university “diversity” bureaucracy. The bill ultimately passed. The state then held hearings in June of 2019 to gain input on how to implement some of the law’s provisions. I was pleased to work with Heterodox Academy in offering some suggestions. As of this writing, compliance is largely through reporting requirements on any infractions against free speech and cataloging outside speakers who come to campus.
A Stacked Deck
South Dakota’s experience with intellectual diversity legislation is a case study for the nation. We are in a position similar to those of many other states. South Dakota is a deep “red” state. Its entire congressional delegation (one House member, two Senators) is Republican. Republicans dominate the state legislature, outnumbering Democrats by a six to one margin. There has not been a Democratic governor since the 1970s, and the last time the state voted Democrat for president was the Lyndon Johnson landslide of 1964.
Yet, as is the case in the rest of the country, the universities are deeply “blue.” While it is fair to say that the worst of campus radicalism has not hit South Dakota, still the academic left is far overrepresented at the state’s institutions of higher education. A recent report from the National Association of Scholars notes that at the state’s two largest institutions of higher education, the University of South Dakota and South Dakota State University, the ratio of Democrat to Republican registration among faculty is about 5:1 and 3:1 respectively.
While party registration is an imperfect measure of faculty ideology, and South Dakota fares better than the national average (about 8:1), this is still far from parity. And the figures do not get to the power of administration and “diversity” bureaucracy to skew the university’s agenda. One is left wondering why the state’s conservative majority should shovel millions of taxpayer dollars to institutions that hold the majority’s beliefs in contempt.
South Dakota’s legislature, then, is to be commended for taking a proactive rather than reactive response to campus radicalism. H.B. 1087 was meant to be a prophylactic, not a corrective. While it is a shame that legislative action is required on these matters, the lack of intellectual diversity comes from within higher education, so it is hard to believe that the solution will also come from within. South Dakota is a microcosm of issues that have arisen all over the country, often in more serious form. Note the power of “diversity” staff, especially those on the student affairs side of the university.
One also cannot discount the nefarious influence of accrediting bodies. The Higher Learning Commission chided the University of South Dakota for its lack of attention to “diversity.” This accrediting wrist-slap explains in part the rise of “diversity” infrastructure within the state. Of course, for HLC “diversity” means everything but intellectual diversity. As in university assessment and accreditation, the way to appease complaints is to create offices with budgets and staff to show you are “addressing the problem.” The federally protected cartel which is university accreditation gives enormous power to these unaccountable bureaucratic forces that, like most of higher education, have drunk deeply from the draught of identity and diversity politics. The growing power of “diversity” officers has not been lost on the South Dakota legislature.
The original instincts of H.B. 1087’s sponsors were sound. The way to increase intellectual diversity is primarily through the curriculum, although the other provisions of the bill are laudable. I testified in favor of H.B. 1087 in front of the House Education committee, obviously speaking only for myself. There I noted that over the last two decades the state university system has gone through various curricular reforms, virtually all of them dumbing down the curriculum. For example, Western Civilization, once required of all students, is now simply one of a smorgasbord of courses that fulfill a humanities requirement. At this point, most South Dakota university students can graduate without taking a single course in history, government, economics, philosophy, or literature.
True Learning
To be sure, most students actually take courses in one or more of these fields. But this is by happy accident. We do not praise the blind man for inadvertently choosing the right road. Also, given recent changes to K-12 curriculum, the last time the State of South Dakota requires its students to take a history course on the American Founding is in the eighth grade when, as a friend notes, students are not far beyond the “draw a turkey with your hand” stage. So one can graduate from a South Dakota high school and then a South Dakota university without taking a single American history course beyond the age of twelve. We will call this person “educated” and then wonder why our populace is so civically illiterate.
The response to H.B. 1087 by South Dakota education bureaucrats has been to slow-walk compliance. It is an ill-concealed strategy by the Board of Regents and member schools to do as little as possible, trusting that other matters will inevitably distract our part-time legislature. The permanent executive branch generally exerts little control over the Board of Regents, which is nominally responsible to the governor but in practice tends to operate as an independent agency. Without pressure, it is difficult to see the system and individual institutions who opposed H.B. 1087 complying in anything but the most perfunctory manner.
One notes that of the six public four-year institutions in the state, only one (Dakota State University) names academic freedom or intellectual diversity as part of its mission. Only one (University of South Dakota) expresses a commitment to liberal education. It is a fair summary of the six university mission statements that vague references to “diversity” and “inclusion” dominate over any idea of academic excellence, preserving our civilization’s heritage, or placing intellectual diversity at the heart of the academic experience.
Those who wish for more ideological diversity on campus and a defense of the study of Western Civilization should avoid the temptation to bean counting. The point is not how many speakers hold what views or the ratio of right-leaning faculty to left-leaning faculty, although we could improve on these matters. The goal is to create a place where those who wish to challenge academia’s left-wing orthodoxies can do so with without fear of repercussion.
The Campus Expression Survey created by Heterodox Academy may be useful to this end. As NAS suggested in its own recommendations to South Dakota, intellectual diversity and “diversity offices” are often at odds. This may require minimizing if not eliminating offices and academic departments whose very reason for existence is ideological. In addition, students who wish to study the foundations of their civilization in a traditional manner need to have a place where they can do so.
This might mean curricular adjustments, namely requiring rather than suggesting certain fundamental courses. Universities can create centers like the Kinder Institute at University of Missouri, the Center for Freedom and Western Civilization at Colgate, the School for Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership at Arizona State, or the Center for American Founding Principles at Mercer. These are safe havens, so to speak, where students, parents, and funders (including legislatures) can be assured that the Western and American tradition is studied free of the ideological biases that dominate higher education.
South Dakota is in the process of implementing its legislation. In doing so, it just may set a model for the nation. But this will only happen if those who care about these matters remain vigilant.
News of the Times;
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2020/03/29/the_medias_top_lies_and_spins_about_covid-19.html
https://www.infowars.com/media-bleating-about-muslim-rape-gangs-takes-focus-away-from-islamophobia/
https://pjmedia.com/trending/what-the-media-isnt-telling-you-about-the-united-states-coronavirus-case-numbers
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2020/03/venezuelan-general-is-extradited-to-us-second-general-surrenders-after-us-puts-bounty-on-leaders-of-criminal-socialist-maduro-regime/
https://greenworldtips.com/tucker-carlson-savagely-obliterates-ilhan-omar-suggests-she-should-never-have-been-granted-citizenship/
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2020/03/good-guy-with-a-gun-stops-woman-who-allegedly-opened-fire-on-customers-at-tulsa-shopping-plaza/
https://jcpa.org/palestinian-authority-still-insists-on-paying-salaries-to-terrorists/
https://unclevladdi.wordpress.com/2013/04/05/moslem-criminal-appoints-ontarios-judges/
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/joe-biden-believe-all-women-except-one-accusing-me-sexual-assault
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/how-bill-de-blasio-botched-nycs-response-covid-19
https://jonathanturley.org/2020/03/28/you-will-see-darkness-meltdown-of-rep-haley-stevens-shows-how-hysteria-can-be-fueled-by-politicians/
https://economicprism.com/boeings-bean-counter-culture-and-mass-financialization/
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2020/03/cdc-is-now-tracking-millions-of-americans-by-using-cell-phone-data-but-dont-worry-because-you-can-trust-the-govt-to-not-spy-on-innocent-americans/
https://hbg100.com/2020/03/29/city-councilman-incites-blm-riot-during-covid-19-shutdown-in-newburgh-n-y-after-police-shooting/
https://breaking911.com/over-a-dozen-child-predators-nabbed-in-undercover-sting-in-florida/
Exporting?
All countries may eventually get coronavirus.
But China got it right off the bat.
*.*
My family treats me like a God.
They forget that I exist unless they want something.
*.*
A Japanese couple is having an argument over ways of performing highly erotic sex:
Husband: Sukitaki.
Wife replies: Kowanini!
Husband says: Toka a anji rodi roumi yakoo!
Wife on her knees literally begging: Mimi nakoundinda tinkouji!
Husband replies angrily: Na miaou kina tim kouji!
I can't believe you just sat and tried to read this. As if you understand Japanese! Unbelievable!
I knew you would read anything as long as it is about sex.
You need help!
*.*
I heard that Prince Charles tested positive for Covid-19.
Looks like he got coronated at last!
*.*
My wife has evil lessons with Satan every week.
I don’t know how much she charges.
Quote of the Times;
A wise and frugal government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, which shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. This is the sum of good government. – Jefferson
Link of the Times;
https://www.foxnews.com/world/what-are-the-wet-markets-coronavirus
Issue of the Times;
China is exporting far more than coronavirus by Chuck Norris
While I love people from every country around the world, I can't say the same about their governments.
China is already in global hot water for being the petri dish in which the COVID-19 (coronavirus) spawned. But that culpability and atrocity might pale in comparison to what else the Chinese Red State is doing.
The Chinese regime has been found guilty of continuing to kill tens of thousands of prisoners of faith and conscience annually and then sell their organs for profit. That was the final judgment on March 1 from an independent people's tribunal based in London, as outlined in a 160-page report, which includes an additional 300 pages of witness testimonies and submissions.
For those who didn't know about these atrocities against humanity, the report explained:
For over a decade the People's Republic of China has stood publicly accused of acts of cruelty and wickedness that match the cruelty and wickedness of medieval torturers and executioners.
If the accusations are true, then thousands of innocent people have been killed … having their bodies – the physical integrity of their beings – cut open while still alive for their kidneys, livers, hearts, lungs, cornea and skin to be removed and turned into commodities for sale.
Those innocents were killed by doctors simply because they believed, for example, in truthfulness, compassion, and forbearance and lived lives of healthy exercise and meditation and because the way they lived was seen as dangerous to the interests and objectives of the totalitarian state of the People's Republic of China.
And yet the People's Republic of China has done little to challenge the accusations except to say that they were politically motivated lies. …
If the accusations are proved, they will, inevitably, be compared to the worst atrocities committed in conflicts of the 20th century; but victim for victim and death for death, the gassing of the Jews by the Nazis, the massacre by the Khmer Rouge or the butchery to death of the Rwanda Tutsis may not be worse than cutting out the hearts, other organs and the very souls of living, blameless, harmless, peaceable people.
The chairman of the tribunal was Sir Geoffrey Nice QC, who previously led the prosecution of former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic for war crimes at the International Criminal Tribunal.
According to the Epoch Times, "Four methods of forced organ harvesting are currently known: killing prisoners by removing their organs; harvesting organs from prisoners after lethal injection; harvesting from prisoners who weren't dead after execution by shooting; and 'organ harvesting under the pretext of brain death.'"
In 2015, the Chinese government said it would cease forced organ harvesting from executed prisoners and rely exclusively on a new voluntary donation system.
But just months ago, in November 2019, a study published in the scientific journal BMC Medical Ethics found that "Beijing's reported organ donation numbers don't stack up, and there is highly compelling evidence that they are being falsified." (The availability of organs cannot be accounted for by the number of death-row executions and voluntary organ donations.)
The reason for the discrepancy is based in the inhibition and refusal of the Chinese people to donate their organs, which was made clear last year when the University of Arizona hosted a panel on China's forced organ harvesting.
Weldon Gilcrease, M.D., deputy director of DAFOH and a director and assistant professor of oncology at the University of Utah School of Medicine, explained: "Prior to 1999, [the] number of liver transplantations taking place in China was about 15 to 20 per year as an entire country, because there is a culture code within China that you take your body into [the] next life, so your organs must stay intact. Therefore, the donation rate is extremely low."
After 1999, however, there was an absolute explosion in the number of organ transplants in China, Dr. Gilcrease explained.
Since the early 2000s, Chinese hospitals have been providing live organs on demand. In just a few days or weeks, perfectly matched organs can "magically be acquired." And we aren't just talking about harvesting a few available organs; rather, there are 60,000 to 100,000 major organ transplant cases per year in China.
It was back in 2006 that former Canadian Secretary of State David Kilgour and human rights lawyer David Matas removed the Chinese veil of secrecy by uncovering evidence that Falun Gong prisoners of conscience were being murdered on demand to supply China's organ transplant industry.
In fact, there has been so much harvesting of human organs in China that it has become a major export industry, too, with even some Western countries in support, including "Canada, among other developed countries," as the Epoch Times again reported.
Fortunately, most developed countries have opposed it.
The European Union and the United States have condemned forced organ harvesting. And countries like Israel, Spain, Belgium, Italy, Taiwan and Norway have already enacted anti-organ trafficking legislation.
The Chinese regime's human rights abuses were just highlighted in a U.S. State Department report, including its state-sanctioned practice of killing prisoners of conscience for organ transplant surgery.
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said at press briefings last week and last July that China's persecution, abuse and atrocities against those who are simply expressing and practicing compassionate religious beliefs – including "underground" and "expendable" Christians, Tibetans and Muslims – is the "stain of the century."
"It's imprisoning religious minorities in internment camps – part of its historic antipathy to religious believers," Pompeo explained.
He concluded, "We pray for a day when Cubans, Venezuelans, Chinese, Iranians, and all peoples can speak and assemble freely without fear of their own governments."
My wife, Gena, and I are grateful that a bipartisan group of U.S. senators has drafted a resolution to expose China's barbaric human rights record as the basis for the country being unfit to host the Olympic Games in 2022.
When you write or call your government representatives and President Trump about continuing to fight to free the U.S. from its dependency upon China, particularly in the areas of medicine and antibiotics, tell them to fight even more ferociously against Beijing's atrocities of forced organ harvesting and trafficking.
Whether aiding us to fight against COVID-19, sparing human life in the womb or warring against brutal regimes that torture and kill their own people for the profit of organ sales, the wisdom of Thomas Jefferson applies: "The care of human life and happiness and not their destruction is the first and only legitimate object of good government."
News of the Times;
https://www.infowars.com/biden-haunted-by-sons-china-dealings-donor-steered-missile-technology-to-china/
https://www.theepochtimes.com/the-closing-of-21-million-cell-phone-accounts-in-china-may-suggest-a-high-ccp-virus-death-toll_3281291.html
https://pittsburgh.cbslocal.com/2020/03/25/pennsylvania-supermarket-throws-out-food-after-coronavirus-prank/
https://www.jobsjano.com/2019/10/transgender-boy-wins-girls-state.html
https://thedailycoin.org/2019/02/25/signed-executive-orders-reveal-trump-is-planning-mass-arrests-military-tribunals-for-deep-state-traitors-like-comey-clinton-and-obama-update/
https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/why-did-hundreds-ceos-resign-just-world-started-going-absolutely-crazy
https://www.aol.com/article/news/2020/03/25/waffle-house-declares-index-red-shutters-365-stores/23961221/
https://www.dailywire.com/news/epidemiologist-behind-highly-cited-coronavirus-model-admits-he-was-wrong-drastically-revises-model
But China got it right off the bat.
*.*
My family treats me like a God.
They forget that I exist unless they want something.
*.*
A Japanese couple is having an argument over ways of performing highly erotic sex:
Husband: Sukitaki.
Wife replies: Kowanini!
Husband says: Toka a anji rodi roumi yakoo!
Wife on her knees literally begging: Mimi nakoundinda tinkouji!
Husband replies angrily: Na miaou kina tim kouji!
I can't believe you just sat and tried to read this. As if you understand Japanese! Unbelievable!
I knew you would read anything as long as it is about sex.
You need help!
*.*
I heard that Prince Charles tested positive for Covid-19.
Looks like he got coronated at last!
*.*
My wife has evil lessons with Satan every week.
I don’t know how much she charges.
Quote of the Times;
A wise and frugal government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, which shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. This is the sum of good government. – Jefferson
Link of the Times;
https://www.foxnews.com/world/what-are-the-wet-markets-coronavirus
Issue of the Times;
China is exporting far more than coronavirus by Chuck Norris
While I love people from every country around the world, I can't say the same about their governments.
China is already in global hot water for being the petri dish in which the COVID-19 (coronavirus) spawned. But that culpability and atrocity might pale in comparison to what else the Chinese Red State is doing.
The Chinese regime has been found guilty of continuing to kill tens of thousands of prisoners of faith and conscience annually and then sell their organs for profit. That was the final judgment on March 1 from an independent people's tribunal based in London, as outlined in a 160-page report, which includes an additional 300 pages of witness testimonies and submissions.
For those who didn't know about these atrocities against humanity, the report explained:
For over a decade the People's Republic of China has stood publicly accused of acts of cruelty and wickedness that match the cruelty and wickedness of medieval torturers and executioners.
If the accusations are true, then thousands of innocent people have been killed … having their bodies – the physical integrity of their beings – cut open while still alive for their kidneys, livers, hearts, lungs, cornea and skin to be removed and turned into commodities for sale.
Those innocents were killed by doctors simply because they believed, for example, in truthfulness, compassion, and forbearance and lived lives of healthy exercise and meditation and because the way they lived was seen as dangerous to the interests and objectives of the totalitarian state of the People's Republic of China.
And yet the People's Republic of China has done little to challenge the accusations except to say that they were politically motivated lies. …
If the accusations are proved, they will, inevitably, be compared to the worst atrocities committed in conflicts of the 20th century; but victim for victim and death for death, the gassing of the Jews by the Nazis, the massacre by the Khmer Rouge or the butchery to death of the Rwanda Tutsis may not be worse than cutting out the hearts, other organs and the very souls of living, blameless, harmless, peaceable people.
The chairman of the tribunal was Sir Geoffrey Nice QC, who previously led the prosecution of former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic for war crimes at the International Criminal Tribunal.
According to the Epoch Times, "Four methods of forced organ harvesting are currently known: killing prisoners by removing their organs; harvesting organs from prisoners after lethal injection; harvesting from prisoners who weren't dead after execution by shooting; and 'organ harvesting under the pretext of brain death.'"
In 2015, the Chinese government said it would cease forced organ harvesting from executed prisoners and rely exclusively on a new voluntary donation system.
But just months ago, in November 2019, a study published in the scientific journal BMC Medical Ethics found that "Beijing's reported organ donation numbers don't stack up, and there is highly compelling evidence that they are being falsified." (The availability of organs cannot be accounted for by the number of death-row executions and voluntary organ donations.)
The reason for the discrepancy is based in the inhibition and refusal of the Chinese people to donate their organs, which was made clear last year when the University of Arizona hosted a panel on China's forced organ harvesting.
Weldon Gilcrease, M.D., deputy director of DAFOH and a director and assistant professor of oncology at the University of Utah School of Medicine, explained: "Prior to 1999, [the] number of liver transplantations taking place in China was about 15 to 20 per year as an entire country, because there is a culture code within China that you take your body into [the] next life, so your organs must stay intact. Therefore, the donation rate is extremely low."
After 1999, however, there was an absolute explosion in the number of organ transplants in China, Dr. Gilcrease explained.
Since the early 2000s, Chinese hospitals have been providing live organs on demand. In just a few days or weeks, perfectly matched organs can "magically be acquired." And we aren't just talking about harvesting a few available organs; rather, there are 60,000 to 100,000 major organ transplant cases per year in China.
It was back in 2006 that former Canadian Secretary of State David Kilgour and human rights lawyer David Matas removed the Chinese veil of secrecy by uncovering evidence that Falun Gong prisoners of conscience were being murdered on demand to supply China's organ transplant industry.
In fact, there has been so much harvesting of human organs in China that it has become a major export industry, too, with even some Western countries in support, including "Canada, among other developed countries," as the Epoch Times again reported.
Fortunately, most developed countries have opposed it.
The European Union and the United States have condemned forced organ harvesting. And countries like Israel, Spain, Belgium, Italy, Taiwan and Norway have already enacted anti-organ trafficking legislation.
The Chinese regime's human rights abuses were just highlighted in a U.S. State Department report, including its state-sanctioned practice of killing prisoners of conscience for organ transplant surgery.
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said at press briefings last week and last July that China's persecution, abuse and atrocities against those who are simply expressing and practicing compassionate religious beliefs – including "underground" and "expendable" Christians, Tibetans and Muslims – is the "stain of the century."
"It's imprisoning religious minorities in internment camps – part of its historic antipathy to religious believers," Pompeo explained.
He concluded, "We pray for a day when Cubans, Venezuelans, Chinese, Iranians, and all peoples can speak and assemble freely without fear of their own governments."
My wife, Gena, and I are grateful that a bipartisan group of U.S. senators has drafted a resolution to expose China's barbaric human rights record as the basis for the country being unfit to host the Olympic Games in 2022.
When you write or call your government representatives and President Trump about continuing to fight to free the U.S. from its dependency upon China, particularly in the areas of medicine and antibiotics, tell them to fight even more ferociously against Beijing's atrocities of forced organ harvesting and trafficking.
Whether aiding us to fight against COVID-19, sparing human life in the womb or warring against brutal regimes that torture and kill their own people for the profit of organ sales, the wisdom of Thomas Jefferson applies: "The care of human life and happiness and not their destruction is the first and only legitimate object of good government."
News of the Times;
https://www.infowars.com/biden-haunted-by-sons-china-dealings-donor-steered-missile-technology-to-china/
https://www.theepochtimes.com/the-closing-of-21-million-cell-phone-accounts-in-china-may-suggest-a-high-ccp-virus-death-toll_3281291.html
https://pittsburgh.cbslocal.com/2020/03/25/pennsylvania-supermarket-throws-out-food-after-coronavirus-prank/
https://www.jobsjano.com/2019/10/transgender-boy-wins-girls-state.html
https://thedailycoin.org/2019/02/25/signed-executive-orders-reveal-trump-is-planning-mass-arrests-military-tribunals-for-deep-state-traitors-like-comey-clinton-and-obama-update/
https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/why-did-hundreds-ceos-resign-just-world-started-going-absolutely-crazy
https://www.aol.com/article/news/2020/03/25/waffle-house-declares-index-red-shutters-365-stores/23961221/
https://www.dailywire.com/news/epidemiologist-behind-highly-cited-coronavirus-model-admits-he-was-wrong-drastically-revises-model
Medieval?
Harvey Weinstein has coronavirus.
Must suck to have something invade your body against your will.
*.*
Why is it that everyone’s stocking up on milk, bread and eggs?
When it hits the fan, I don't think my top activity will be making boatloads of French toast.
*.*
INTERNATIONAL SPACE STATION – Due to justified concerns about their own immune systems, an alien race has decided to postpone their plans for a hostile takeover of planet Earth until the novel coronavirus pandemic clears.
“Invading a new planet does require a lot of time, effort, and coordination, and if the time’s not right, the time’s not right,” an alien known as Yq9 told Gomerblog. “Humans have been on their planet for a long time and if they don’t have a handle on the virus, there’s a strong chance we won’t either. Those poor Americans are really struggling down there, it almost seems rude to invade, you know? Right now, it’s more fun just to be the spectator.”
The aliens have spent the past several days having many thoughtful conversations weighing the risk and benefits of taking over Earth now versus a later date in time. Ultimately the decision was unanimous: wait until later.
“There are several positives to waiting,” an alien known as Zq4 explained. “First, humanity might be wiped out by COVID-19, which makes our lives a whole lot easier. Two, if the human hosts of coronavirus die out, so might the virus. Three, we are all curious to see if Lebron James can bring a championship back to Los Angeles.”
The new invasion date is to be determined.
*.*
"Push harder" I shouted at my wife while she was in labor.
"Screw you" she screamed back at me.
Bit harsh I thought…, it wasn't my fault the car broke down on the way to the hospital!
*.*
This whole month I'm only eating yogurt and soup.
I gave up mastication for Lent.
Quote of the Times;
People don’t want to hear the truth because they don’t want their illusions destroyed. – Nietzsche
Link of the Times;
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KOTZMJMbyxc
Issue of the Times;
California Is a Cruel Medieval State by Victor Davis Hanson
One way of understanding California is simply to invert traditional morality. What for centuries would be considered selfish, callous, and greedy is now recalibrated as caring, empathetic, and generous. The current ethos of evaluating someone by his or her superficial appearance—gender or race—has returned to the premodern values of 19th-century California when race and gender calibrated careers. We don’t pay medieval priests for indulgences of our past and ongoing sin, but we do tweet out displays of our goodness as the penance price of acting amoral.
A paradox ensues that Californians both have a high, indeed smug, view of themselves and yet do a lot of damage to their fellow human beings. Their haughtiness is based largely on the reality that Silicon Valley, sandwiched between Stanford University and University of California, Berkeley, became the birthplace of the global computer, internet, social media, and a high-tech revolution. For progressives who deprecate the capitalist lifestyle, having a lot of money still allows one to say one thing and live out the opposite.
The state’s multi-trillion-dollar companies have hired tens of thousands of seven-figure, mid-level executives and computer experts who assume that life in the California coastal corridor is a birthright paradise.
The resulting tax revenue bonanza to the state allows one-party-rule to rid California of the old bothersome Reagan-Deukmejian-Wilson working- and middle-classes by embracing not-in-my-backyard zoning, identity politics, anal-retentive regulations, steep tax rates, utopian green agendas, open borders, and decriminalization of things that used to be felony offenses.
Indeed, the bigger and wealthier California became, the more the rich sought to privatize their lives and to give up on public services, the more the middle classes left the state, the more the poor from Mexico and Latin America crossed the southern border illegally, the more its schools deteriorated, and the more its infrastructure ossified and became decrepit, from century-old power transmission towers to pot-holed and jammed highways.
The resulting medieval society is now one of a few thousand millionaires and millions of lower-middle-class wage earners as well as millions of abject peasants and poor serfs. Those on the bottom receive relatively generous subsidies to just get by. Over a quarter of the state’s population was not born in the United States. A fifth lives below the poverty line. One-third of welfare recipients in the United States live in California. These are statistics of which our moralists in Malibu or Mill Valley either are ignorant, or simply shrug that they don’t care.
In a paradoxical way, California would have to become much more impoverished than it is now to seem a far worse abode than the birthplace of most of its current immigrants from southern Mexico, Central America, China, and Southeast Asia. That is, while the middle class has been leaving in droves, given the abject decline of their beloved native state, the even poorer newcomers have a quite different benchmark of comparison. Compared, to say, Oaxaca, or rural China, California’s is rich, free, and eager to subsidize even illegal arrivals.
Out of Sight, Out of Mind
The coastal rich and professional classes make so much that they are willing to put up with the state’s high taxes and poor services on three assumed premises.
First, state redistribution of some of their vast incomes doesn’t hurt all that much, while offering atheists, agnostics, and secularists generous medieval penance and fides as true-blue progressives. As long as the coastal tech economy, financial services, entertainment, tourism, and blue-chip research universities keep booming, the state within a state doesn’t worry about the funding-to-benefit relationship between soaring California taxes and commensurately declining public services.
Second, the coastal enclaves have enough money to navigate around the ramifications of their own ideology, whether by avoiding much of the state’s interior, putting their kids in private schools, living in tiny gated communities, buying concierge private healthcare, and ensuring that the Other, who daily ventures into their neighborhoods to do domestic and outdoor chores, leaves by nightfall. Buying a Range Rover or Mercedes SUV or even a Gulfstream is a good way to ease the burden of fighting climate change, just as one’s concierge doctor can galvanize his support for Medicare for All.
Third, our blessed lords and earls envision California not as a single state. Indeed, most coastal dwellers have never visited the small towns of the Central Valley or the Sierra foothills or the northern third of the state. Instead, they see these areas the way Manhattanites look at Rochester, or Chicago looks at southern Illinois. In their view, freakish 19th-century mapping created California, and so they have no concern what Outer Californians think of the way they govern the state.
The result is abject cruelty. How can state leaders impose the highest gasoline taxes in the country, and then allow sections of their main longitudinal freeways—large swaths of the 99, the central coastal 101, or most of the West Side I-5—to become gory 4-lane motorized gladiatorial arenas?
As traffic quadrupled over the last half-century, the state’s freeways necessary to drive across California remained calcified. And the result was that lots of people simply died, and that calculation was always baked into California governance as tolerable. By that, I mean, our masters of the universe couldn’t care less that the 99 “freeway” has become, by most metrics, the most lethal major thoroughfare in the United States. Out of sight, out of mind.
“Winners” and “Losers”
Much of the state is a natural desert—ironically in some of the tiniest places where the rich dwell, from Montecito to Carmel.
Yet no major reservoir has been built in nearly 40 years, a period during which the population doubled. No doubt, 19th-century California was a paradise—Hetch Hetchy undammed, the lush delta flooding over millions of acres, upstream salmon fighting the San Joaquin River white water from the Bay to the Sierra Nevada.
But such fantasies are no way to run a 21st-century state with open borders, 40 million people, and a population that to survive and eat needs daily vast transfers of irrigation and municipal water from the wet north and east to the parched center and west.
Releasing to the sea millions of acre-feet of reservoir water or never allowing it to be banked in established manmade lakes means that millions of struggling rural residents drill new, multi-thousand-dollar domestic wells to survive, farmers idle land, and the poor lose jobs. The elite response is that there is no mental connection for them between what is sold at Whole Foods and what is grown outside of Bakersfield or Salinas. They muse why do such exploiters of nature have to drain our state’s aquifer? And they assume that while Hetch Hetchy and the Owens Valley are critical to bring the anointed water, all other such huge water transfer projects should become negotiable.
One of the strangest sights in California is the horde of trailers, ratty cars, and dilapidated Winnebagos parked throughout moralistic Menlo Park, Palo Alto, and Sunnyvale, juxtaposed with gleaming high-tech corporate campuses. The most empathetic and caring people in the world, as they remind us hourly, turn out to be pretty callous about the “losers” in their midst who live in mobile and makeshift quarters on the street to keep Silicon Valley humming.
At least 19th-century company mining towns did not have the percentages of transients and homeless as does the richest, most caring landscape in the world. Those who can afford $1,000-a-square-foot coastal cottages assume that the losers who can’t code just couldn’t cut it. If you insist on driving a semi, or welding tanks, and you are not willing to program, then why in the world should you dare imagine that you deserve to live within 50 miles of the California coast?
To walk in areas of downtown San Francisco, Los Angeles, Fresno, or Sacramento is to venture into the pages of Boccaccio or Dickens, as thousands defecate, inject, eat, drink, and urinate on the sidewalks. Should the coronavirus ever incubate there among California’s hundreds of thousands on the street, the result would make the current nationwide caseload look like the common cold. Indeed, an epidemic among the tents and grocery carts of the state’s main cities would become hideous and terrifying—and right out of the accounts of Thucydides or Procopius.
These ebbs and flows of homeless villages often lap up near the commuting corridors of the hyper-wealthy pedestrians and commuters. The former appeared bothered and so play the role of mounted knights that rode on by beggars outside the walls of the keep.
Truth and Consequences
In California’s upside-down morality, what is ethical is allowing thousands to live in fetid filth and to endanger their own health and that of an entire city, or waving in millions of foreign nationals without health audits, background checks, or legal permission. The Silicon Valley moralist at coffee seethes that Trump “put people in cages,” while in private is relieved that there are not caravans of tens of thousands headed his way from Central America—in the age of the coronavirus.
What is now considered unethical would be either to provide planned suburban or rural homeless campuses with sanitation, clean food, and dormitory shelters, or to ask illegal immigrants in their home countries first to apply for U.S. residence through legal channels, to undergo legal, health, and job audits, and in the interval to learn English and the customs and laws of their desired new home.
Instead, opening the southern border to millions of destitute Central Americans and southern Mexican nationals is proof of one’s morality among the wealthy of La Jolla, Santa Barbara, Pacific Heights, and Sausalito—again at least in the abstract. Few of them venture to a Merced, Sanger, Madera, or Firebaugh school to see the impact of tens of thousands of immigrant youths, without English, money, or skills suddenly overwhelming local school districts.
Fewer experience the effects on driving and law enforcement when millions of foreign immigrants navigate without prior experience of U.S. traffic laws, and without licenses, insurance, and registration.
No moralist seems to worry that tens of thousands of Americans, among them Mexican-American citizens in particular, depend on access to state and federal dialysis centers and hospital emergency rooms, many of which are now overwhelmed with non-citizen new patients.
To write the above is proof of one’s callousness, to be its architect evidence of one’s caring.
So those who craft sanctuary cities never venture into the Reedley emergency room, or know what a rural Tulare County sheriff encounters on a Saturday night, or what it is like to drive late on a Saturday night on a rural road in Central California, or would dare put their children in the Delano public schools, or to live outside of Mendota with the house pump sputtering sand. Those who insisted on continuing with a money-draining, high-speed rail boondoggle rarely try to drive east on Highway 152 outside Gilroy and thereby learn the consequences of allowing roads to become Road Warrior death zones.
Those legislators and executives who dreamed up decriminalizing thefts under $950 never worried about how the lost inventory of a family-owned store destroys middle-class aspirations. They certainly are careful about where not to shop, especially not where hordes of teens swarm and walk out each with mysteriously less than $950 in loot.
California has become a cruel and unusual state because callousness and narcissism were redefined as caring and compassion.
News of the Times;
https://www.centerforsecuritypolicy.org/2018/11/26/decision-brief-president-trump-must-declassify-obamas-secret-psd-11-strategy-to-support-the-muslim-brotherhood
https://www.womenarehuman.com/trans-identified-twitter-engineer-rapes-his-wife-dana-mccallum/
https://www.popularmechanics.com/military/a31122720/kratos-xq58a-valkyrie-future
https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/03/despicable_joe_biden_is_trying_to_lie_his_way_into_the_white_house.html
https://www.infowars.com/left-wing-ars-technica-journalist-drpizza-convicted-of-pedophilia-offense/
https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2020/03/21/chinese-ambassador-lauds-hillary-clintons-attack-on-president-trump-justice-always-speak-loudly/
https://m.washingtontimes.com/news/2020/jan/25/george-soros-89-still-quest-destroy-america
https://americanmilitarynews.com/2020/02/illegal-immigration-down-80-percent-in-el-paso-because-of-border-wall-border-chief-says
https://www.thenewneo.com/2020/03/21/globalization-is-the-first-casualty/
Must suck to have something invade your body against your will.
*.*
Why is it that everyone’s stocking up on milk, bread and eggs?
When it hits the fan, I don't think my top activity will be making boatloads of French toast.
*.*
INTERNATIONAL SPACE STATION – Due to justified concerns about their own immune systems, an alien race has decided to postpone their plans for a hostile takeover of planet Earth until the novel coronavirus pandemic clears.
“Invading a new planet does require a lot of time, effort, and coordination, and if the time’s not right, the time’s not right,” an alien known as Yq9 told Gomerblog. “Humans have been on their planet for a long time and if they don’t have a handle on the virus, there’s a strong chance we won’t either. Those poor Americans are really struggling down there, it almost seems rude to invade, you know? Right now, it’s more fun just to be the spectator.”
The aliens have spent the past several days having many thoughtful conversations weighing the risk and benefits of taking over Earth now versus a later date in time. Ultimately the decision was unanimous: wait until later.
“There are several positives to waiting,” an alien known as Zq4 explained. “First, humanity might be wiped out by COVID-19, which makes our lives a whole lot easier. Two, if the human hosts of coronavirus die out, so might the virus. Three, we are all curious to see if Lebron James can bring a championship back to Los Angeles.”
The new invasion date is to be determined.
*.*
"Push harder" I shouted at my wife while she was in labor.
"Screw you" she screamed back at me.
Bit harsh I thought…, it wasn't my fault the car broke down on the way to the hospital!
*.*
This whole month I'm only eating yogurt and soup.
I gave up mastication for Lent.
Quote of the Times;
People don’t want to hear the truth because they don’t want their illusions destroyed. – Nietzsche
Link of the Times;
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KOTZMJMbyxc
Issue of the Times;
California Is a Cruel Medieval State by Victor Davis Hanson
One way of understanding California is simply to invert traditional morality. What for centuries would be considered selfish, callous, and greedy is now recalibrated as caring, empathetic, and generous. The current ethos of evaluating someone by his or her superficial appearance—gender or race—has returned to the premodern values of 19th-century California when race and gender calibrated careers. We don’t pay medieval priests for indulgences of our past and ongoing sin, but we do tweet out displays of our goodness as the penance price of acting amoral.
A paradox ensues that Californians both have a high, indeed smug, view of themselves and yet do a lot of damage to their fellow human beings. Their haughtiness is based largely on the reality that Silicon Valley, sandwiched between Stanford University and University of California, Berkeley, became the birthplace of the global computer, internet, social media, and a high-tech revolution. For progressives who deprecate the capitalist lifestyle, having a lot of money still allows one to say one thing and live out the opposite.
The state’s multi-trillion-dollar companies have hired tens of thousands of seven-figure, mid-level executives and computer experts who assume that life in the California coastal corridor is a birthright paradise.
The resulting tax revenue bonanza to the state allows one-party-rule to rid California of the old bothersome Reagan-Deukmejian-Wilson working- and middle-classes by embracing not-in-my-backyard zoning, identity politics, anal-retentive regulations, steep tax rates, utopian green agendas, open borders, and decriminalization of things that used to be felony offenses.
Indeed, the bigger and wealthier California became, the more the rich sought to privatize their lives and to give up on public services, the more the middle classes left the state, the more the poor from Mexico and Latin America crossed the southern border illegally, the more its schools deteriorated, and the more its infrastructure ossified and became decrepit, from century-old power transmission towers to pot-holed and jammed highways.
The resulting medieval society is now one of a few thousand millionaires and millions of lower-middle-class wage earners as well as millions of abject peasants and poor serfs. Those on the bottom receive relatively generous subsidies to just get by. Over a quarter of the state’s population was not born in the United States. A fifth lives below the poverty line. One-third of welfare recipients in the United States live in California. These are statistics of which our moralists in Malibu or Mill Valley either are ignorant, or simply shrug that they don’t care.
In a paradoxical way, California would have to become much more impoverished than it is now to seem a far worse abode than the birthplace of most of its current immigrants from southern Mexico, Central America, China, and Southeast Asia. That is, while the middle class has been leaving in droves, given the abject decline of their beloved native state, the even poorer newcomers have a quite different benchmark of comparison. Compared, to say, Oaxaca, or rural China, California’s is rich, free, and eager to subsidize even illegal arrivals.
Out of Sight, Out of Mind
The coastal rich and professional classes make so much that they are willing to put up with the state’s high taxes and poor services on three assumed premises.
First, state redistribution of some of their vast incomes doesn’t hurt all that much, while offering atheists, agnostics, and secularists generous medieval penance and fides as true-blue progressives. As long as the coastal tech economy, financial services, entertainment, tourism, and blue-chip research universities keep booming, the state within a state doesn’t worry about the funding-to-benefit relationship between soaring California taxes and commensurately declining public services.
Second, the coastal enclaves have enough money to navigate around the ramifications of their own ideology, whether by avoiding much of the state’s interior, putting their kids in private schools, living in tiny gated communities, buying concierge private healthcare, and ensuring that the Other, who daily ventures into their neighborhoods to do domestic and outdoor chores, leaves by nightfall. Buying a Range Rover or Mercedes SUV or even a Gulfstream is a good way to ease the burden of fighting climate change, just as one’s concierge doctor can galvanize his support for Medicare for All.
Third, our blessed lords and earls envision California not as a single state. Indeed, most coastal dwellers have never visited the small towns of the Central Valley or the Sierra foothills or the northern third of the state. Instead, they see these areas the way Manhattanites look at Rochester, or Chicago looks at southern Illinois. In their view, freakish 19th-century mapping created California, and so they have no concern what Outer Californians think of the way they govern the state.
The result is abject cruelty. How can state leaders impose the highest gasoline taxes in the country, and then allow sections of their main longitudinal freeways—large swaths of the 99, the central coastal 101, or most of the West Side I-5—to become gory 4-lane motorized gladiatorial arenas?
As traffic quadrupled over the last half-century, the state’s freeways necessary to drive across California remained calcified. And the result was that lots of people simply died, and that calculation was always baked into California governance as tolerable. By that, I mean, our masters of the universe couldn’t care less that the 99 “freeway” has become, by most metrics, the most lethal major thoroughfare in the United States. Out of sight, out of mind.
“Winners” and “Losers”
Much of the state is a natural desert—ironically in some of the tiniest places where the rich dwell, from Montecito to Carmel.
Yet no major reservoir has been built in nearly 40 years, a period during which the population doubled. No doubt, 19th-century California was a paradise—Hetch Hetchy undammed, the lush delta flooding over millions of acres, upstream salmon fighting the San Joaquin River white water from the Bay to the Sierra Nevada.
But such fantasies are no way to run a 21st-century state with open borders, 40 million people, and a population that to survive and eat needs daily vast transfers of irrigation and municipal water from the wet north and east to the parched center and west.
Releasing to the sea millions of acre-feet of reservoir water or never allowing it to be banked in established manmade lakes means that millions of struggling rural residents drill new, multi-thousand-dollar domestic wells to survive, farmers idle land, and the poor lose jobs. The elite response is that there is no mental connection for them between what is sold at Whole Foods and what is grown outside of Bakersfield or Salinas. They muse why do such exploiters of nature have to drain our state’s aquifer? And they assume that while Hetch Hetchy and the Owens Valley are critical to bring the anointed water, all other such huge water transfer projects should become negotiable.
One of the strangest sights in California is the horde of trailers, ratty cars, and dilapidated Winnebagos parked throughout moralistic Menlo Park, Palo Alto, and Sunnyvale, juxtaposed with gleaming high-tech corporate campuses. The most empathetic and caring people in the world, as they remind us hourly, turn out to be pretty callous about the “losers” in their midst who live in mobile and makeshift quarters on the street to keep Silicon Valley humming.
At least 19th-century company mining towns did not have the percentages of transients and homeless as does the richest, most caring landscape in the world. Those who can afford $1,000-a-square-foot coastal cottages assume that the losers who can’t code just couldn’t cut it. If you insist on driving a semi, or welding tanks, and you are not willing to program, then why in the world should you dare imagine that you deserve to live within 50 miles of the California coast?
To walk in areas of downtown San Francisco, Los Angeles, Fresno, or Sacramento is to venture into the pages of Boccaccio or Dickens, as thousands defecate, inject, eat, drink, and urinate on the sidewalks. Should the coronavirus ever incubate there among California’s hundreds of thousands on the street, the result would make the current nationwide caseload look like the common cold. Indeed, an epidemic among the tents and grocery carts of the state’s main cities would become hideous and terrifying—and right out of the accounts of Thucydides or Procopius.
These ebbs and flows of homeless villages often lap up near the commuting corridors of the hyper-wealthy pedestrians and commuters. The former appeared bothered and so play the role of mounted knights that rode on by beggars outside the walls of the keep.
Truth and Consequences
In California’s upside-down morality, what is ethical is allowing thousands to live in fetid filth and to endanger their own health and that of an entire city, or waving in millions of foreign nationals without health audits, background checks, or legal permission. The Silicon Valley moralist at coffee seethes that Trump “put people in cages,” while in private is relieved that there are not caravans of tens of thousands headed his way from Central America—in the age of the coronavirus.
What is now considered unethical would be either to provide planned suburban or rural homeless campuses with sanitation, clean food, and dormitory shelters, or to ask illegal immigrants in their home countries first to apply for U.S. residence through legal channels, to undergo legal, health, and job audits, and in the interval to learn English and the customs and laws of their desired new home.
Instead, opening the southern border to millions of destitute Central Americans and southern Mexican nationals is proof of one’s morality among the wealthy of La Jolla, Santa Barbara, Pacific Heights, and Sausalito—again at least in the abstract. Few of them venture to a Merced, Sanger, Madera, or Firebaugh school to see the impact of tens of thousands of immigrant youths, without English, money, or skills suddenly overwhelming local school districts.
Fewer experience the effects on driving and law enforcement when millions of foreign immigrants navigate without prior experience of U.S. traffic laws, and without licenses, insurance, and registration.
No moralist seems to worry that tens of thousands of Americans, among them Mexican-American citizens in particular, depend on access to state and federal dialysis centers and hospital emergency rooms, many of which are now overwhelmed with non-citizen new patients.
To write the above is proof of one’s callousness, to be its architect evidence of one’s caring.
So those who craft sanctuary cities never venture into the Reedley emergency room, or know what a rural Tulare County sheriff encounters on a Saturday night, or what it is like to drive late on a Saturday night on a rural road in Central California, or would dare put their children in the Delano public schools, or to live outside of Mendota with the house pump sputtering sand. Those who insisted on continuing with a money-draining, high-speed rail boondoggle rarely try to drive east on Highway 152 outside Gilroy and thereby learn the consequences of allowing roads to become Road Warrior death zones.
Those legislators and executives who dreamed up decriminalizing thefts under $950 never worried about how the lost inventory of a family-owned store destroys middle-class aspirations. They certainly are careful about where not to shop, especially not where hordes of teens swarm and walk out each with mysteriously less than $950 in loot.
California has become a cruel and unusual state because callousness and narcissism were redefined as caring and compassion.
News of the Times;
https://www.centerforsecuritypolicy.org/2018/11/26/decision-brief-president-trump-must-declassify-obamas-secret-psd-11-strategy-to-support-the-muslim-brotherhood
https://www.womenarehuman.com/trans-identified-twitter-engineer-rapes-his-wife-dana-mccallum/
https://www.popularmechanics.com/military/a31122720/kratos-xq58a-valkyrie-future
https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/03/despicable_joe_biden_is_trying_to_lie_his_way_into_the_white_house.html
https://www.infowars.com/left-wing-ars-technica-journalist-drpizza-convicted-of-pedophilia-offense/
https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2020/03/21/chinese-ambassador-lauds-hillary-clintons-attack-on-president-trump-justice-always-speak-loudly/
https://m.washingtontimes.com/news/2020/jan/25/george-soros-89-still-quest-destroy-america
https://americanmilitarynews.com/2020/02/illegal-immigration-down-80-percent-in-el-paso-because-of-border-wall-border-chief-says
https://www.thenewneo.com/2020/03/21/globalization-is-the-first-casualty/
Several animals were savagely beaten in the making of this page, including but not limited to; kittens, rabbits, zebu, skunks, puppies, and platypus. Also several monkeys where force fed crack to improve their typing skills.
And someone shot a duck.
An Images & Ideas, Inc. Service.
No Vegans were harmed in the making of this site. We're looking for a new provider.
And someone shot a duck.
An Images & Ideas, Inc. Service.
No Vegans were harmed in the making of this site. We're looking for a new provider.