I couldn't find a parking spot at my job this morning, so I just left.
They must have enough people.
*.*
I need to re-home a dog. It's a small terrier and tends to bark a lot.
If you're interested, let me know and I'll climb over my neighbor's fence and get it for you.
*.*
Today marked the end of an era, as the Mafia announced it was officially closing its Chicago branch due to the rising wave of violent crime in the city.
"We just can't operate under these conditions," said street boss Albert "Albie the Falcon" Vena, speaking on behalf of Salvatore "Solly D" DeLaurentis, who has run the Chicago organization since 2002. "How are we supposed to conduct respectable business — loan sharking, bribery, racketeering, illegal gambling — with so much crime going on? It's insane!"
The Windy City has long been known for its organized crime operations, dating back even before the days of Al "Scarface" Capone in the 1920s Prohibition Era. Today's mobsters now lament the difficulty they face in doing horrible things behind the scenes in the city while so many even more horrible things are being done in broad daylight. "One of our best leg-breakers got his legs broken by a gang of 40 high schoolers last week," said organization member Frank "Toots" Caruso. "They recorded it and put it on TikTok. We just don't feel safe around here. I'm afraid to just walk down the street!"
Rising crime rates have become a staple under Democrat leaders, resulting in skyrocketing numbers of violent crimes and shooting deaths, despite the city having some of the strictest gun laws in the nation. "You think we're gonna be out there working?" asked Nicholas "Jumbo" Guzzino. "Are you kidding me? I don't wanna get shot!"
*.*
Oneliners:
The fridge is a perfect example that what matters is on the inside.
You know you're over 40 when you have 'upstairs ibuprofen' and 'downstairs ibuprofen'.
People write 'Congrats' because they can't spell 'Congratjulayshun'.
Without a doubt, the cashew is my favorite nut that sounds like a sneeze.
Studies show the most expensive vehicle to operate is a Costco shopping cart.
My toxic trait: Let's see if that food that normally hurts my stomach hurts my stomach TODAY.
I've made a lot of mistakes in my life but adding more cheese than a recipe calls for is not one of them.
Loved are the ones who are told of their faults in private.
Everyone seems normal until you get to know them.
Say nothing, often.
*.*
Word of the day: Exhaustipated.
Definition: Too tired to give a crap.
Quote of the Times;
“What percentage of gun crimes are committed by Republicans?” - Scott Adams
Link of the Times;
Target reaffirms partnership with LGBT group pushing explicit homosexual books in schools:
https://www.lifesitenews.com/news/target-reaffirms-partnership-with-lgbt-group-pushing-explicit-homosexual-books-in-classrooms/
Issue of the Times;
Complex Systems Won’t Survive the Competence Crisis by Harold Robertson
At a casual glance, the recent cascades of American disasters might seem unrelated. In a span of fewer than six months in 2017, three U.S. Naval warships experienced three separate collisions resulting in 17 deaths. A year later, powerlines owned by PG&E started a wildfire that killed 85 people. The pipeline carrying almost half of the East Coast’s gasoline shut down due to a ransomware attack. Almost half a million intermodal containers sat on cargo ships unable to dock at Los Angeles ports. A train carrying thousands of tons of hazardous and flammable chemicals derailed near East Palestine, Ohio. Air Traffic Control cleared a FedEx plane to land on a runway occupied by a Southwest plane preparing to take off. Eye drops contaminated with antibiotic-resistant bacteria killed four and blinded fourteen.
While disasters like these are often front-page news, the broader connection between the disasters barely elicits any mention. America must be understood as a system of interwoven systems; the healthcare system sends a bill to a patient using the postal system, and that patient uses the mobile phone system to pay the bill with a credit card issued by the banking system. All these systems must be assumed to work for anyone to make even simple decisions. But the failure of one system has cascading consequences for all of the adjacent systems. As a consequence of escalating rates of failure, America’s complex systems are slowly collapsing.
The core issue is that changing political mores have established the systematic promotion of the unqualified and sidelining of the competent. This has continually weakened our society’s ability to manage modern systems. At its inception, it represented a break from the trend of the 1920s to the 1960s, when the direct meritocratic evaluation of competence became the norm across vast swaths of American society.
In the first decades of the twentieth century, the idea that individuals should be systematically evaluated and selected based on their ability rather than wealth, class, or political connections, led to significant changes in selection techniques at all levels of American society. The Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) revolutionized college admissions by allowing elite universities to find and recruit talented students from beyond the boarding schools of New England. Following the adoption of the SAT, aptitude tests such as Wonderlic (1936), Graduate Record Examination (1936), Army General Classification Test (1941), and Law School Admission Test (1948) swept the United States. Spurred on by the demands of two world wars, this system of institutional management electrified the Tennessee Valley, created the first atom bomb, invented the transistor, and put a man on the moon.
By the 1960s, the systematic selection for competence came into direct conflict with the political imperatives of the civil rights movement. During the period from 1961 to 1972, a series of Supreme Court rulings, executive orders, and laws—most critically, the Civil Rights Act of 1964—put meritocracy and the new political imperative of protected-group diversity on a collision course. Administrative law judges have accepted statistically observable disparities in outcomes between groups as prima facie evidence of illegal discrimination. The result has been clear: any time meritocracy and diversity come into direct conflict, diversity must take priority.
The resulting norms have steadily eroded institutional competency, causing America’s complex systems to fail with increasing regularity. In the language of a systems theorist, by decreasing the competency of the actors within the system, formerly stable systems have begun to experience normal accidents at a rate that is faster than the system can adapt. The prognosis is harsh but clear: either selection for competence will return or America will experience devolution to more primitive forms of civilization and loss of geopolitical power.
From Meritocracy to Diversity
The first domino to fall as Civil Rights-era policies took effect was the quantitative evaluation of competency by employers using straightforward cognitive batteries. While some tests are still legally used in hiring today, several high-profile enforcement actions against employers caused a wholesale change in the tools customarily usable by employers to screen for ability.
After the early 1970s, employers responded by shifting from directly testing for ability to using the next best thing: a degree from a highly-selective university. By pushing the selection challenge to the college admissions offices, selective employers did two things: they reduced their risk of lawsuits and they turned the U.S. college application process into a high-stakes war of all against all. Admission to Harvard would be a golden ticket to join the professional managerial class, while mere admission to a state school could mean a struggle to remain in the middle class.
This outsourcing did not stave off the ideological change for long. Within the system of political imperatives now dominant in all major U.S. organizations, diversity must be prioritized even if there is a price in competency. The definition of diversity varies by industry and geography. In elite universities, diversity means black, indigenous, or Hispanic. In California, Indian women are diverse but Indian men are not. When selecting corporate board members, diversity means “anyone who is not a straight white man.” The legally protected and politically enforced nature of this imperative renders an open dialogue nearly impossible.
However diversity itself is defined, most policy on the matter is based on a simple premise: since all groups are identical in talent, any unbiased process must produce the same group proportions as the general population, and therefore, processes that produce disproportionate outcomes must be biased. Prestigious journals like Harvard Business Review are the first to summarize and parrot these views, which then flow down to reporting by mass media organizations like Bloomberg Businessweek. Soon, it joins McKinsey’s “best practices” list and becomes instantiated in corporate policies.
Unlike accounting policies, which emanate from the Financial Accounting Standards Board and are then implemented by Chief Financial Officers, the diversity push emanates inside of organizations from multiple power centers, each of which joins in for independent reasons. CEOs push diversity policies primarily to please board members and increase their status. Human Resources (HR) professionals push diversity policies primarily to avoid anti-discrimination lawsuits. Business development teams push diversity to win additional business from diversity-sensitive clients (e.g. government agencies). Employee Resource Groups (ERGs), such as the Black Googler Network, push diversity to help their in-group in hiring and promotion decisions.
Diversity in Theory and Practice
In police academies around the country, new recruits are taught to apply an escalation of force algorithm with non-compliant subjects: “Ask, Tell, Make.” The idea behind “Ask, Tell, Make” is to apply the least amount of force necessary to achieve the desired level of compliance. This is the means by which police power, which is ultimately backed by significant coercive force, can maintain an appearance of voluntary compliance and soft-handedness. Similarly, the power centers inside U.S. institutions apply a variant of “Ask, Tell, Make” to achieve diversity in their respective organizations.
The first tactics for implementing diversity imperatives are the “Ask” tactics. These simply ask all the members of the organization to end bias. At this stage, the policies seem so reasonable and fair that there will rarely be much pushback. Best practices such as slating guidelines are a common tool at this stage. Slating guidelines require that every hiring process must include a certain number and type of diverse candidates for every job opening. Structured interviews are another best practice that requires interviewers to stick with a script to minimize the chance of uncovering commonalities between the interviewer and interviewee that might introduce bias. Often HR will become involved in the hiring process, specifically asking the hiring manager to defend their choice not to hire a diverse candidate. Because the wrong answer could result in shaming, loss of advancement opportunities, or even termination, the hiring manager can often be persuaded to prioritize diversity over competence.
Within specialized professional services companies, senior-level recruiting will occasionally result in a resume collection where not a single diverse candidate meets the minimum specifications of the job. This is a terrible outcome for the hiring manager as it attracts negative attention from HR. At this point, firms will often retain an executive search agency that focuses on exclusively diverse candidates. When that does not result in sufficient diversity, roles will often have their requirements diluted to increase the pool of diverse candidates.
For example, within hedge funds, the ideal entry-level candidate might be an experienced former investment banker who went to a top MBA program. This preferred pedigree sets a minimum bar for both competence and work ethic. This first-pass filter enormously winnows the field of underrepresented candidates. To relax requirements for diversity’s sake, this will be diluted in various ways. First, the work experience might be stripped. Next, the role gets offered to MBA interns. Finally, fresh undergraduates are hired into the analyst role. Dilution works not just because of the larger field of candidates it allows for but also because the Harvard Admission Office of 2019 is even more focused on certain kinds of diversity than the Harvard Admission Office of 2011 was.
This dilution is not costless; fewer data points result in a wider range of outcomes and increase the risk of a bad hire. All bad hires are costly but bad hires that are diverse are even worse. The risk of a wrongful termination lawsuit either draws out the termination process for diverse hires or results in the firm adjusting by giving them harmless busy work until they leave of their own volition—either way, a terrible outcome for the organizations which hired them.
If these “Ask” tactics do not achieve enough diversity, the next step in the escalation is to attach carrots and sticks to directly tell decision-makers to increase the diversity of the organization. This is the point at which the goals of diversity and competence truly begin displaying significant tension between each other. The first step is the implementation of Key Performance Indicators (KPI) linked to diversity for all managers. Diversity KPIs are a tool to embarrass leaders and teams that are not meeting their diversity targets. Given that most organizations are hierarchical and pyramidal, combined with the fact that America was much whiter 50 years ago than it was today, it is unsurprising that senior leadership teams are less diverse than America as a whole—and, more pertinently, than their own junior teams.
The combination of a pyramid-shaped org chart and a senior leadership team where white men often make up 80 percent or more of the team means that the imposition of an aggressive KPI sends a message to the layer below them: no white man in middle management will likely ever see a promotion as long as they remain in the organization. This is never expressed verbally. Rather, those overlooked figure it out as they are passed over continually for less competent but more diverse colleagues. The result is demoralization, disengagement, and over time, departure.
While all the aforementioned techniques fall into the broad category of affirmative action, they primarily result in slightly tilting the scale toward diverse candidates. The next step is simply holding different groups to different standards. Within academia, the recently filed Students for Fair Admissions v. President and Fellows of Harvard College lawsuit leveraged data to show the extent to which Harvard penalizes Asian and white applicants to help black and Hispanic applicants. The UC System, despite formally being forbidden from practicing affirmative action by Proposition 209, uses a tool called “comprehensive admission” to accomplish the same goal.
The latest technique, which was recently brought to light, shows UC admissions offices using the applicants’ high schools as a proxy for race to achieve their desired goal. Heavily Asian high schools such as Arcadia—which is 68 percent Asian—saw their UC-San Diego acceptance rate cut from 37 percent to 13 percent while the 99-percent-Hispanic Garfield High School saw its UC-San Diego acceptance rate rise from 29 percent to 65 percent.
The preference for diversity at the college faculty level is similarly strong. Jessica Nordell’s End of Bias: A Beginning heralded MIT’s efforts to increase the gender diversity of its engineering department: “When applications came in, the Dean of Engineering personally reviewed every one from a woman. If departments turned down a good candidate, they had to explain why.”
When this was not enough, MIT increased its gender diversity by simply offering jobs to previously rejected female candidates. While no university will admit to letting standards slip for the sake of diversity, no one has offered a serious argument why the new processes produce higher or even equivalent quality faculty as opposed to simply more diverse faculty. The extreme preference for diversity in academia today explains much of the phenomenon of professors identifying with a minor fraction of their ancestry or even making it up entirely.
During COVID-19, the difficulty of in-person testing and online proctoring created a new mechanism to push diversity at the expense of competency: the gradual but systematic elimination of standardized tests as a barrier to admission to universities and graduate schools. Today, the majority of U.S. colleges have either stopped requiring SAT/ACT scores, no longer require them for students in the top 10 percent of their class, or will no longer consider them. Several elite law schools, including Harvard Law School, no longer require the LSAT as of 2023. With thousands of unqualified law students headed to a bar exam that they are unlikely to pass, the National Conference of Bar Examiners is already planning to dilute the bar exam under the “NextGen” plan. Specifically, “eliminat[ing] any aspects of our exams that could contribute to performance disparities” will almost definitionally reduce the degree to which the exam tests for competency.
Similarly, standards used to select doctors have also been weakened to promote diversity. Programs such as the City College of New York’s BS/MD program have eliminated the MCAT requirement. With the SAT now optional, new candidates can go straight from high school to the United States Medical Licensing Examination Step 1 exam in medical school without having gone through any rigorous standardized test whose score can be compared across schools. Step 1 scores were historically the most significant factor in the National Residency Matching Program, which pairs soon-to-be doctors with their future residency training programs. Because Step 1 scores serve as a barrier to increasing diversity, they have been made pass/fail. A handful of doctors are speaking out about the dangers of picking doctors based on factors other than competency but most either explicitly prefer diversity or else stay silent, concerned about the career-ending repercussions of pointing out the obvious.
When even carrot and stick incentives and the removal of standards do not achieve enough diversity, the end game is to simply make decision-makers comply. “Make” has two preferred implementations: one is widely discussed and the other is, for obvious reasons, never disclosed publicly. The first method of implementation is the application of quotas. Quotas or set-asides require the reservation of admissions slots, jobs, contracts, board seats, or other scarce goods for women and members of favored minority groups. Government contracts and supplier agreements are explicitly awarded to firms that have acronyms such as SB, WBE, MBE, DBE, SDB, VOSB, SDVOSB, WOSB, HUB, and 8(a).
Within large employers and government contractors, quotas are used for both hiring and promotions, requiring specific percentages of hiring or promotions to be reserved for favored groups. During the summer of 2020, the CEO of Wells Fargo, was publicly shamed after his memo blaming the underrepresentation of black senior leaders on a “very limited pool” of black talent was leaked to Reuters. Less than a month later, the bank publicly pledged to reserve 12 percent of leadership positions for black candidates and began tying executive compensation to reaching diversity goals. In 2022, Goldman Sachs extended quotas to the capital markets by adopting a policy to avoid underwriting IPOs of firms without at least two board members that are not straight white men.
When diversity still refuses to rise to acceptable levels, the remaining solution is the direct exclusion of non-diverse candidates. While public support for anti-discrimination laws and equal opportunity laws is high, public support for affirmative action and quotas is decidedly mixed. Hardline views such as those expressed in author Ijeoma Oluo’s Mediocre: The Dangerous Legacy of White Male America—namely that “any white man in a position of power perpetuates a system of white male domination”—are still considered extreme, even within U.S. progressive circles.
As such, when explicit exclusion is used to eliminate groups like white men from selection processes, it is done subtly. Managers are told to sequester all the resumes from “non-diverse” candidates—that is, white males. These resumes are discarded and the candidates are sent emails politely telling them that “other candidates were a better fit.” While some so-called “reverse discrimination” lawsuits have been filed, most of these policies go unreported. The reasons are straightforward; even in 2023, screening out all white men is not de jure legal. Moreover, any member of the professional managerial class who witnesses and reports discrimination against white men will never work in their field again.
Even anonymous whistleblowing is likely to be rare. To imagine why, suppose incontrovertible evidence was produced that one’s employer was explicitly excluding white male candidates, and a lawsuit was filed. The employer’s reputation and the reputation of all the employees there, including the white men still working there, would be tarnished. That said, we can expect to see more lawsuits from men who feel they have little to lose.
This “Ask, Tell, Make” framework, under various descriptions, is the method by which individuals with a vested interest in more diversity push their organizations toward their preferred outcome. Force begins requesting modest changes to recruiting to make it “more fair.” Force ends with the heavy-handed application of quotas and even exclusion. The American system is not a monolith, however, which means that the strength of the push and its effects on competency is not distributed evenly.
Competency Is Declining From the Core Outwards
Think of the American system as a series of concentric rings with the government at the center. Directly surrounding that are the organizations that receive government funds, then the nonprofits that influence and are subject to policy, and finally business at the periphery. Since the era of the Manhattan Project and the Space Race, the state capacity of the federal government has been declining almost monotonically.
While this has occurred for a multitude of reasons, the steel girders supporting the competency of the federal government were the first to be exposed to the saltwater of the Civil Rights Act and related executive orders. Government agencies, which are in charge of overseeing all the other systems, have seen the quality of their human capital decline tremendously since the 1960s. While the damage to an agency like the Department of Agriculture may have long-term deadly consequences, the most immediate danger is at safety-critical agencies like the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA).
The Air Traffic Control (ATC) system used in the U.S. relies on an intricate dance of visual or radar observation, transponders, and radio communication, all with the incredible challenge of keeping thousands of simultaneously moving planes from ever crashing into each other. Since air controlling is one of the only jobs that pays more than $100,000 per year and does not require a college diploma, it has been a popular career choice for individuals without a degree who nonetheless have an exceptionally good memory, attention span, visuospatial awareness, and logical skills. The Air Traffic Selection and Training (AT-SAT) Exam, a standardized test of those critical skills, was historically the primary barrier to entry for air controllers. As a consequence of the AT-SAT, as well as a preference for veterans with former air controller experience, 83 percent of air controllers in the U.S. were white men as of 2014.
That year, the FAA added a Biographical Questionnaire (BQ) to the screening process to tilt the applicant pool toward diverse candidates. Facing pushback in the courts from well-qualified candidates who were screened out, the FAA quietly backed away from the BQ and adopted a new exam, the Air Traffic Skills Assessment (ATSA). While the ATSA includes some questions similar to those of the BQ, it restored the test’s focus on core air traffic skills. The importance of highly-skilled air controllers was made clear in the most deadly air disaster in history, the 1977 Tenerife incident. Two planes, one taking off and one taxiing, collided on the runway due to confusion between the captain of KLM 4805 and the Tenerife ATC. The crash, which killed 583 people, resulted in sweeping changes in aviation safety culture.
Recently, the tremendous U.S. record for air safety established since the 1970s has been fraying at the edges. The first three months of 2023 saw nine near-miss incidents at U.S. airports, one with two planes coming within 100 feet of colliding. This terrifying uptick from years prior resulted in the FAA and NTSB convening safety summits in March and May, respectively. Whether they dared to discuss root causes seems unlikely.
Given the sheer size of the U.S. military in both manpower and budget dollars, it should not come as a surprise that the diversity push has also affected the readiness of this institution. Following three completely avoidable collisions of U.S. Navy warships in 2017 and a fire in 2020 that resulted in the scuttling of USS Bonhomme Richard, a $750 million amphibious assault craft, two retired marines conducted off-the-record interviews with 77 current and retired Navy officers. One recurring theme was the prioritization of diversity training over ship handling and warfighting preparedness. Many of them openly admit that, given current issues, the U.S. would likely lose an open naval engagement with China. Instead of taking the criticism to heart, the Navy commissioned “Task Force One Navy,” which recommended deemphasizing or eliminating meritocratic tests like the Officer Aptitude Rating to boost diversity. Absent an existential challenge, U.S. military preparedness is likely to continue to degrade.
The decline in the capacity of government contractors is likewise obvious, with the largest contractors being the most directly impacted. The five largest contractors—Lockheed Martin, Boeing, General Dynamics, Raytheon Company, and Northrop Grumman—will all struggle to maintain competency in the coming years.
Boeing, one of only two firms globally capable of mass-producing large airliners, has a particularly striking crisis unfolding in its institutional culture. Shortly after releasing the 737 MAX, 346 people died in two nearly identical 737 MAX crashes in Indonesia and Ethiopia. The cause of the crashes was a complex interaction between design choices, cost-cutting led by MBAs, FAA issues, the MCAS flight-control system, a faulty sensor, and pilot training. Meanwhile, on the defense side of the business, Boeing’s new fuel tanker, the KC-46A Pegasus is years behind on deliveries due to serious technical flaws with the fueling system along with multiple cases of Foreign Object Debris left inside the plane during construction: tools, a red plastic cap, and in one case, even trash. Between the issues at ATC and Boeing, damage to the U.S.’s phenomenal aviation safety record seems almost inevitable.
After government contractors, the next-most-affected class of institutions are nonprofit organizations. They are entrapped by the government whose policies they are subject to and trying to influence, the opinions of their donor base, and lack of any profit motive. The lifeblood of nonprofits is access to capital, either directly in the form of government grants or through donations that are deemed tax-deductible. Accessing federal monies means being subject to the full weight of U.S. diversity rules and regulations. Nonprofits are generally governed by boards whose members tend to overlap with the list of major donors. Because advocacy for diversity and board memberships are both high-status positions, unsurprisingly board members tend to voice favorable opinions of diversity, and those opinions flow downstream to the organizations they oversee.
Nonprofits—including universities, charities, and foundations—exist in an overlapping ecosystem with journalism, with individuals tending to freely circulate between the four. The activities of nonprofits are bound up in the same discourses shaped by current news and academic research, with all four reflecting the same general ideological consensus. Finally, lacking the profit motive, the decision-making processes of nonprofits are influenced by what will affect the status of the individuals within those organizations rather than what will affect profits. Within nonprofits, the cost of incompetent staffers is borne by “stakeholders,” rather than any one individual.
While all businesses subject to federal law must prioritize diversity over competency at some level, the problem is worse at publicly-traded corporations for reasons both obvious and subtle. The obvious reason is that larger companies present larger targets for EEOC actions and discrimination lawsuits with hundreds of millions of dollars at stake. Corporations have logically responded by hiring large teams of HR professionals to preempt such lawsuits. Over the past several decades, HR has evolved from simply overseeing onboarding to involvement in every aspect of hiring, promotions, and firings, seeing them all through a political and regulatory lens.
The more subtle reason for pressure within publicly-traded companies is that they require ongoing relationships with a spiderweb of banks, credit ratings agencies, proxy advisory services, and most importantly, investors. Given that the loss of access to capital is an immediate death sentence for most businesses, the CEOs of publicly-traded companies tend to push diversity over competency even when the decline in firm performance is clear. CEOs would likely rather trade a small drag on profits margins than a potentially career-ending scandal from pushing back.
Whereas publicly-traded corporations nearly uniformly push diversity, privately-held businesses vary tremendously based on the views of their owners. Partnerships such as the Big Four accounting firms and top-tier management consultancies are high-status. High-status firms must regularly proclaim extensive support for diversity. While the firms tend to be highly selective, partnerships whose leadership is overwhelmingly white and male have generally capitulated to the zeitgeist and are cutting standards to hit targets. Firms often manage around this by hiring for diversity and then putting diversity hires into roles where they are the least likely to damage the firm or the brand. Somewhat counterintuitively, firms with diverse founders are often highly meritocratic, as the structure harnesses the founder’s desire to make money and shields them from criticism on diversity issues.
The most notable example of a diverse meritocracy is Vista Equity Partners, the large private equity firm founded by Robert F. Smith, America’s wealthiest black man. Robert F. Smith is one of the most vocal advocates for and philanthropists to historically black U.S. colleges and universities. It would be reasonable to expect Vista to prioritize diversity over competency in its portfolio companies. However, Vista has instead been profiled for giving all portfolio company management teams the Criteria Cognitive Aptitude Test and ruthlessly culling low-performers. Given the amount of value to be created by promoting the best people into leadership roles of their portfolio companies, one might imagine this to be low-hanging fruit for the rest of private equity, yet Vista is an outlier. Why Vista can apply the CCAT without a public outcry is obvious.
The other firms that tend to still focus on competency are those that are small and private. Such firms have two key advantages: they fall below the fifteen-employee threshold for the most onerous EEOC rules and the owner can usually directly observe the performance of everyone inside the organization. Within small firms, underperformance is usually obvious. Tech startups, being both small and private, would seem to have the right structure to prioritize competency.
The American System Is Cracking
Promoting diversity over competency does not simply affect new hires and promotion decisions. It also affects the people already working inside of America’s systems. Morale and competency inside U.S. organizations are declining. Those who understand that the new system makes it hard or impossible for them to advance are demoralized, affecting their performance. Even individuals poised to benefit from diversity preferences notice that better people are being passed over and the average quality of their team is declining. High performers want to be on a high-performing team. When the priorities of their organizations shift away from performance, high performers respond negatively.
This effect was likely seen in a recent paper by McDonald, Keeves, and Westphal. The paper points out that white male senior leaders reduce their engagement following the appointment of a minority CEO. While it is possible that author Ijeoma Oluo is correct, and that white men have so much unconscious bias raging inside of them that the appointment of a diverse CEO sends them into a tailspin of resentment, there is another more plausible explanation. When boards choose diverse CEOs to make a political statement, high performers who see an organization shifting away from valuing honest performance respond by disengaging.
Some demoralized employees—like James Damore in his now-famous essay, “Google’s Ideological Echo Chamber”—will directly push back against pro-diversity arguments. Like James, they will be fired. Older, demoralized workers, especially those who are mere years from retirement, are unlikely to point out the decline in competency and risk it costing them their jobs. Those who have a large enough nest egg may simply retire to avoid having to deal with the indignity of having to attend another Inclusive Leadership seminar.
As older men with tacit knowledge either retire or are pushed out, the burden of maintaining America’s complex systems will fall on the young. Lower-performing young men angry at the toxic mix of affirmative action (hurting their chances of admission to a “good school”) and credentialism (limiting the “good jobs” to graduates of “good schools”) are turning their backs on college and white-collar work altogether.
This is the continuation of a trend that began over a decade ago. High-performing young men will either collaborate, coast, or downshift by leaving high-status employment altogether. Collaborators will embrace “allyship” to attempt to bolster their chances of getting promoted. Coasters realize that they need to work just slightly harder than the worst individual on their team. Their shirking is likely to go unnoticed and they are unlikely to feel enough emotional connection to the organization to raise alarm when critical mistakes are being made. The combination of new employees hired for diversity, not competence, and the declining engagement of the highly competent sets the stage for failures of increasing frequency and magnitude.
The modern U.S. is a system of systems interacting together in intricate ways. All these complex systems are simply assumed to work. In February of 2021, cold weather in Texas caused shutdowns at unwinterized natural gas power plants. The failure rippled through the systems with interlocking dependencies. As a result, 246 people died. In straightforward work, declining competency means that things happen more slowly, and products are lower quality or more expensive. In complex systems, declining competency results in catastrophic failures.
To understand why, one must understand the concept of a “normal accident.” In 1984, Charles Perrow, a Yale sociologist, published the book, Normal Accidents: Living With High-Risk Technologies. In this book, Perrow lays out the theory of normal accidents: when you have systems that are both complex and tightly coupled, catastrophic failures are unavoidable and cannot simply be designed around. In this context, a complex system is one that has many components that all need to interact in a specified way to produce the desired outcome. Complex systems often have relationships that are nonlinear and contain feedback loops. Tightly-coupled systems are those whose components need to move together precisely or in a precise sequence.
The 1979 Three Mile Island Accident was used as a case study: a relatively minor blockage of a water filter led to a cascading series of malfunctions that culminated in a partial meltdown. In A Demon of Our Own Design, author Richard Bookstaber added two key contributions to Perrow’s theory: first, that it applies to financial markets, and second, that regulation intended to fix the problem may make it worse.
The biggest shortcoming of the theory is that it takes competency as a given. The idea that competent organizations can devolve to a level where the risk of normal accidents becomes unacceptably high is barely addressed. In other words, rather than being taken as absolutes, complexity and tightness should be understood to be relative to the functionality of the people and systems that are managing them. The U.S. has embraced a novel question: what happens when the men who built the complex systems our society relies on cease contributing and are replaced by people who were chosen for reasons other than competency?
The answer is clear: catastrophic normal accidents will happen with increasing regularity. While each failure is officially seen as a separate issue to be fixed with small patches, the reality is that the whole system is seeing failures at an accelerating rate, which will lead in turn to the failure of other systems. In the case of the Camp Fire that killed 85 people, PG&E fired its CEO, filed Chapter 11, and restructured. The system’s response has been to turn off the electricity and raise wildfire insurance premiums. This has resulted in very little reflection. The more recent coronavirus pandemic was another teachable moment. What started just three years ago with a novel respiratory virus has caused a financial crisis, a bubble, soaring inflation, and now a banking crisis in rapid succession.
Patching the specific failure mode is simultaneously too slow and induces unexpected consequences. Cascading failures overwhelm the capabilities of the system to react. 20 years ago, a software bug caused a poorly-managed local outage that led to a blackout that knocked out power to 55 million people and caused 100 deaths. Utilities were able to restore power to all 55 million people in only four days. It is unclear if they could do the same today. U.S. cities would look very different if they remained without power for even two weeks, especially if other obstructions unfolded. What if emergency supplies sat on trains immobilized by fuel shortages due to the aforementioned pipeline shutdown? The preference for diversity over competency has made our system of systems dangerously fragile.
Americans living today are the inheritors of systems that created the highest standard of living in human history. Rather than protecting the competency that made those systems possible, the modern preference for diversity has attenuated meritocratic evaluation at all levels of American society. Given the damage already done to competence and morale combined with the natural exodus of baby boomers with decades worth of tacit knowledge, the biggest challenge of the coming decades might simply be maintaining the systems we have today.
The path of least resistance will be the devolution of complex systems and the reduction in the quality of life that entails. For the typical resident in a second-tier city in Mexico, Brazil, or South Africa, power outages are not uncommon, tap water is probably not safe to drink, and hospital-associated infections are common and often fatal. Absent a step change in the quality of American governance and a renewed culture of excellence, they prefigure the country’s future.
News of the Times;
Stanford University and UMass Researchers Uncover Disturbing Pedo Network on Instagram:
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2023/06/stanford-university-umass-researchers-uncover-disturbing-pedophle-network/
Leaked Video Shows D.C. Cops Were 'Rioters' and Instigators at J-6 Protest:
https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/victoria-taft/2023/06/09/leaked-video-shows-d-c-cops-were-rioters-and-instigators-at-j-6-protest-n1701634
Nearly 30% of people under 30 support government surveillance cameras in every home:
https://www.thecollegefix.com/nearly-30-of-people-under-30-support-government-surveillance-cameras-in-every-home-poll/
76 percent of Princeton students say it’s acceptable to shout down a speaker:
https://www.thecollegefix.com/76-percent-of-princeton-students-say-its-acceptable-to-shout-down-a-speaker-survey/
San Francisco Homeowners Lose $260 Billion In Value:
https://www.hoover.org/research/san-francisco-homeowners-lose-260-billion-value
Solar panels - an eco-disaster waiting to happen:
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-65602519.amp
America Signs Global Climate Agreement to Crack Down on Farming:
https://slaynews.com/news/america-signs-global-climate-agreement-crack-down-farming/
Target circulates memo that claims those who don’t support trans mutilations of children are “extremists”:
https://dcdirtylaundry.com/target-circulates-memo-that-claims-those-who-dont-support-trans-mutilations-of-children-are-extremists/
American Icon KitchenAid Pulls Its Products From Target: “We Have Different Values”:
https://breakingnewspapers.com/index.php/2023/06/09/american-icon-kitchenaid-pulls-its-products-from-target-we-have-different-values/
Vermont school district settles with family punished for opposing male student in girls’ locker room:
https://www.christianpost.com/news/family-punished-after-opposing-locker-room-policy-settles-lawsuit.html
Feds spent over $1.3 billion in Russia, China on controversial projects:
https://www.thecentersquare.com/national/article_a1444bb6-03c5-11ee-93ab-c73ba17b7f10.html
Thank the green-energy cult for major blackouts this summer:
https://nypost.com/2023/06/05/thank-the-green-energy-cult-for-major-blackouts-this-summer/
Woman Accused Of Dismembering, Grilling Remains Of Her Mother:
https://newsradio1290wtks.iheart.com/content/2023-06-06-woman-accused-of-dismembering-grilling-remains-of-her-mother/
"We Are Not Alone": US Has Retrieved Craft Of 'Non-Human Origin' Says Whistleblower From Govt. Task Force On UFOs:
https://www.zerohedge.com/technology/we-are-not-alone-us-has-retrieved-craft-non-human-origin-says-whistleblower-govt-task
Astrophysicist Piers Corbyn Burns the Climate Change Argument to the Ground:
https://thelibertydaily.com/astrophysicist-piers-corbyn-burns-the-climate-change-argument-to-the-ground/
Complex?
Defense?
A human fart is louder than a trombone.
I discovered this at my son's school concert last night.
*.*
Filming on the next "Mission: Impossible" movie has been put on hold, due to the writer's strike.
I'm not trying to be critical here, but wouldn't you want to have the script written before you started filming?
*.*
Language learning company Rosetta Stone announced today it was introducing a new course designed to teach users the difficult language that had previously only been spoken by President Joe Biden.
The course, named "Bidenese," fully immerses the user in Joe Biden's unique dialect. "Millions of people are eager to find out what the President is saying," said Rosetta Stone CEO & Chairman John Hass. "We're excited to unlock this previously indecipherable language for the entire world."
Pre-orders for the course were already coming in by the thousands, with many of them coming from journalists, members of Congress, and foreign leaders from around the globe. "We've spent the last two and a half years having no clue what he was saying," said a spokesperson for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. "You can imagine how difficult it is to negotiate important policy agreements when no one on Earth speaks the other person's language."
Surprisingly, Democratic Party strategists were privately expressing concern that having the public at large know what Biden is actually saying may work to his detriment. "He's been able to sneak by using the whole ‘unintelligible old man' gimmick for a long time," said media personality James Carville. "If voters gain the ability to translate what he's saying, it could turn them off in droves. It would be disastrous."
*.*
Top 5 Signs You Probably Should be Exercising More:
Your five-year-old walking shoes look brand new.
Underneath that pile of cobwebs is your rowing machine
That gym you signed up for has reported you as a missing person
You've switched from wearing belts to bungee cords.
You're got winded just reading this list.
*.*
People say that cracking knuckles is the most annoying personal bad habit.
Apparently, the survey was conducted among people who have never pulled my finger.
Quote of the Times;
The meaning of life is to at all times have a purpose. – Frankl
Link of the Times;
Trove Of Nearly 10K Hunter Biden Laptop Photos, Docs Appear On Organized Website:
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/trove-nearly-10k-hunter-biden-laptop-photos-docs-appear-organized-website
Issue of the Times;
An Unapologetic Defense Of The Crusades by Auguste Meyrat
Fewer moments in history are as misunderstood and revised as the Crusades. This series of violent clashes between Christian and Muslim cultures spanning three continents and nearly a millennium has been characterized as a futile war of aggression. In the telling of most modern historians, belligerent, greedy, and racist Christians in Western Europe were periodically guided by a bloodthirsty theocrat in Rome to channel their savage energies toward embattling a rival faith in the delusional belief that this would guarantee their admittance into Heaven, if not an earthly kingdom to rule over. What resulted was hardly more than pointless slaughter on both sides.
Nearly all of this is false. The Crusades were wars of defense, with Christians attempting to drive out foreign Muslim invaders in lands that were formerly Christian. Far from being unenlightened savages, the Crusaders were a highly organized force that pushed the boundaries of what was possible in warfare, government, and religious practice. The great personal sacrifice of the Crusaders, along with moral arguments against the use of violence, disprove the idea that they did this for personal gain.
By contrast, the Muslim invaders greatly profited from their conquests. They essentially took ownership of the preexisting wealth from their opponents. They subjected people of these areas to mass enslavement, regular persecution, and crippling taxes — all of which were sanctioned by their holy books and scriptures. And nearly all their victories against opposing forces were attributable to superior numbers and the domestic dysfunction of their opponents rather than superior strategy, logistics, or technology.
Unfortunately, few historians will risk professional ruin by challenging the prevailing narrative of the academy and telling the true history of the Crusades. However, to his great credit, Raymond Ibrahim dismisses such concerns and offers riveting profiles of eight great heroes of the Crusades in his newest book, Defenders of the West: The Christian Heroes Who Stood Against Islam.
As an Arabic linguist and expert in Islamic history and theology, he is able to tap into primary sources from both sides of the conflict to give a more objective, unbiased account of the Crusades. More importantly, he makes a point of prioritizing the reader and telling a story. In his introduction, he fully agrees with Carlyle’s thesis that history is “but the biography of great men.” Whereas most modern historians tend to attribute developments in the past to impersonal forces (what is known as “historicism”), Ibrahim recognizes and celebrates the accomplishments of heroic individuals and the effect they have on the world. By doing this, he shows that these men were not only important for their time, but can still serve as models for people today.
The War for the Holy Land
Although Ibrahim organizes his chapters chronologically, his biographies work better as a framework for three different regional conflicts: the war for the Holy Land and Byzantium, the Reconquista of the Spanish peninsula, and the Balkan defense against the Ottoman Turks. As Ibrahim relates, each war had its own share of successes and failures for the West, but so much of this depended on the leadership and how unified the Christian kingdoms were. When the leaders were strong and unity existed, they would have long-term victories (as in Spain); when the leaders were strong, but unity didn’t exist, they would have only short-term victories (as in the Holy Land and Balkans).
The war for the Holy Land and Byzantium presents the best overall view of the Crusades. While the first Crusaders recaptured many of the kingdoms along the Eastern Mediterranean, Crusaders in the following centuries devoted most of their resources to securing those kingdoms and establishing outposts to facilitate supply lines. Finally, these kingdoms and outposts were eventually lost, as Western leaders lost interest in crusading.
In the first group was Godfrey of Bullion, a noble who was “strong beyond compare, with solidly built limbs and stalwart chest,” according to William of Tyre. Moreover, he was extremely religious, often praying and fasting before battles. Both qualities proved necessary as Godfrey encountered a completely different kind of enemy, one that had few qualms about murdering and torturing innocents and using terror tactics to intimidate their opponents. Despite this, Godfrey and the other Crusaders managed to retake Antioch and other fortresses as they marched toward Jerusalem.
At that point, they were exhausted, starving, and dying of thirst. Added to this was news of Muslim atrocities where Christian men were massacred and women and children were brutally ravished and sold into slavery. These tactics effectively prevented sympathizers from helping the Crusaders who were forced to depend on their feckless Byzantine allies and fragile supply lines stretching back many miles. Eventually, Godfrey ordered the construction of a siege tower and scaled the walls of Jerusalem. What resulted from the prolonged frustration and ongoing atrocities was the famously bloody massacre of everyone in the city: “the carnage was so horrific that, once the battle frenzy had subsided, ‘even the victors experienced sensations of horror and loathing.” Sadly, showing mercy just wasn’t a luxury for Crusaders if they hoped to be successful.
Nowhere was this lesson better demonstrated than in the two kings who tried to build on Godfrey’s first victories a century later, Richard the Lionheart of England and Louis IX of France. Displaying amazing toughness and intelligence, King Richard lived up to the moniker of Lionheart. In battle after battle, Richard recovered and reinforced the Crusader kingdoms along the coast and conquered Cyprus, which was then ruled by a Byzantine rebel, Isaac Comnenus.
Most of Richard’s success could be attributed to a realistic approach to warfare, understanding the dynamics of negotiation and leverage and outmaneuvering the famed (and exceptionally duplicitous) Saladin: “Richard … marched some twenty-six hundred Muslim captives outside in full view of Saladin and ordered their execution.” If actions like these weren’t taken, Richard would have quickly succumbed to enemy forces or retreated early like his old friend King Philip-Auguste of France.
In contrast to Richard’s accomplishments, King Louis IX (St. Louis) was a “tragic hero” of the Crusades, showing amazing promise and having the best intentions, only to experience continual setbacks during his campaign in North Africa. Unlike Richard, a giant of a man who commanded authority through example and shrewdness, Louis was more sickly and saintly. Although he enjoyed respect from his people and his peers, he struggled to hold them back at critical junctures of the fighting, which led to a number of ambushes inflicting heavy losses. There were also bouts of plague since the enemy poisoned wells and clogged the river with rotting corpses — he had the bad luck of fighting the Mamluk (“slave-soldier”) leader Baibars, an even more vicious and duplicitous ruler than Saladin.
Finally, Louis himself was taken captive, but he bravely endured taunts and torture before he was ransomed. In the end, Louis died of sickness in his second Crusade, and with him died the crusading movement. Meanwhile, Muslim invaders recaptured what was won by the Crusaders and inflicted egregious persecutions against the Christian population.
The Victors
In the profiles of El Cid (Rodrigo Diaz) and King Ferdinand III, Ibrahim is able to tell a happier story about the Reconquista. Considering the incredible odds they faced after being forced into a literal corner of the Iberian peninsula, each of the Spanish Crusaders deserves a chapter for their contributions. From about 712 to 1492 A.D., the tiny Christian kingdom of Asturia, which held only a few hundred Christian refugees, would spread to retake all of Spain and eject the occupying Moors.
As Ibrahim demonstrates in his biographies of El Cid (1043-1099) and King Ferdinand III (1200-1252), there were a few factors that led to this. One was the superior leadership and prowess of the Christian leaders, exhibited in both El Cid and King Ferdinand (also a saint) who cut through the hordes of Moorish armies and orchestrated extensive sieges of enemy fortresses.
The second factor was that the Christian kings were usually unified in their mission while the Moors were often disorganized, complacent, and therefore vulnerable. And third, the Spaniards came to understand the futility of allowing an enemy religion to live among its people. While El Cid and many others would allow Muslim residents to practice their faith, Ferdinand forced them to leave because “no matter how lenient a Christian ruler was with his Moorish subjects, and no matter how docile the latter appeared, whenever the opportunity arose, the Muslims immediately revolted.” This helped Ferdinand solidify the victories of previous Spanish Crusaders by reconquering most of Spain and neutralizing possible insurgencies.
Perhaps the most interesting chapters of the book concern the Balkan Crusaders who held off the Ottoman Turks from the late 14th century to the late 15th century. In what amounted to a thankless task that earned them infamy both from their contemporaries and later historians, these heroes faced even more impossible odds than the earlier Crusaders.
Ibrahim begins with Hungarian King John Hunyadi who bucks the trend of paying tribute to the Ottoman Turks and instead launches a guerrilla campaign against the gargantuan armies of Sultan Murad. He was one of the first leaders to show the weakness of the Turks, who never really had to defend their territory: “Both Christians and Muslims were especially impressed that, instead of taking a defensive position, Hunyadi was actually taking the offensive — crossing rivers and mountains to confront the Turks in their own domains.”
Despite Hunyadi’s success, few other kings or nobles followed his lead. Rather, the rulers in Western Europe were preoccupied with other, more self-interested affairs. Only the Italian city-state of Venice was involved — and they helped the Ottoman Turks nearly as much as they fought them. The other exceptions to this general indifference were the two men Ibrahim writes about in the following two chapters: George Kastrioti (whom the Turks called “Skanderbeg,” or “Lord Alexander — after Alexander the Great of Macedon”) and Vlad Dracula III (whom rival nobles smeared as a vampire).
Because both men were captives of the Turks for a number of years, both had personal reasons for liberating their kingdoms and a deep understanding of how the Turks operated. Like Hunyadi, Skanderbeg and Dracula turned their small numbers into a strength by picking apart large, poorly organized Turkish armies. While Skanderbeg’s previous training as a janissary (elite troops of the Turks) helped him to lead his forces efficiently and effectively, Dracula made infamous use of impalement (hence the name, Vlad the Impaler) and night raids. Both men were able to turn the tables on their foes and successfully stymie the Turkish advance into Europe.
A Worse Alternative
For some readers, the greatest strength of Defenders of the West may feel like its greatest drawback, which is Ibrahim’s graphic descriptions and lack of sympathy for the Muslim civilizations. Even if most of these gruesome details come from the sources Ibrahim weaves in, it’s apparent that he wants to cast the Moors, the Turks, and various Arab dynasties in the least flattering light — and if the descriptions aren’t enough, he draws more than a few parallels with them and modern-day Muslim terrorists.
However, the violence and the harsh descriptions give important context that helps to explain the extreme measures taken by the Crusaders, particularly Dracula. This may be off-putting for readers preferring a more sanitized and equivocating approach to history, but this would be misleading and false.
In terms of what it meant for Western civilization, Ibrahim proves that the Crusades were not only necessary but ultimately moral and justified. As ugly as they often were, the alternative of surrender and submission would have been far uglier.
News of the Times;
Tucker on Twitter Ep. 1:
https://twitter.com/TuckerCarlson/status/1666203439146172419
American Retail Giant Notices Change in Customer Behavior Historically Signaling Recession:
https://www.westernjournal.com/american-retail-giant-notices-change-customer-behavior-historically-signaling-recession/
The slow-motion trainwreck everyone sees coming:
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/realestate/the-slow-motion-trainwreck-everyone-sees-coming/ar-AA1c8ljS
‘Boycott Target’ Jumps Past Morgan Wallen, Taylor Swift to Become No. 1 Song on iTunes:
https://www.breitbart.com/entertainment/2023/05/31/boycott-target-jumps-past-morgan-wallen-taylor-swift-to-become-no-1-song-itunes/
Children’s Choir Stopped Mid-Performance While Singing National Anthem at US Capitol:
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2023/06/outrageous-childrens-choir-stopped-mid-performance-while-singing/
Mom of preteen who fatally stabbed brother in ‘demonic’ rage says she was on ADHD meds:
https://nypost.com/2023/06/02/mom-of-girl-12-who-fatally-stabbed-brother-said-she-was-on-adhd-meds/
Elementary School Turned into LGBTQI+ Pride Indoctrination Camp:
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2023/06/videos-elementary-school-turned-lgbtqi-pride-indoctrination-camp/
$1 million bond set for man charged with shooting prominent businessman to death:
https://www.wcpo.com/news/local-news/police-investigating-shooting-crash-on-75-northbound
Nothing wrong with' murder of Trump supporter:
https://www.campusreform.org/article?id=15640
South Africa Drafts Water Usage Regulations to Limit White People’s Access:
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2023/06/south-africa-drafts-water-usage-regulations-white-people/
South African Couple Tortured to Death, Set on Fire While Still Alive:
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2023/06/south-african-couple-tortured-death-set-fire-while/
UMD course aims to remove the 'whiteness' from LGBTQ+ studies:
https://www.campusreform.org/article?id=23374
Suspect in custody after 1-year-old punched in face:
https://www.wbtv.com/2023/06/04/cmpd-suspect-custody-after-1-year-old-punched-face-south-end/
Norway bans child sex changes, joins Finland, Sweden, and UK in rejecting gender ideology:
https://www.sott.net/article/480555-Norway-bans-child-sex-changes-joins-Finland-Sweden-and-UK-in-rejecting-gender-ideology
Border Patrol K-9 sniffs out $2M in fentanyl — enough to kill 48M people:
https://nypost.com/2023/06/04/border-patrol-k-9-sniffs-out-2m-in-fentanyl-enough-to-kill-48m-people-during-traffic-stop-in-arizona/
I discovered this at my son's school concert last night.
*.*
Filming on the next "Mission: Impossible" movie has been put on hold, due to the writer's strike.
I'm not trying to be critical here, but wouldn't you want to have the script written before you started filming?
*.*
Language learning company Rosetta Stone announced today it was introducing a new course designed to teach users the difficult language that had previously only been spoken by President Joe Biden.
The course, named "Bidenese," fully immerses the user in Joe Biden's unique dialect. "Millions of people are eager to find out what the President is saying," said Rosetta Stone CEO & Chairman John Hass. "We're excited to unlock this previously indecipherable language for the entire world."
Pre-orders for the course were already coming in by the thousands, with many of them coming from journalists, members of Congress, and foreign leaders from around the globe. "We've spent the last two and a half years having no clue what he was saying," said a spokesperson for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. "You can imagine how difficult it is to negotiate important policy agreements when no one on Earth speaks the other person's language."
Surprisingly, Democratic Party strategists were privately expressing concern that having the public at large know what Biden is actually saying may work to his detriment. "He's been able to sneak by using the whole ‘unintelligible old man' gimmick for a long time," said media personality James Carville. "If voters gain the ability to translate what he's saying, it could turn them off in droves. It would be disastrous."
*.*
Top 5 Signs You Probably Should be Exercising More:
Your five-year-old walking shoes look brand new.
Underneath that pile of cobwebs is your rowing machine
That gym you signed up for has reported you as a missing person
You've switched from wearing belts to bungee cords.
You're got winded just reading this list.
*.*
People say that cracking knuckles is the most annoying personal bad habit.
Apparently, the survey was conducted among people who have never pulled my finger.
Quote of the Times;
The meaning of life is to at all times have a purpose. – Frankl
Link of the Times;
Trove Of Nearly 10K Hunter Biden Laptop Photos, Docs Appear On Organized Website:
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/trove-nearly-10k-hunter-biden-laptop-photos-docs-appear-organized-website
Issue of the Times;
An Unapologetic Defense Of The Crusades by Auguste Meyrat
Fewer moments in history are as misunderstood and revised as the Crusades. This series of violent clashes between Christian and Muslim cultures spanning three continents and nearly a millennium has been characterized as a futile war of aggression. In the telling of most modern historians, belligerent, greedy, and racist Christians in Western Europe were periodically guided by a bloodthirsty theocrat in Rome to channel their savage energies toward embattling a rival faith in the delusional belief that this would guarantee their admittance into Heaven, if not an earthly kingdom to rule over. What resulted was hardly more than pointless slaughter on both sides.
Nearly all of this is false. The Crusades were wars of defense, with Christians attempting to drive out foreign Muslim invaders in lands that were formerly Christian. Far from being unenlightened savages, the Crusaders were a highly organized force that pushed the boundaries of what was possible in warfare, government, and religious practice. The great personal sacrifice of the Crusaders, along with moral arguments against the use of violence, disprove the idea that they did this for personal gain.
By contrast, the Muslim invaders greatly profited from their conquests. They essentially took ownership of the preexisting wealth from their opponents. They subjected people of these areas to mass enslavement, regular persecution, and crippling taxes — all of which were sanctioned by their holy books and scriptures. And nearly all their victories against opposing forces were attributable to superior numbers and the domestic dysfunction of their opponents rather than superior strategy, logistics, or technology.
Unfortunately, few historians will risk professional ruin by challenging the prevailing narrative of the academy and telling the true history of the Crusades. However, to his great credit, Raymond Ibrahim dismisses such concerns and offers riveting profiles of eight great heroes of the Crusades in his newest book, Defenders of the West: The Christian Heroes Who Stood Against Islam.
As an Arabic linguist and expert in Islamic history and theology, he is able to tap into primary sources from both sides of the conflict to give a more objective, unbiased account of the Crusades. More importantly, he makes a point of prioritizing the reader and telling a story. In his introduction, he fully agrees with Carlyle’s thesis that history is “but the biography of great men.” Whereas most modern historians tend to attribute developments in the past to impersonal forces (what is known as “historicism”), Ibrahim recognizes and celebrates the accomplishments of heroic individuals and the effect they have on the world. By doing this, he shows that these men were not only important for their time, but can still serve as models for people today.
The War for the Holy Land
Although Ibrahim organizes his chapters chronologically, his biographies work better as a framework for three different regional conflicts: the war for the Holy Land and Byzantium, the Reconquista of the Spanish peninsula, and the Balkan defense against the Ottoman Turks. As Ibrahim relates, each war had its own share of successes and failures for the West, but so much of this depended on the leadership and how unified the Christian kingdoms were. When the leaders were strong and unity existed, they would have long-term victories (as in Spain); when the leaders were strong, but unity didn’t exist, they would have only short-term victories (as in the Holy Land and Balkans).
The war for the Holy Land and Byzantium presents the best overall view of the Crusades. While the first Crusaders recaptured many of the kingdoms along the Eastern Mediterranean, Crusaders in the following centuries devoted most of their resources to securing those kingdoms and establishing outposts to facilitate supply lines. Finally, these kingdoms and outposts were eventually lost, as Western leaders lost interest in crusading.
In the first group was Godfrey of Bullion, a noble who was “strong beyond compare, with solidly built limbs and stalwart chest,” according to William of Tyre. Moreover, he was extremely religious, often praying and fasting before battles. Both qualities proved necessary as Godfrey encountered a completely different kind of enemy, one that had few qualms about murdering and torturing innocents and using terror tactics to intimidate their opponents. Despite this, Godfrey and the other Crusaders managed to retake Antioch and other fortresses as they marched toward Jerusalem.
At that point, they were exhausted, starving, and dying of thirst. Added to this was news of Muslim atrocities where Christian men were massacred and women and children were brutally ravished and sold into slavery. These tactics effectively prevented sympathizers from helping the Crusaders who were forced to depend on their feckless Byzantine allies and fragile supply lines stretching back many miles. Eventually, Godfrey ordered the construction of a siege tower and scaled the walls of Jerusalem. What resulted from the prolonged frustration and ongoing atrocities was the famously bloody massacre of everyone in the city: “the carnage was so horrific that, once the battle frenzy had subsided, ‘even the victors experienced sensations of horror and loathing.” Sadly, showing mercy just wasn’t a luxury for Crusaders if they hoped to be successful.
Nowhere was this lesson better demonstrated than in the two kings who tried to build on Godfrey’s first victories a century later, Richard the Lionheart of England and Louis IX of France. Displaying amazing toughness and intelligence, King Richard lived up to the moniker of Lionheart. In battle after battle, Richard recovered and reinforced the Crusader kingdoms along the coast and conquered Cyprus, which was then ruled by a Byzantine rebel, Isaac Comnenus.
Most of Richard’s success could be attributed to a realistic approach to warfare, understanding the dynamics of negotiation and leverage and outmaneuvering the famed (and exceptionally duplicitous) Saladin: “Richard … marched some twenty-six hundred Muslim captives outside in full view of Saladin and ordered their execution.” If actions like these weren’t taken, Richard would have quickly succumbed to enemy forces or retreated early like his old friend King Philip-Auguste of France.
In contrast to Richard’s accomplishments, King Louis IX (St. Louis) was a “tragic hero” of the Crusades, showing amazing promise and having the best intentions, only to experience continual setbacks during his campaign in North Africa. Unlike Richard, a giant of a man who commanded authority through example and shrewdness, Louis was more sickly and saintly. Although he enjoyed respect from his people and his peers, he struggled to hold them back at critical junctures of the fighting, which led to a number of ambushes inflicting heavy losses. There were also bouts of plague since the enemy poisoned wells and clogged the river with rotting corpses — he had the bad luck of fighting the Mamluk (“slave-soldier”) leader Baibars, an even more vicious and duplicitous ruler than Saladin.
Finally, Louis himself was taken captive, but he bravely endured taunts and torture before he was ransomed. In the end, Louis died of sickness in his second Crusade, and with him died the crusading movement. Meanwhile, Muslim invaders recaptured what was won by the Crusaders and inflicted egregious persecutions against the Christian population.
The Victors
In the profiles of El Cid (Rodrigo Diaz) and King Ferdinand III, Ibrahim is able to tell a happier story about the Reconquista. Considering the incredible odds they faced after being forced into a literal corner of the Iberian peninsula, each of the Spanish Crusaders deserves a chapter for their contributions. From about 712 to 1492 A.D., the tiny Christian kingdom of Asturia, which held only a few hundred Christian refugees, would spread to retake all of Spain and eject the occupying Moors.
As Ibrahim demonstrates in his biographies of El Cid (1043-1099) and King Ferdinand III (1200-1252), there were a few factors that led to this. One was the superior leadership and prowess of the Christian leaders, exhibited in both El Cid and King Ferdinand (also a saint) who cut through the hordes of Moorish armies and orchestrated extensive sieges of enemy fortresses.
The second factor was that the Christian kings were usually unified in their mission while the Moors were often disorganized, complacent, and therefore vulnerable. And third, the Spaniards came to understand the futility of allowing an enemy religion to live among its people. While El Cid and many others would allow Muslim residents to practice their faith, Ferdinand forced them to leave because “no matter how lenient a Christian ruler was with his Moorish subjects, and no matter how docile the latter appeared, whenever the opportunity arose, the Muslims immediately revolted.” This helped Ferdinand solidify the victories of previous Spanish Crusaders by reconquering most of Spain and neutralizing possible insurgencies.
Perhaps the most interesting chapters of the book concern the Balkan Crusaders who held off the Ottoman Turks from the late 14th century to the late 15th century. In what amounted to a thankless task that earned them infamy both from their contemporaries and later historians, these heroes faced even more impossible odds than the earlier Crusaders.
Ibrahim begins with Hungarian King John Hunyadi who bucks the trend of paying tribute to the Ottoman Turks and instead launches a guerrilla campaign against the gargantuan armies of Sultan Murad. He was one of the first leaders to show the weakness of the Turks, who never really had to defend their territory: “Both Christians and Muslims were especially impressed that, instead of taking a defensive position, Hunyadi was actually taking the offensive — crossing rivers and mountains to confront the Turks in their own domains.”
Despite Hunyadi’s success, few other kings or nobles followed his lead. Rather, the rulers in Western Europe were preoccupied with other, more self-interested affairs. Only the Italian city-state of Venice was involved — and they helped the Ottoman Turks nearly as much as they fought them. The other exceptions to this general indifference were the two men Ibrahim writes about in the following two chapters: George Kastrioti (whom the Turks called “Skanderbeg,” or “Lord Alexander — after Alexander the Great of Macedon”) and Vlad Dracula III (whom rival nobles smeared as a vampire).
Because both men were captives of the Turks for a number of years, both had personal reasons for liberating their kingdoms and a deep understanding of how the Turks operated. Like Hunyadi, Skanderbeg and Dracula turned their small numbers into a strength by picking apart large, poorly organized Turkish armies. While Skanderbeg’s previous training as a janissary (elite troops of the Turks) helped him to lead his forces efficiently and effectively, Dracula made infamous use of impalement (hence the name, Vlad the Impaler) and night raids. Both men were able to turn the tables on their foes and successfully stymie the Turkish advance into Europe.
A Worse Alternative
For some readers, the greatest strength of Defenders of the West may feel like its greatest drawback, which is Ibrahim’s graphic descriptions and lack of sympathy for the Muslim civilizations. Even if most of these gruesome details come from the sources Ibrahim weaves in, it’s apparent that he wants to cast the Moors, the Turks, and various Arab dynasties in the least flattering light — and if the descriptions aren’t enough, he draws more than a few parallels with them and modern-day Muslim terrorists.
However, the violence and the harsh descriptions give important context that helps to explain the extreme measures taken by the Crusaders, particularly Dracula. This may be off-putting for readers preferring a more sanitized and equivocating approach to history, but this would be misleading and false.
In terms of what it meant for Western civilization, Ibrahim proves that the Crusades were not only necessary but ultimately moral and justified. As ugly as they often were, the alternative of surrender and submission would have been far uglier.
News of the Times;
Tucker on Twitter Ep. 1:
https://twitter.com/TuckerCarlson/status/1666203439146172419
American Retail Giant Notices Change in Customer Behavior Historically Signaling Recession:
https://www.westernjournal.com/american-retail-giant-notices-change-customer-behavior-historically-signaling-recession/
The slow-motion trainwreck everyone sees coming:
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/realestate/the-slow-motion-trainwreck-everyone-sees-coming/ar-AA1c8ljS
‘Boycott Target’ Jumps Past Morgan Wallen, Taylor Swift to Become No. 1 Song on iTunes:
https://www.breitbart.com/entertainment/2023/05/31/boycott-target-jumps-past-morgan-wallen-taylor-swift-to-become-no-1-song-itunes/
Children’s Choir Stopped Mid-Performance While Singing National Anthem at US Capitol:
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2023/06/outrageous-childrens-choir-stopped-mid-performance-while-singing/
Mom of preteen who fatally stabbed brother in ‘demonic’ rage says she was on ADHD meds:
https://nypost.com/2023/06/02/mom-of-girl-12-who-fatally-stabbed-brother-said-she-was-on-adhd-meds/
Elementary School Turned into LGBTQI+ Pride Indoctrination Camp:
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2023/06/videos-elementary-school-turned-lgbtqi-pride-indoctrination-camp/
$1 million bond set for man charged with shooting prominent businessman to death:
https://www.wcpo.com/news/local-news/police-investigating-shooting-crash-on-75-northbound
Nothing wrong with' murder of Trump supporter:
https://www.campusreform.org/article?id=15640
South Africa Drafts Water Usage Regulations to Limit White People’s Access:
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2023/06/south-africa-drafts-water-usage-regulations-white-people/
South African Couple Tortured to Death, Set on Fire While Still Alive:
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2023/06/south-african-couple-tortured-death-set-fire-while/
UMD course aims to remove the 'whiteness' from LGBTQ+ studies:
https://www.campusreform.org/article?id=23374
Suspect in custody after 1-year-old punched in face:
https://www.wbtv.com/2023/06/04/cmpd-suspect-custody-after-1-year-old-punched-face-south-end/
Norway bans child sex changes, joins Finland, Sweden, and UK in rejecting gender ideology:
https://www.sott.net/article/480555-Norway-bans-child-sex-changes-joins-Finland-Sweden-and-UK-in-rejecting-gender-ideology
Border Patrol K-9 sniffs out $2M in fentanyl — enough to kill 48M people:
https://nypost.com/2023/06/04/border-patrol-k-9-sniffs-out-2m-in-fentanyl-enough-to-kill-48m-people-during-traffic-stop-in-arizona/
Pride?
A beautiful woman at the bar wasn't ready for the answer I gave her when she asked, "What do you and I have in common?"
"They're both vowels," I replied.
*.*
I read recipes the same way I read science fiction.
I read to the end and say, "Well, that's not going to happen."
*.*
Senior Pentagon officials have canceled a fundraising car wash upon news the debt ceiling crisis has been averted, sources confirm today.
“Well, shoot,” Gen. Mark Milley, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said as he put his shirt back on and placed a pair of cut-off jean shorts back in his desk drawer. “The boys and I were really looking forward to getting some fresh air in the Pentagon courtyard and raising some scratch for another aircraft carrier, a new sixth generation fighter jet, and some more pens,” he said. “I can never seem to find any pens around here!”
Senior Department of Defense officials say the car wash is no longer critical following a debt ceiling budget deal between President Joe Biden and Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy (R-Ca.) that, according to sources close to the matter, came down to a high-stakes game of rock-paper-scissors.
The debt ceiling is a congressionally mandated limit on the amount of money the U.S government can borrow to cover costs, including the defense budget and paying off its debts to China. A point of contention in the negotiations this year was President Biden’s paltry $886 billion defense budget request Republican lawmakers say would force the Department to make difficult trade-offs between readiness, modernization, and pens.
*.*
Things You Say After 50:
Where the #$%# is my phone?
How did I get that bruise?
How do they expect you to read that small print?
Where'd I put my glasses?
I don't care if it doesn't look fashionable, it's comfortable!
Who the heck is calling at 9pm?
*.*
Nearly 30% of people say they don't commute to work.
But I will say, my bedroom to kitchen to office route can be tricky sometimes.
Quote of the Times;
“Since there's no big surge of transgender young people among homeschooling students in this country, it's obvious where the sexually perverse indoctrination is coming from.” - Kathleen Peck
Link of the Times;
Mock them till they cry:
https://donsurber.substack.com/p/mock-them-till-they-cry
Issue of the Times;
‘Pride’ is Nothing to Celebrate by Trevor Thomas
In his seminal work Mere Christianity, the great Christian apologist C.S. Lewis describes “pride” as “the Great Sin,” “the essential vice,” “the utmost evil.” Lewis concludes,
Unchastity, anger, greed, drunkenness, and all that, are mere flea bites in comparison; it was through Pride that the devil became the devil; Pride leads to every other vice; it is the complete anti-God state of mind.
Thus, I suppose it is rather fitting that the “official” celebration of the evil LGBT agenda is called “Pride Month.” Few things today more encompass the wretched display of pride than what is exhibited when those under the throes of the LGBT agenda are unashamedly and boldly “out of the closet.”
Why was it -- as this is typically no longer the case -- that those with homosexual attractions had to come “out of the closet?” It was because to act on those attractions was often illegal, and -- or at least -- typically frowned upon by society at large. Why was homosexual behavior so stigmatized? Because it was once largely (and rightly) viewed as “unnatural” and immoral.
It is important to note that things are not -- or should not be -- immoral because they are illegal, they are -- or should be -- illegal because they are immoral. And this is not to say that all immoral things should be illegal. The biggest achievement of the LGBT agenda has not been the reversal of U.S. laws that deemed homosexual behavior illegal, but rather a sea-change in the views on homosexuality in the American culture at large.
As was the case with all the rotten and perverse fruit of the “sexual revolution,” this was largely accomplished by appealing to the pride of those who wanted to go their own way in the sexual realm. As C.S. Lewis noted, “pride leads to every other vice.” Homosexuality, pornography, promiscuity, and the like, are all born of the desire to ignore our Creator and write our own moral code.
It is telling that, before the LGBT agenda took root in America, pornography, promiscuity, sexually explicit displays throughout media, the “hook-up” culture, abortion (yes, abortion is a sexual issue), and so on, were being promoted and widely embraced across the U.S. Thus, no one should be surprised that once heterosexual immorality became entrenched in our culture, widespread acceptance of homosexuality would soon follow. Immorality breeds immorality.
It is also telling that, the sexual revolution that infected America flourished once those devoted to such a perverse agenda gained power. U.S. courts, politicians, academics, influential media personalities -- and most tragically, even those within the church -- alike all played a role in the pervasive spread of the sexual revolution. Power and pride go hand-in-hand, “For, of course, power is what Pride really enjoys,” writes Lewis. He adds,
There is nothing that makes a man feel so superior to others as being able to move them about like toy soldiers. What makes a pretty girl spread misery wherever she goes by collecting admirers? Certainly not her sexual instinct; that kind of girl is quite often sexually frigid. It is Pride. What is it that makes a political leader or a whole nation go on and on, demanding more and more? Pride again. Pride is competitive by its very nature; that is why it goes on and on.
Many were duped into believing that those promoting the LGBT agenda merely wanted to “live and let live.” However, as I’ve often noted, “live and let live” has never really been a part of the LGBT agenda. Because of their desire to use their power to not only push their agenda, but to exact revenge upon those who stood in their way, the Left’s Pride warriors have enthusiastically gone “on and on” targeting their opponents.
As Dennis Prager rightly noted earlier this year, “pride is not about tolerance -- it is totalitarian.” One only has to examine those targeted in the marriage debate for evidence of this. However, the “transing” of America provides most of the recent and most egregious examples of LGBT totalitarianism.
Few things display the pride of humanity than unabashed displays of LGBT behavior. This is because, few things are further from the truth than the legal redefinition of marriage, and the absurd notion that one can change his sex. Again, almost nothing in the realm of truth is older than what is marriage, and what is a male and what is a female. This is because, “in the beginning” God revealed these foundational truths to us.
Of course, it is hard -- if not impossible -- to hear God when one is filled with pride. And if we’re not hearing God, then we are likely clueless as to what is sin. “Treason doth never prosper,” wrote English poet John Harington. “What’s the reason? For if it prospers, none dare call it treason.” Likewise, sin “doth” never prosper. Why? Because if it prospers, none dare call it sin. This is where we are in America, instead of calling sin what it is, and dealing with it appropriately, we celebrate it, and misery ensues.
Again, C.S. Lewis was right:
The Christians are right: it is Pride which has been the chief cause of misery in every nation and every family since the world began… Pride always means enmity -- it is enmity. And not only enmity between man and man, but enmity to God.
In God you come up against something which is in every respect immeasurably superior to yourself. Unless you know God as that -- and, therefore, know yourself as nothing in comparison -- you do not know God at all. As long as you are proud you cannot know God. A proud man is always looking down on things and people: and, of course, as long as you are looking down, you cannot see something that is above you.
The ultimate message of Pride Month is that God -- if He exists at all -- is a liar, and that you can do whatever you wish in the sexual realm without consequence. This is why no Christian should have any part of it.
News of the Times;
How Jan. 6 security footage was altered by Democrats:
https://justthenews.com/videos/new-jan-6-security-footage
China rejects Pentagon meeting request:
https://www.rt.com/news/577113-china-rebuffs-pentagon-meeting/
Planned Parenthood officials admit under oath to selling aborted body parts:
https://www.liveaction.org/news/bombshell-planned-parenthood-admits-oath-aborted-parts/
Frilly dresses and white supremacy:
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/opinion/frilly-dresses-and-white-supremacy-welcome-to-the-weird-frightening-world-of-trad-wives/ar-AA1bVTcY
School official laments electric buses cost ‘5X more’ and are riddled with ‘performance issues’:
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/policy/energy-environment/school-electric-buses-cost-more-performance-issues
Scientists generate 'electricity from thin air.' Humidity could be a boundless source of energy:
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2023/05/30/harvesting-electricity-clean-energy-from-thin-air-humidity/70269453007/
Rainbow flag is burned at LA elementary school:
https://archive.is/2023.06.01-031653/https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12145839/Rainbow-flag-burned-LA-elementary-school-furious-parents-vowed-BOYCOTT-Pride-event.html
Female Athlete Retires After Competing Against Biological Men:
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/female-athlete-retires-after-competing-against-biological-men-says-girls-no-longer-have
The State Of Colorado Is Arming Illegal Aliens:
https://vdare.com/posts/the-state-of-colorado-is-arming-illegal-aliens
Four suspects arrested after Georgia Lululemon robbery, employees fired for calling police:
https://thepostmillennial.com/four-suspects-arrested-after-georgia-lululemon-robbery-employees-fired-for-calling-police
Circle K clerk fires shots after thugs threaten him in store:
https://www.theblaze.com/news/circle-k-clerk-fires-shots-after-thugs-threaten-him-in-store-and-sheriffs-reaction-has-folks-applauding
ESPN Host Stephen A. Smith Is Fed Up with Silence About Black-on-Black Gun Crime:
https://pjmedia.com/culture/gwendolynsims/2023/06/02/espn-host-stephen-a-smith-is-fed-up-with-silence-about-black-on-black-gun-crime-n1699919
Stop hiring useless White male:
https://hotair.com/david-strom/2023/05/31/stop-hiring-useless-white-males-royal-air-farce-n554597
Recalled San Francisco DA Lands At Berkeley Law, While Lori Lightfoot Brings 'Big D*ck' To Harvard:
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/failing-forward-recalled-san-francisco-da-lands-berkeley-law-while-lori-lightfoot-brings
Over 1M fentanyl pills headed for Phoenix seized in southern Arizona:
https://www.fox10phoenix.com/news/over-1m-fentanyl-pills-headed-for-phoenix-seized-in-southern-arizona-dps-says.amp
"They're both vowels," I replied.
*.*
I read recipes the same way I read science fiction.
I read to the end and say, "Well, that's not going to happen."
*.*
Senior Pentagon officials have canceled a fundraising car wash upon news the debt ceiling crisis has been averted, sources confirm today.
“Well, shoot,” Gen. Mark Milley, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said as he put his shirt back on and placed a pair of cut-off jean shorts back in his desk drawer. “The boys and I were really looking forward to getting some fresh air in the Pentagon courtyard and raising some scratch for another aircraft carrier, a new sixth generation fighter jet, and some more pens,” he said. “I can never seem to find any pens around here!”
Senior Department of Defense officials say the car wash is no longer critical following a debt ceiling budget deal between President Joe Biden and Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy (R-Ca.) that, according to sources close to the matter, came down to a high-stakes game of rock-paper-scissors.
The debt ceiling is a congressionally mandated limit on the amount of money the U.S government can borrow to cover costs, including the defense budget and paying off its debts to China. A point of contention in the negotiations this year was President Biden’s paltry $886 billion defense budget request Republican lawmakers say would force the Department to make difficult trade-offs between readiness, modernization, and pens.
*.*
Things You Say After 50:
Where the #$%# is my phone?
How did I get that bruise?
How do they expect you to read that small print?
Where'd I put my glasses?
I don't care if it doesn't look fashionable, it's comfortable!
Who the heck is calling at 9pm?
*.*
Nearly 30% of people say they don't commute to work.
But I will say, my bedroom to kitchen to office route can be tricky sometimes.
Quote of the Times;
“Since there's no big surge of transgender young people among homeschooling students in this country, it's obvious where the sexually perverse indoctrination is coming from.” - Kathleen Peck
Link of the Times;
Mock them till they cry:
https://donsurber.substack.com/p/mock-them-till-they-cry
Issue of the Times;
‘Pride’ is Nothing to Celebrate by Trevor Thomas
In his seminal work Mere Christianity, the great Christian apologist C.S. Lewis describes “pride” as “the Great Sin,” “the essential vice,” “the utmost evil.” Lewis concludes,
Unchastity, anger, greed, drunkenness, and all that, are mere flea bites in comparison; it was through Pride that the devil became the devil; Pride leads to every other vice; it is the complete anti-God state of mind.
Thus, I suppose it is rather fitting that the “official” celebration of the evil LGBT agenda is called “Pride Month.” Few things today more encompass the wretched display of pride than what is exhibited when those under the throes of the LGBT agenda are unashamedly and boldly “out of the closet.”
Why was it -- as this is typically no longer the case -- that those with homosexual attractions had to come “out of the closet?” It was because to act on those attractions was often illegal, and -- or at least -- typically frowned upon by society at large. Why was homosexual behavior so stigmatized? Because it was once largely (and rightly) viewed as “unnatural” and immoral.
It is important to note that things are not -- or should not be -- immoral because they are illegal, they are -- or should be -- illegal because they are immoral. And this is not to say that all immoral things should be illegal. The biggest achievement of the LGBT agenda has not been the reversal of U.S. laws that deemed homosexual behavior illegal, but rather a sea-change in the views on homosexuality in the American culture at large.
As was the case with all the rotten and perverse fruit of the “sexual revolution,” this was largely accomplished by appealing to the pride of those who wanted to go their own way in the sexual realm. As C.S. Lewis noted, “pride leads to every other vice.” Homosexuality, pornography, promiscuity, and the like, are all born of the desire to ignore our Creator and write our own moral code.
It is telling that, before the LGBT agenda took root in America, pornography, promiscuity, sexually explicit displays throughout media, the “hook-up” culture, abortion (yes, abortion is a sexual issue), and so on, were being promoted and widely embraced across the U.S. Thus, no one should be surprised that once heterosexual immorality became entrenched in our culture, widespread acceptance of homosexuality would soon follow. Immorality breeds immorality.
It is also telling that, the sexual revolution that infected America flourished once those devoted to such a perverse agenda gained power. U.S. courts, politicians, academics, influential media personalities -- and most tragically, even those within the church -- alike all played a role in the pervasive spread of the sexual revolution. Power and pride go hand-in-hand, “For, of course, power is what Pride really enjoys,” writes Lewis. He adds,
There is nothing that makes a man feel so superior to others as being able to move them about like toy soldiers. What makes a pretty girl spread misery wherever she goes by collecting admirers? Certainly not her sexual instinct; that kind of girl is quite often sexually frigid. It is Pride. What is it that makes a political leader or a whole nation go on and on, demanding more and more? Pride again. Pride is competitive by its very nature; that is why it goes on and on.
Many were duped into believing that those promoting the LGBT agenda merely wanted to “live and let live.” However, as I’ve often noted, “live and let live” has never really been a part of the LGBT agenda. Because of their desire to use their power to not only push their agenda, but to exact revenge upon those who stood in their way, the Left’s Pride warriors have enthusiastically gone “on and on” targeting their opponents.
As Dennis Prager rightly noted earlier this year, “pride is not about tolerance -- it is totalitarian.” One only has to examine those targeted in the marriage debate for evidence of this. However, the “transing” of America provides most of the recent and most egregious examples of LGBT totalitarianism.
Few things display the pride of humanity than unabashed displays of LGBT behavior. This is because, few things are further from the truth than the legal redefinition of marriage, and the absurd notion that one can change his sex. Again, almost nothing in the realm of truth is older than what is marriage, and what is a male and what is a female. This is because, “in the beginning” God revealed these foundational truths to us.
Of course, it is hard -- if not impossible -- to hear God when one is filled with pride. And if we’re not hearing God, then we are likely clueless as to what is sin. “Treason doth never prosper,” wrote English poet John Harington. “What’s the reason? For if it prospers, none dare call it treason.” Likewise, sin “doth” never prosper. Why? Because if it prospers, none dare call it sin. This is where we are in America, instead of calling sin what it is, and dealing with it appropriately, we celebrate it, and misery ensues.
Again, C.S. Lewis was right:
The Christians are right: it is Pride which has been the chief cause of misery in every nation and every family since the world began… Pride always means enmity -- it is enmity. And not only enmity between man and man, but enmity to God.
In God you come up against something which is in every respect immeasurably superior to yourself. Unless you know God as that -- and, therefore, know yourself as nothing in comparison -- you do not know God at all. As long as you are proud you cannot know God. A proud man is always looking down on things and people: and, of course, as long as you are looking down, you cannot see something that is above you.
The ultimate message of Pride Month is that God -- if He exists at all -- is a liar, and that you can do whatever you wish in the sexual realm without consequence. This is why no Christian should have any part of it.
News of the Times;
How Jan. 6 security footage was altered by Democrats:
https://justthenews.com/videos/new-jan-6-security-footage
China rejects Pentagon meeting request:
https://www.rt.com/news/577113-china-rebuffs-pentagon-meeting/
Planned Parenthood officials admit under oath to selling aborted body parts:
https://www.liveaction.org/news/bombshell-planned-parenthood-admits-oath-aborted-parts/
Frilly dresses and white supremacy:
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/opinion/frilly-dresses-and-white-supremacy-welcome-to-the-weird-frightening-world-of-trad-wives/ar-AA1bVTcY
School official laments electric buses cost ‘5X more’ and are riddled with ‘performance issues’:
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/policy/energy-environment/school-electric-buses-cost-more-performance-issues
Scientists generate 'electricity from thin air.' Humidity could be a boundless source of energy:
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2023/05/30/harvesting-electricity-clean-energy-from-thin-air-humidity/70269453007/
Rainbow flag is burned at LA elementary school:
https://archive.is/2023.06.01-031653/https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12145839/Rainbow-flag-burned-LA-elementary-school-furious-parents-vowed-BOYCOTT-Pride-event.html
Female Athlete Retires After Competing Against Biological Men:
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/female-athlete-retires-after-competing-against-biological-men-says-girls-no-longer-have
The State Of Colorado Is Arming Illegal Aliens:
https://vdare.com/posts/the-state-of-colorado-is-arming-illegal-aliens
Four suspects arrested after Georgia Lululemon robbery, employees fired for calling police:
https://thepostmillennial.com/four-suspects-arrested-after-georgia-lululemon-robbery-employees-fired-for-calling-police
Circle K clerk fires shots after thugs threaten him in store:
https://www.theblaze.com/news/circle-k-clerk-fires-shots-after-thugs-threaten-him-in-store-and-sheriffs-reaction-has-folks-applauding
ESPN Host Stephen A. Smith Is Fed Up with Silence About Black-on-Black Gun Crime:
https://pjmedia.com/culture/gwendolynsims/2023/06/02/espn-host-stephen-a-smith-is-fed-up-with-silence-about-black-on-black-gun-crime-n1699919
Stop hiring useless White male:
https://hotair.com/david-strom/2023/05/31/stop-hiring-useless-white-males-royal-air-farce-n554597
Recalled San Francisco DA Lands At Berkeley Law, While Lori Lightfoot Brings 'Big D*ck' To Harvard:
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/failing-forward-recalled-san-francisco-da-lands-berkeley-law-while-lori-lightfoot-brings
Over 1M fentanyl pills headed for Phoenix seized in southern Arizona:
https://www.fox10phoenix.com/news/over-1m-fentanyl-pills-headed-for-phoenix-seized-in-southern-arizona-dps-says.amp
Cover?
They had a 2.2 earthquake in New York City last Friday morning.
No more details were available, as shortly afterwards, someone stole the seismograph.
*.*
Two beefy men came to my house to install some new floor covering in the kitchen. Once they had moved the stove and refrigerator out of the way, it was not long before the job was done.
As they were getting ready to leave, I asked them to put the heavy appliances back in place.
The two men demanded $45 for this service, stating it was not in their contract.
I really had no choice but to pay them.
As soon as they left, however, the doorbell rang. It was the two men. They asked me to move my car, which was blocking their van.
I told them my fee was $45.
*.*
Oneliners:
A study found we blink almost 29,000 times a day and I don't know about you, but I'm counting that as exercise.
If your dog is overweight, you're not getting enough exercise.
Sermons and biscuits are improved by shortening.
Today is "National Leave The Office Early Day", which I observe every Monday through Friday.
People with true character show it when nobody else is present.
Anything worth taking seriously is worth making fun of.
When you get older, lack of pep is often mistaken for patience.
People never grow up; they just learn how to act in public.
If you have to ask the price, you can't afford it.
No matter how bad it gets, I'm rich at the dollar store.
*.*
Alec Baldwin allegedly chastised a server at a gala in New York last week, calling her a ‘peasant'.
On the positive side, he wasn't armed.
*.*
Al Pacino is getting ready to be a dad again with his 29-year-old girlfriend.
There's definitely a, "Say hello to my little friend" line in there somewhere.
Quote of the Times;
"In politics the middle way is none at all." - John Adams
Link of the Times;
FBI Destroyed All Evidence:
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2023/05/biden-doj-formally-shut-down-clinton-foundation-investigation/
Issue of the Times;
For Obama, the Cover-Up Was Worse than the Crime by Jack Cashill
Two enduring aphorisms emerged from the Watergate affair, both directed at then-president Richard Nixon. The one at the outset of the investigation was delivered in the form of a question: “What did he know and when did he know it?” The second came at the end in the form of a warning to future presidents: “The cover-up is worse than the crime.”
Thanks to the Durham report, we know the date that then-president Barack Obama learned about what John Durham calls the “Clinton Intelligence plan.” If CIA Director John Brennan’s notes are to be believed, that date was August 3, 2016.
This was the day Brennan briefed Obama and other key players about the “alleged approval by Hillary Clinton on 26 July of a proposal from one of her [campaign] advisors to vilify Donald Trump by stirring up a scandal claiming interference by the Russian security services."
To be fair, Barack Obama likely had no more role in the orchestration of the Clinton Intelligence plan than Richard Nixon did in the 1972 bugging of the DNC headquarters at the Watergate. Obama did, however, play the critical role in the cover-up of the Clinton Intelligence plan. It could not have happened without him.
This past Sunday, former congressman Devin Nunes raised the cover-up issue on Maria Bartiromo’s show. Said Nunes, “We now know from Durham that Obama knew and his team knew that in August 2016 this was a dirty trick from the Clinton campaign.”
So what did Obama do with this information? Right after the November election, said Nunes, “He got all the intelligence agencies involved and they leaked out to the fake news media that, ‘Oh, the Russians must have done something and they were trying to help Trump.’
Had Nixon blamed Watergate on Cuba -- several Cubans were, in fact, arrested -- he would have been laughed out of office. Unlike Obama, however, Nixon did not have an obsequious media eager to ignore his mischief nor to explain away that which could not be ignored. With the FBI and the intelligence community in his pocket, Obama executed the most elaborate -- and destructive -- political cover-up in American political history.
Peter Strzok, the FBI agent heading “Crossfire Hurricane,” the FBI investigation into Trump’s apocryphal collusion with Russia, confirmed Obama’s role on August 5, two days after the August 3 meeting. Texting with his FBI lover Lisa Page, Strzok quoted an unnamed bigwig, likely Brennan, as saying, “The White House is running this.”
Strzok wasn’t happy. He believed the White House was intruding on FBI turf. On August 15, Strzok memorably signaled the shared motive of all the conspirators. “There’s no way [Trump] gets elected -- but I’m afraid we can’t take that risk,” he texted Page. “It’s like an insurance policy in the unlikely event you die before you’re 40.” On September 2, Page confirmed Obama’s involvement. “POTUS wants to know everything we’re doing,” she texted Strzok.
The insurance policy proved insufficient. Shocked and understandably frightened by Trump’s victory, the conspirators got more methodical in their plotting. As part of the plot, Obama was to keep his hands clean -- or at least appear to. In his 2018 memoir, The World As It Is, intimate Obama adviser Ben Rhodes makes a claim so deep in exculpatory BS it needs to be read in full:
Of course, we had no idea -- Obama had no idea -- at the time that there was an FBI investigation into the Trump campaign’s contacts with Russia; that information was walled off from the White House, and I wouldn’t even learn about it until long after I left government, in the press.
The “time” in question was two weeks before Election Day 2016, nearly three months after the initial August meeting. In Rhodes, Obama had found just the right person to move this hogwash forward, but then again Obama had a gift for choosing the unscrupulous. In nominating John Brennan first as deputy national security advisor and later as director of the CIA, Obama picked the rare American intel chief openly fond of Marxism.
From the beginning, Brennan served as Obama’s fixer. He came to the job well prepared, having written in his graduate thesis, “The democratic process may involve, at some point, the violation of personal liberties and procedural justice.”
Brennan met at least one potential fellow traveler in Obama’s inner intelligence circle. In 2013, the same year Brennan was named director of the CIA, Obama chose the seemingly apolitical James Comey to head the FBI. Like Brennan, however, Comey had a past. In 2003, he acknowledged his leftist roots in a New York magazine interview, telling reporter Chris Smith, “I’d moved from Communist to whatever I am now.”
A globalist and a cradle progressive, National Security Advisor Susan Rice shared with Brennan and Comey a penchant for situational ethics. She proved her mettle in 2012 telling the same Benghazi lie on five different shows one Sunday morning. She upped her game following a meeting that took place in the White House on January 5, 2017.
In conference with Obama was his national security team including all the usual suspects: Comey, Brennan, Biden, Rice, James Clapper, and acting attorney general Sally Yates. After the meeting, Obama asked Yates and Comey to stick around along with Rice, his trusted scribe and factotum.
Obama had a reason for singling out Comey and Yates. Unlike the others, they were staying on in their jobs. On the very day at the very moment Trump was being inaugurated, the soulless Rice sent to “self” a peculiar email. It read:
President Obama began the conversation by stressing his continued commitment to ensuring that every aspect of this issue is handled by the Intelligence and law enforcement communities “by the book.” The President stressed that he is not asking about, initiating or instructing anything from a law enforcement perspective. He reiterated that our law enforcement team needs to proceed as it normally would by the book.
There is no “book” that justifies what Comey and pals did in the weeks immediately following this meeting while Obama was still president. The next day, January 6, 2017, the conspirators released the declassified version of the Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA).
Commissioned a month earlier by Obama, the ICA was John Brennan’s way of welcoming the president-elect to Washington. Titled “Assessing Russian Activities and Intentions in Recent US Elections,” the report concluded that Putin “ordered” an influence campaign, the goal of which was “to undermine public faith in the US democratic process, denigrate Secretary Clinton, and harm her electability and potential presidency.”
The “Obama dossier,” as Nunes called the ICA, reads like one of my college term papers, filled with sundry bits of information gathered from here and there just hours before the due date. Although Christopher Steele had conspicuously failed to corroborate any of his alleged evidence against Trump, Comey lobbied to have the Steele dossier included in the body of the text. He settled for the appendix. On January 10, BuzzFeed published the entire dossier.
Given what we know now, the ICA’s bold-faced claims -- “Putin Ordered Campaign To Influence US Election” or the “Influence Effort Was Boldest Yet in the USA" -- seem laughably crude. Lacking human intelligence in the Kremlin, the conspirators had no idea what Putin did or did not order, but facts no longer mattered.
By the time he left office on January 20, 2016, Obama had all his cucks in a row -- prominent sycophants in every branch of the government and in every major newsroom prepared to ruin Donald Trump’s presidency in service to a lie.
“He weaponized information and showed a willingness to lie,” Ben Rhodes writes about Putin, “using traditional media like television, and new media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube, to spread disinformation into open, Western societies like a virus.”
I imagine Obama reading this and saying, “Vladimir, hold my beer.”
News of the Times;
Chicago Has Worst Memorial Day Weekend Violence in Over a Decade:
https://www.thetruthaboutguns.com/even-more-than-the-old-boss-chicago-has-worst-memorial-day-weekend-violence-in-over-a-decade/
Left-Wing Extremism Tied To Psychopathy And Narcissism:
https://www.dailywire.com/news/left-wing-extremism-tied-to-psychopathy-and-narcissism-study-finds
The value of the illicit Drug Market is half a Trillion Dollars per Year:
https://oneworldto.blogspot.com/2022/09/drugs-in-war.html
TikToker Who Filmed Himself Committing Crimes For Clout Says Outrage Is Only Because He’s a “Black Male”:
https://summit.news/2023/05/23/tiktoker-who-filmed-himself-committing-crimes-for-clout-says-outrage-is-only-because-hes-a-black-male/
South African Farmers Set up Safe Havens as Crime Explodes:
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2023/06/three-murders-every-hour-south-african-farmers-set/
Charges dismissed against COVID patient who assaulted senior citizen in nursing home:
https://www.wxyz.com/news/charges-dismissed-against-covid-patient-who-assaulted-senior-citizen-in-nursing-home
Maryland doorstep where dad was beaten to death protecting son:
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12118757/Father-beaten-death-son-12-middle-school-brawl-spilled-over.html
Social Justice Now Claims Waking Up Early Is White Supremacy:
https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/benbartee/2023/05/21/social-justice-now-claims-waking-up-early-is-white-supremacy-n1697018
Democrats to parents everywhere:
https://nypost.com/2023/05/21/democrats-to-parents-everywhere-your-kids-belong-to-us-not-you/
'Teacher of the Year' Busted for Allegedly Having Sex with 16-Year-Old Student:
https://radaronline.com/p/california-high-school-teacher-of-the-year-busted-sex-16-student/
Musk is right about Soros, libs’ trouble with truth and other commentary:
https://nypost.com/2023/05/22/elon-musk-is-right-about-soros-libs-trouble-with-truth-and-other-commentary/
FBI Refuses To Comply With Congressional Subpoena:
https://www.weaselzippers.us/490389-fbi-refuses-to-comply-with-congressional-subpoena-on-biden-pay-to-play-scheme/
North Face Unveils New Ad Featuring Drag Queen:
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2023/05/north-face-unveils-new-ad-featuring-drag-queen/
Conservatives’ Bud Light boycott is a massive success:
https://www.lifesitenews.com/blogs/conservatives-bud-light-boycott-is-a-massive-success-and-other-companies-are-taking-notice/
Nordstrom to lay off 379 San Francisco workers as company flees crime-ridden city:
https://thepostmillennial.com/nordstrom-to-lay-off-379-san-francisco-workers-as-company-flees-crime-ridden-city
No more details were available, as shortly afterwards, someone stole the seismograph.
*.*
Two beefy men came to my house to install some new floor covering in the kitchen. Once they had moved the stove and refrigerator out of the way, it was not long before the job was done.
As they were getting ready to leave, I asked them to put the heavy appliances back in place.
The two men demanded $45 for this service, stating it was not in their contract.
I really had no choice but to pay them.
As soon as they left, however, the doorbell rang. It was the two men. They asked me to move my car, which was blocking their van.
I told them my fee was $45.
*.*
Oneliners:
A study found we blink almost 29,000 times a day and I don't know about you, but I'm counting that as exercise.
If your dog is overweight, you're not getting enough exercise.
Sermons and biscuits are improved by shortening.
Today is "National Leave The Office Early Day", which I observe every Monday through Friday.
People with true character show it when nobody else is present.
Anything worth taking seriously is worth making fun of.
When you get older, lack of pep is often mistaken for patience.
People never grow up; they just learn how to act in public.
If you have to ask the price, you can't afford it.
No matter how bad it gets, I'm rich at the dollar store.
*.*
Alec Baldwin allegedly chastised a server at a gala in New York last week, calling her a ‘peasant'.
On the positive side, he wasn't armed.
*.*
Al Pacino is getting ready to be a dad again with his 29-year-old girlfriend.
There's definitely a, "Say hello to my little friend" line in there somewhere.
Quote of the Times;
"In politics the middle way is none at all." - John Adams
Link of the Times;
FBI Destroyed All Evidence:
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2023/05/biden-doj-formally-shut-down-clinton-foundation-investigation/
Issue of the Times;
For Obama, the Cover-Up Was Worse than the Crime by Jack Cashill
Two enduring aphorisms emerged from the Watergate affair, both directed at then-president Richard Nixon. The one at the outset of the investigation was delivered in the form of a question: “What did he know and when did he know it?” The second came at the end in the form of a warning to future presidents: “The cover-up is worse than the crime.”
Thanks to the Durham report, we know the date that then-president Barack Obama learned about what John Durham calls the “Clinton Intelligence plan.” If CIA Director John Brennan’s notes are to be believed, that date was August 3, 2016.
This was the day Brennan briefed Obama and other key players about the “alleged approval by Hillary Clinton on 26 July of a proposal from one of her [campaign] advisors to vilify Donald Trump by stirring up a scandal claiming interference by the Russian security services."
To be fair, Barack Obama likely had no more role in the orchestration of the Clinton Intelligence plan than Richard Nixon did in the 1972 bugging of the DNC headquarters at the Watergate. Obama did, however, play the critical role in the cover-up of the Clinton Intelligence plan. It could not have happened without him.
This past Sunday, former congressman Devin Nunes raised the cover-up issue on Maria Bartiromo’s show. Said Nunes, “We now know from Durham that Obama knew and his team knew that in August 2016 this was a dirty trick from the Clinton campaign.”
So what did Obama do with this information? Right after the November election, said Nunes, “He got all the intelligence agencies involved and they leaked out to the fake news media that, ‘Oh, the Russians must have done something and they were trying to help Trump.’
Had Nixon blamed Watergate on Cuba -- several Cubans were, in fact, arrested -- he would have been laughed out of office. Unlike Obama, however, Nixon did not have an obsequious media eager to ignore his mischief nor to explain away that which could not be ignored. With the FBI and the intelligence community in his pocket, Obama executed the most elaborate -- and destructive -- political cover-up in American political history.
Peter Strzok, the FBI agent heading “Crossfire Hurricane,” the FBI investigation into Trump’s apocryphal collusion with Russia, confirmed Obama’s role on August 5, two days after the August 3 meeting. Texting with his FBI lover Lisa Page, Strzok quoted an unnamed bigwig, likely Brennan, as saying, “The White House is running this.”
Strzok wasn’t happy. He believed the White House was intruding on FBI turf. On August 15, Strzok memorably signaled the shared motive of all the conspirators. “There’s no way [Trump] gets elected -- but I’m afraid we can’t take that risk,” he texted Page. “It’s like an insurance policy in the unlikely event you die before you’re 40.” On September 2, Page confirmed Obama’s involvement. “POTUS wants to know everything we’re doing,” she texted Strzok.
The insurance policy proved insufficient. Shocked and understandably frightened by Trump’s victory, the conspirators got more methodical in their plotting. As part of the plot, Obama was to keep his hands clean -- or at least appear to. In his 2018 memoir, The World As It Is, intimate Obama adviser Ben Rhodes makes a claim so deep in exculpatory BS it needs to be read in full:
Of course, we had no idea -- Obama had no idea -- at the time that there was an FBI investigation into the Trump campaign’s contacts with Russia; that information was walled off from the White House, and I wouldn’t even learn about it until long after I left government, in the press.
The “time” in question was two weeks before Election Day 2016, nearly three months after the initial August meeting. In Rhodes, Obama had found just the right person to move this hogwash forward, but then again Obama had a gift for choosing the unscrupulous. In nominating John Brennan first as deputy national security advisor and later as director of the CIA, Obama picked the rare American intel chief openly fond of Marxism.
From the beginning, Brennan served as Obama’s fixer. He came to the job well prepared, having written in his graduate thesis, “The democratic process may involve, at some point, the violation of personal liberties and procedural justice.”
Brennan met at least one potential fellow traveler in Obama’s inner intelligence circle. In 2013, the same year Brennan was named director of the CIA, Obama chose the seemingly apolitical James Comey to head the FBI. Like Brennan, however, Comey had a past. In 2003, he acknowledged his leftist roots in a New York magazine interview, telling reporter Chris Smith, “I’d moved from Communist to whatever I am now.”
A globalist and a cradle progressive, National Security Advisor Susan Rice shared with Brennan and Comey a penchant for situational ethics. She proved her mettle in 2012 telling the same Benghazi lie on five different shows one Sunday morning. She upped her game following a meeting that took place in the White House on January 5, 2017.
In conference with Obama was his national security team including all the usual suspects: Comey, Brennan, Biden, Rice, James Clapper, and acting attorney general Sally Yates. After the meeting, Obama asked Yates and Comey to stick around along with Rice, his trusted scribe and factotum.
Obama had a reason for singling out Comey and Yates. Unlike the others, they were staying on in their jobs. On the very day at the very moment Trump was being inaugurated, the soulless Rice sent to “self” a peculiar email. It read:
President Obama began the conversation by stressing his continued commitment to ensuring that every aspect of this issue is handled by the Intelligence and law enforcement communities “by the book.” The President stressed that he is not asking about, initiating or instructing anything from a law enforcement perspective. He reiterated that our law enforcement team needs to proceed as it normally would by the book.
There is no “book” that justifies what Comey and pals did in the weeks immediately following this meeting while Obama was still president. The next day, January 6, 2017, the conspirators released the declassified version of the Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA).
Commissioned a month earlier by Obama, the ICA was John Brennan’s way of welcoming the president-elect to Washington. Titled “Assessing Russian Activities and Intentions in Recent US Elections,” the report concluded that Putin “ordered” an influence campaign, the goal of which was “to undermine public faith in the US democratic process, denigrate Secretary Clinton, and harm her electability and potential presidency.”
The “Obama dossier,” as Nunes called the ICA, reads like one of my college term papers, filled with sundry bits of information gathered from here and there just hours before the due date. Although Christopher Steele had conspicuously failed to corroborate any of his alleged evidence against Trump, Comey lobbied to have the Steele dossier included in the body of the text. He settled for the appendix. On January 10, BuzzFeed published the entire dossier.
Given what we know now, the ICA’s bold-faced claims -- “Putin Ordered Campaign To Influence US Election” or the “Influence Effort Was Boldest Yet in the USA" -- seem laughably crude. Lacking human intelligence in the Kremlin, the conspirators had no idea what Putin did or did not order, but facts no longer mattered.
By the time he left office on January 20, 2016, Obama had all his cucks in a row -- prominent sycophants in every branch of the government and in every major newsroom prepared to ruin Donald Trump’s presidency in service to a lie.
“He weaponized information and showed a willingness to lie,” Ben Rhodes writes about Putin, “using traditional media like television, and new media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube, to spread disinformation into open, Western societies like a virus.”
I imagine Obama reading this and saying, “Vladimir, hold my beer.”
News of the Times;
Chicago Has Worst Memorial Day Weekend Violence in Over a Decade:
https://www.thetruthaboutguns.com/even-more-than-the-old-boss-chicago-has-worst-memorial-day-weekend-violence-in-over-a-decade/
Left-Wing Extremism Tied To Psychopathy And Narcissism:
https://www.dailywire.com/news/left-wing-extremism-tied-to-psychopathy-and-narcissism-study-finds
The value of the illicit Drug Market is half a Trillion Dollars per Year:
https://oneworldto.blogspot.com/2022/09/drugs-in-war.html
TikToker Who Filmed Himself Committing Crimes For Clout Says Outrage Is Only Because He’s a “Black Male”:
https://summit.news/2023/05/23/tiktoker-who-filmed-himself-committing-crimes-for-clout-says-outrage-is-only-because-hes-a-black-male/
South African Farmers Set up Safe Havens as Crime Explodes:
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2023/06/three-murders-every-hour-south-african-farmers-set/
Charges dismissed against COVID patient who assaulted senior citizen in nursing home:
https://www.wxyz.com/news/charges-dismissed-against-covid-patient-who-assaulted-senior-citizen-in-nursing-home
Maryland doorstep where dad was beaten to death protecting son:
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12118757/Father-beaten-death-son-12-middle-school-brawl-spilled-over.html
Social Justice Now Claims Waking Up Early Is White Supremacy:
https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/benbartee/2023/05/21/social-justice-now-claims-waking-up-early-is-white-supremacy-n1697018
Democrats to parents everywhere:
https://nypost.com/2023/05/21/democrats-to-parents-everywhere-your-kids-belong-to-us-not-you/
'Teacher of the Year' Busted for Allegedly Having Sex with 16-Year-Old Student:
https://radaronline.com/p/california-high-school-teacher-of-the-year-busted-sex-16-student/
Musk is right about Soros, libs’ trouble with truth and other commentary:
https://nypost.com/2023/05/22/elon-musk-is-right-about-soros-libs-trouble-with-truth-and-other-commentary/
FBI Refuses To Comply With Congressional Subpoena:
https://www.weaselzippers.us/490389-fbi-refuses-to-comply-with-congressional-subpoena-on-biden-pay-to-play-scheme/
North Face Unveils New Ad Featuring Drag Queen:
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2023/05/north-face-unveils-new-ad-featuring-drag-queen/
Conservatives’ Bud Light boycott is a massive success:
https://www.lifesitenews.com/blogs/conservatives-bud-light-boycott-is-a-massive-success-and-other-companies-are-taking-notice/
Nordstrom to lay off 379 San Francisco workers as company flees crime-ridden city:
https://thepostmillennial.com/nordstrom-to-lay-off-379-san-francisco-workers-as-company-flees-crime-ridden-city
Absurdity?
I've been busy lately telling people about the benefits of eating dried grapes.
I'm raisin awareness.
*.*
Facebook should have a limit on how many times a relationship status can be changed.
After 3 times, it should change by default to "Unstable."
*.*
A man in a hunter's outfit enters a butcher's shop. "I would like to buy two undressed ducks, please."
"I'm very sorry," the butcher replies. "But I'm afraid we're fresh out of ducks. I can sell you a couple of fresh chickens instead if you like."
"Chickens!" the hunter exclaims. "I can't go home and tell my wife I bagged a couple of chickens!"
*.*
Oneliners:
I worked hard all this week to put this beer on the table.
There should be a summer camp for adults where you just go to sleep for three weeks.
You think you love your family, but suddenly there are three of you and one remaining slice of pizza.
A shout out to everyone who got report cards growing up that said, "Talks too much."
Purses are just junk drawers with handles.
One thing horror movies have helped me realize is that as a parent, you definitely want to avoid having demonic children.
It is not the lofty sails but the unseen wind that moves the ship.
If something is confidential, it will be left in the copier machine.
Ditch the driving test for an I.Q. test.
Trust everybody, then cut the cards.
*.*
The 107th Running of the Indianapolis 500 is happening Sunday at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway in Speedway, Indiana.
It sounds like there was a shortage of available words when they came up with this event.
Quote of the Times;
“When Joe Biden came to Washington as a Senator in 1973, America’s national debt was $438 Billion. Under his 50 year control, America is now nearly $32 Trillion in debt.” - Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene
Link of the Times;
Three Lies They're Telling You about the Debt Ceiling:
https://mises.org/wire/three-lies-theyre-telling-you-about-debt-ceiling
Issue of the Times;
The Absurdities Of Our Age by Davis Hanson
A sign of a civilization in headlong decline is its embrace of absurdities. Unfortunately for the United States, we are witnessing an epidemic of nihilist nonsense.
Here are a few examples:
Reparations
How could a dysfunctional state like California even contemplate $800 billion in reparations?
The state currently faces a $31 billion annual deficit—and it’s climbing. The state’s $100 billion high-speed rail project is inert, a veritable Stonehenge of concrete monoliths without a foot of track laid down.
California’s income tax rates are already the highest in the nation. Its sales taxes, electricity rates, and gas taxes and prices are among the steepest in the country. And for what?
Crime, homelessness, and medieval decay characterize the once great downtowns of San Francisco and Los Angeles. It is now not safe to walk alone in any major California city after dark.
Shoplifting and smash-and-grab theft are no longer treated as real crimes. The result is the mass flight of brand stores from our downtowns and inner cities, with all the accustomed cries of “racism,” even as racist public prosecutors pick and choose whether to indict the arrested on the basis of race.
California infrastructure, once the best in the county, is now among the worst. Decaying and crowded freeways, inadequate water storage, and pot-holed streets are the new norm. Once robust gas, oil, mining, and timber industries are nearly inert.
The state’s public schools are dysfunctional. Once premier public universities are spiraling headlong into decline—junking scholastic tests for admissions, using illegal racial quotas to warp admissions, and institutionalizing racialized dorms and graduation ceremonies.
Even if California enjoyed a huge surplus, even if 300,000 residents were not fleeing the state each year, even if California had a history of being a Confederate slave state, even if whites were the majority of the population, even if the black population was greater than its present 5-6 percent, it would be insane for the state to even contemplate racial reparations.
Twenty-seven percent of the state’s residents were born outside of the United States, and have no American ancestors. The state is the most racially diverse in America, and one in which every group could, in theory, lodge complaints against the dead of the past. Mexican-Americans, Armenians, Asians, and the descendants of the impoverished “Okie” diaspora could all cite legacies of bias—but from whom exactly? The long dead?
For those of increasingly mixed heritage—about a quarter of the state—did their own ancestors oppress their own ancestors? Are all blacks sure that eight generations ago their individual ancestors were slaves outside of California, and therefore they have monetary grievances against those in the state whose ancestors eight generations ago might have owned slaves outside of California? And can such writs be documented?
Do we really wish to go down this path of destroying individuality and insisting that superficial appearance damns us to a collective rooted in the past?
If so, are we to tally up the half-century role of racial quotas to calibrate all the impoverished whites of the last 50 years who were discriminated against in admissions and hiring? Have there not been existing reparations from the decades-long implementations of racial preferences and exemptions—or perhaps in some $20 trillion dollars in reparatory transferences during a half-century of Great Society entitlements?
If we are collectives and not individuals anymore, are all of us to be judged by adding up our group’s historical and current pluses and minuses?
If so, do we add or subtract reparatory charges based on group data? If one race is vastly overrepresented in hate crimes or interracial crime statistics, and other groups vastly underrepresented as perpetrators, is it the role of the state now to intervene and provide reparatory and collective “equity” from one collective for the relatives of the victims of another collective?
Are we really convinced that past institutional racial bias is all-determinative of present opportunity? If so, why do Asians nationally as a collective on average earn $20,000 a year more than non-Hispanic whites—despite past exclusionary immigration laws, forced government relocations, and zoning prohibitions? Was there some unknown university study that postulated that the Japanese-internment or early 20th century Yellow Peril exclusionary immigration statutes were irrelevant to Asian-American upward mobility?
Inequality Under the Laws
Ideology now has made a mockery of the cherished traditions of blind justice and equality under the laws. Whether you are arrested, indicted, and convicted increasingly hinges on your politics.
During the 120 days of 2020 riots, looting, arson, and assault that saw $2 billion in damage, 35-40 killed, hundreds of injured police officers, and 14,000 arrests, were there mass detentions, thousands of convictions, and lengthy sentences handed out to Antifa and BLM members for the violence? After all, the insurrectionary rioters staged iconic attacks on the idea of government, whether defined as torching a police precinct or federal courthouse.
Why then were so many protestors of January 6 demonstrations at the Capitol that saw no violent deaths at the hands of another—except a Trump supporter lethally shot for the misdemeanor of entering a broken window of the Capitol—given lengthy prison sentences?
George Floyd—a 6’4”, 223 pound black career violent felon, arrested while suspected of passing counterfeit money, serially high on dangerous drugs, resisting arrest—was choked into unconsciousness while resisting arrest by a reckless white police officer.
Floyd was canonized as an American hero, often portrayed with halo and angelic wings.
The officer was convicted of second-degree murder and is serving combined state and federal prison sentence of over 40 years.
A white Ashli Babbitt, 5’2”, 113 pounds, a 14-year military veteran, and, like Floyd, unarmed, was lethally shot for the crime of entering a broken window in the Capitol by a black policeman.
Postmortem, her life was smeared and slandered, her shooter canonized. Was Babbitt some sinner, Floyd a saint? The choker officer Chauvin a Satan, the lethal shooter cop Byrd godly? The petite Babbitt a mortal danger stopped only by a bullet, the huge and uncooperative Floyd supposedly easy to arrest with no need of force?
Why were the downtowns of Washington, D.C. and Seattle simply hijacked and expropriated by violent groups with impunity, while federal troops were forbidden to assist overtaxed local law enforcement? Was that not in stark contrast to the barbed wire, 20,000 soldiers and barricades that marked Washington for weeks after the Capitol demonstrations?
Why was there not to be a 2020 riot congressional commission to investigate the deaths and destruction caused by groups who crossed state lines to plan and orchestrate the violence, often weaving their conspiracies with the aid of social media?
Nullification
Did we not fight a Civil War to reestablish that states and locales could not ignore federal laws?
Why did 550 local and state jurisdictions, in old Confederate South Carolina style, declare with impunity that federal immigration law did not apply in their territories? Does the Left now believe in such neo-Confederate principles? Would it applaud counties that rendered federal endangered species, or handgun-control statutes null and void in their jurisdictions?
Or do we now declare some nullifications good and others bad, depending on our own politics?
How did the Biden Administration simply suspend all immigration law to greenlight 6-7 million illegal entries across the southern border since January 2021? Did Biden not take an oath to execute our laws faithfully?
Does any president now have the right to order the executive branch not to execute entire bodies of federal law? Will the next president declare entire sections of EPA statutes inert by de facto nonenforcement to appease a particular political base?
At any time, did Joe Biden send a bill to Congress requesting that anyone can now cross U.S. borders without identification and legal sanction?
So do citizens fly into JFK or LAX from foreign countries and simply announce that they either forgot their passports or never obtained them? And as a reward for lack of an ID or legal permission, are they still allowed into the United States and given a free phone, and a free hotel room? Do we have one set of laws for citizens, and another for non-citizens? And if so, why?
Rogue Agencies
How can a former FBI director under oath claim amnesia or ignorance 245 times during congressional testimony, or leak a classified account of a private conversation with a president with complete impunity, as did James Comey?
How can an FBI director, as did Andrew McCabe, lie on four occasions with impunity to federal investigators? Is it now the case that FBI directors at times must lie and deceive as part of their job descriptions?
How can a former FBI director, as in the case of Robert Mueller, with all seriousness deny under oath any knowledge of Fusion GPS or the Steele dossier, whose controversies prompted his own special counsel appointment? Can citizens tell inquisitive IRS auditors that they have no memory of deductions in question?
Why is there still an FBI after it has been confessed that it paid a foreign national, Christopher Steele, to compile dirt against a presidential candidate—and paid his source in Washington to provide Steele with false information to impugn a presidential candidate? How did the FBI manage to play a central role in both the 2016 and 2020 elections in efforts to alter the result?
How can a legitimate FBI knowingly submit such information that it knew was false to a federal judge to spy on an American citizen to further a farcical plot to destroy a presidential campaign?
So what will the FBI not do? Forge documents? Offer in vain $1 million to a foreign national to verify just one fact in a fake, bought dossier used to obtain a FISA warrant? Disappear cell phone data under subpoena?
Have high-ranking officials promise that a presidential candidate will never be elected? Infiltrate Latin-Mass Catholic Church services and school board meetings to monitor the activities of church-goers and parents in attendance?
Use armed performance-art SWAT teams to swoop into private homes to arrest suspects accused of mostly misdemeanors? Hire out social media private companies like Twitter to suppress free expression deemed by the FBI unhelpful or problematic?
Suppress information about an FBI-confiscated Hunter Biden laptop, while keeping mum as former intelligence officers lie absurdly before a national election that the computer in FBI hands was likely the work of Russian disinformationists—to aid a presidential candidate in a debate and harm the incumbent?
Destroy the lives of any whistleblowers who expose such miscreant behavior to Congress?
Printing Money
The journalist/historian Paul Johnson famously once wrote that the tripartite duty of any government leadership was “to ensure external security, internal order and maintenance of an honest currency.”
We certainly do not maintain an honest currency by borrowing 130 percent of annual GDP, with a looming debt of $33 trillion, an annual $1.5 trillion-plus budget deficit, and a 2022 annualized 6.5 percent inflation rate.
But statistics mask the real problem, which is a mentality of suicidal spending passed off as juvenile “modern monetary theory.” Unlimited borrowing as a “theory” is the academic idiocy that some socialist hare-brained professors dreamed up to excuse printing money we do not have.
Both parties have run up the debt. Yet the culpability mounts as each successive president adds to the crushing debt, in fear that on his watch the medicine of restraint will be worse than the disease of insolvency.
Note how casually the federal government burns through billions of dollars. We still have no idea how many billions of dollars in arms and equipment the military shrugged away in Kabul. Who cares anyway whether the terrorist Taliban is becoming one of the largest dispensers of U.S. taxpayers’ weaponry?
Currently, Joe Biden lies that by not spending allotted money he somehow is the greatest deficit hawk in memory, as he rams through a $1.5 trillion 2023 budget deficit.
The top federal income tax rate is 37 percent. In California, to take the example of our largest state, the top state bracket is 13.3 percent. Income subject to federal payroll taxes is 15.3 percent for the self-employed—and income subject to that crushing take is a whopping $160,200.
The above taxes are well aside from capital gains taxes, sales taxes, property taxes, and fuel taxes, which, along with income taxes, can easily take 50-60 percent of one’s middle-class income. Note that the government not only does not appreciate the crushing extractions but targets for auditing those who pay at that rate. And all this tax revenue leads to what? Multitrillion-dollar budget deficits and unsustainable national debt.
Adding insult to injury, our current White House occupant, Mr. “Ten-Percent”/ “The Big Guy” Joe Biden demagogues as “greedy” anyone who resents the wastage of federal spending after handing over half his income to the government. Yet did the Bidens report all their past foreign income and pay at that rate? Could Joe have ensured that his son first paid all he owed to the IRS before he smeared other Americans as not paying their fair shares?
A sane country would immediately reboot and update the old Simpson-Bowles reduction and simplification of taxes and spending proposals that would gradually work our way toward a balanced budget—and maybe, in a century, pay off what we have borrowed. But we know that is impossible since we would hear ad nauseam that such fiscal integrity was racist, heartless, and cruel.
So we will keep up borrowing and printing bread-and-circus money until, like the late fourth-century polis, or late imperial Rome, there is finally no money for the upkeep of infrastructure, domestic law and order, and deterrence against foreign enemies.
Then what cannot go on, will not go on and all the absurdities of the present will end with a bang not a whimper.
News of the Times;
Target Becomes The Latest Target Of Anti-Woke Boycott As It Sells ‘Satanist Pride’ LGBTQ+ Products For Kids:
https://summit.news/2023/05/22/target-becomes-the-latest-target-of-anti-woke-boycott-as-it-sells-satanist-pride-lgbtq-products-for-kids/
The Leftist Controlled FBI is now American KGB. Speak against them and get crushed:
https://daily.whatfinger.com/the-leftist-controlled-fbi-is-now-american-kgb-speak-against-them-and-get-crushed-jim-jordan-dicusses/
The FBI just got caught in yet more massive, outrageous FISA abuses:
https://nypost.com/2023/05/21/the-fbi-just-got-caught-in-yet-more-massive-outrageous-fisa-abuses/
Sorry vegans, a major health organization says meat, eggs and milk are vital sources of 'much-needed nutrients':
https://www.msn.com/en-us/health/nutrition/sorry-vegans-a-major-health-organization-says-meat-eggs-and-milk-are-vital-sources-of-much-needed-nutrients/ar-AA1aVtlW
Universal flu vaccine based on mRNA tech to be tested by National Institutes of Health:
https://www.cnbc.com/2023/05/15/nih-will-start-testing-universal-flu-vaccine-based-on-mrna-technology.html
Texas DPS recovers 30 children in joint human trafficking operations:
https://www.newsbreak.com/news/3026240467499-texas-dps-recovers-30-children-in-joint-human-trafficking-operations
UC Berkeley Hosts Exclusive “Black Only Graduation Ceremony”:
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2023/05/uc-berkeley-hosts-exclusive-black-only-graduation-ceremony/
Chicago suburb forced to cancel armed forces carnival:
https://www.theblaze.com/news/chicago-suburb-flash-mob-armed-forces-carnival
Homeless Vets Ousted to Make Room for Illegal Immigrants:
https://uniondailypost.com/homeless-vets-ousted-to-make-room-for-illegal-immigrants/
China Built an Army of Influence Agents:
https://www.thedailybeast.com/how-china-built-an-army-of-influence-agents-in-the-us
Tampa drag queen event canceled after DeSantis signs new law protecting children:
https://www.lifesitenews.com/news/tampa-drag-queen-event-canceled-after-desantis-signs-new-law-protecting-children/
Supreme Court Reins in EPA Overreach:
https://reason.com/2023/05/25/supreme-court-reins-in-epa-overreach/
WHO Issues Warning on “Unusual” Surge of Severe Myocarditis Cases in Newborns:
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2023/05/who-issues-warning-unusual-surge-severe-myocarditis-cases/
Social media risks for youth mental health highlighted:
https://www.statnews.com/2023/05/23/social-media-youth-mental-health/
Native American Man Gunned Down:
https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/lincolnbrown/2023/05/22/native-american-man-gunned-down-after-calling-cbp-on-trespassing-illegals-n1697296
I'm raisin awareness.
*.*
Facebook should have a limit on how many times a relationship status can be changed.
After 3 times, it should change by default to "Unstable."
*.*
A man in a hunter's outfit enters a butcher's shop. "I would like to buy two undressed ducks, please."
"I'm very sorry," the butcher replies. "But I'm afraid we're fresh out of ducks. I can sell you a couple of fresh chickens instead if you like."
"Chickens!" the hunter exclaims. "I can't go home and tell my wife I bagged a couple of chickens!"
*.*
Oneliners:
I worked hard all this week to put this beer on the table.
There should be a summer camp for adults where you just go to sleep for three weeks.
You think you love your family, but suddenly there are three of you and one remaining slice of pizza.
A shout out to everyone who got report cards growing up that said, "Talks too much."
Purses are just junk drawers with handles.
One thing horror movies have helped me realize is that as a parent, you definitely want to avoid having demonic children.
It is not the lofty sails but the unseen wind that moves the ship.
If something is confidential, it will be left in the copier machine.
Ditch the driving test for an I.Q. test.
Trust everybody, then cut the cards.
*.*
The 107th Running of the Indianapolis 500 is happening Sunday at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway in Speedway, Indiana.
It sounds like there was a shortage of available words when they came up with this event.
Quote of the Times;
“When Joe Biden came to Washington as a Senator in 1973, America’s national debt was $438 Billion. Under his 50 year control, America is now nearly $32 Trillion in debt.” - Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene
Link of the Times;
Three Lies They're Telling You about the Debt Ceiling:
https://mises.org/wire/three-lies-theyre-telling-you-about-debt-ceiling
Issue of the Times;
The Absurdities Of Our Age by Davis Hanson
A sign of a civilization in headlong decline is its embrace of absurdities. Unfortunately for the United States, we are witnessing an epidemic of nihilist nonsense.
Here are a few examples:
Reparations
How could a dysfunctional state like California even contemplate $800 billion in reparations?
The state currently faces a $31 billion annual deficit—and it’s climbing. The state’s $100 billion high-speed rail project is inert, a veritable Stonehenge of concrete monoliths without a foot of track laid down.
California’s income tax rates are already the highest in the nation. Its sales taxes, electricity rates, and gas taxes and prices are among the steepest in the country. And for what?
Crime, homelessness, and medieval decay characterize the once great downtowns of San Francisco and Los Angeles. It is now not safe to walk alone in any major California city after dark.
Shoplifting and smash-and-grab theft are no longer treated as real crimes. The result is the mass flight of brand stores from our downtowns and inner cities, with all the accustomed cries of “racism,” even as racist public prosecutors pick and choose whether to indict the arrested on the basis of race.
California infrastructure, once the best in the county, is now among the worst. Decaying and crowded freeways, inadequate water storage, and pot-holed streets are the new norm. Once robust gas, oil, mining, and timber industries are nearly inert.
The state’s public schools are dysfunctional. Once premier public universities are spiraling headlong into decline—junking scholastic tests for admissions, using illegal racial quotas to warp admissions, and institutionalizing racialized dorms and graduation ceremonies.
Even if California enjoyed a huge surplus, even if 300,000 residents were not fleeing the state each year, even if California had a history of being a Confederate slave state, even if whites were the majority of the population, even if the black population was greater than its present 5-6 percent, it would be insane for the state to even contemplate racial reparations.
Twenty-seven percent of the state’s residents were born outside of the United States, and have no American ancestors. The state is the most racially diverse in America, and one in which every group could, in theory, lodge complaints against the dead of the past. Mexican-Americans, Armenians, Asians, and the descendants of the impoverished “Okie” diaspora could all cite legacies of bias—but from whom exactly? The long dead?
For those of increasingly mixed heritage—about a quarter of the state—did their own ancestors oppress their own ancestors? Are all blacks sure that eight generations ago their individual ancestors were slaves outside of California, and therefore they have monetary grievances against those in the state whose ancestors eight generations ago might have owned slaves outside of California? And can such writs be documented?
Do we really wish to go down this path of destroying individuality and insisting that superficial appearance damns us to a collective rooted in the past?
If so, are we to tally up the half-century role of racial quotas to calibrate all the impoverished whites of the last 50 years who were discriminated against in admissions and hiring? Have there not been existing reparations from the decades-long implementations of racial preferences and exemptions—or perhaps in some $20 trillion dollars in reparatory transferences during a half-century of Great Society entitlements?
If we are collectives and not individuals anymore, are all of us to be judged by adding up our group’s historical and current pluses and minuses?
If so, do we add or subtract reparatory charges based on group data? If one race is vastly overrepresented in hate crimes or interracial crime statistics, and other groups vastly underrepresented as perpetrators, is it the role of the state now to intervene and provide reparatory and collective “equity” from one collective for the relatives of the victims of another collective?
Are we really convinced that past institutional racial bias is all-determinative of present opportunity? If so, why do Asians nationally as a collective on average earn $20,000 a year more than non-Hispanic whites—despite past exclusionary immigration laws, forced government relocations, and zoning prohibitions? Was there some unknown university study that postulated that the Japanese-internment or early 20th century Yellow Peril exclusionary immigration statutes were irrelevant to Asian-American upward mobility?
Inequality Under the Laws
Ideology now has made a mockery of the cherished traditions of blind justice and equality under the laws. Whether you are arrested, indicted, and convicted increasingly hinges on your politics.
During the 120 days of 2020 riots, looting, arson, and assault that saw $2 billion in damage, 35-40 killed, hundreds of injured police officers, and 14,000 arrests, were there mass detentions, thousands of convictions, and lengthy sentences handed out to Antifa and BLM members for the violence? After all, the insurrectionary rioters staged iconic attacks on the idea of government, whether defined as torching a police precinct or federal courthouse.
Why then were so many protestors of January 6 demonstrations at the Capitol that saw no violent deaths at the hands of another—except a Trump supporter lethally shot for the misdemeanor of entering a broken window of the Capitol—given lengthy prison sentences?
George Floyd—a 6’4”, 223 pound black career violent felon, arrested while suspected of passing counterfeit money, serially high on dangerous drugs, resisting arrest—was choked into unconsciousness while resisting arrest by a reckless white police officer.
Floyd was canonized as an American hero, often portrayed with halo and angelic wings.
The officer was convicted of second-degree murder and is serving combined state and federal prison sentence of over 40 years.
A white Ashli Babbitt, 5’2”, 113 pounds, a 14-year military veteran, and, like Floyd, unarmed, was lethally shot for the crime of entering a broken window in the Capitol by a black policeman.
Postmortem, her life was smeared and slandered, her shooter canonized. Was Babbitt some sinner, Floyd a saint? The choker officer Chauvin a Satan, the lethal shooter cop Byrd godly? The petite Babbitt a mortal danger stopped only by a bullet, the huge and uncooperative Floyd supposedly easy to arrest with no need of force?
Why were the downtowns of Washington, D.C. and Seattle simply hijacked and expropriated by violent groups with impunity, while federal troops were forbidden to assist overtaxed local law enforcement? Was that not in stark contrast to the barbed wire, 20,000 soldiers and barricades that marked Washington for weeks after the Capitol demonstrations?
Why was there not to be a 2020 riot congressional commission to investigate the deaths and destruction caused by groups who crossed state lines to plan and orchestrate the violence, often weaving their conspiracies with the aid of social media?
Nullification
Did we not fight a Civil War to reestablish that states and locales could not ignore federal laws?
Why did 550 local and state jurisdictions, in old Confederate South Carolina style, declare with impunity that federal immigration law did not apply in their territories? Does the Left now believe in such neo-Confederate principles? Would it applaud counties that rendered federal endangered species, or handgun-control statutes null and void in their jurisdictions?
Or do we now declare some nullifications good and others bad, depending on our own politics?
How did the Biden Administration simply suspend all immigration law to greenlight 6-7 million illegal entries across the southern border since January 2021? Did Biden not take an oath to execute our laws faithfully?
Does any president now have the right to order the executive branch not to execute entire bodies of federal law? Will the next president declare entire sections of EPA statutes inert by de facto nonenforcement to appease a particular political base?
At any time, did Joe Biden send a bill to Congress requesting that anyone can now cross U.S. borders without identification and legal sanction?
So do citizens fly into JFK or LAX from foreign countries and simply announce that they either forgot their passports or never obtained them? And as a reward for lack of an ID or legal permission, are they still allowed into the United States and given a free phone, and a free hotel room? Do we have one set of laws for citizens, and another for non-citizens? And if so, why?
Rogue Agencies
How can a former FBI director under oath claim amnesia or ignorance 245 times during congressional testimony, or leak a classified account of a private conversation with a president with complete impunity, as did James Comey?
How can an FBI director, as did Andrew McCabe, lie on four occasions with impunity to federal investigators? Is it now the case that FBI directors at times must lie and deceive as part of their job descriptions?
How can a former FBI director, as in the case of Robert Mueller, with all seriousness deny under oath any knowledge of Fusion GPS or the Steele dossier, whose controversies prompted his own special counsel appointment? Can citizens tell inquisitive IRS auditors that they have no memory of deductions in question?
Why is there still an FBI after it has been confessed that it paid a foreign national, Christopher Steele, to compile dirt against a presidential candidate—and paid his source in Washington to provide Steele with false information to impugn a presidential candidate? How did the FBI manage to play a central role in both the 2016 and 2020 elections in efforts to alter the result?
How can a legitimate FBI knowingly submit such information that it knew was false to a federal judge to spy on an American citizen to further a farcical plot to destroy a presidential campaign?
So what will the FBI not do? Forge documents? Offer in vain $1 million to a foreign national to verify just one fact in a fake, bought dossier used to obtain a FISA warrant? Disappear cell phone data under subpoena?
Have high-ranking officials promise that a presidential candidate will never be elected? Infiltrate Latin-Mass Catholic Church services and school board meetings to monitor the activities of church-goers and parents in attendance?
Use armed performance-art SWAT teams to swoop into private homes to arrest suspects accused of mostly misdemeanors? Hire out social media private companies like Twitter to suppress free expression deemed by the FBI unhelpful or problematic?
Suppress information about an FBI-confiscated Hunter Biden laptop, while keeping mum as former intelligence officers lie absurdly before a national election that the computer in FBI hands was likely the work of Russian disinformationists—to aid a presidential candidate in a debate and harm the incumbent?
Destroy the lives of any whistleblowers who expose such miscreant behavior to Congress?
Printing Money
The journalist/historian Paul Johnson famously once wrote that the tripartite duty of any government leadership was “to ensure external security, internal order and maintenance of an honest currency.”
We certainly do not maintain an honest currency by borrowing 130 percent of annual GDP, with a looming debt of $33 trillion, an annual $1.5 trillion-plus budget deficit, and a 2022 annualized 6.5 percent inflation rate.
But statistics mask the real problem, which is a mentality of suicidal spending passed off as juvenile “modern monetary theory.” Unlimited borrowing as a “theory” is the academic idiocy that some socialist hare-brained professors dreamed up to excuse printing money we do not have.
Both parties have run up the debt. Yet the culpability mounts as each successive president adds to the crushing debt, in fear that on his watch the medicine of restraint will be worse than the disease of insolvency.
Note how casually the federal government burns through billions of dollars. We still have no idea how many billions of dollars in arms and equipment the military shrugged away in Kabul. Who cares anyway whether the terrorist Taliban is becoming one of the largest dispensers of U.S. taxpayers’ weaponry?
Currently, Joe Biden lies that by not spending allotted money he somehow is the greatest deficit hawk in memory, as he rams through a $1.5 trillion 2023 budget deficit.
The top federal income tax rate is 37 percent. In California, to take the example of our largest state, the top state bracket is 13.3 percent. Income subject to federal payroll taxes is 15.3 percent for the self-employed—and income subject to that crushing take is a whopping $160,200.
The above taxes are well aside from capital gains taxes, sales taxes, property taxes, and fuel taxes, which, along with income taxes, can easily take 50-60 percent of one’s middle-class income. Note that the government not only does not appreciate the crushing extractions but targets for auditing those who pay at that rate. And all this tax revenue leads to what? Multitrillion-dollar budget deficits and unsustainable national debt.
Adding insult to injury, our current White House occupant, Mr. “Ten-Percent”/ “The Big Guy” Joe Biden demagogues as “greedy” anyone who resents the wastage of federal spending after handing over half his income to the government. Yet did the Bidens report all their past foreign income and pay at that rate? Could Joe have ensured that his son first paid all he owed to the IRS before he smeared other Americans as not paying their fair shares?
A sane country would immediately reboot and update the old Simpson-Bowles reduction and simplification of taxes and spending proposals that would gradually work our way toward a balanced budget—and maybe, in a century, pay off what we have borrowed. But we know that is impossible since we would hear ad nauseam that such fiscal integrity was racist, heartless, and cruel.
So we will keep up borrowing and printing bread-and-circus money until, like the late fourth-century polis, or late imperial Rome, there is finally no money for the upkeep of infrastructure, domestic law and order, and deterrence against foreign enemies.
Then what cannot go on, will not go on and all the absurdities of the present will end with a bang not a whimper.
News of the Times;
Target Becomes The Latest Target Of Anti-Woke Boycott As It Sells ‘Satanist Pride’ LGBTQ+ Products For Kids:
https://summit.news/2023/05/22/target-becomes-the-latest-target-of-anti-woke-boycott-as-it-sells-satanist-pride-lgbtq-products-for-kids/
The Leftist Controlled FBI is now American KGB. Speak against them and get crushed:
https://daily.whatfinger.com/the-leftist-controlled-fbi-is-now-american-kgb-speak-against-them-and-get-crushed-jim-jordan-dicusses/
The FBI just got caught in yet more massive, outrageous FISA abuses:
https://nypost.com/2023/05/21/the-fbi-just-got-caught-in-yet-more-massive-outrageous-fisa-abuses/
Sorry vegans, a major health organization says meat, eggs and milk are vital sources of 'much-needed nutrients':
https://www.msn.com/en-us/health/nutrition/sorry-vegans-a-major-health-organization-says-meat-eggs-and-milk-are-vital-sources-of-much-needed-nutrients/ar-AA1aVtlW
Universal flu vaccine based on mRNA tech to be tested by National Institutes of Health:
https://www.cnbc.com/2023/05/15/nih-will-start-testing-universal-flu-vaccine-based-on-mrna-technology.html
Texas DPS recovers 30 children in joint human trafficking operations:
https://www.newsbreak.com/news/3026240467499-texas-dps-recovers-30-children-in-joint-human-trafficking-operations
UC Berkeley Hosts Exclusive “Black Only Graduation Ceremony”:
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2023/05/uc-berkeley-hosts-exclusive-black-only-graduation-ceremony/
Chicago suburb forced to cancel armed forces carnival:
https://www.theblaze.com/news/chicago-suburb-flash-mob-armed-forces-carnival
Homeless Vets Ousted to Make Room for Illegal Immigrants:
https://uniondailypost.com/homeless-vets-ousted-to-make-room-for-illegal-immigrants/
China Built an Army of Influence Agents:
https://www.thedailybeast.com/how-china-built-an-army-of-influence-agents-in-the-us
Tampa drag queen event canceled after DeSantis signs new law protecting children:
https://www.lifesitenews.com/news/tampa-drag-queen-event-canceled-after-desantis-signs-new-law-protecting-children/
Supreme Court Reins in EPA Overreach:
https://reason.com/2023/05/25/supreme-court-reins-in-epa-overreach/
WHO Issues Warning on “Unusual” Surge of Severe Myocarditis Cases in Newborns:
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2023/05/who-issues-warning-unusual-surge-severe-myocarditis-cases/
Social media risks for youth mental health highlighted:
https://www.statnews.com/2023/05/23/social-media-youth-mental-health/
Native American Man Gunned Down:
https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/lincolnbrown/2023/05/22/native-american-man-gunned-down-after-calling-cbp-on-trespassing-illegals-n1697296
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.