Do You Want to Die?

Couple things came across on X today that got me thinking a little more deeply about our current condition.

The first was a news report about the President of the International Olympic Committee claiming, to quote, there is “no scientifically solid system” to determine male or female.

Next thing was a report out of the UK where the government is going full-Gestapo against British people who dared to be upset about foreign savages stabbing British girls.

Final thing was, in response to that, someone posting a link to the Sex Pistols song, God Save the Queen. You remember it, don’t you? I do; and this bit:

God save the Queen
She ain’t no human being
There is no future
In England’s dreaming

These three things rolled around in my head a for a bit and it occurred to me, very counter-intuitively, that because the Brits tolerated that lyric, they are now being arrested for posting memes about foreign savages.

It might seem wrong to think that because, of course, the UK government is savagely repressing free speech whereas the Sex Pistols were a sort of test case for free speech. The sort of thing we were told we must allow to happen or we’d all end up arrested. Well, the Brits did let it happen – and now they’re being arrested. Funny, isn’t it?

There’s no future in England’s dreaming. They did get that right, but not how they meant. What they meant was that there was no future in England’s dream of a solidly middle class society of strictly law-abiding people who did the right thing cheerfully. Punk rock was at war with that. So was the rest of British pop culture – and, indeed, pop culture all through the West; taking endless shots at the staid, boring old fuddy-duddies who just wouldn’t let people have fun. We’ve got to fight for our right to par-taaaaay!

But, of course, nobody was ever against having fun – but the fuddy-duddies did object to thinking that being garbage was fun…being drunk. Being stoned. Being on welfare. Dressing like a weirdo. This wasn’t fun; this was just being insulting. And living off the productive while doing it. So the fuddy-duddies objected and got made even more fun of…and so they just let it happen because, being fuddy-duddies, they didn’t want to seem rude. Problem was that there was a social system which was based upon sobriety, hard work, thrift, being law-abiding…and it was so very successful that it built a surplus that lazy, profligate drunken thieves could take advantage of. That old fuddy-duddy society is now long gone…and now your daughter can be murdered by a foreign savage and if you object you’ll get a visit from the police.

And that brought my mind back to the IOC President – what he said is a lie. He knows it is a lie. Everyone who heard it knew it was a lie. He knew that everyone who heard it knows that he knows it is a lie. Yet, he said it; he went ahead and lied. And he still has his job. The particular lie here isn’t really the point – the point is that our society has become so entirely suffused with lies that we don’t really even notice them. A lot of people commented on the article – but only very rarely did anyone call it a lie. They called it stupid. They called it ignorant. They called it all sorts of things but only a few (me, included, of course) called it what it is: a lie.

You have to really roll that around in your head for a moment, what the IOC guy said: he is denying not some controversial theory of the universe but a self-evident truth. I don’t need to prove to anyone what a man is. I don’t need a DNA test. I need to merely see the person – naked if necessary just in case there’s been some surgery, etc – and that will tell me what I need to know. I no more need to prove a person is man or woman than I need to prove to anyone that water is wet by pouring a bucket of it over their head. We know water is wet. We know what a man is. We know what a woman is. There’s no guesswork here. And that makes the IOC President a liar – quite an egregious and ridiculous liar. The only possible out for him would be a determination that he is stark, raving mad. Because only a madman can possibly not know the difference between a man and a woman. Anyone else making such a claim is just a liar.

It is said that C. S. Lewis was greatly influenced by G. K. Chesterton and I do believe this is true – if for nothing else than that both of them hit upon the requirement that if you’ve gone wrong, you have to go back to the mistake – no matter how far back that is – and fix it from there. It is no use trying to tinker with the mistake. You can’t fix wrong – you can only stop being wrong. And as I pondered all of this, it came into my mind that the error – where we went wrong – was when we accepted the assertion that we must tolerate wrong if we want to be right.

You know the argument: its generally associated with the Libertarian ideal these days but its been around for a long time. Let’s just say it started with Voltaire in the 18th century – “I may not agree with what you say, but I’ll defend to the death your right to say it”. This, of course, was in stark opposition to the societal expectation of his day – in both Catholic and Protestant countries – that there are some things you just couldn’t say. Mostly related to blasphemy against God. To be sure, some nations took it hard in the direction of not saying anything against the King, or the government, or the higher orders in general and that was wrong. But because Louis XV would unjustly send a man to the Bastille for speaking out of turn about Madame du Pompadour it doesn’t necessarily follow that we must allow everything to be said as if nothing matters.

It is a good theory, I’ll grant it that – it does seem that if I in any way curtail someone’s ability to say a thing then it might come out that I, in my turn, am curtailed. But what if what the other person is saying is just a lie? What if its an insane lie? What if its an assertion that we can’t tell man from woman? To be sure, we didn’t immediately jump from Rousseau’s absurdities to “hey, I can’t tell what a man is”, but it is a rather straight line. There is another quote from Voltaire which is pertinent here: “those who can make you believe absurdities will get you to commit atrocities”. Yeah. No kidding, Volty ol’ buddy. We went from the absurdity of the proposition that humanity once lived in a “state of nature” to “you can be born in the wrong body” in just 250 years. Blink of an eye. So maybe defending to the death everyone’s right to say whatever they damned well pleased wasn’t such a good idea?

What we’ve done is place lies on the same platform as truth and said, “you’re equal, have at it”. But lies, being lies, cheated and has now kicked truth to the curb and is running wild. Here’s my assertion on this: nobody actually believes a lie. Even the people who get conned out of money by the more conventional kind of liar – you know: “hey, I can get you 25% returns forever, just give me your money”. Nobody believes that – the “suckers” are just hoping they get paid before the pyramid scheme blows up. Everyone knows that there’s no such thing as a free lunch and that what is too good to be true is always false. A six year old can believe a lie. A senile person can believe a lie. No person in possession of their senses does.

But people do go along with the lies – for a variety of reasons and none of them matter. What matters is that they are participating in them even if just by silent consent. And they participate because they are expecting a payoff before it all goes to hell. Even if that payoff is just what they think will be a little bit of peace and quiet. And after now a couple centuries of allowing lies to pervade we are now in a situation where things are starting to crack – and I mean the basics of civilization. You see it: most obviously in the public brawls and looting of stores. But it is also in a bridge that can’t be repaired for years, or a space capsule that can’t land because, apparently, someone forget to make sure it could land…or maybe they didn’t even know what’s required for landing a space capsule? But they launched the thing! They did that – clearly didn’t know if it would work, but they launched it. Far more important than the space ship was that the lies were agreed to…and I’m sure the workforce that failed to replicate 1969 tech is filled with diverse and equitable people…when we need some geek with a slide rule to just do the math.

So, as Chesterton and Lewis pointed out, to fix this we have to go back to the beginning and start all over again. Our mistake was to allow lies. We must not allow lies any more. First off, we have to punish those who are lying. This is crucial: they must feel real pain. Not so much to punish them (though there is that) but to instruct everyone else that lying is bad. Really bad. Like so bad you should never, ever do it. Not even a little bit. Secondly, and far more importantly, we have to ban lying. We can’t let people lie and call it free speech. Just can’t. I know: tricky. This won’t be easy – but if we allow lies to flourish then we’ll just get more lies. Liars like to lie – beats working for a living. Until it is legally and socially impossible to lie and be rich, we’ll just continue to be overwhelmed…and our civilization will die. First in a round of cruel oppression as the liars try to kill everyone who won’t go along, secondly as everything falls apart because liars can’t do things like keep roads and sewer systems working. And do keep in mind that I said the liars will kill us – in fact, they already are: those girls stabbed in Britain were stabbed by liars. Sure, maybe a foreign savage held the knife, but it was a polished, urbane bureaucrat who invited the savage in via lies. Bottom line is that one way or another a lot of people are going to lose everything – liberty, property and life. Your choice: liars, or you.

38 thoughts on “Do You Want to Die?

  1. Retired Spook's avatar Retired Spook August 10, 2024 / 8:48 am

    Mark, you’ve posted a lot about lies recently, but this post is by far the best and most comprehensive. I’m printing it out and keeping it for my grandkids and great grandkids.

    • Retired Spook's avatar Retired Spook August 10, 2024 / 9:50 am

      The more I think about this, the more I realize that pretty much every Conservative on this blog has used the same tactic to combat lies and half-truths. The Left has become highly skilled at using the strawman argument as well as taking things out of context. We Conservatives rarely, if ever use those tactics because they’re intellectually dishonest, and quite frankly, because our arguments can usually stand on their own. The quickest and easiest way to combat such tactics is to simply say, “I don’t accept your premise – full stop.

      • Cluster's avatar Cluster August 10, 2024 / 10:47 am

        JD Vance did just that the other day. When asked a very loaded question from a leftist reporter, JD quickly responded by saying “well first of all, I reject the premise of the question”, Vance then proceeded to school the media activist and it was beautiful.

        The problem we have in America today is that we don’t even share the same reality with our political opponents and that is a breach that will lead to more and more conflict, unless and until we expose the lies, hold those accountable, and restore normalcy and decency in this country

      • Retired Spook's avatar Retired Spook August 10, 2024 / 11:40 am

        we don’t even share the same reality with our political opponents

        If you had to point to a single factor, I think that’s it. Up until 10 years or so, maybe a little longer, the goal of the vast majority of Americans, at least those with families, was that their kids have a better life than they did. Polls taken during Obama’s tenure showed that that ceased to be reality. For the first time ever the majority of Americans believe that life would be worse for their kids.

        So what changed? It’s pretty obvious for anyone paying the slightest bit of attention. For most of my adult life Democrats and Republicans essentially wanted the same things; they just differed on how to achieve them and at what level of government they could best be achieved. At some point there was a divergence from methods to outcomes. That divergence has to be reconciled, either by defeat at the ballot box or by violence.

      • Amazona's avatar Amazona August 10, 2024 / 12:01 pm

        And that takes me back to the same complaint I have been making loudly and insistently for years—that we suck at defining and explaining things. That leaves a vacuum of information which the Left fills with lies, and that means that if and when we finally decide to speak up we are on defense, against an assimilated and entrenched falsehood, shored up by carefully erected and maintained emotional defenses. This goes back to Mark’s statement that:

        the requirement that if you’ve gone wrong, you have to go back to the mistake – no matter how far back that is – and fix it from there. It is no use trying to tinker with the mistake. You can’t fix wrong – you can only stop being wrong.

        That means, to me, that while I agree with what you say how we don’t even share the same reality with our political opponents I also think we need to go back to the origins of that divide. I suggest that politically that would mean addressing the lack of understanding on the Left (and here I mean the average citizen who supports the Left but without knowledge of or commitment to its core ideology) of the fundamental disputes between the two sides—-that is, not ISSUES per se, but the correct way to address them and solve them within the boundaries of our Constitution.

        That is that a given ISSUE itself is not always at the heart of a dispute, but the way to address it is. That used to be the debate between Democrats and Republicans—yes, poverty is a problem, agreed. The division was caused by one side saying this is a problem the federal government must solve and the other saying this is not in the purview of federal authority and must be addressed at the state and local levels, and societally, not necessarily governmentally. The original “mistake” is not concern for those in poverty, a concern shared across the board, but in the differing beliefs of the role of the federal government in addressing it.

        If we could wave a magic wand and make all the emotional detritus disappear, all the moral posturing and identifying the opposition in disparaging ways, all the condemnation of the opposition as “evil” and so on, there could be an honest debate about the true and necessary role of the federal government. It might be energetic, even contentious, but based on truth and not a collection of lies built upon lies and reinforced with propaganda. I believe that many on America’s Left (which, I repeat, are not ideologues but emotionally attached to a “Party” rather than an understood and accepted model of government) if they could step away from that fortress of emotion created by the ideologues of the movement to block them from reason, we could find common ground.

        We sometimes wonder how Ronald Reagan managed to bring opposing sides together to accomplish things. I suggest that it was because this was his approach, shifting the discourse from the personal and emotional to the abstract and analytical. Getting to that ideal now, with the fortress even more reinforced with even more emotional appeal, will be a long and difficult slog, but I think it can be done. I think our younger people are more receptive to the appeal of thinking rather than just emoting—certainly not all of them, but a lot—and it’s time to start doing what Vance did, simply reject the concept itself as flawed and get back to basics.

      • Amazona's avatar Amazona August 10, 2024 / 12:03 pm

        As usual, Spook says it better, with fewer words:

        For most of my adult life Democrats and Republicans essentially wanted the same things; they just differed on how to achieve them and at what level of government they could best be achieved. At some point there was a divergence from methods to outcomes. That divergence has to be reconciled, either by defeat at the ballot box or by violence.

        I think most of the legacy Dems simply don’t realize that the choice is not between “Do It” and “Don’t Do It” (“It” being the issue of the day) but instead is about “How To Do It”. When people understand that they will be more inclined to vote against the authoritarian Central Authority top-down One Size Fits All dictates of Leftist governance and in favor of the essentially libertarian Constitutional model

  2. Amazona's avatar Amazona August 10, 2024 / 11:31 am

    Going back to your comments about free speech, and banning lying. While it is a noble goal to end lying by punishing it, that way lies tyranny as it requires an official authority to define “truth” and a Ministry of Truth with the power to punish is a frightening thing.

    I am more inclined to keep our current standards for some kinds of lying, such as slander and libel, but in general I think freedom of speech, up to limits such as these is too important to discard for fear of lies being told. True freedom of speech, which of course depends on equal access to various media whether they are television or radio or social media or various print media or whatever, will allow for the open debate of what is true and what is not and allow the weight of truth to crush the lies.

    Pick a lie, a dangerous lie—-let’s say the lie that the “vaccines” developed ostensibly to protect against Covid are safe and effective. Without the protection and collusion of most of all the media, this lie would have almost immediately gone head-to-head in a true “free speech” society with competing information, within days of the falsehood being discovered. Proof of the falsehood, absent public discourse and revelations, would take months or longer. Punish the lie when it has gone through that process, but don’t handicap free speech in the meantime because that is the first line of defense.

    • Cluster's avatar Cluster August 10, 2024 / 11:35 am

      There are levels of lies and I would say the most destructive lie being perpetrated in this country is Climate Change.

    • Mark Noonan's avatar Mark Noonan August 10, 2024 / 2:54 pm

      I agree wholeheartedly!

      We must not ever get into prior restraint – the Ministry of Truth must never come to be. But this is what I have in mind:

      Technically, we’re already not allowed to lie – its why there are libel cases. But what really started the explosion of lies was the Sullivan ruling where it was held that for the MSM to be guilty of libel the plaintiff has to prove actual malice…and unless the MSMer wrote a memo in advance saying, “Imma lie about that guy”, you can’t prove that malice. It was an open invitation for the MSM to lie with wild abandon…and that’s just what they’ve done. One must think about that ruling – the Court essentially held, and affirmed/expanded it in later cases, that the First Amendment secured a right to lie.

      Now, they did that in Sullivan because the case ultimately involved MLK vs some dumb Southern racist hicks (guarantee you that’s what the Justices were thinking). They just wanted to make sure that in a battle with dumb Southern racist hicks you could say whatever you wanted and nobody could stop you. Flash forward from 1960 to 2024 and this is why we get MSM reports which are 180 from reality – flat out, bald-faced lies: because nobody can do anything about it.

      So, clearly, removing the requirement to prove “actual malice” is key – libel has to be recoverable if you lie. Sullivan must be overturned. Once that is done, what I would do is enact laws in Red States where if you lie on a medium which is available in that State, you have lied in that State. So, a New York liberal journalist slandering Trump in the Atlantic would be liable in Alabama if anyone there read it. This is, of course, more of a long-term solution. So what can we do today?

      Simple: use what laws we already have. Accuse the MSM of collusion with the DNC. File the case in a Red State. Start discovery.

      Accuse the MSM when it lies of conspiring to deny civil rights. Seems to me that if CNN tells a bald-faced lie about something Trump said then they are conspiring to deny the civil rights of Trump’s voters who need to know the truth in order to make a rational decision about their vote (you should really check the Voting Rights Act – the Liberals put some teeth into that and it is very wide ranging in what constitutes interfering with the right to vote: remember, they convicted a guy who put up a joke in 2016 saying that Hillary’s voters had to vote on a different day – it was a joke and they indicted, tried and convicted him…well, if that is a felony then so is saying that Trump is an existential threat to Our Democracy).

      Claim MSM report after MSM report is an in-kind donation to the Harris campaign. The FEC is going to be useless here but pretty much every State has campaign finance laws and so use those to just go after the MSM.

      • Amazona's avatar Amazona August 10, 2024 / 3:27 pm

        I think that publishing something proved to be untrue (“there was no Holocaust”) would be a de facto admission of or at least proof of malice.

        I also think that coordinated lying among federal agencies, as well as collusion with media, to promote a lie designed to influence a presidential election would qualify as malice. In the case of the laptop story, or rather lack of a story, the coordinated lying’s purpose was to damage a presidential candidate and by extension to deprive voters of crucial information—lots of damages there. And a lot of the lying was done under the color of law.

      • Amazona's avatar Amazona August 11, 2024 / 11:37 am

        unless the MSMer wrote a memo in advance saying, “Imma lie about that guy”, you can’t prove that malice.

        I think it’s worse than that. I think you have to write a memo saying “Imma lie about that guy because I want to hurt him” or they can say well, yeah, he knew it wasn’t true but you haven’t proved malicious motive. What if the guy just likes to lie, without intending harm?

        When we veer into Thought Crimes we are in trouble. It’s like “Hate Crimes”, which are really Thought Crimes. Did he shoot the clerk because he was black, or because he was reaching for a gun? And what about the white guy standing next to him, who was also killed? Does the one killing mean more than the other because of melanin content because the State has arbitrarily added a Thought Crime to one of the homicides?

        I think it’s all permutations of Identity Politics, of so much depending on “who” rather than “what”. Get the feelz out of it. It’s against the law to lie about people full stop. The impact of the lies would be another issue, rather like the penalty phase of a trial after the verdict is guilty. Killing people is a crime full stop, no matter what color the victim is, no matter what color the killer is.

        And we need to remember that merely saying something that is not true is not necessarily lying. There has to be the knowledge that it is not true. Here it gets a little dicey, like when people repeat lies told to them about political figures—is there a moral or even legal responsibility to at least try to ascertain the validity of the claim before repeating it? There might be a line between irresponsibility and outright lying, but then when we get into trying to legislate human behavior it always gets complicated.

      • Mark Noonan's avatar Mark Noonan August 11, 2024 / 12:49 pm

        “It’s against the law to lie about people full stop”

        Yep – and IMO we should leave it to a jury to decide if it was a lie.

        Now, I do understand that in deep Blue jurisdictions the Left will try to indict me for saying “the sky is blue” with a battery of experts claiming there is no scientifically solid system to determine the color of the sky. It is a risk; they would do that. But the back of it is that we can indict them in deep Red jurisdictions for actual lies.

        That is one of the main things we on the Right have lacked over the past 50 years – the willingness to punish.

        You think about Masterpiece Cake shop – he’s already gone all the way to the Supreme Court and had his right to refuse service affirmed as fully Constitutional and they are still working up cases against him. I think the most recent is his refusal to back a gender-transition cake. They will not stop going after him. That is how we have to be towards the Left – just continually going after them on every level. The difference being that we will be going after them for lying and for serial violations of civil rights (in my view, the efforts against Masterpiece Cake amount to a conspiracy to deny civil rights and everyone involved should be facing ten years for each instance).

  3. jdge's avatar jdge1 August 10, 2024 / 11:52 am

    For any who’ve watched Olympic Track & Field events, the US athlete Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone destroyed her own word record in the 400M Hurdles. Her comment below is something to remember when things look bleak.  

    My faith was being tested all week. From bad practices, to 3 false start delays, to a meet delay. I just kept hearing God say, “Just focus on me”. It was the best race plan I could have ever assembled. I no longer run for self recognition, but to reflect His perfect will that is already set in stone. I don’t deserve anything. But by grace, through faith, Jesus has given me everything. Records come and go. The glory of God is eternal. Thank you Father.

    • Amazona's avatar Amazona August 10, 2024 / 2:44 pm

      Thank you for sharing that.

      One of the biggest turnarounds in my life was when I said “Lord, I keep telling you what I want. Please tell me what YOU want.”

  4. Retired Spook's avatar Retired Spook August 10, 2024 / 11:54 am

    The other day I made what I’m sure some thought was a bigoted comment about Jewish support for Democrats and how the majority of American Jews would still vote for Harris/Walz while simultaneously making reservations for the first boxcar. Well, according to the most recent Siena College Research Institute poll, the number is now down to 49%, so I may be proved wrong. Still, I’d love to hear the rationalization from that 49%.

  5. Amazona's avatar Amazona August 11, 2024 / 12:25 am

    I was visiting with my lawyer today and he told me he had lunch last week with an attorney who had gone up against Kamala Harris in California and said she was the stupidest and least prepared lawyer he had ever seen, and that all she was interested in was grandstanding. That make the following list even more believable:

    Now that she is the Presidential nominee for the Democrat Party, we should remind ourselves what kind of president she might be by again looking back at all the things the then-Vice Presidential nominee Kamala Harris had done in her career as a “top cop” and a U.S. Senator. Here’s a partial list:

    • 2019 — Harris ripped a law firm’s work on a controversial plea deal involving deep-pocketed pedophile Jeffrey Epstein — the same day she took money from some of its attorneys at a fundraiser.
    • 2018 — Harris aide was forced to resign a year after losing a $400k sexual assault case, once the media started asking about it.
    • “The Appeal” reports that “Harris also failed to hold police and prosecutors accountable for misconduct. In Orange County, where a sprawling jailhouse informant scandal has robbed countless people of their right to a fair trial, her lack of meaningful oversight has contributed to a crisis of legitimacy that continues to upend the county’s criminal justice system.”
    • 2016 — Harris left California with a $3.3 billion tab to close the defective San Onofre nuclear facility bill by letting PUC president Peevey off even though he conspired with Socal Edison to move costs of decommissioning San Onofre to the consumers for Edison’s own failures. She let the statute of limitations run out on the case.
    • 2015 — When called upon to support bills that would have mandated that all police officers wear body-worn cameras and that the Attorney General’s office investigate lethal officer-involved shootings, she declined.
    • 2014 — Lawyers for Attorney General Harris argued in court that if forced to release inmates early, prisons would lose an important labor pool.
    • 2013 — Harris challenged innocent man Daniel Larsen’s release from prison after he was exonerated by two federal judges.
    • 2011-2017 — Attorney General Harris refused DNA testing for the wrongly imprisoned Kevin Cooper, who much evidence shows was innocent.
    • 2011 — Harris personally championed a new state law making it a criminal misdemeanor for parents to allow kids in K–8 grades to miss more than 10 percent of school days without a valid excuse.
    • 2010 — Harris laughed about jailing parents over their kids’ truancy (she sent an attorney from her office to intimidate a homeless single mother whose children were missing school, reports the Left wing Huffpost).
    • 2010 — Harris covered up a crime lab scandal and tried to violate suspects’ rights to a free trial by covering it up.
    • 2009 — Kamala Harris drug treatment program was wiping drug convictions from illegal aliens’ records.
    • 2004 — When Harris became San Francisco district attorney in 2004, she stopped her office from helping any survivors of sexual abuse by the Catholic Church and pursued no cases against the Church whatsoever.
  6. Amazona's avatar Amazona August 11, 2024 / 12:41 am

    Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, Vice President Kamala Harris’ running mate, faces growing criticism as the state’s education performance has reportedly plummeted under his leadership, with opponents blaming his administration’s focus on ideology over effective policies, according to the New York Post.

    Walz, a former public school teacher, assumed office in 2019. Since then, the academic proficiency of Minnesota students has seen a downturn.According to the Minnesota Department of Education (MDE), reading proficiency fell from 59.2% in 2019 to 49.9% in 2023. Math scores have also steeply declined, dropping from 55% in 2019 to 45.5% last year. 

    ……………………………….

    Minnesota dropped from 7th in 2021 to 19th in 2023 in the Annie E. Casey Foundation’s Kids Count Data Book, which assesses states based on National Assessment of Educational Progress test scores.

    • Mark Noonan's avatar Mark Noonan August 11, 2024 / 1:52 am

      Like all Progs, he’s failed utterly – and he’s only kept afloat on a sea of MSM lies…and lies usually unchallenged by the wet noodle GOP.

      I found out today that every year the moron issues a George Floyd Day proclamation…as if that crackhead bum deserves remembrance! But that is what they are…

  7. Amazona's avatar Amazona August 11, 2024 / 11:01 am

    Remember casper obediently swooning over the huge huge HUGE crowds fawning over Kamala? Yeah, it sounded fake to me, too. Then a few people started examining a photo sent out by her campaign of a crowd so massive that it was, well, really impressive. Except it was also evidently faked. And poorly faked at that.

    I guess no one in her PR campaign thought anyone would wonder why an airport let tens of thousands of people onto the tarmac to cluster around an airplane. Or how Harris and Harrishub would make their way through this dense crowd that was right up against the bottom of the plane stairs. Or why there were no reflections of any of the “crowd” on the shiny surfaces of the plane.

    But then, to even BE a Kamala supporter means to suspend rational thought and analysis, so maybe the photo was created just to assure her followers that they are not alone in their blind fandom.

    You have to admit, those people in that faked photo do look JOYFUL. And even EXCITED. Are those still the two memes being promoted?

    • Mark Noonan's avatar Mark Noonan August 11, 2024 / 12:55 pm

      Team Harris announced to great fanfare and much Democrat cheers that her event at the Thomas and Mack here in Vegas was now closed to further entrants because the place was packed. They had 12,000 people and they had to turn away 4,000! Trouble is that the Thomas and Mack holds 18,600 people. And I saw some video of the event: clearly large parts were closed off. But it made the news! Packed event! People turned away! My brother in Arizona said he saw advertisement for paid attendees at her rally in that State. Here in Nevada as it was Las Vegas it was probably SEIU filling it up…except they couldn’t actually fill it up.

      It is all very much an astro-turf campaign.

      • Amazona's avatar Amazona August 11, 2024 / 2:09 pm

        paid attendees at her rally pretty much says it all. I guess “JOY” doesn’t fill the seats. Unions can send in shills (who may or may not be compensated in some way for their time) and they can lie about the capacity of the venue, etc. but the fact is that people drive hundreds of miles and stand in line for hours to get into Trump rallies.

    • Mark Noonan's avatar Mark Noonan August 11, 2024 / 12:59 pm

      Oh, and you’ll love this:

      PA says they won’t be able to get a result on election night.

      https://x.com/PAStateDept/status/1821589896773128621

      This means Harris’ internals show her losing the State – as this point, narrowly.

      It is so absolutely ridiculous – France counted their ballots in just hours. Florida will be done within a few hours of poll closing. Pennsylvania might take days! There’s only 13 million people in the whole State.

      The only reason there is a slow count is because someone is going to stuff the ballot boxes. This is existential truth.

      Team Trump has a strong election integrity team and I expect they’ll be going to court on this.

      • Amazona's avatar Amazona August 11, 2024 / 1:32 pm

        This is why we need volunteers, millions of them, to watch every element of every election in every state. And we need legal teams ready to file lawsuits and initiate criminal actions IMMEDIATELY when shenanigans are discovered. None of this waiting till the last minute.

        The best message we can send is that there will be accountability in this election. No more just letting state legislatures pass new laws that contradict state constitutions and then hanging around till it is too late to do anything. No more just talking about the drop box frauds, the vote counters accepting unsigned envelopes, etc. If Little Debby Democrat is trying to shuffle unsigned envelopes into the “accepted” pile she needs to be prosecuted for election fraud and she needs to know, going in, that this is what is going to happen. Ditto for every kind of manipulation by every state official in every state.

        One state (possibly Pennsylvania) has a law forbidding the certification of votes known to be inaccurate. Yet the votes were certified. Where was the prosecution for this? Not a thing happened, not a single hint of accountability. We need legal teams in every single state studying its laws and making it clear that when laws and rules are broken steps will be taken to prosecute every single person involved. Pre-emptively making these points, making them emphatic and making them over and over again.

        No more playing catch-up. We need to be proactive. For one thing, every state GOP should push, with as much publicity as possible, the law implemented in Virginia, cited earlier here. (BTW you don’t need to be registered to vote in a state to volunteer to help count votes.)

  8. Amazona's avatar Amazona August 11, 2024 / 1:22 pm

    I am a big Douglas Murray fan. I read his book The Madness of Crowds and found it to be brilliant not just in its content but its writing. I love seeing him on Gutfeld! and think he has not only great insights but a communication skill that is very impressive.

    Here he discusses a concept of the attacks on Israel I had not thought of, and suggest taking a few minutes to listen to the short interview because I think it raises ideas we need to consider and talk about.

    As he says, “Western Civilization is based on Athens and Jerusalem” and the destruction of Jews (and therefore Judaism) would undermine Western Civilization itself.

  9. Amazona's avatar Amazona August 11, 2024 / 8:45 pm

    Why Tulsi Gabbard Was Put on TSA’s Suspected Terror Watchlist

    But it’s not like Democrats represent totalitarian governance or anything. It’s not like the might of the State will be brought to bear on those who represent political opposition or anything. It’s not like we have to be afraid to speak our minds without fearing constant surveillance and monitoring of our activities or anything. //sarc off

    • Cluster's avatar Cluster August 12, 2024 / 8:48 am

      It’s been a slippery slope since 2000. We use to debate tax policy. Now we try and not to offend the Alphabet Mafia and hope the government doesn’t label us an an extremists. And this decline has been applauded by people like Casper, and that weird guy who showed up last week.

      • Retired Spook's avatar Retired Spook August 12, 2024 / 9:15 am

        It’s been a slippery slope since 2000

        But you know, at some point you have to get to the bottom of the hill. As Economist, Herb Stein, so famously noted, “if something can’t continue forever, it won’t. (Stein’s Law). I think we’re approaching the bottom of the hill, or to put it in different terms, the Left is approaching the bottom of the barrel. In fact, they’re wallowing in the dregs. I figured the last thing they would attempt to force on society would be to try to make pedophilia legitimate, and that’s where we’re at. I suppose there is some other depravity that they will attempt to foist on us, but I think most ordinary people have had enough.

      • Cluster's avatar Cluster August 12, 2024 / 11:30 am

        And let’s not forget, Steve Bannon sits in a Federal Prison for a misdemeanor.

  10. Amazona's avatar Amazona August 11, 2024 / 10:15 pm

    Great idea for a new slogan and bumper sticker: MOFA

    MAKE ORWELL FICTION AGAIN

  11. Amazona's avatar Amazona August 12, 2024 / 9:18 am

    YCMTSU on steroids, X 1,000

    The acting director of the Secret Service admits that it just never occurred to them that someone might want to harm one of the people the Secret Service exists, in great part, TO PROTECT.

    Secret Service Acting Director Ronald Rowe claims that what went wrong on July 13 was a “failure of imagination.” “A failure to imagine that we actually do live in a very dangerous world where people do actually want to do harm to our protectees.”

  12. Retired Spook's avatar Retired Spook August 12, 2024 / 10:31 am

    Entries in the YCMTSU file are happening faster than you can keep up with them.

    The U.S. Secret Service was forced to apologize to a Massachusetts salon owner after using her building’s bathroom without permission ahead of a fundraiser for Vice President Kamala Harris last week.

    The salon owner, Alicia Powers, says Secret Service agents put duct tape over her security cameras and broke into her building by picking the lock. They then allowed various people to use the salon’s bathroom over a two-hour period.

    Rules, schmules, we don’t need no steenking rules!

    • Amazona's avatar Amazona August 12, 2024 / 10:36 am

      The salon owner says she was never contacted or asked to make her facilities available to the Secret Service. They just broke in and didn’t even clean up after themselves.

  13. Amazona's avatar Amazona August 12, 2024 / 10:34 am

    Does anyone really believe that American support for Hamas and the extinction of Jews doesn’t influence other nations and encourage warfare?

    US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin ordered a guided-missile submarine to the Middle East and accelerated the arrival of a carrier strike group to the region ahead of an anticipated Iranian attack against Israel, the Pentagon said in a statement Sunday evening.

    The USS Georgia, a nuclear-powered submarine armed with cruise missiles, was operating in the Mediterranean Sea in recent days, according to the Navy, having just completed training near Italy.

    Austin ordered the submarine into the waters of the Middle East, the Pentagon said. The movement of US missile submarines is rarely revealed publicly, and the nuclear-powered vessels operate in near-complete secrecy.

    The announcement of a submarine’s movement is a clear message of deterrence to Iran and its proxies, who the US and Israel believe are preparing for a potential large-scale attack on Israel.

    Austin also ordered the USS Abraham Lincoln carrier strike group to accelerate its transit to the Middle East, the Pentagon said. The defense secretary had ordered the Lincoln strike group to the Middle East on August 2, but its ships carried out port calls in Guam and the Northern Mariana Islands along the way, according to the Navy.

    The Lincoln strike group consists of the carrier, which operates with stealth F-35C fighter jets, as well as several destroyers.

    The USS Theodore Roosevelt carrier strike group has been operating in the waters of the Middle East for several weeks, giving the US a formidable presence in the region. The USS Wasp amphibious ready group, which includes a force of thousands of Marines capable of special operations, is already operating in the Mediterranean Sea.

    • Cluster's avatar Cluster August 12, 2024 / 11:09 am

      Democrats like to claim MAGA is a cult. And it’s these people LOL

      • Cluster's avatar Cluster August 12, 2024 / 12:56 pm

        This wasn’t meant to be a reply to Amazon’s post …. don’t know what happened

      • Retired Spook's avatar Retired Spook August 12, 2024 / 3:22 pm

        Word Press glitch? Gremlins?

      • Amazona's avatar Amazona August 12, 2024 / 3:52 pm

        I’ve encountered a Word Press gremlin a couple of times. This one probably thought it had been too long since we chatted.

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