Nothing Fails Like the Appearance of Success

The primarily don’t like Trump because he’s calling them idiots. Sometimes, because he’s Trump, directly, but even when he’s on his best behavior, his every action exposes them for the idiots they are. And it is infuriating to them.

You have to think about their world for a minute: they grew up in the system and the system taught them certain things as unquestionable dogma. This is how the world works and thus it ever shall be. Things like NATO, the UN, foreign aid, mass immigration, free trade…all dogmas defended as stoutly as any Christian will defend the Trinity…but with the difference that the Christian is defending a Mystery while the secular Establishmentarian is defending…merest opinion.

That is the thing, of course: what these people hold to be established fact which no educated person may question are just opinions. Often opinions which weren’t supported by the facts at their creation. But all rigidly enforced. William Manchester, liberal to the core, recognized what was happening in the 1970’s – that the age was becoming one of Liberal Bigotry…no thought, no questioning…just endless repetitions of received dogmas with the only change allowed being carrying it to the conclusion: that is, the bad idea morphs into the insane idea so lets have a 200 pound man compete against a 120 pound woman.

And the reason Liberal Bigotry has been sustained for so long is that for a very long time, it seemed to work. Heck, almost all of us on the Right were taken in by it. I used to defend NATO! I thought the FBI was a first-rate crime fighting outfit. I thought the schools were trying to educate. I figured our senior military officers were apolitical patriots only concerned with the defense of the nation. On and on like that…and it was all based, ultimately, on the fact that the Liberal order had won World War Two. Can’t emphasize enough how much that built up credibility for Liberalism. That plus the apparent cure of the Great Depression. Essentially, the Liberal order has been cruising on that since 1945.

But it never was what it seemed. As I’ve explained before, the Great Depression was the inevitable result of things that happened ten years previously: the massive destruction of global markets represented by the twin events of the First World War and the Spanish flu. Every economy was living on borrowed time starting in 1919…and the British economy slumped into de-facto depression by 1926: it was so bad by then that the British working class – especially the coal miners (then Britain’s basic industry) – called a general strike. The global economic contraction was ongoing…it hit America’s agricultural sector as early as 1921. The crash of the Stock Market in 1929 was merely a belated exposure of the underlying weakness…but even that wasn’t all of it. For instance, France didn’t tumble into Depression until 1931. But it was going to hit everywhere eventually. Nothing anyone did would either stop it or lessen its effects. The only thing anyone could do is make it worse – which is precisely what the governments of the world, including ours, started to do.

And it wasn’t the tariffs! In fact, what Britain should have done when their economy slumped in the mid-20’s was impose tariffs. As noted, their basic industry back then was coal…but the British Empire was being overrun by cheap coal from Germany, Poland and the United States. Think about it: the British controlled 1/4th of the world’s land mass and population. Coal was the basic motivator of industry at the time. If you wanted something to be done mechanically, coal had to be used – even if merely to generate the electricity you need for electrical machines. How could Britain’s coal industry slump when 1/4 of the world was their market? Because they were free traders! They allowed their basic industry – their working class – to be squeezed into poverty on the theory that India and Canada should be able to buy their coal from Germany. Insane! And Britain, like the rest of the world, opted to use government spending to cure the economic malaise.

Think about this for a moment: you’ve got an economy that has crashed. Poverty is spreading. The money is all gone. So, your solution is to take money from this crashed, impoverished economy and give it to the government. And call the resultant government spending “growth”. This is what deepened and extended the Depression. Not tariffs. The money which was supposed to be used by the people to rebuild their economic lives was spent by government…sure, some of it useful spending (like the Brits subsidizing their shipbuilding industry which was to prove crucial for British victory in WWII) but the main thing is that it couldn’t be “growth” … it was just moving money around. Some bright guy out there might have had some new product or innovation ready to go but he couldn’t get financing because the money had been taxed or borrowed away to build a CCC camp in Nevada.

And then World War Two happened. Kinda interesting aspect of this has not been explored. Probably because exploring it would expose some weaknesses in the Liberal Narrative. German rearmament started before the ink was dry on the Treaty of Versailles. First covertly and ad-hoc, it was eventually taken over by the government and as early as 1927 the Germans had a plan to create a large, modern army. But they also knew it would take time. Years and years. The program was put into overdrive when Hitler came to power in 1933 and all sorts of financial trickery were used to provide the money for the buildup. But it was still going to take time. The German Navy – the Kriegsmarine – put their program under the title of Plan Z which envisioned a Germany Navy strong enough to fight the UK by 1948. In a pinch, they felt they could at least fight it out by 1942. The Army also felt that they could present Hitler with a reliable military instrument in a pinch by 1942, though they more envisioned 1945 as the time when the German army would be ready. But as we all know, the war started in 1939. What gives?

The German staffs – Army and Navy – were among the best in the world. Arguably for the Army the very best in the world and maybe in all time. They knew what Germany needed to have a fair shot at winning. These were deeply educated, highly intelligent men. The official Narrative is that Hitler was just too impatient and so flew off the handle, as it were, and invaded Poland in 1939 before Germany was ready but then the slight quality edge the Germans had in 1939 and 1940 allowed to stupendous success. There is some truth in that but the firing of Hjalmar Schacht as President of the Reichsbank was more imporant – Schacht had been sacked because he kept on telling Hitler that he had to stop the arms buildup as it was bankrupting Germany. To outsiders, Germany in the 1930’s looked like an economic miracle…pretty much full employment, everyone prosperous and great public works being done at the same time Germany’s military grew more imposing by the year. It looked as though State planning and spending were the magic talisman. But it was all a false front: the money was fake (MEFO bills – enormously funny thing which I’m sure our current Rulers would love to have – forcing businesses to take promissory notes which will be redeemed when the government says so and don’t appear on the government books as debts), the truth concealed by economic sleight of hand…and it was all about to come crashing down into renewed Depression once the world figured out just how much debt the German government was carrying. There were two ways out for Hitler’s regime: allow a Depression or start a war. Guess which option was taken?

The main thing here is that the Nazi regime, aside from its other sins, shows that State planning and spending don’t actually do anything. They don’t create growth. They might give you a hot house and very temporary prosperity, but they are all on borrowed time and something has to give. This is why, I believe, this aspect hasn’t been looked into. Nor has the real effect of the New Deal been looked into. There’s been some criticism around the edges of it, but nobody points out that it didn’t do anything positive – and very likely made things worse in the long term. The industrial power which armed the world against Nazism wasn’t made by the New Deal. And while the Hoover Dam is quite impressive and useful, it wasn’t as useful as the ability to make aluminum and steel. In fact, we rather lucked out on aluminum which was to be crucial for aircraft production…totally outside government, a new facility was built in the late 1930’s for aluminum production for the Japanese market. Outside that stroke of luck, building those 50,000 planes FDR ordered would have been tricky. You’d think if our Ruling Class was super smart and figuring things out that the things we needed the most would have got priority in government spending. But, it wasn’t like that at all. In fact, some particularly needful things – like food production – were hobbled in the 1930’s in an attempt to keep food prices artificially high.

But it all seemed to work on that glad day in September of 1945 when the Japanese affixed their signature to the surrender document. The war was won. The Depression was over (though it is forgotten that right after the war there was a recession and a spike in inflation as the economy readjusted itself). The Smarty Pants Experts had fixed everything! And since then, their successors have continued to run things all based on the assumption that Smarty Pants Experts know what they’re doing. Don’t you know that General Massive Decorations is the successor of such geniuses as George Marshall!??!? How dare you question! And Professor Gimme A. Sinecure is the successor of Rexford Tugwell of FDR’s Brain Trust! How can you know more than him?!?!?!

Guys, they have no clue what they’re doing. Heck, even old Rexford didn’t know. He was a Columbia University economics graduate who figured he knew better than the farmers how agriculture should work. Because who better than an upper class academic to tell you how to plow a field? They’re just people who happen to be in positions of power when things happen…and if good things coincide with their tenure, they get awards and reputations for being geniuses. For the Liberal order, being in charge while American industry (they did nothing to create) arms a military (they also did nothing to create) which then goes on to win a global war was the grandest stroke of luck in history. And, my friends, the people in charge actually made even winning worse than it should have been. You think about the bone headed strategic decisions taken which prolonged the war unnecessarily, the diplomacy which awarded half of Europe to Stalin and China to Mao…the post war Cold War and fruitless wars in Vietnam and Korea…the slow destruction of the American industrial and agricultural sectors which had awarded them victory in the first place…the importation of millions of foreigners, the destruction of all public decency…on and on and on they went just totally lousing everything up but keeping in power on the after glow of a document signing on the USS Missouri.

And here we are. It is 2025. Eighty years later and its all come apart at the seams and Trump is trying to sew it back together again. It is simple logic that the illegals have to go home. That we use tariff pressure to force acceptable trade deals. That we revive American manufacturing as much as we can. That we prosecute violent criminals. That we let girls compete with girls. And they hate Trump for doing it – because it shows them up as the totally clueless buffoons they’ve always been. The mask it off. The Emperor not only has no clothes but he’s fat, bald, covered in pimples and he’s swinging something a chipmunk would be ashamed to carry.

And I do believe it is going to work – mostly because sensible things do work. It won’t be the appearance of success, but actual success. Not a higher mythical GDP number, but an increase in actual wealth. Not a higher defense budget, but an actually effective military force. On and on like that…and that will put an end to the Liberal Order.

35 thoughts on “Nothing Fails Like the Appearance of Success

  1. Rdm's avatar Rdm May 12, 2025 / 8:21 pm

    liberalism is cargo cult mentality. They think that if they get the forms right the prosperity and success will follow even if they don’t actually build or create anything. Its a hollow philosophy that can only and ever eat the seed corn and not grow anything.

    • Cluster's avatar Cluster May 13, 2025 / 11:24 am

      Spot on

  2. Amazona's avatar Amazona May 13, 2025 / 12:18 am

    The credentials committee of the Democratic National Committee voted on Monday to void the results of the internal party vote that made David Hogg a party vice chair.

    But….muh democracy! Don’t like the way the vote went, just void the result! The “internal party vote” can be nullified by a committee. Good to know.

    • Retired Spook's avatar Retired Spook May 13, 2025 / 8:33 am

      I’m not sure which is worse, the way Democrats treat votes they don’t like or that someone thought that David Hogg would be a good DNC vice chair.

      • Amazona's avatar Amazona May 13, 2025 / 10:36 am

        I had the same two reactions. If the DNC had just issued a statement along the lines of “We goofed! For some reason we didn’t fully understand that David Hogg is a narcissistic loudmouth with no understanding that this is a political party dedicated to promoting a specific system for governance, not just a platform for grievances. Therefore, although he technically retains the position to which he was elected he does not speak for the party and the DNC and his statements reflect only his personal opinions and agendas. Official spokespersons for the party will be named shortly. Sorry about that” they might not be in the position of, once again, proving that their much-ballyhooed claim to revere “democracy” would not be so thoroughly proven to be a lie.

    • Mark Noonan's avatar Mark Noonan May 13, 2025 / 10:38 am

      Remember that lady “bishop” who scolded Trump about immigration on January 20th? She’s Episcopalian and her church just ended its refugee partnership with the government because Trump has let in 59 Boers as refugees.

      59. Not even five dozen. Not ten million. 59.

      But they’re white, of course. Also very likely Christian. Refugees welcome as long as you ain’t white or Christian.

      But that just shows how entirely bogus they all are. They aren’t decent. They aren’t moral. They don’t believe in truth or beauty. They are just hate filled bigots who pretend to be normal human beings…but once you press them even a little bit, the mask drops.

      • Cluster's avatar Cluster May 13, 2025 / 10:57 am

        They are just hate filled bigots who pretend to be normal human beings…

        Sadly though they are a large part of the electorate. These people are the result of a destroyed educational system that became highly political and taught kids to hate this country and everything about it. That’s what we are contending with. They are completely narcissistic and over emotional and must be confronted and destroyed. How that happens, I don’t much care, but it must happen if we are to continue as that shining city on the hill.

      • Amazona's avatar Amazona May 13, 2025 / 1:40 pm

        There is also the documented proof that their lives are in danger if they stay in South Africa. Not to mention the racial component of this. Not because of politics, not because of religion, but because of racial hatred.

        But these Lefties are all about redefining “asylum” to include “economic asylum”—that is, people whose lives are not in danger, who are not targeted for the legal reasons for asking for asylum (political or religious oppression) but because they want more stuff.

        OTOH, the government and we taxpayers are better off for the ending of the “refugee partnership”, whatever that is, and letting them go off on their own. Hopefully DOGE will cut off any NGO support they get, so they can fund their illegal support of illegal immigration out of their own pockets.

  3. Retired Spook's avatar Retired Spook May 13, 2025 / 9:58 am

    This piece (hat-tip, Jeff Childers) encapsulates every reason why we despise the Left, and Leftist “journalists” in particular. I use the word journalist because technically that’s what they are, although, as Childers notes, this is not journalism.

    Yesterday, the New York Times ran an unintentionally hilarious and hyperbolic hit piece headlined, “RFK Jr. Swims in Washington Creek That Flows With Sewage and Bacteria.” At first, when they said “creek” I thought it was a pointed metaphor for Washington DC. But they actually meant a proper creek:

    image.png

    Germaphobic Times reporters went into full Hazmat-mode on Sunday, after Kennedy posted a few innocent pictures of himself stepping through Rock Creek with his grandkids tree-climbing nearby. Instead of running a wholesome headline like, “HHS Secretary Pauses Bureaucracy to Celebrate Mother’s Day,” the Times dove headfirst into municipal water reports. Apparently, Rock Creek has a swimming advisory due to elevated E. coli levels.

    Fair enough. But here’s the kicker: the government put it there. DC’s Water Authority dumps over 40 million gallons of raw sewage into Rock Creek every year. If you did that, they’d build a new Supermax prison named in your dishonor. But when the local bureaucrats do it, it’s just Tuesday.

    Alas, his creek’s contamination wasn’t the story. That’s not what this was about. It was really about three things— all of which spoke volumes more about the Times than about Kennedy.

    First, come on. This isn’t news. It’s a performative public scolding over a Mother’s Day Instagram post. Yesterday’s top story was essentially “Man Gets Dirty With Kids Outdoors.”

    Second, it showed just how deeply the pandemic scrambled the brains of progressive newsroom staff. The mere thought of stepping into a creek with non-sterile water — no Purell, no masks! — flung them into a frothing moral panic. What if there’s Covid in the water! they probably shrieked behind their plexiglass face shields.

    Third, and most revealing, was the tone: naggy, moralizing, anxious. It wasn’t journalism. It had all the emotional energy of a clucking school nurse combined with a helicopter mom. “Robert, don’t you know there’s bacteria in there?” It wasn’t any masculine critique. It wasn’t even political. It was dark maternalism.

    It made me wonder. Back in the 80’s during my rebellious year in journalism school, it was celebrated insider knowledge that j-school’s gender composition was 84% female. Great dating odds, but perhaps also a red flag. So I checked— and admit I was wrong. The creek-germs piece was written by a man (allegedly):

    image 2.png

    So maybe the problem isn’t that there are too many lady reporters, or too few men.

    Maybe the problem is that the weak men at the Times are indistinguishable from its OCD’d women — and not in a good way. At this point, you could swap out half the bylines for housewives from a 1980s Lysol commercial and nobody would notice the difference.

    Kennedy, barefoot in a sewage creek, looks like a gladiator compared to the media’s fearful, bleach-your-groceries worldview. Our new Health Secretary is literally wading through Washington’s crap — a metaphor made manifest. And that, more than anything, is why they can’t stand him.

    • Mark Noonan's avatar Mark Noonan May 13, 2025 / 10:35 am

      It was all quite ridiculous. If its an open sewer, then why aren’t we arresting the DC government? And if it isn’t worthy of arresting the DC government…then fears about contamination are probably overblown.

    • Amazona's avatar Amazona May 13, 2025 / 10:39 am

      Great article, and the best line is at the end: Our new Health Secretary is literally wading through Washington’s crap

      • Amazona's avatar Amazona May 13, 2025 / 10:40 am

        He has a grandkid named “Bobcat”? If that’s not just a family nickname for Robert, I admire Kennedy even more.

      • Amazona's avatar Amazona May 13, 2025 / 10:57 am

        I strongly believe that we are too clean. I lived a normal, if not fearful, urban life till I dove into the horse business. Suddenly I was not only spending my time with smelly sweaty critters who snorted snot on me, I was cleaning stalls and barn aisles (translation: breathing dust filled with particles of horse manure and urine plus “byproducts” of the birds living in the rafters) and dragging a harrow across fields occupied, over the years/centuries by horses, cows, deer, elk, and even buffalo and breathing the dust I stirred up. I tried to use basic sanitation when dealing with horse wounds, but still got exposed to nasties from abscessed hooves and infected cuts.

        And I was never healthier. My immune system kicked into turbo. In 20-some years I had one mild case of flu and a couple of mild colds (after being coughed and sneezed on by people from all over the country at the National Western Stock Show). Even cuts and scratches healed faster. That’s not my life any more, but I am still healthier than most. My bout with Covid consisted of three days of debilitating fatigue followed by three days of muscle aches, followed by the sensation that coffee and bourbon now tasted like dirt. (That latter was a tragedy, but I have been working on it.)

        I see people frantically scrubbing their hands and their grocery cart handles at the store, and still see frightened panicky eyes peering over masks every now and then. Children aren’t allowed to get dirty. Sanitation has become a fetish. Yeah, swimming in sewage is not recommended, and yeah, e coli is bad, but humanity in general has lived with e coli throughout history and yet here we are. I find myself wondering if it hits the super-clean harder, because their immune systems have never been exposed to the scope and volume of pathogens they were designed to defend against.

      • Mark Noonan's avatar Mark Noonan May 13, 2025 / 8:02 pm

        I, too, am healthy. Rather annoyingly so to the doctors. I’m a 60 year old smoker who could drop a few pounds…heart, lungs, bodily functions all not just normal, but very good. I was down in the dirt when I was a kid because, well, I was a boy and back in those days if a boy didn’t come back filthy, mom probably would have been suspicious. Like you, I rarely get ill – and my Covid was about a week of misery – but really only 3 very bad days where I had fever, chills, fatigue, headache, runny nose and cough all at once.

        Perhaps I’m just from what they call the deep end of the gene pool. Like all people my age, I was given the smallpox vaccine as a child. Didn’t take. The Navy gave me one when I got in. Didn’t take. They did it again. Didn’t take. Conclusion: no weird little arm scar for Mark and I was probably born immune to smallpox (this does happen to make sure a disease can’t wipe out a whole species). But I do believe that a youth lived outside and around dirt and bacteria likely toughened up my body.

      • Cluster's avatar Cluster May 13, 2025 / 11:54 am

        I strongly believe that we are too clean.

        I am a YUGE believer in our immune systems and our bodies ability to fight disease. Back in the late 80’s and early 90’s when I was raising my kids, a lot of our friends would rush their children to the doctor over the smallest things; runny noses, cough, fever, etc. I did not, sometimes at my wife’s scorn, but I knew their bodies needed to learn how to fight those illnesses without medication. Today, both of them are very healthy kids and are doing the same with their kids. Our bodies are a lot more capable of fighting illnesses than Big Pharma wants us to know and sadly too many people believe Big Pharma. God Bless RFK Jr.

      • Retired Spook's avatar Retired Spook May 13, 2025 / 12:41 pm

        followed by the sensation that coffee and bourbon now tasted like dirt. (That latter was a tragedy, but I have been working on it.)

        Still laughing!

    • Retired Spook's avatar Retired Spook May 16, 2025 / 11:46 am

      Kind of dovetails with the immunity discussion:

    • Mark Noonan's avatar Mark Noonan May 13, 2025 / 8:03 pm

      LOL – we’ll never know if the Pope is MAGA because he’ll never say. But his brother is!

  4. Amazona's avatar Amazona May 14, 2025 / 10:27 am

    This is what I have been talking about—the Left’s campaign to splinter our society and then turn the divided groups against each other.

    It used to be simple, basically the old class warfare theme of rich/poor and then the newly developing men/women in the advent of the Leftist-designed “feminism”. When those two strategies were getting tired and worn out the Left needed new splinter groups to stir up into conflict.

    It got some traction with its LGB gambit and gay “marriage” but when that stopped being very divisive it added a “T” to the mix and developed and dragged in the whole “trans” thing. During all of this it ignored those who just wanted to be accepted as normal people and members of society who were just attracted to members of the same sex, who were forced to either deny the movement and appear to be “traitors to the cause” or just sit back and be tainted by it.

    The Left upped the ante by highlighting the most blatant and repellent members of their new freak show, putting porn (especially gay porn) in elementary school libraries, advocating for drag queen story hours, etc. But it was all about conflict—creating it, feeding it, amplifying it and using it to destabilize our society.

    Now we can add illegal immigration to the mix. As we see with the outrage about granting refugee status to 59 families threatened with death if they remain in their home countries it is obvious that the Left doesn’t care about “refugees” or “migrants” but only about the element that generates the most damage to the nation and the most conflict.

    BTW, the image is from Dr. Malone’s article today.

    • Mark Noonan's avatar Mark Noonan May 14, 2025 / 2:45 pm

      Divide and rule!

      I’m trying to impress upon people that you can’t think of the Left – or, indeed, the overall Global Establishment – as normal human beings. They are human, of course: they are each children of God and capable of being redeemed simply by asking for it. But as they are and unless and until they repent, it is better to treat them as a different species.

      I pointed out some while back that Goering was abnormal. He had his wife whom he affected to love and his daughter whom he apparently adored. He ate his good food, enjoyed his fantastic (stolen) art and from all accounts could be one heck of a fun person to hang around with. Charming as all get out.

      Best to think of him as a chimp with a machine gun.

      He wasn’t normal. He’d return from the Wolfsschanze after counter-signing the deaths of millions and hug his wife and kiss his daughter. But normal human beings don’t do that. Weird, insane psychotic killers do that. The kiss for daughter and the hug for the Mrs was mere show…a sick and twisted facade of a monkey pretending to be a human being. That is how we have to view the Left – they might seem like one of us, but they have hardened their hearts and removed all actual human feeling from themselves. They blindly plow ahead with death and despair in their wake and they think they are good people for what they have done. They don’t care about Laken Riley. Or any other person who winds up in the chipper-shredder of their policies. No more than Himmler actually cared about the piles of bodies in ditches. We pray they will repent, we hope to see them in the life of the world to come…but until they change, all we can do is hold them off by varied means as we try to restore sanity and basic human decency to society.

      UPDATE: Been thinking about this – one way we can help prevent division is to define things. Leftists hate definitions. They hate exact terms with clear meanings because it prevents them from lying all the time.

      For instance: Settler.

      The Boers who are leaving South Africa are still called “settlers”. Or “colonists”…all with very negative connotations. Leaving aside the debate about whether or not settler-colonialism is good or bad, giving the term “settler” to Boers is silly. The first Dutch – from whom the Boers sprang – arrived in South Africa in 1602. The first settlers in 1652. We’re getting close to 400 years now…more than 400 since first contact. If we put it into 25 year generations, then the Boer born today is the great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandchild of the original settlers. That puts it back a bit. The Zulu and Xosha, who make up the largest part of South Africa’s black population, arrived – at best – only slightly before the first Boer settlers (nobody really knows; it is all conjecture as there are no written records and only scant archeological evidence). And you can’t say that Africans can only be black because recent DNA tests on ancient Egyptians indicates that the pyramid builders originally hailed from what we know today as the Caucasus region – not Swedish crackers but definitely not black Africans.

      To call a Boer a “settler” is a lie and a way to “otherize” them preparatory to genocide. We need to strictly define the term and force everyone to accept it.

      So, I would legislate it here in the USA:

      1. Alien: foreign born, not naturalized.

      2. Citizen: born or naturalized citizen.

      3. Native: Two or more native born ancestors living a century prior to the person’s birthday (this, for me, would be at least 4 of my 8 great-grandparents, for instance, it is probably 6 of 8 but I haven’t fully checked – only my mother’s paternal grandparents appear to be foreign born).

      And then, by treaty, force everyone to go along with this – no trade deals, no aid…no nothing until this is regularized in local law. It is essentially just saying a truth: if you are born to a family long domiciled in an area, you are Native to that area. I mean, what connection do I have to Ireland? Sure, you could do a DNA work up and find that I’m distantly related to some of the people of Cork, but what of it? I don’t know them, they don’t know me…and they are an alien people to me. All genetics decides is what you look like – what you are depends on your upbringing plus personal choices. I was born and raised American and as I rose to manhood I deliberately (and joyfully) took on the title of patriotic American…that is what I am. That is all I’ll ever be as far as nationality goes. Some sixth cousin nine times removed in a foreign land means absolutely nothing to me. I am a Native American.

      On and on we’d go like this – carefully defining terms like “liberty”, “justice”, “rights” and so on…legislating those definitions into American law (no judicial review to change it later!) and then forcing foreigners to adopt our definitions.

      • Amazona's avatar Amazona May 15, 2025 / 12:57 am

        It’s great to see someone else pick up the flag of “definitions”. I have been feeling like a lone voice in the wilderness. I keep talking about the need for clarity but there seems to be a belief that this is just “arbitrary” and unnecessary.

        The issue of definitions is an important part of that. Look at the conflict and divisiveness in this country right now when the legal and literal definition of the word “insurrection” has been reinvented for political purposes, to inflame emotions of people too ignorant to know what the word means and too lazy to find out.

        I don’t think for a minute that these deviations are natural evolutions, or erosions, of understanding. I think they are purposeful, because when understanding is manipulated so are emotions. “Alien”, for example, has always meant “non-citizen”. Not as a pejorative, not as a slight or an insult, but merely as an identifier. Look at the damage done by the callous and purposeful distortions of that word. We have seen the formerly common and accurate term “illegal alien” carefully massaged into “undocumented alien” to “undocumented person” and even to “undocumented citizen”, with a clutter of other linguistic manipulations along the way. But now that some people have accepted, or at least absorbed, the internally contradictory term “undocumented citizen” this opens the door to conflict based on the conviction that this means these people are entitled to the same Constitutional protections as real citizens.

        But language links us. Language makes it possible to form and maintain a society, a culture. A word has to have a meaning, not mean one thing one day and something else the next. Structure also matters. When I was in school we used to have to diagram sentences—I’ll bet that no one reading this has ever diagrammed a sentence, or knows what that means. I hated it, but it was an important part of understanding the building blocks of our language, which as I said is essential to have a culture or society.

        When I was learning these rules I remember being absolutely tickled by a phrase I encountered in a book about English, illustrating the need to understand the parts of language and how they fit together: “Three shots were fired. Two of the men fell dead and the third went through his hat.” While one might be able to take a minute and sort through that to understand it, clarity requires that the meaning be clear without dissecting the syntax.

      • Mark Noonan's avatar Mark Noonan May 15, 2025 / 1:20 pm

        I’m reminded of the fight between homoiousian and homoousios – why we use the phrase “not an iota of difference”. But that is actually wrong: that iota was crucial and sparked the largest battle in the early Christian world. Add that iota and you eventually get Islam: the Council of Nicea determined that homoousios was correct (ie, that Jesus and God are one substance, co-eternal) and we got the Christian West. Mohammad did his own, personal inquiry into the matter and went with homoiousian (that Jesus was created by God in time and so is not of the same substance), reducing Jesus to a prophet and thus dispensing with the sacraments instituted by Christ. It might seem silly to fight over definitions but how we define terms decides what sort of world we’ll have.

  5. Amazona's avatar Amazona May 15, 2025 / 12:14 pm

    I finally started some posting on X and quickly got followed by Catturd, which I thought was pretty cool as I always like seeing his posts referenced in various news articles. I was just curious, and don’t expect to spend a lot of time there, but when I have been stuck on the computer in back-and-forth emailing, or on hold for some reason, it’s better than Solitaire. Or at least different, if less demanding of linear thinking.

    • Mark Noonan's avatar Mark Noonan May 15, 2025 / 1:25 pm

      I love the back and forth you can get on X. To be sure, over the years for me it has boiled down to a relatively small number of accounts I regularly interact with and we have some long-running, inside jokes between ourselves. Like with the @ccoderdyne account whenever a bird does something odd we tag him and tell him his fake birds are acting up again (most recently, of course, the seagulls by the Papal Conclave chimney). Or @mowoodier we’ll post a copy of the menu and tell him he’s buying. Side note: you’d like @mowoodier – black guy who tags himself on his account as a “shiftless negro” but is, of course, a very highly educated man of refined tastes. I’m bouncing around 6,300 followers and still slowly rising up but you can see on my account that I only follow about a thousand…I figure if I tried to follow more then the feed would get too cluttered.

      And what is your @?

      • Cluster's avatar Cluster May 15, 2025 / 3:39 pm

        X is a progressive sewer …. but fun lol. And getting followed by catturd is a huge win … good job. What’s your handle?

      • Amazona's avatar Amazona May 16, 2025 / 12:18 pm

        Hawkeye35492502

        When you sign up at midnight you have a hard time coming up with a handle so I just did ages of people close to me

      • Mark Noonan's avatar Mark Noonan May 16, 2025 / 4:28 pm

        I believe I found and followed you! Let me know!

      • Amazona's avatar Amazona May 16, 2025 / 7:28 pm

        Yes, that is me. Been out and about this gorgeous day—too windy to work so we went sightseeing, checking out some of those roads we keep driving past and thinking “I wonder where that goes?”

      • Mark Noonan's avatar Mark Noonan May 16, 2025 / 4:26 pm

        @Mark_E_Noonan

  6. Retired Spook's avatar Retired Spook May 16, 2025 / 11:51 am

    ROTFLMAO!!!

  7. Amazona's avatar Amazona May 16, 2025 / 12:26 pm
  8. Amazona's avatar Amazona May 16, 2025 / 1:21 pm

    A couple of years ago I ordered some physical therapy equipment (PEMF and EWOT) and had a great conversation with the guy at the company about a lot of things, including politics. He calls me every now and then to chat and we had a good conversation yesterday in which he told me to watch a documentary in which someone from Pfizer made a comment about that company’s guilt that he thought was amazing and could lead to an indictment.

    So today’s Jeff Childers story about a Pfizer exec, Pfizer’s Global Head of Vaccine Research & Development during the pandemic, going to another pharma company, GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), after Trump got elected, admitting to that company’s head of HR that he was moving to try to avoid being prosecuted.

    According to GSK, its HR person asked Dormitzer why he was so afraid of being investigated for his role in developing the covid shots. He said, and I am not making this up, “Let’s just say it wasn’t a coincidence, the timing of the vaccine.”

    This, and other statements from GSK, have been reported to the FBI which evidently has an investigation going–not into the various frauds of Pfizer about its “vaccine” but for—get this—election interference.

    But that wasn’t close to all. GSK also told the House Investigative Committee that Dormitzer repeatedly bragged to his GSK co-workers that “the three most senior” Pfizer executives decided to “slow-walk” trial results— so that the vaccine would not become available until after the 2020 elections, specifically to hurt Trump’s electoral chances.

    The story made news this week because yesterday, House Committee Chair Jim Jordan fired off a two-page letter to Pfizer President Albert Bourla that could become historic in scope and scale.

    That Jordan letter is well worth reading. Jim hasn’t been in the headlines lately but let’s not forget what a powerful presence he is in our battles against the Left.

    I understand the frustration of people wondering why certain people have not been charged with crimes, etc. This offers one possible example and explanation—-that going after Pfizer in areas where the company might be able to argue immunity would provide a way to complicate and drag out a trial, involving side arguments about the nature of the company’s immunity (at least some of it no doubt due to the complicity of the Biden administration in allowing Pfizer to continue pushing its drug under the protection of the Emergency Use label). But, as Childers points out:

    This election interference angle could be easier to prove and ultimately more damaging than Pfizer’s crimes related to the awful shots, since Pfizer lacks legal immunity for political misconduct

    “Ultimately more damaging” in a couple of ways, as it also adds to the growing pile of evidence regarding the many MANY ways the Left rigged the 2020 election. This goes so far beyond mere ballot harvesting, bogus ballots, etc. as we are now linking the media and federal agency coverup of the information on Hunter Biden’s laptop and the media participation in promoting Biden.

    • Retired Spook's avatar Retired Spook May 16, 2025 / 1:45 pm

      The only FAIR thing to do would be to nullify the 2020 election and let Trump serve two more terms (the current on and another)

      • Mark Noonan's avatar Mark Noonan May 16, 2025 / 4:40 pm

        Comey putting up a picture of “86 47” is getting the most attention out there but its been in a lot of places – the Democrats are still hoping that there’s a lucky lunatic out there. They know what they’re doing – it is deliberate and quite malicious.

        Trump’s welcome in the Arab world is telling a tale the Democrats would prefer wasn’t told. Sure, their like in the Western world hates Trump as much as they do…but everyone else has either liked Trump or is warming up to him fast. And in the non-Western world, where testosterone is still valued, Trump’s manly response to getting shot matters quite a lot. To the credentialed “men without chests” (as C S Lewis described them) that raw courage means nothing to them…but to every heart that beats red blood, it does matter. No surprise they buried that iconic photo as quickly as they could in the news cycle.

        Things are changing very fast. Normalcy is starting to rear its head. As are logic and common sense. Their whole world is falling apart…poverty, disgrace and even jail awaits them. And they are very angry about it; mostly because they know what they’ve done.

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