Well, wonderful time at Lake Tahoe. Totally exhausted and we had the fun of the last 100 miles home the AC in the car conked out. Still makes cold air but the fan system simply isn’t blowing it into the cab in sufficient force to counteract Southern Nevada sunshine! So, with more than 93,000 miles on the car, we’re already looking for a replacement as at that mileage cars always start to nickel and dime you to death (this is probably just a busted fan or, perhaps, some break in the venting…but I suspect the fan as I could still feel cold air right at the vent openings). Its been a good car but it is time for it to go to that great garage in the sky (ie, the high miles used car lot where some poor sap will pay three times what its worth on a 19% APR loan…on the plus side, the actual maintenance was done on the regular so it probably has 25,000 miles left on it).
Gabbard has referred the Trump case to the DoJ. About time! Everyone involved from start to finish was breaking a whole raft of federal laws day in and day out. There are a host of very serious federal laws regarding the improper use of intel and law enforcement powers. And every person involved is guilty of the conspiracy – even if, in theory, they didn’t know exactly what was happening. And for those thinking the statute of limitations applies because it started in 2015…bad news! These people kept on breaking the law right through the 2024 election. That is, the law breaking kept on going…so, if you entered into the conspiracy in 2015 and bailed out of it in 2018, you’re still on the hook.
It is hard to decide if this or Biden’s dementia is the biggest political scandal in history. Not just American history: world history. That officials sworn to uphold the laws failed to do so – and, indeed, deliberately broke those laws – isn’t unprecedented, but the staggering scale of it here is hard to imagine. And it cuts right through just about every institution…even MSMers could be caught in this net. Not because they wrote it up, but because they actively cooperated in advancing the scam. It is one thing to say “I’m just a reporting saying what I’ve been told”…it is quite another to rigidly adhere to what were clearly talking points all through the matter. Remember, they all refused to cover the Hunter laptop story…not one of them broke ranks and pointed out the obvious: it is real, it is Hunter’s and it details quite a large number of felony actions. There are coincidences, but none quite like that – and if we can prove they were part of the conspiracy (which doesn’t require forensic proof – that is, to charge someone with conspiracy we don’t need to prove they took orders), then they’re going down as well. And it was all of a piece – the same people and institutions which created and pushed Trump-Russia created and pushed the myth of Biden cognitive ability as well as Hunter’s innocence.
We’ll see how it goes. But this tells why Trump wants us off Epstein and the Democrats want to talk about nothing else. We all know what a complete slime ball Epstein was and that very large number of well-connected people were deep in with him…but the bottom line is that the man is dead and the more crucial law enforcement issue isn’t to go after those who covered for Epstein but to go after those who tried to carry out a coup against the elected President. Democrats would love to talk Epstein for a year – after all, Biden’s people had four years to destroy evidence in that case. And even if it singed some Democrats, that’s worth the price if it bogs down Trump. My view: I don’t think Trump has let Epstein go so much as back-burnered it. At all events, if we take down the people who tried to destroy Trump, we’re probably going after most of the same people who protected Epstein.
Democrats are saying Colbert was fired from his TV gig for political reasons – as someone pointed out on X, the truth of the matter is that Colbert was kept on the air for political reasons. His ratings were horrible from start to finish. He was just considered a useful took in the DNC propaganda machine…his usefulness is now at an end.
You can – in theory – be liberal and be funny as well as insightful (stop laughing! It is possible!). A liberal host could make a success out of a late night or other TV gig. But it must be entertaining. I’ve watched a few episodes of Guttfeld’s show on Fox – sure, he and the guests lean Right (or at least Libertarian) but the most important thing is that they are funny and have something interesting to say. Endlessly repeating variations of Orange Man Bad is, at the end, just boring. It might make Liberal trained seals happy but nobody else. Joe Biden was a gold mine for the host of any humor-centered late night show…they left him untouched. Meanwhile, Trump is actually a funny guy – and the key to getting a hit on him is to first laugh with him…then you can tweak. Heck, the guys at Babylon Bee do it all the time. Trump also rolls with a joke – liberals never do. At least, not in some decades. One thing for certain, if Biden had been mentally competent those four years he would have been furious at the slightest fun being poked at him – so, too, was Obama (he actually took people aside and scolded them for being other than laudatory in all respects about him). This is why anyone with an actual sense of humor these past ten years has gravitated to the Right…first off, we laugh. Secondly, we can take a joke – in fact, we tend to laugh harder at jokes at our expense. We know we’re the Stupid Party! There’s a goldmine just in the Senate GOP for laughs (one recent joke: Senator Graham had to call his doctor after we bombed Iran because his erection lasted more than 4 hours). Democrats just can’t get this – and their attempts at being funny just fall flat.
Blogs For Victory 
The car I drove from Indiana to Colorado last fall (to drop off my dog with Amazona), and then on to California (4,800 miles round trip) was a 2010 Toyota Venza that had 182,000 miles on it when I returned. Had a tire issue, but no mechanical problems. Traded it in on a new Toyota RAV4 when I got home. Got a pretty good deal on a ’24 right before the ’25s came out. I thought about a hybrid, but the difference in gas mileage is not enough to make up the difference in initial cost, plus Indiana charges extra on registration/plates for hybrids (even more for EVs), which makes the spread even worse. A good friend of mine has a ’24 RAV4 hybrid, averages about 37 mpg. I’m averaging over 33 on the gas, and I haven’t even had it on the highway for more than about 20 miles.
My theory is that even if the nickel-and-diming starts at around 100,000 miles as long as it is small issues, like replacing climate control fans, economically it works out better than starting over with a new car. As long as the engine and transmission are functioning (or easily and economically repaired) I think it usually pays off to repair as needed.
Of course this depends on what kind of car you are talking about. (If your car only has a lifespan of about 125,000 miles—your current 93,000 + guessing another 25,000— you might rethink what kind of car to buy next time.) My first pickup, a Chevy, just plain quit at 100,000 miles, but my 2000 Ford Excursion with 180,000+ miles on it, is still roadworthy and reliable. (Of course it is also a Power Stroke diesel that is just starting to get broken in at about 150,000 miles.) All I have ever done to it is some front-end work on the steering, which is expected in a heavy truck after so many high-speed miles often over bad roads and often pulling heavy trailers. (A winter trip through Ohio demanded all new new shock absorbers.) Some cars just don’t hold up, or hold their value, while others (like Spook’s Toyotas) just keep running and running.
Right now I have two used Tauruses, one in Colorado and one in Florida, one a 2014 and one of my all-time favorite cars and the other a 2019. They are solid transportation, and I paid $20,000 for each of them. They are both in the 70,000 mile range, and so far are running perfectly, but I also have the comfort of knowing that if either of them hits or gets too close to its expiration date I won’t be out a lot of money.
Because this is, after all, ME writing, I have to veer off into some political territory as well.
Under the Fair Tax, which is a consumption tax, you would automatically pay a consumption tax of anywhere from 17% (the original figure given) all the way up to 24% or so, on any new car. However, whoever buys your old car would pay no tax at all, meaning that the market value of your car just escalated.
When you consider that used goods are not taxable you can see how this would make everything you own immediately more valuable. I think it would also end up affecting the amount of property now just disposed of in our landfills. If something can be fixed and made usable, avoiding any tax on it, then this would certainly impact the “just throw it away” mentality we now have.
And while reeling from that 24% added to the cost of that new car, remember, you are also not paying any income tax at all. So you actually have control over your finances, for a change, and can choose to buy used things or not buy at all to save up enough money to spring for that new car, knowing that its resale value will be great because whoever buys it from you won’t have to pay any tax on it at all.
Part of it is Vegas – unless you garage your car through the day here, the sun just eats at them…so even a well-maintained car (ours are!) simply starts to disintegrate. I can already feel the slight vibrations starting as the motor mounts dry up. Everything plastic eventually dies in Vegas! Batteries, too – which is why I’ll never go EV out here. You can buy the very best battery on the market out here and you’ll be lucky to get three years out of it. I’m still pondering having it checked and if the repair is, say, $500 or less just going with that…but I’m also going to be looking for new.
You make some excellent points about climate effects on cars. I put my two cars (my 2014 Taurus and my 1978 Mercedes 450SL) in my garage in Florida, with gasoline treatment and battery tenders while I am gone for six months or so, and I have still had to replace both batteries in two years. A mechanically inclined friend told me that heat is harder on batteries than cold—that he has to replace batteries in Michigan far less often than in Florida. The rubber components in the Merc are already 46 years old (though the car has just under 30,000 miles on it) and now you have me a little worried about them. When I bought the car in 2012 I had some motor mounts replaced just because they were dried out, and a couple of other rubber components, and now I am wondering what effect baking in that garage a few months a year is having on them.
I can certainly see how heat and UV can destroy plastics in a hurry.
Ok, we’ll look into the Rav 4! We tend to go used – why pay the premium when if there’s 20,000 miles on it you get a huge discount for an essentially new car? So we’re looking for a low mileage 2023 or maybe 2022…though they are offering zero percent on 2025’s at some places and we’re going to work out the math to see if the savings justify buying new this time.
The RAV4 was the first NEW car I’ve bought since 2007. I bought the Venza used in 2018 with 124,000 miles on it. I had originally intended to buy a used RAV4, but it turned out that a 5-year-old RAV4 was only $6 or $7,000 less than a new one, and would likely have anywhere from 50,000 to 80,000 miles on it. I got 2 years free regular service on the new RAV4, so NO maintenance costs at all for the first 24 months. The Venza (V6, AWD) averaged around 23 mpg, or 10 less than the RAV4. I don’t drive much anymore, maybe 9-10,000 miles a year, so at $3.00/gal. I’m also saving around $360/year in gas.
I’m not trying to convince you about what kind of car to buy, or new vs. used; just giving you my personal experience factor.
Here’s the oddity now: turned the car on this morning, working just fine! New theory: as we were driving quite a long distance at sustained speeds over 70 mph in a desert climate, some internal computer cut out the AC to prevent engine overheating. Which would indicate that there is starting to be that long-term wear on the engine as it should be efficient enough for both. Now we’re going to hold off and see how it goes for a few days.
The AC in my Florida Taurus (2014) sometimes just cuts out. Not after sustained driving, because I only drive short distances down there. I had it looked at in an auto repair place and they couldn’t find a problem. But I finally learned that if I just hit the button again it will come back on. So I don’t think it is related to the engine, or probably not even to the AC system itself as I had that looked at, but more likely just a little relay somewhere. If it get worse I’ll have it looked at from an electrical, wiring, perspective and not an AC perspective.
And it seems more likely that it was your fan motor itself that overheated, not the car engine prompting a computer shutdown. Remember, Occam’s Razor applies to cars, too.
Possibly! The Mrs is showing pure guts by taking it out for shopping today…we’ll see how it goes. The guys at the dealership are first rate so we’ll now probably have it inspected and see where we go.
Given the damage inflicted by the Las Vegas climate you might want to look for a used car from a place that is less harsh, to avoid a couple of years of accumulated heat and sun damage before you even get the car. I have always been advised to avoid buying a car from a state that uses salt on the roads in the winter, and I think that makes sense, as I have seen some cars with a lot of rust and have never had a rust problem in Colorado or Wyoming.
It is hard to decide if this or Biden’s dementia is the biggest political scandal in history
I’m going with Covid. From the origins of the virus, developed by US researchers using US tax money, to the coverup (skipping over the really serious question of whether or not its release was intentional, which would move it from “scandal” to “crime against humanity”) to the denial of life-saving therapeutics, to lies about the drugs, to the forcing of people to inject these experimental drugs in spite of knowing they (1) did not work and (2) were dangerous and often life-threatening, to the destruction of the economy under the guise of “protecting people”, this will when it is fully dissected and explained turn out to be the biggest and worst political scandal in history, as it affected people around the world and millions are still living with, and suffering from, the effects of these drugs on their bodies.
A secondary scandal would be the payment of billions of dollars of US funds to support it and finding out how much of this money made its way back to the Biden Crime Family or other nefarious actors.
The story of the hiding of Biden’s dementia will be on the list, but farther down. After all, Woodrow Wilson’s condition was worse than Biden’s and the fact that the office of the presidency was assumed by his wife is now a mere footnote in history. Although the Biden situation is worse because he was not competent when he was presented as a candidate and installed in the presidency through a series of frauds upon the nation, and the consequences of the actions of those acting in his name are far worse and far-reaching than those enacted by Edith Wilson. So the Biden Dementia Story is more significant in that it consists of collusion of federal agencies in committing various frauds upon the courts and the nation, the corruption of the election process, the office of the president openly flouting federal immigration laws to invite millions of people to invade the country illegally, the damage to our economy (and that of the world), the subversive element of implementing the Cloward and Pivens strategy, etc.
But even the involvement of federal agencies and officials in the Biden Dementia Story can’t make it more significant than the deaths of millions of people worldwide and the role the Biden administration played after the introduction of the virus, even if that WAS accidental. (As it led to the defeat of Trump in 2024, it has to be considered as at the very least a possible Dirty Trick to get a Democrat in office.)
Its a good point about Covid – which, IMO, was a deliberate release. I figure the ChiComs were testing to see how much damage they could do with a biological agent that was essentially no more than a severe cold. After all, who wants to release a pathogen that will wipe out a lot of your own people? So, release an engineered virus which is more deadly than usual but not very deadly at all…and then work up a media panic using your paid agents in the West to carry the ball. As a political scandal I’ll still rate it second or third, though: as I don’t think the Democrats explicitly worked with the ChiComs on it…they merely took advantage of it and ruthlessly used the ChiCom psy-op to advance their own cause.
I can’t remember if I explained my recent absence or not, but I was in the hospital for 8 days back in June, had a couple of bad falls while in the hospital, which compressed a nerve in my back, causing my right leg to quit working, resulting in 8 more days in a rehab facility to get me walking again. The initial problem was that my digestive tract quite working, and I ended up with an e. coli infection, sepsis, and crashed electrolytes and sodium level. I was a whisker away from being in the ICU before I finally turned the corner. ANYWAY, while in the hospital, I had an interesting conversation with a general surgeon who thought, at one point, that he was going to have to operate on me. He was curious about how I got to the point where I drove myself to the ER. He wanted to know if my bowel habits had changed recently. I told him they had following the COVID shots, and he said he wished he had a dollar for every patient who had told him the same thing, and that it would be 20 years before the medical community knows the full extent of the damage caused by the shots. That’s the first time I’ve heard a doctor make such an admission.
I got the first two shots – no problems here! But the Mrs – who has had a weak digestion since her gall bladder surgery – is often plagued with …. pretty bad tummy troubles! And nobody can explain why…just happens. Off and on with no rhyme or reason to it.
I cringed when I would hear of people I like getting the jab. I had a very bad feeling about it from the get-go, but it was intuitive so I kept my mouth shut. It is hard to refrain from asking if someone got the jab when hearing of some physical problem, because it can sound like blaming the victim but I always think it and I always wonder. I know a lot of people who got one shot and then started to develop some doubts and never went back for those “boosters”. I have a friend who got the shot because her company demanded it (side note: I wonder when those companies are going to get hit with lawsuits for damages) and then found out she was pregnant. Her regular doctor wanted her to keep getting boosters but her OB/GYN said no, so she didn’t. But her three young sons all had to get the jab, and she worries about them even though they have never shown any negative results.
That’s the thing about this drug. It’s the young people I worry about, as the vector for the drug tends to concentrate in the reproductive organs and young men in particular have had heart issues.
I’d tend to agree with you except for the vast scope of the impact of the virus. As if killing millions of people around the world is not bad enough, remember, its original release was timed to affect the 2020 election, in an effort to get Trump out of office. That effort also included the other election rigging we have discovered and talked about here. We have to remember that we had safe, effective, tested and available drugs proven to be effective against the worst of the virus symptoms—and they were demonized and banned because a quick and effective recovery from this virus would have undermined the true reason it was there in the first place. (And in the United States, Donald Trump would have gotten credit for identifying and recommending these treatments. That could not be allowed to happen.)
I suggest that rather than wondering “how much damage they could do with a biological agent that was essentially no more than a severe cold” they indulged in a callous calculation that they were quite happy to kill millions of people, many of whom were not even Americans and therefore not in any way related to our election, just to gain power. And remember, they didn’t just release the virus just prior to the election, they then forcibly banned the use of cheap and effective therapeutics which would have saved many lives.
If they had merely released a virus which, as you say, was “essentially no more than a severe cold” and then let it play out naturally, with doctors able to address the more severe symptoms when they occurred, that would have been one thing. But they made it impossible to treat those severe symptoms. Worse, they imposed a “treatment” (ventilators) that often killed on their own—-and focused millions of dollars and resources on manufacturing unneeded and dangerous ventilators that were then forced upon people by hospitals, often against the will of the patient or his family.
This element alone, the refusal to allow proven therapeutics and techniques to be used by professional medical personnel while giving vast powers over hospitals to force dangerous alternatives on unwilling patients, will comprise its own chapter in this shameful history.
Dems didn’t HAVE to work with the ChiComs on this, aside from using their research facilities and the ability to distract from the truth with stories about “wet markets” and bats and so on—none of which, BTW, reflected well on Chinese culture and society. Because the goal was to take over the United States by the Left, not by China.
It was a multi-faceted and elaborate scheme, starting with taking over the White House through a combination of undermining Trump and rigging the election and then putting a brain-dead puppet in place to act as the president, but it was more sinister than that. When we look at the impact on our economy, which is mentioned in connection with Covid but more as an unfortunate byproduct than a feature of the plan, we see the Cloward and Pivens theory woven in (both in the pressures on government plans resulting from the lockdowns and also in the parallel pressures of illegal immigration, ramping up in the background while we were dealing with the virus) and what might have been the most sinister of all, the testing of the willingness of the American public to meekly bow down to blatant tyranny.
Combine panic, millions of deaths leading to frantic fears amped up by silly theater like forcing people to wear masks and stay six feet apart, with crashing the economy and shutting down schools and limiting basic freedoms like assembly and travel, the specter of government thugs arresting people for family gatherings and church attendance, forcible injection of a dangerous and ineffective drug just to be able to keep jobs or military positions or travel freely, hospitals literally kidnapping people and holding them against their will as families begged for their release and then forcing them onto ventilators which usually killed them, state governors issuing edicts banning the sale of safe and proven drugs, doctors having to go underground to be able to secretly treat people and risking their licenses and even freedom to do so, people forced onto the street because they couldn’t afford rent or mortgage payments, children basically locked in their homes without schools, and worst of all entire populations meekly submitting to these various acts of tyranny and abuse, and you have a suddenly dystopian society created out of whole cloth within two or three short years. This doesn’t even address the societal fragmentation as people chose sides and turned on their families, friends and neighbors. (Just a year or so ago a woman on Next Door, a social media platform, posted in bold all-caps IVERMECTICIN IS A POISON IT IS TOXIC AND ANY DOCTOR WHO PRESCRIBES IT SHOULD GO TO JAIL and anyone who disagreed was kicked off the site, after being attacked by similarly insane people. Even now, after ivermectin has been identified as safe and benign and even a possible treatment for cancer, there is still a contingent of rabid partisans ready to attack anyone not in agreement about a DRUG. BTW they are not nearly as passionate about fentanyl.)
I don’t think historians will isolate Covid as one thing and the invasion of invited illegals as another, but will see both of them as threads in the same strategy to completely take over the country in four or five years, with related components like the Leftist-generated societal conflicts that only serve to destabilize our society.
When we look at how close the Left came to succeeding, derailed by the energy and vision of Donald Trump and the determination of millions to fight to pull the country away from that cliff’s edge, I think the full scope of their efforts and various successes will someday be chronicled as the closest this nation has ever come to being destroyed. And in that context, the mental state of the alleged leader of the country won’t matter all that much.
I had forgot about ivermecticin – that is a strong point; after all, the deliberate suppression of its benefits cost lives…and lots more besides. That does raise it to a more horrific crime.
Ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine and steroids.
The go-to treatment for inflammation is steroids. The most dangerous effect of Covid was what is called a “cytokine storm” or an autoimmune overreaction to something. There are several physical conditions that are autoimmune disfunctions, such as lupus and rheumatoid arthritis, and they are routinely treated with hydroxychloroquine, and the natural response to the cytokine storm from Covid that caused massive lung inflammation was, would have been, to administer hydroxychloroquine to suppress this overreaction. But Trump mentioned that he had heard it could be effective, so it was immediately banned. Literally banned. State governors decreed it could not be sold in their states. Pharmacists refused to fill prescriptions for it. People who had depended on it for years—decades—could not get it. Doctors who prescribed it were threatened with jail or losing their licenses or both.
This was after doctors were told by the CDC (which is not run by doctors) to not use steroids to treat the inflammation from Covid. So the two obvious and most effective ways to address massive inflammation were not allowed. The government then decreed that people who could not breathe due to this massive lung inflammation should be put on artificial breathing devices—ventilators—-and millions were spent in frantic hysterical efforts to suddenly manufacture ventilators. But ventilators cause their own problems, and most forced onto them died anyway.
(The Frontline Doctors, who continued to treat Covid by whispered word of mouth referrals, fearing arrest at any time for practicing medicine, routinely treated patients with nebulized steroids and in one panel discussion after the Gestapo treatment of doctors subsided, those in the panel said they never lost a patient they treated this way.) They would start with the steroid to attack the initial inflammation and then follow up with hydroxychloroquine to treat the impulse of the immune system to keep overreacting to the virus.
No one seems to know how ivermectin works, but it does. Small doses of IVM seemed to knock down the virus almost immediately. It’s cheap, available, and benign. And the government made it illegal, while demonizing it. Though the drug was developed for humans, with the developer winning a Nobel Prize for his work, it works excellently as an an antiparasitic drug and is therefore popular as an animal dewormer. In that form it is, for horses, in a thick paste squirted into the horse’s mouth, sticky to try to keep the horse from spitting it out, and the actual drug is a small part of the paste needed to carry it. So people who used IVM were ridiculed for using “horse paste” in an absolute orgy of ignorance on parade. Loud, smug, virulent ignorance. And lives were lost due to the politicization of this drug.
(As to the claim that IVM is toxic, anyone who has dewormed horses with this paste can affirm that they don’t like having it shoved into their mouths and try to get rid of it, mostly though vigorous head-shaking. This means that the administrator usually ends up with some of the paste in her face. After deworming a large herd of horses with IVM paste I probably ended up eating at least a tube of it and having a couple more smeared on my face and arms and hands. Funny, there was never a toxic reaction.)
That was the silly – and evil – aspect of it. For heaven’s sake, most medicines humans use are also used for animals…maybe with slight variations but nearly identical in make up and use. In a pinch, you could use an animal antibiotic on a human. Not ideal…but not a death sentence, either. To a certain extent, mammals is mammals. I recall a friend of mine’s dad was a medical researcher…experimental heart and stomach surgery. Most of the time, they operated on pigs because pig hearts and stomachs operate very much like the human. The whole thing was a horrific scam.
The thing is, doctors know this yet many sided with the government, or at least hospitals did. We saw horror stories of people going to the hospital for a covid test and being held against their will with relatives not allowed to see them. Since when can a pharmacist just refuse to fill a legitimate prescription? Since when can governors issue medical edicts?
This was a two-year orgy of tyranny as some people seemed giddy with the chance to exhibit their Inner Dictators/Bullies, and people died because of it. Looking back on it, aside from the Leftist government using this as a lever to take over the country, the responses of regular people were like a litmus test of character. But then that is true of nearly everything that has happened in the last 4-5 years.
Who could imagine whole groups of people coming out and demanding a new Final Solution for the Jews? Right here in our communities, in our colleges and universities. At least antisemitism used to be a shameful secret never spoken of in public and now it is celebrated and openly advocated. Ditto for advocating for violating federal laws and attacking law enforcement officers.
People are openly crossing lines, and I for one will not accept an effort to slink back onto the decent, civilized, side to pretend that it never happened.
Yep – and I’m afraid that it will have to be burned out of the system. In fact, I’m just writing up a new post on this very subject.
People use the term “path to citizenship” so I think there could be a “path to decency” for some—–SOME—of those currently caught up in the hate culture of the Left.
As a former Liberal, someone I describe now as an “unexamined Liberal” because it was pure herd mentality and social contagion without a hint of actual thought or analysis, I can testify to the fact that it is possible for people who have taken a stand to discover they were wrong and move to the other side because I did it.
I truly believe that a lot of Dems are Dems because they truly want to be good people and have bought into the fantasy that the Democrat Party offers a shortcut to the Higher Moral Ground. They are not totally blameless, because they have the ability (especially in this information-dense age) to do independent research and analysis, but when you are in a deep rut it can be hard to see over the top to what is on the other side. And the power and brilliance of Leftist propaganda can’t be overstated.
If you truly believe the propaganda about “Palestine” and the many horrors inflicted on innocent people by the rapacious Jews of Israel, how can you NOT speak out against it? On the surface, this makes complete sense. It takes effort to break out of the Leftist propaganda bubble to learn actual facts, and emotions are powerful and controlling.
I think most young people have an inherent desire to make changes that will “make things better” and the Left is brilliant at playing on that and imparting the conviction that their message is the information these idealistic young people need to be the kind of “better people” they yearn to be. And they are herded into information gulags where the only information they receive is the propaganda, which includes the message that “the other side” is so deeply and profoundly evil that nothing it says can be believed.
And they have grown up in a culture that has steadily become more violent, more hateful, more contentious, so it is natural to express themselves in the context of their culture. and at the same time to mistake virtue signaling for virtue.
All we can do, regarding this segment of the Left, the possibly salvageable segment, is to whittle away at the vast bulk of “knowledge” that controls them. And the only way to do that is to provide information, which requires coherent and appealing voices. This will require, to a great extent, using the same tools the Left uses to reach these people—-social media, of course, and the entertainment medium as well. And we suck at messaging.
I am dealing with what I call Internet Herpes—that is, the search engine Edge. I can’t get rid of it. It just won’t go away. I have Google as my default server, and Edge just ignores this. I have gone into various sites to delete it but it just comes back. So when I boot up my computer it is what pops up, and I often have to turn it off a couple of times to get rid of it and that is only temporary till I reboot and there is again/still.
One of the aspects of this is that the page is full of clickbait, “news” stories and so on. Every now and then I do click on one of them, because I can tell from the headline it is BS, even without seeing the NYT byline.
The most recent breathlessly informed us that Another Top Aide to Hegseth Leaves the Pentagon. This was obviously an effort to dramatize the departure of someone from the DOD and meant to imply chaos and mismanagement and dissatisfaction within the agency.
Of course, it means no such thing, as the blurb (I can’t even call it an article as it is an AI-generated summary) admits that “He had planned to work for the federal government for only six months” though it does try to soften the truth with an editorial comment that “He is the latest in a string of senior officials to leave the department’s top ranks.”
One bullet point comments that “The turnover in Hegseth’s office has been notable, with several aides being placed on leave or reassigned amid investigations and internal conflicts.” Uh, yeah! Which is exactly what Hegseth said would happen as he committed to reforming the department.
And then, in typical (even with AI) NYT effort to spin, it goes on to whine that “Reports suggest that the atmosphere in the Pentagon has become chaotic, with aides accusing each other of disloyalty and experiencing tense exchanges.” Ah, yes, the NYT’s beloved passive voice, in which things are just said (suggested) appearing out of nowhere with no attribution, just anonymous “reports” making “suggestions”. AKA lies, AKA typical NYT propaganda.
What I think is funny is that the Times has outsourced its propaganda to AI, not even caring enough about it to have it written by human beings. I guess they figure their base is too ignorant to notice and too invested in its bias to care.
Another thing I have noticed about Edge is that it appears to be wholly AI-generated, with the already stereotyped bland writing style of AI. A friend’s college student son says that his school will not allow any AI input, even requiring computer search logs and so on. An AI submission is a failing grade. She asked an employee to proofread something she had written and the employee instead produced an AI version of the report, which was so obviously canned my friend totally rejected it, and her young employee was stunned. “But it’s so easy!” So the pendulum may swing, with younger users turning over thinking to AI, but as its defects become more annoying I predict that pendulum will swing back to rejecting it and even ridiculing it. In the meantime it is taking over the internet. Every “story” is AI-generated, and they are all the same.