Social Issues

What Do We Really Know?

Mark Noonan32 Comments

A Twitter friend went into the way back machine and reminded me of the Nuclear Freeze movement of the 1980s. I guess you’d have to be at least 50 to have any memory of it at all: so, a lot of the youngsters in the world wouldn’t know what it was about. Of course, you could Google it – but if you did that, you almost certainly won’t find out about it.

Oh, you’d read a lot about it. And what you read would be almost invariably praising it to the skies. But what you probably won’t read about it is that it was nothing more than a Soviet front organization. We were about to build and deploy a type of nuclear weapon the USSR (a) couldn’t build and (b) couldn’t defend against. Our having these weapons while the USSR didn’t would put us in the driver’s seat – the USSR would essentially be forced to throw in the towel on Cold War competition. So, the USSR did the one thing it was actually good at: call forth the Useful Idiots of the West to ensure the USA shot itself in the foot.

I remember it, now, very well. Especially one of the leading voices of it: Dr Helen Caldicott. She was just about everywhere during the time. Highly in demand for your Soviet inspired peace march and conferences around the world. And she was an Authority on it! She knew was she was talking about! After all, she’s a doctor.

Well, a pediatrician…who never had any experience dealing with either nuclear power or weapons…but she fit the bill: someone who seemed oh, so nice and had Smart credentials and how can you argue against her? You can’t hug your kid with nuclear arms!

The drivel almost worked – huge pressure was placed on Reagan and Thatcher to ditch the new weapons. But, they didn’t…and then the weapons (along with other Reagan tactics) did precisely what they were supposed to do: force the Soviets to the table at a disadvantage and eventually unravel their Empire in Europe (the fall of the USSR was really just a bonus that nobody could foresee).

But that isn’t our issue for the moment – the real issue is that a pack of ridiculous lies nearly sunk Reagan’s USSR policy and even though the lies failed at that, they still managed to implant into the public mind that nuclear power is somehow extra dangerous and that the only safe thing to do with nuclear power is have nothing to do with it. By this time in our history, almost all our electricity production should come from nuclear power. A whole series of plants all across America should be humming with cheap, clean nuclear energy providing far more than our greatest need. We’re not because of people like Caldicott got themselves fooled and then managed to fool enough other people.

And, heck, I have to admit – back there in the late 80s and early 90s, I was wary of nuclear power. I still figured we should go for it, but I had this mental image of it being extra dangerous and we had to take extra care around it…and this was after I got out of the Navy, when I had literally stood next to an operating nuclear power plant aboard a submarine. How could I have been so stupid?

Of course it had to be operated properly – but so does any device. Operate a solar plant incorrectly and you’ll cause a lot of problems. We got into our minds, though, that nuke was Super Dangerous! Thousands of years must pass before it is clean! For goodness sake, at no point did people stop living in Hiroshima. A few days after the bomb went off and all the bodies were cleared away, the people were already starting to rebuild. It is a city of nearly 1.2 million people: far larger than it was when bombed in 1945. Here’s the photo of the iconic dome of Hiroshima. Tell me, what immediately leaps out here?

That is doesn’t quite look like the wasteland of 1945…the trees really take away from the whole End of the World vibe we’re supposed to get here.

Obviously, nuclear weapons are very destructive and nuclear power is something that you have to be careful with…but there is clearly a bit of a mental psychosis in the popular imagination about it which is not supported by things we can easily observe. Things we can know just by knowing them. I doesn’t take special knowledge or insight to know that Hiroshima is a thriving city…but we, in a sense, don’t know it…and so we fear nuclear power and think that using a nuclear weapon is unthinkable.

And then you start to ponder: what else are we refusing to know? How much of what we “know” are lies?

You can do this yourself: just take some subject and think about it. Think about what you know but then take the crucial step: pretend you don’t know it and think about it for a bit. Does what you “know” match up with what you think? Like this:

One of the things you’ll find asserted – in books, movies, documentaries, everywhere – is that the Anglo-American alliance could not have defeated Nazi Germany without the USSR. This is an article of faith. It is true and may not be questioned. If you do, you’re an idiot. I mean, think about it – at least 5 million German and Axis soldiers fell against the USSR. If the USSR hadn’t killed them, then they would have all been turned against us and we never could have won!

Makes sense, right? I mean, that is a lot of dead Krauts and it would have taken us a powerful long time to off them, ourselves. But when examined, it simply falls apart.

At the end of the war, more than 21 million Americans and Brits were in the armed forces. This does not count British Empire forces: even excluding Britain’s Indian Army, this probably worked out to two or three million more. But lets just go with the Yanks and the Limeys.

By 1945, the Brits were at maximum strength: 5 million was about what their population could sustain in the field. The USA could still call up three or four million more than we had, though that would be pushing it. The Germans, if they strained every nerve to the breaking point, could maybe get 10 million into uniform. Starting to see something here? Just the Anglo-Americans, alone, vastly outnumbered the Germans. Throw in the Italians and minor Axis allies and you still have a big advantage for the Anglo-Americans. When you add in that the UK/USA had vastly more economic capacity than the entire Axis (including Japan) and had open access to all the resources in the world what you conclude is that regardless of how any particular engagement went, the only question on defeating Germany was how long it was going to take? Having the USSR in got the job done in 1945, rather than 1946 or 1947. That’s it. Good thing, of course; but certainly far different from “we must be thankful because without the USSR we couldn’t have won the war.”

And who likely floated the idea that we had to have the USSR? The USSR – and their useful idiots in the United States. Starting with those who gave away the store at Yalta in order to get Russia into a war against Japan we had already won.

That is just one mental exercise which, once concluded, lays to rest a myth which is believed really for no other reason than it has been repeated over and over again. But I think we all have to start doing this – start thinking entirely fresh. Roll it around in your. They say this happened: well, does it make sense that it would happen, or happen that way? They say we must do this: why? They say we have retain this policy or alliance: are we sure?

Last night I posted a Tweet where I asserted that the US government must keep no secrets. That a Republic must do her business in the open for all the citizens to see as it is done. Very smart people said we can’t have that – even George Washington believed in keeping diplomatic secrets! Well, sure: if Washington was President today, I’d probably trust him to keep some things confidential. But we’ve got Pudding Brain and his merry band of morons running the show: you really want them to be able to keep what they’re doing secret from you?

But I came to this conclusion by a bit of a winding intellectual road and it just flashed in my mind that secrets are for con artists You don’t keep secret honest dealings – you keep a con secret because if your con gets out into the open, enough people will see it in time to warn your mark off. Heck, even God doesn’t really keep secrets from us – He’s got some Mysteries, but He has shown them to us: we just can’t fully understand God. Go figure. But secrets are just not good – and in government, they are downright bad. And so, the whole FBI/CIA/NSA “National Security” apparatus, in my view, has to be ditched. It is keeping secrets mostly to hide its incompetence. But I only got to this view by thinking anew about everything – by taking nothing for granted. I got here by thinking – and we really do have only two ways to live:

  1. By thought that has been thought out.
  2. By thought that hasn’t been thought out.

For nigh to a century, we’ve been going on “not thought out”. I think we need to change that. We need to find out what we really know.

The Rich, Not the Left, are the Enemy

Mark Noonan7 Comments

Saw this on Twitter:

And it is real. They are paying people to stop farming. You know: growing food. As has been pointed out: you are the carbon they want reduced.

You see this and then you take Sri Lanka in mind, see all the fast food corps trying to market “beyond beef” products, endless articles about how we can eat bugs instead of meat…deliberately pushing up gas and oil costs while pushing electric vehicles while mega corps buy up residential property to rent it out. Sorry, but I see a plan: reduce human population and have what remains jammed into mega-cities where common folks eat bug paste in their life pods while getting around by bicycle or electric train. Did some group of rich people sketch this out? Not sure: but the various rich people NGO’s are all singing from the same Green hymnal and it all comes out to regular people having less, with the subtext being there will be fewer regular people.

Leave aside whether this is or isn’t a global conspiracy and you’re still left with the fact of what they are doing: in the name of “saving the planet” they are proposing we completely restructure our society to be Green – and no matter how you slice it, Green gives you less food and energy. With seven billion people on Earth, the wheels of agriculture, manufacturing and transport must turn rapidly in order for everyone to get their daily bread. If you interfere with that, there simply won’t be enough to go around. And rely on it, if there are shortages, the rich people telling us to go Green aren’t suffering them. Went to the store today to get yellow peppers and they didn’t have any. Hardly any red peppers, either. This isn’t odd food – this is staple stuff for the modern American diet. Bin after bin where the peppers normally are sit empty. But I guarantee you that if Gates wants some yellow peppers with his dinner tonight, he’s got them or will have them within the hour.

So, in my view, it isn’t the Left that we really have a problem with. They’re just kooks who don’t know anything – the problem comes in when the rich adopt Leftist views and seek to implement them. As to just why billionaires want to impose the ideals of ignorant Marxists, I don’t know for certain. It is probably a variety of reasons: but the underlying issue is that the Masters of the Universe want to remain Masters…and they are more than happy to change title and Party Line as long as they stay rich and in charge. Chesterton pointed this out more than a century ago when he noted that the British Ruling Class would have no problem changing over from being Duke of Norfolk to being Administrator of Norfolk. Because at the end of all plans of the rich, they remain fabulously rich, immune to law and firmly in control. What matters to you if the mass of people are crammed into stinking, crime ridden cities? You’ve just flown out to your private island after another Geneva confab and you’re getting ready for you and your buddies to abuse some young men and girls.

We have to cease worrying about absurdities like AOC or the latest Tik Tok Progressive weirdo who is grooming kids to be trans – these are problems and they’ll have to be dealt with, but the way to deal with them is to get rid of the rich people. Get rid of those who fund, promote and protect the Marxist fruitcakes. The Marxist numbskulls would be powerless and ignored except for very rich people funneling them money so they can attack not the rich, but you and me with our suburban homes, cars and our weekend trip to the beach (and the Rich hates that – hates that right next to their zillion dollar beachfront home are regular folks just being there). And do keep that in mind: for all the Left’s “eat the rich” rhetoric, their practical policy demands are for you and me to have less…less money, less property, less freedom. And who want us to have less? Those who have the most – their wealth is sacred, ours is Destroying the Planet. The footsoldiers of the Left are just too stupid to see how they are being manipulated…but that is no surprise because you have to be monumentally stupid to be a Leftist to begin with. But they are still not the enemy – the most aggressive BLM/Antifa rioter is not your enemy. He’s an idiot. He’s a tool. And he’s sent out against you by people who have fabulous fortunes, almost all inherited or recently acquired via political connections.

Unless and until we make this mental shift and realize that the rich are our enemies, we’re really not going to get anywhere. Any victory will be temporary in nature. Defeated in one field, they’ll just use their money to open up another one…and it doesn’t take them much money. Just a few million dollars can fund all sorts of people and programs to attack us. And what is even a billion dollars to someone with tens of billions? It is chump change – and for chump change, they will destroy you. Unless you take all their money away.

I’m not talking about taxing and redistributing – I’m talking about straight up confiscation. The Ruling Class does it to us all the time via asset forfeiture. Turn about is fair play – their money is forfeit one fine day. We just take it, leaving them with nothing – and then we pass it out to our people in some set increment so that the net wealth of our side increases.

Or, you can adhere to some tired theory which holds that private property includes fortunes of hundreds of billions which are being used to undermine the very basis of normal, human life. Up to you. Pick what you want. I prefer we get rid of those who propose to desrtoy us.

They Want You to Lie

Mark Noonan17 Comments

You might have seen the exchange between Senator Hawley and Professor Khiara Bridges. Bridges is absolutely insane. Stupid, too. Someone who knows absolutely nothing but whatever Marxist drivel was shoved into her…and then she was advanced in the legal career because as a POC who could regurgitate the Party Line on command, she was just what Diversity demanded. But there is a very sinister aspect to her – and I’ll be generous and say she, herself, might not understand it. Mindless mouthpieces like the Professor are such because they are mindless, after all. But consciously or not, what she is demanding is that we all become liars.

In the exchange, what the Professor insists upon is that saying only women can get pregnant is transphobic and is violence against transgender people. Think about that – she’s saying that if you state a biological fact (“women get pregnant”) then you are killing people. It is an absurd thing to say. It is insane. But, it is crucial to the Left’s agenda – because sane, tolerant people don’t like to get into confrontations. We like peace and quiet. And, so, faced with someone like Bridges, we start to trim our sails…maybe not all at once going along with it, but carefully editing our own words to cause the least offense possible. But, folks, we’re trying to cause the least offense to people who are insane liars. I don’t think this effort has an upside to it.

The crucial thing for the Left – all the time and on every issue – is to get people to lie. To get them to concede, even if only partially, that the Left’s lie is true. Think about it – when the Floyd issue exploded the Left’s Party Line was that racist cops were hunting down unarmed black men just for the racist heck of it. Not wishing to cause offense, people on the right hemmed and hawed about it – instead of just calling such claim what it is (an insane lie), there was an attempt to not be confrontational. You know how it went, “sure, there are racist cops and there is much racism in America and all of us are saddened by the unjustified death of George Floyd, but…”. And everything after “but” was pointless…because the lie had been agreed to. Maybe not exactly in Leftist terms, but enough of it to make any policy response to the Floyd death in line with Leftist ideology. Had we true courage on our side, we would have said the truth: Floyd died because he was a stupid, high as a kite and passing funny money. Had he not be stupid, high or breaking the law, he’d still be alive. That a cop was involved in his death was pure happenstance – Floyd was going to an early grave, cops or no cops. The example in my mind while this unfolded was my late elder brother: died because of a stupid drug-addict fight at the age of 50…because he was stupid and got high and then got into a fight and so he passed out on asphalt in the summer sun and his brain cooked to death. It could very well have been an interaction with a cop that killed him…but, it was another drug addicted bum who did him in. And it didn’t matter – my brother is dead because he was stupid and high; the particular circumstances of his death are irrelevant.

And I know that seems harsh and perhaps it is – but it isn’t like my brother didn’t have any agency. He had a thousand chances to alter course. He was given aid by family and friends over a many year span of time…all he had to do to live a nice life was stop being stupid and getting high. Lots of people have successfully navigated this and gone on to happy, productive lives. It isn’t a miracle: it is an act. A choice. A decision. Some people never make it and pay the price for their folly. George Floyd and my brother: same/same.

But the Left doesn’t care about that. Didn’t and doesn’t care that Floyd is dead, either. Floyd was just what was necessary for the lie: a black man who died in custody of a white cop. Once that fact was established, all the Left did was tell as story based on the Left’s lie – that racist cops hunt down black people. And it worked – by and large, almost the entire Western Establishment went along with it. But do keep in mind that the Floyd case wasn’t just to advance a false Narrative of racist cops…it was to make it impossible for cops to police our cities and thus allow for an explosion of crime which the Left will then use to advance their biggest goal: the breakdown of American society as “proof” that a free market system governed by people who believe in God doesn’t work. Crime, in the Left’s view, is the result of an unjust system…and by getting the cops out of the equation, they can now proceed to the social destruction which, in their minds, will force people to turn to the Left for a solution.

And it isn’t just one lie – it is a lie about everything. Racist cops, men can get pregnant, illegals are mere migrants, etc, etc, etc…are all designed with the same purpose, to get us to go along with the lies and so make us defenseless as society falls apart…after all, if we’re liars, how do we call out the Left and demand they stop? Can’t: not if you’re a liar, too. But the Left is making it so that just to live in society, you have to lie.

Put the breaks on it – concede nothing. Whatever the Left is saying is a lie. It can’t be other because the Left’s ideology is based on lies. Push back against the lies – this will take some courage and some of us who do so will suffer social and economic pain. But it must be done. The Leftist Emperor has no clothes and if we can merely say that, the Left will lose.

Quid est veritas?

Mark Noonan19 Comments

The famous question of Pilate to Jesus: what is truth? Now, we Christians answer that by saying Jesus is the Truth…and that is true and sufficient for all events. But as we are no longer a Christian civilization, perhaps we need to expand on it a bit more? For the heathen…and, maybe, a lot of those who call themselves Christian but live as practical pagans.

The basic issue of truth has been rolling around in my head a lot lately, but Team Pudding Brain setting up a Disinformation Governance Board gives the matter urgency. To absolutely no surprise to you or anyone on our side, there are already Never Trump squishes trying to explain or explain away this board – which cannot but have a nefarious purpose of suppressing dissent. The way NT writes it up, there is a need for someone to clamp down on “misinformation”, though when pressed they’ll admit that a board inside the Department of Homeland Security isn’t the best place for it. There is, naturally, no best place for it – there is no place for it, at all.

We know that when the Left says “misinformation” what they mean is anything they disagree with. It is why they say “misinformation” rather than “lies”. Keep in mind that Leftist fact checkers will take someone which is 100% true and call it “partially false”, based on what they say is the relevant context. Meanwhile, bald faced lies by the Left are held to be “mostly true” because once you think about the whole situation, that Leftist lie speaks to a larger truth. You see how it goes: anything we say is false, anything they say is true…and so even when we say factually true things, we’re spreading “misinformation” and that has to be stopped. Now by Pudding Brain’s Cheka inside DHS.

But the larger problem we have is that a lot of people don’t know what truth is any longer. We’ve been conditioned for decades to think that divorce (ie, breaking a promise) is ok and that we have to tell “little while lies” just to get on in society. It was under Bill Clinton that this was rammed home. It would have eventually been rammed home by the Left but Clinton gave it urgency because just about everything he said was false…but as it was all in the service of the greater good (ie, advancing the Left) we all had to be taught that some times lies are good.

There is a poll out there were people were asked questions like “what portion of the population is gay?” and “what portion of the population is white” and the overall results show that people haven’t a clue about their own nation. The question about gay was very revealing in that the “vote” for gay was about 20 percent when the actual gay number is 3 percent. People are walking around thinking that one in five are gay. But, who can blame them? Turn on popular culture and it is shot through with gay characters. It seems that every move and TV show has to have a significant number of gay people in it when, in reality, most Americans might personally know one or two gay people because there simply aren’t that many out there (for myself, I personally know two gay people – and one of them is only distantly known via a second party mutual friend). People think America is barely majority white when the reality is that we’re seventy percent white. People think that twenty percent are millionaires when it is less than one percent.

And this is all because the people have been lied to and they have been conditioned to accept and repeat lies.

Here I would like to point out that a lie does no have to be false. In fact, a lie can be entirely factually correct and still be a lie. Like this:

Here are your facts. Jack went to the store where he pulled out a gun and shot the clerk and stole fifty dollars. He then went home and had a beer and told his wife he loved her.

Here is your news report: Jack came home from the store and after having a beer, told his wife he loved her.

There is nothing false in the news report, but it is a completely false story all the same. It is a fact that the most effective lies adhere as close to the truth as possible in order to transmit the lie. Recently, Marjorie Taylor Greene was accosted by an MSMer who tried to ask her why she brought up the possibility of martial law to prevent Biden from becoming President. She stopped and asked the MSMer to read the actual text (all the while refusing to confirm it was even her text – my bet is that it isn’t, but she didn’t want to get drawn into an argument on that level). Once she really pressed, the MSMer (not facing the camera while he did so) read the whole text and thus we found out that it wasn’t MTG saying we needed to go to martial law, but someone saying that some people are talking like that. And some people were – but some people talking about a thing doesn’t equate to anyone advocating for a thing.

But there was the MSM, trying to slander MTG into being an insurrectionist. And the lie was merely the MSM not reporting the whole text – they just latched on to a word and then started asking everyone “why was MTG advocating martial law?”. Now, MTG ably destroyed the MSMer – calling him a liar to his face – but you can bet on it that if any of the video is shown in the MSM, it won’t be the parts where MTG calls the MSMer a liar or the MSMer having to admit that the text doesn’t verify MTG calling for martial law. Whatever gets into the MSM show will, by selective use of words and facts, work out to the MSM viewers being told that MTG favored martial law to stop Biden. And it will have the true things in it that MTG was part of a text thread where martial law was mentioned…and that will sound oh, so ominous! But it will also be a lie.

I think our first step here is to define a lie – and it isn’t just the statement of a falsehood. It is the attempt to deceive which differentiates a lie from the truth. And while it is possible to deceive someone with an outright falsehood, the reality is that the most effective deceptions use truth as their foundation. It is the difference between an adult pulling a toddler’s leg by asserting the Moon is made out of green cheese and the con artist trying to sucker the unwary out of their money. The adult isn’t really trying to get the kid to believe the Moon is made out of cheese…but the con artist is definitely trying to get the money. This is why Trump grandly saying that Mexico will pay for the wall (implying to the unwary – or the malicious – that Trump was saying Mexico will cut us a check for wall construction) wasn’t an attempt to deceive, but Obama saying “if you like your doctor, you can keep him”, was. Trump was trying to drive home a rhetorical point about the necessity and benefit of the wall…Obama was just bald faced lying to save his political bacon because if he had come out and told us what ObamaCare was going to do, he would have lost the 2012 election. Obama lied to fool us into keeping him in power, Trump exaggerated to make a point – there is a gigantic difference here.

“Safe, legal and rare”: remember that? This was the supposedly centrist Democrat answer to the problem of abortion in the 1990’s. It sounded so good, but it was an attempt to deceive. And it by and large worked. It sounded so right. “Hey, I don’t like abortion, but as long as it is rare, then I’m ok with it.” Democrats went with that angle because saying “federally funded abortion on demand to the moment of birth” (their actual position at the time and now) would have been politically disastrous. But it has been lies like that which have kept the Left in power because the lies, which all contain aspects of truth, are so relentlessly hammered home by the MSM and popular culture, help people make a coward’s bargain. That bargain is: I’ll pretend you’re not lying, if you’ll leave me alone.

But that bargain never works, long term. The trouble is that the liars never stop lying: they just see if you’ll swallow the next one as readily as the last. And I think the Left has gone too far – and the trans issue seems to be the dam buster here. Trying to get people to agree that men can get pregnant and that kids are old enough to decide if they should transition was just a step way too far. But even with the rising pushback here, we have a long way to go. Many other lies have been very firmly implanted into the American mind. People – large numbers of of them – believe complete drivel because it has been endlessly and slickly imparted to them in popular culture for decades.

To take an example: Columbus. Once such a hero that we named our capital city after him, he’s now nearly universally despised, and by extension every explorer, pioneer and colonist despised with him. Most people, if you query them on the subject, will at least go along with some concept of Columbus and his successors being bad. Never mind that they recently dug up 1,000 female skulls in Mexico and, after first thinking it was a mass grave of Cartel victims, discovered it was instead a 1,000 year old site of mass female human sacrifice. Had Columbus and the Conquistadores not come along, that stuff would have just kept on going.

So, too, with all of it – there is no indication that my Irish ancestors, left alone, would have set in motion a train of events which got me to sitting in my air conditioned home in the desert with a pool out back and a pantry stuffed with food that I didn’t have to sweat in the fields to obtain. Sure, there were probably some ancestors back there who were hung for stealing a sheep and I am firmly against hanging sheep thieves…but the bottom line is that absent the Limey bastards, I wouldn’t be living nearly as well as I do today. So, thank God for the colonists!

But we can’t even have that discussion these days because the lies have been so deeply implanted that most wouldn’t know what you were talking about and a determined minority would seek to socially destroy you for pointing out relevant facts which place the Current Narrative in a bad light.

We have to get back to truth – the real truth. Telling the story which places all relevant information in the public square in a timely manner so that people can react properly to events. To do this, lying – intentional deception – is going to have to be punished. The liar,when caught, can’t be allowed to give us a “my bad” and move on. There has to be pain involved. Lots of pain. So much pain that people might start to think that honesty really is the best policy.

Hey, its either that or get ready for a future where you die of easily treatable diseases as your doctor in his ignorance throws up his hands – not knowing the simple treatments because after a century of lies, it was decided that being a doctor doesn’t require knowledge of human physiology. But he’s dead certain that men can get pregnant.

The Lies We Contend With

Mark Noonan71 Comments

When Andrew Yang announced he was leaving the Democrat party, I commented to him that nearly everything he believed was a lie, but also noting that huge amounts of what I used to believe were lies as well. That I now could see the whole system of lies, right and left, which have been used to keep we, the people compliant. Then someone asked me when did the lies start?

To be sure, there have been lies since the Garden. But I do believe what we’ve dealt with these past decades is unique in human history: a whole series of lies maintained at all costs by people who do know better. And while it grew out of a host of factors, I pinpoint the need for a system of lies to the Korean War, specifically to the Truman Administration decision to not seek victory.

We were all told – and we all believed – that when Truman fired MacArthur it was the right and brave thing to do. That MacArthur was off the ranch and threatened not merely a Third World War, but the very Constitutional structure of the United States. Like all good lies, this had a kernel of truth: as a military officer, MacArthur was bound to obey the orders of his civilian Commander in Chief. But that bit of truth was used to blind us to the fact that in a cold blooded and cruel manner, Truman and his Administration had decided that people would continue to die, with no hope of victory, until the Communists decided to end the killing. That was the issue. It always was the issue. And it isn’t even mentioned, for the most part. When it is, it is quickly passed over. No one wants to really consider this. Most of the people who died in the Korean War – Koreans, Chinese and Americans – died after Truman made his decision. They died fighting it out on an arbitrary line of no moral or strategic value. Truman did this. And then slept soundly at night. So did the Defense officials and the generals. The soldiers on the line slept less soundly. And they died. Truman’s decision wasn’t made to spare lives, but merely to sustain the decision he had made to enter the war when he had lost the will to win the war. He lied to the American people in order to save his political prospects.

Sound familiar?

When the Chinese intervened we had two morally acceptable courses open to us: fight it out to victory, or to capitulate. We chose the immoral path: keep fighting, but only to provide cover for a coward’s decision to neither win nor quit. Rely on it: they sized it up. They knew that with our absolute command of the sea and our aerial superiority that the Chinese could not force us all the way out of Korea. They could calculate: this many dead and wounded per month, this large a pool of draftees to send: presto, we could sustain the line indefinitely. All it would take is lots of people – mostly poorer people the leaders never met – dying. The Western Front is held up as the immoral waste of lives, but it wasn’t: as many mistakes as the Allies made, their goal was always total victory. The lives weren’t to be expended to no point. In Korea, they were to be expended pointlessly. And to do this, they had to lie. They had to tell us that if we went for victory, it would lead to WWIII as the Russians would go to war with us and we’d all be nuked. End of the world! If we don’t have Johnny from Akron and Li from Shanghai blow each other to bits over and over again, we’re all gonna die!!!!

Too bad for Johnny and Li: but, hey, at least 24 hour round the clock nuclear holocaust was avoided.

Flaw in the theory: Russia only exploded her first nuke in 1949 and the best they had for a strategic bombing was the TU-4, a reverse engineered B-29 which was incapable of reaching most of the United States from Soviet air bases. Even we didn’t have a real nuclear bomber until the introduction of the B-36 in 1948. Nuclear war as in total wipe of humanity simply wasn’t in the cards during any point of the Korean War. Additionally, there was very little chance that an aging Stalin would bring his country into another World War as Russia was still rebuilding from WWII (it would be the mid-60’s before Russia was fully recovered from the destruction of WWII).

In short, a cruel calculation was made to not win as that seemed more difficult and then a series of lies were generated to explain why we wouldn’t win but the dying would keep going. That, in my view, is when our government became a web of lies…and when all sides of the political spectrum (except a few put down as kooks) became wedded to the web of lies.

In the end, we built up a massive, national security State in service to this concept that at any moment now the Russians would nuke us and so we had to have a massive nuclear force on hair trigger alert, a gigantic Army ready to fight (but not win!) anywhere in the world and a whole bunch of what we were doing kept secret from the people, who were to be monitored and manipulated. By the 1960’s, in my view, the thing was feeding on itself. Just getting ever more crazy and using ever larger amounts of BS to justify itself. Because after a while, people were invested in it. Defense contractors, think tanks, universities, media companies: a whole host of individuals and institutions essentially made their living by sustaining the fiction that we can’t win a war, but we needed a massive military and secret police (FBI, CIA, NSA) to fend off defeat. Nobody was ever allowed to do two things which would cut to the chase:

Drive the Marxists out of America

Directly confront the USSR with a “war or quit” ultimatum.

We couldn’t do these things because they would solve the problem. Getting rid of the American Marxists would end the internal threat and challenging the Soviets to fight or back off would either get them to back off, or get them to fight (they would have backed off: the balance of forces all through the Cold War was overwhelmingly in our favor – they knew it, and so did we).

We had to pretend that having Che Guevara wanna-bees in our schools and bureaucracies was just the price of freedom. Even so-called Conservatives said we had no right to push such people out. We had to allow America to be flooded with a series of corrosive, anti-human Marxist ideologies which sapped our will and warped our sense of right and wrong. And we had to do this simply to sustain lies. In this case, the lie that if we didn’t let our enemies subvert us, our enemies would win. And still all based on the first lie: the Korea Lie – that we can’t win a stand up fight to simply end this once and for all.

Here in 2021, it is all self-sustained. We’re not even allowed to win a fight with rag tag Islamist militias. And we’re appointing Marxist economists to positions in our government.

Reject it all: reject all the lies. You don’t have to fund your enemies. You don’t have to sustain the National Security State. You don’t have to protect those who hate you and want you enslaved. You are sane. You want law and order, sound economics, your people come first: these are normal, sane attitudes and anything against them has to go down. Your laws are for you: for sanity. Not for them, the insane. The liars. The laws do not protect evil. They do not foster insanity. Anyone who says they do is lying to you. Ignore them and take what is yours by right: take back, that is, your citizenship in the Republic and insist that the Republic exist for you, not for those who hate you and lie to you and wish to plunder you.

The Real World is Knocking at the Door

Mark Noonan13 Comments

Wow! Two in a day. When was the last time I did that? But, I’m kinda at an impasse in figuring out the last chapters of Book VII in the Mirrors series and, also, I’m rather furious. So, here we go!

I upset a friend today – don’t know her personally as she’s a Twitter friend but she’s a nice, interesting, right-of-center lady with a fascinating background and lots wise and insightful things to say. What I said was this:

Guys: if you’re not willing to do a bit of shooting pour encourager les autres, this won’t get fixed. Only the thought that they may be shot in a fortnight will concentrate the military mind and get them off working a lobbying gig and back to learning how to fight.

And:

Why does the general who screwed the pooch get let off when the private he ordered to die in a badly planned and executed op is dead or legless? You want to be a general? Cool. Win or die. If it’s a defeat, better die in the battle or by your own hand. Don’t come back.

A bit harsh to modern sensibilities, but I think it needed to be said. I intend to say a lot more of it. We’re not quite at the point of aux armes, citoyens, but we’re pretty close. I was advised to not be so worried about it…and that law, Constitution and Courts will get us through.

Bad news: they won’t.

And that is why I am, indeed, worried. We don’t have a functioning government. The Media are mere regime propagandists. We have, in short, no way to fix this prior to the 2022 and 2024 elections and the part most at risk at the moment – the Executive – not before 2024. We don’t have people in charge – and we can’t get people in charge – who understand the gravity of the situation or, if they did, have the desire to help the United States out of it. The only calculation any of them are making is how to retain their own political viability. They have not, ever, had a thought for the United States or her people and they aren’t suddenly going to have one now.

And I know that seems a rather bleak assessment, but it won’t be the first time its happened. The most recent time it happened in a major power was France in 1940. Do you want to know what the Prime Minister of France, Paul Reynaud was concerning himself with in the last days before the French surrender? Getting his mistress and a suitcase full of government cash into Spain while angling for an ambassadorship to the US from Petain. At a time when the PM should have been bending every effort to defend France, he was making sure he had money for himself and his side piece and maybe a sinecure from the incoming collaborationist regime. And, mark this, Reynaud was in the PM’s office because it was thought that he was the most energetic French leader who would put up the best fight against Hitler. Compared to the other people in the council, he was a lion of defiance…the rest were even mores so into figuring out how to wind up in power and wealth even if it was under Nazi rule.

The collapse of France in 1940 stunned the world. But it had been in the cards for decades – all it took was Hitler to push open the door and it all fell apart. It was only, after all, kept together because the French people, who largely despised their government and leaders, couldn’t coalesce around a sole option to do away with the Ruling Class. Sound familiar?

No institution in the United States is respected. None can be trusted. We all know for certain or at least strongly suspect that everyone in the upper reaches is merely feathering their nests and doesn’t give a damn about the people of the United States. Our military is proving itself, in front of our eyes, incapable of mounting operations. We can’t even be sure that if we placed our troops into battle that they would know what to do. I hope they can. You do, too. But how much training have they really been doing since 2009? Sure, Trump for 4 years…but none of us suspected the rot we’re seeing and so Trump might not have, either. All it takes, now, is for someone to push in the door.

And that is foreign and domestic. Our government lacks legitimacy and not just because of the vote in 2020 – but because no one really believes it is representative of what the American people want. Are you going to fight for them? But our bigger worry is in the foreign sphere: what enemy of the United States is going to have the least fear of us right now? The only calculations they are making in Beijing, Moscow and Tehran is how much money it would cost them to do whatever they want. China’s leaders are thinking terms of, “if we invade Taiwan, global markets will probably drop 25% in a day or two and that will cost the exchequer X yuan: but we gain Y yuan by taking Taiwan’s assets.” If Y is greater than X, they’ll move. They have no worry about our response because we’ve just shown we can’t make one. Today Team Biden is fumbling around trying to explain away what might be thousands of US citizens still stuck in Afghanistan…with the underlying statement being that we can’t get them out. We lack the means to do so.

We won WWII and then we immediately entered a fantasy land and the more the world started to fall apart (and it has been falling apart since 1956) the more the Ruling Class gave us the functional equivalent of Bread and Circuses. I hope everyone enjoyed 50 years of pretending the bill will never come due, because it just has. The real world is back and it isn’t even pissed off…its just the real world where things happen and you have to deal with them, or die.

Good luck to all of us! Say your prayers. Hope that nothing really bad happens until after January 20, 2025.

Enlightened Insanity

Mark Noonan16 Comments

Do you realize why there was an Inquisition? That is something I think most people don’t ponder much. Most just consider it to have been a uniformly horrible thing which we happily dispensed with as the Enlightenment instructed us in the value of tolerance. To a certain extent, there is some truth to such a view, but it doesn’t cover the entirety of it.

That which we call the Inquisition started in response to the Albigensian heresy in the 12th century. If you read secular history about it, you’ll find that the poor Albigensians were horribly persecuted by the Church because they simply wanted to practice their simple faith. Ok, fine. But they also believe that sexual reproduction was inherently wrong – that the physical world was something created by an evil god and it had to be renounced so that the human spirit could unite with the good god. In other words, if the heresy had been allowed to continue, it would have ended civilization. The Church, of course, was also concerned with what happened to human souls – being rather interested in their winding up in heaven rather than hell and so looked in horror upon a sect which pretty much ensured via its beliefs a one-way trip to hell. So, there were two reasons to go after these guys: they’d imperil your soul and end civilization. That is why there was an Inquisition – to root out people preaching insane, destructive ideas.

To be sure, any institution run by human beings is going to mess up. It is in the nature of things because we’re human. Whether or not the attempt should have been made or whether or not the right methods were used in the attempt is a matter for debate. But the fact that lunatic ideas which bring death should be stopped is not something I will debate about. Lunatic ideas bringing death are bad. And bad things are to be held at arms length to the best of our ability.

But, in the event, those who argued against the Inquisition and in favor of tolerance won the debate. The Enlightenment – so called – happened. And people were free to express themselves in any way they chose. This did have the benefit of giving us the Declaration of Independence…but it also gave us the Communist Manifesto and Mein Kampf. Bit of an up and downside on that – and the Declaration of Independence could easily have been written by St Thomas Aquinas…the Manifesto and the Kampf, not so much…because both of those were heresies and St Thomas would have seen right through them.

Now, why do I bring this up? Because earlier today I saw a Twitter thread by a Muslim which expressed the view that Islam needs an Enlightenment. There is much merit to such an argument on the face of it. But I also immediately had my doubts.

First off, of course, is my belief that Islam is itself a heresy – Mohammed taking various aspects of Christianity (and a little Judaism) that he liked and dispensing with the bits he didn’t like. The classic heresy model – leaving something or things out. Be that as it may, if it started as a heresy, it developed rather rapidly into its own thing. And as a Christian I can and do take various issues with it. But whatever one wishes to say about it, for quite a long time it was just another part of the world tapestry. Violent as all things can be, but also beautiful, as all things can be. Yes, I can list for you a large number of Muslim sons-of-bitches but any Muslim out there can come up with a list of Christian SOBs to match – but in neither case were the SOBs the thing about the religions or the civilizations they created. I’ve read quite a bit of history of Islam and I do have to say that something changed over the ages – and the change was rather recent.

Some time in the 19th century or maybe a little earlier, the historical records start to document people of the Muslim faith acting in ways which they simply had to know were wrong. Not just in Christian ideals, but in Muslim ideals. There is a difference between fighting for your side – however brutally you may do it – and committing acts of cruelty. One early example of this is the massacre of about 50 British captives in Delhi during the Mutiny of 1857. But it got worse as time went on – acts of supreme cruelty which had no justification and which the perpetrators knew were wrong when they did them (on the simple fact that they would never want such things done to them). It wasn’t, after all, backwoods Muslim peasants who set the bombs which started the Battle of Algiers in 1956 – it wasn’t, that is, regular, old fashioned Muslims who came up with the idea of setting a bomb off specifically where children gathered so as to cause the most horrific death and injuries to people who could have in no way caused offense.

That takes a modern, Enlightened mind to come up with.

You could say that the things like the bombing in Algiers was provoked – and, to a certain extent, that is correct. The French, far more than the British, could be very brutal overlords when challenged. There were plenty of reasons for the Algerians to be displeased with the French. But it should be noted that the first serious effort of the Algerian rebels wasn’t so much to go after the French, but to kill those Algerians who were friendly to France. And kill them quite brutally, without sparing women and children. That sort of thing isn’t done in response to provocation – that is a cold blooded act of murder. So were the bombings. So, later, were acts like the Munich attack and the Avivim school bus bombing (seriously: what sort of a sick person even thinks up a target like that?). Muslims were involved in these things, but to deliberately seek to murder – usually very cruelly – people who specifically can’t fight back…no, sorry, I’m not going to say that is a Muslim thing. That is an Enlightened thing – that is what happens when people are allowed to pursue insane ideas to their logical conclusion.

Given things like bombed school buses and, well, Treblinka, I’m going to have to come down a bit against the Enlightenment – the idea, that is, that everyone should be able to proceed unchecked wherever their thoughts take them. I’m going to assert that there needs to be a corrective, here and there, which will tell the insane to sit down and shut up – before they get gas chambers or bombed buses into their heads. I think that I’d rather have to deal with the most deeply orthodox Muslims around as they deal with me, a deeply orthodox Christian. I think we’d probably get along better than modern, Enlightened folks. Even if we ended up fighting each other, it wouldn’t be a contest to see who could be the most merciless.

Anyways, this is where my thoughts are leading me these days. A sort of Endarkenment…where being a lunatic gets you a padded room rather than a tenured position or a promotion to Dear Leader.

Our Primary Duty is to Truth, Not Theory

Mark Noonan49 Comments

A little comic strip was put out (see it here) and the premise is that we gun-totting red-neck morons are hypocrites because we’re not using our guns to stop the Feds from arresting Antifa (though the cartoonist cleverly uses a “mom” as the person being taken away by Drumpf’s Gestapo, rather than a molotov-throwing fanatic). My response to this was:

Remind me again why I’m supposed to defend people who think I’m inherently racist.

And this is even supposing the police are Gestapo and it was an innocent mom being rounded up. But, of course, it isn’t Gestapo and it isn’t moms. It is regular, clearly identified federal officers arresting people in the process of committing federal crimes (like one idiot who was ID’d as an arsonists because he had his name tattooed on his back). None of us feel the 2A gives us the right to shoot at police officers in the performance of their normal duties. 2A, as you and I know, is only if the police try to enforce unconstitutional laws. Like, say, a law (the Left wants) making “misgendering” someone a hate crime.

But getting to the point I made: why should I defend my enemies? I know the True Conservative/Libertarian premise has been that we must defend our enemies in order to prove we are in favor of freedom. I used to believe that. Trust me: 20 years ago, I’d have gone to the mat to defend the proposition that I had to protect a Commie’s right to speak.

I have revised my views.

Communists, Nazis and Fascists definitely have some things in common. One of them is a firm desire to suppress any ideas which aren’t their own. Another commonality is that they will all use a liberal, democratic system to advance themselves into power and once they have the power, they then use it to make sure no one can ever get rid of them. In the Trio of Totalitarianism, regardless of what the three may kill each other over, the unified front is that only the Totalitarians get to have power and everyone else gets suppressed (often very brutally and unto death).

This is the truth. There is no way around it: and the Truth shall not be forced to give ground to lies. That is what our real problem is – all up and down in our society. In an effort to be fair, we conceded that disgusting lies have a place alongside the most beautiful truth. We have to stop that. Lies are wrong and bad and have no place in a civilized nation. In theory, of course: free expression of ideas. In practice, we can’t allow lying ideas to be expressed without let or hindrance.

But Mark, you say, who gets to define it? Well, we do. You know: you and me and that guy down the street. It was only a Libertarian pinhead and a liberal judge who decided we have to let lying Commies walk around free in the USA. Make a law – even if it requires an amendment – saying that the propagation of Totalitarian ideologies is illegal in the USA. Then let the Commies and Nazis and Fascists try to prove their ideology isn’t that…love to hear a Commie explain that he’s totes ok with people retaining private property after the Revolution…and then show him in his own damned book that he is not ok with it. But the main thing is that we’ll no longer be saying “see, we let you spout your evil lies, we’re in favor of freedom!”. Instead, we’ll be saying, “your lies are vile; convince me they aren’t or stop saying them.” It is a whole world of difference.

If you wonder why things are so screwed up in the USA, look no further than the fact that we have allowed a host of lies to walk free. If you wonder why doors are locked; kids are fat and on psychological medicine; bums are defecating on the streets; purple haired weirdos are given power… it is all because we allowed liars to lie with impunity. We said – how stupidly! – that if we didn’t allow the liars to lie, then we’d have no chance to speak the truth! What happened is that the cacophony of lies drowned out the truth…until, now, telling the truth in public may get you fired, arrested or at least hounded out of public life.

Our primary loyalty must be to the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. And if reaffirming truth requires some quite brutal actions (it almost certainly will), then that is what we’ll have to do. It is either demand adherence to truth, or live in nothing but lies. It is our choice.

Stop Reacting. Start Thinking.

Mark Noonan16 Comments

Earlier today, I got myself into trouble on Twitter: I had suggested that we shouldn’t immediately dismiss an idea because it conforms in some to what BLM might want. I got a pretty consistent explosion of outrage directed my way. And, I understand it and am sympathetic to it. But it was difficult to try and explain myself in a series of Tweets…so, here is a larger exposition of my ideas.

Our opponents aren’t a rag-tag bunch of Bolshevik wannabees: they are a well-funded and tightly organized Ruling Class which is determined to have its way. The rag-tag rioters out there shouting to kill the police and such are just the bought and paid for operatives of this Ruling Class. And the key is that the rioters don’t know it.

Some of them don’t know, simply: in other words, they are just ignorant fools following along with whatever seems cool at the moment. But others have a level of sincerity against injustice and simply think they are fighting the Establishment when what they are doing is the Establishment’s bidding. You’ll note how quickly “Defund the Police” got discarded…and even when it has advanced a bit, as in Minneapolis, the big shots are merely hiring private security details (on the taxpayer dime, of course). The target of the mob is, what? It is Trump. It is religion. It is you and me. It isn’t Nike and Hollywood. It isn’t Pelosi. It isn’t Yale’s gigantic endowment. It isn’t the actual system of control: the government bureaucracies; the intelligence agencies; the megacorporations; popular culture manufacturers.

My idea is that there is, indeed, a great deal of injustice out there – and a great deal of this is visited on the poorest Americans, who are disproportionately minority. I’ve talked about this before: poor people simply ground up in a legal system they can’t navigate their way out of. Some times, of course, because they are incompetent…but some times simply because once you get caught in it, there’s no way out unless you have a bucket of money. From the perspective of such a person, it seems at times like things are stacked against them…and then they see us, on our side, backing the blue…the same blue which the Establishment set up and which goes lightly where it can get burned (ie, rich and middle class neighborhoods) and drops like a hammer where it can (ie, poor neighborhoods). It can seem to such a person that you and I are the problem…that we set this up.

We know we didn’t. We back the blue not because we’re bastards, but because we know that law is a must. But even our side has been a little blind here: what if the laws, themselves, are insane? Shouldn’t the blue we back have gone, at some point, and said “I won’t enforce this insane law. Fire me if you want, but I became a cop to make sure justice and peace prevail.” Never a peep like that – and, finally, we got our taste of it with the lockdowns: we were finally the people being targeted for the enforcement of insane decrees of government. And the ground shifted and we were prepared for deep reforms of the police…which also entailed a willingness for deep reforms of all government and how it interacts with the people. Hey, presto!, riots…and we’re all back to “back the blue” and lets crack some heads. We’re forgetting that the same people who sent the cops out to arrest kids in a playground also let the rioters run wild…and in both the arresting of kids and the allowing of riots the police did as they were told.

How about we stop being suckers, at least for a bit?

We really have to start thinking and stop reacting. The riots do need to stop. The police do need to enforce the laws. But the laws have to be sane – and we can’t get sane laws until we get power and we won’t get power until the overwhelming mass of the people swing in line behind us. 51% won’t do it. That’ll just lead to our eventual political defeat or civil war…or both. We need 60 and 65%. We need to convince huge masses of people who ostensibly hate us to come over to us. This means we must talk to them – and talk to them about what they think is important. And do things they would like to have done. Not the Bolshevik stuff (the Establishment tolerates the odd Bolshy in the realms of power…but keeps them on a leash: eg, Bernie). But stuff like reforming the police. Instituting neighborhood militia for routine patrols. Pouring in buckets of money confiscated from liberal moneybags (Yale’s endowment would be a good place to start).

It comes down to this: what are you trying to conserve? A theory, or a civilization? The institutions are corrupt to the bone. Our Ruling Class is un-American and merely interested in keeping its wealth and privilege; and to do so it feels it must destroy family, property and religion. I think it is time we thought anew and acted anew…that we cease to fall into the categories the Ruling Class has provided for us and start to reach out to all. Some will spit on us. That’s ok. But some will come over if we show that we want justice…and if we show them who their real enemies are.

National Divorce or Civil War?

Mark Noonan26 Comments

The other day I saw on Twitter an article about a Canadian case where a father was forced by a judge to address his daughter as a boy because that is what his daughter claims she is – a boy. This was, naturally, a minor child. It caused a lot of outrage but the real issue here isn’t whether or not a kid should transition or whether a parent should accept such a thing. These are important issues, of course, but the most crucial aspect of it was the judge ordering the father to do something he believed to be wrong – in this case, lie about his daughter’s gender. And that, really, is the point of the whole exercise: to force the lie. Either tell a lie – that your daughter is a boy – or be held in contempt of court and go to jail…where you won’t be able to do anything for anyone, least of all your daughter who is being destroyed before your eyes. But, also, if you agree to say the lie then you’ve just lost the most important thing you can be for your daughter: someone who is fearlessly honest. If you’ll lie about something like that, what won’t you lie about?

Another case that caused some comment was the Utah Senate’s vote to de-criminalize polygamy. From the article:

Sen. Deidre Henderson stood on the Senate floor Friday and asked her colleagues to reconsider a decades-old state law classifying bigamy as a felony and making implied criminals of the state’s polygamous residents.

Rather than deter or eliminate polygamy, the Spanish Fork Republican said, the state code’s threat of harsh punishments had driven polygamous communities underground; cut families off from jobs, education and health care; and given rise to a subculture that gives predators “free rein to prey upon vulnerable people.”

Note how our Conservative Republican is busy Conserving…we have to legalize polygamy because if we don’t let these weirdos do what they want, they’ll be weird. Argument sound familiar? You have heard it before. Its the way Conservatism cements Liberalism…because the real reason they are doing this is because SSM became legal and once that was done, there was no argument to be made against polygamy except the same arguments used to attack SSM…it is against Natural Law (which Conservatives are supposed to Conserve). But we jettisoned that with SSM…and by “we” I mean “we Conservatives”. Not all of us, of course, but a large enough number that made the imposition of SSM a bipartisan event in the United States.

And we were all so happy about it, weren’t we? Love is love, right? Two men. Two Women. Three Woman and a Man. A 40 year old and a 15 year old…hey, wait! What are you saying? No one is advocating for that! You insane, mean spirited bigot! The very idea!

But, you know its coming. I’m sure if I dug around enough I’d find serious scholarship arguing for no age barriers, or at least much lowered age barriers. I won’t look for it because I don’t really want to see it – and if it doesn’t exist at this moment, it will in a short while. And you know it. And the argument which will be made – and eventually by Conservative Republicans Super Conserving Conservatism – is that if we don’t lower the age bars, we’ll be giving predators “free rein to prey upon vulnerable people.”

But still in all that, the worst aspect of it all is that we are not being asked to tolerate, but to actively approve. That’s the real problem here: we definitely live in a post-Christian world which not only lacks a mechanism to enforce morality, but wouldn’t even agree most of the time on what is moral – but it isn’t enough, for those running the show, that we who still retain the old morality to live and let live. No: they insist that we participate and approve. We Christians are rather back to square one, as it were: just waiting to be rounded up and led to the arena to provide dinner for the lions. Because it is going to be like that – the Christians of 100 AD made no effort to stop the storied infamies of 1st century Rome. There was no demand that the Games be cancelled or that the licentiousness be curbed…and yet still the Roman world went mad against Christians and tore them to pieces…because they wanted the Christians to approve of the Pagan lifestyle. When such approval was withheld, off the Christians went to provide bloody entertainment to the offended Pagans. Do you get it? Your lack of immorality offends.

So, what to do?

I’m not sure – but I am inclining towards those who simply want a divorce. That the portion of America which believes a person can change their gender separates from that part of America which doesn’t believe such a thing can happen. It would take some sorting out – how much territory each side gets; divvying up the national debt and military assets; will people have a period of time where they can move freely from America I to America II (and vice versa) with immediate full citizenship status? My guess is that we’d vote by county – and if a majority votes for America I, they are America I…America II, America II. It would make for a bit of a chopped up America II (the Left side) as they have majorities in far few counties but that could be address by negotiation…which would also be a drawn out process.

But, if we don’t divorce, we’ll have to fight. One thing I can’t see is us staying together and at peace when the two sides differ not just on trivia like forms of government, but on basic things like “2 plus 2 equals 4”. For our citizens who really think that “genderfluid” is a thing, 2 plus 2 equals whatever the hell they want at the moment. I’d rather we divorced – because if we fight, then the losing side doesn’t get to live in the America of the winning side. And I mean, at all.