Enslaved by Lies

Mark Noonan

I was suddenly reminded yesterday of the Christmas Truce.

If you are not aware of it, this occurred on Christmas of 1914 between the trenches in France. World War One was four months old by then and the armies, by that time, were exhausted, incapable of mounting any serious offensive actions. As Christmas Eve came in, entirely spontaneously all along the front, groups of soldiers started to fraternize in No Man’s Land. It was especially marked in the areas were British and German troops faced off, but even in many areas where French and German troops held the line, this happened.

It was, of course, all every much in defiance of orders and many officers on both sides deplored it, but it was so widespread that no action could seriously be taken against the soldiers. Essentially, they called a one day walk out on the war and enjoyed themselves immensely: exchanging souvenirs, food and drink and even, according to some stories, engaging in some soccer matches.

The following year there was some repeats of this but very much rarer: the high commands of all armies decreed raids and artillery barrages for Christmas, 1915 just in order to prevent a repeat. By 1916, the bitterness of the war had sunk so deep that no one on either side was in any mood for a truce.

It was, in retrospect, one of the last acts of decency in the world.

The War was a mistake. A huge miscalculation by the German military class which, while brilliant, was entirely focused on strictly military affairs and simply did not have the corporate ability to consider anything else. They had seen their chance in July of 1914 – with Britain on the verge of Civil War, revolutionary ferment again rising in Russia – to smash France and reassert German dominance of the Continent. They guessed wrong. They should have made peace as soon as possible after the failure to destroy France. But they felt they couldn’t. Meanwhile, the French certainly didn’t feel like making peace while German soldiers occupied parts of France and that held true for Britain, as well. But the cause of the war – a stupid German attempt to simply be strong and show it – was not enough to sustain a major war effort for long. Nor was it sufficient in France and Britain to merely make the war about getting the Germans out of France and Belgium.

And so the lies crept in. Both sides started accusing the other of being monsters. And while Germany was ever in the van, both sides started to behave as monsters. Step by step every rule of war was tossed aside in a desperate attempt to find some expedient which would give a decisive advantage. At the end of it all, as Churchill pointed out, the scientific, Christian States of Europe had only denied themselves torture and cannibalism as tools of warfare, and these of doubtful utility. And it was merely to sustain a war which was a mistake and which should have been composed as swiftly as possible once it was clear (say, by late 1915) that neither side could win quick and cheap enough to make the effort worthwhile. That, once again from Churchill, that in that war victory could only be bought so dearly as to be indistinguishable from defeat.

There was one more chance at human decency – the Marquis of Lansdowne, a senior British politician, circulated a letter in early 1917 arguing that peace must be made on the basis of the pre-war status quo before Civilization was wrecked. He became despised by all sides. And so the grind went on until sheer exhaustion hit the Germans harder than the allies and they quit.

I think that what happened in World War One provided the foundation of our current Age of Lies. Government got into the habit of deceiving the people, and itself. Lies became routine. It began to be asserted that certain things couldn’t be told to the public. They put high minded phrases around their justifications but the reality was that they didn’t want to admit things like 20,000 dead British soldiers on the first day of the Battle of the Somme. Release that, and the British people might have decided that giving peace a chance had merit. Hide it and you could lie that things were moving along splendidly. This habit of lies and deception even worked into popular culture. You might recall the scene in 2001: A Space Odyssey where the Dr Floyd character is apologizing to the assembled scientists about the cover story of a plague to hide the fact that evidence of alien intelligence had been found – and then further goes on to say that they had to find a way to release that information in a manner which wouldn’t alarm the public. As a kid when I watched that, it made immediate sense that the government had to lie and carefully dole out information. But now that I’m older and (we hope) a little wiser, I can see it: the only people who gain advantage from lying and hiding facts are con artists. People who are trying to get what they shouldn’t have.

Think about it: sure in the Civil War Lincoln and his people would try to play certain things close to the vest and try to put the brightest face on failure…but when the Battle of Cold Harbor cost 13,000 Union lives for no advantage, there was no way to hide that – the casualty lists were published within days and the newspapers were calling it the hideous failure it was from the get-go. In today’s world, can you imagine that sort of openness? Of course not. They’d hide it. Call it a victory. Call anyone who questioned it a traitor. And then they’d do the same thing again and again…the thing about Cold Harbor is that it was Grant’s only serious mistake of the war and he never repeated it. Because it was out there right away and he and his officers couldn’t deny it. They could only do better going forward. Because it was a time of truth and they were truthful men.

This is not a time of truth, nor of truthful men. We live by lies. We are enslaved to them. Grumpily for those of us who see the con, joyfully for those still enthralled to the lies. But all of us live by them. Ever said “Happy Holidays”? You participated in the lies of our times – in this case, that anyone would be doing anything special the last week of December absent the birth of Jesus. And if there ever was a Jew pissed off that we didn’t mark Hanukkah or a Muslim who felt slighted by our lack of Ramadan greetings…then they were the few jerks which always show up in any community. No decent non-Christian person ever had the slightest complaint about “Merry Christmas”. It is on and on like that. It is drilled into our brains. It keeps people justifying the lies because we need the lies to live. After all, if we told the truth about things, then some people would be upset about it! If you look at some of the people writing about what the FBI did with Twitter or the way Ukraine corruption has been swept under the rug, you can see it – they are essentially saying that these are noble lies in a good cause.

But there are no noble lies. There are just lies. And we do have to break free of them. We have to stop being slaves.

We Need to Destroy the GOP in Order to Save It

Mark Noonan29 Comments

The 18 Republican Senators who betrayed us today are a watershed moment, I think. Keep in mind that they didn’t have to do it just in practical terms. Once the vote to close debate happened, the Democrats had 50 plus the VP to ensure passage. They didn’t need a single GOP vote after that. Also, there is no part of the GOP base which wanted this Omnibus to pass. If you polled it, you’d probably find well more than 80 percent opposed. So, there would be no risk of a GOP base revolt over a “no” vote. Meanwhile, a “yes” vote also doesn’t help these guys because most Independents are also opposed to the pork in the bill while the Democrat voters were never going to vote for the GOPer. So, the reason why they voted in favor was to insult us.

They were letting us know that they don’t give a damn what we think and, further, that they are confident that the revolt represented by Trump and his supporters is over. They’ve figured it out – in the 2022 cycle, they managed to successfully sabotage almost every Trump-backed candidate. They now sit there and with this vote say: you can’t beat us. And even if you manage to primary us, we’ll ensure a Democrat wins so you’ll be even worse off. You have no choice but to vote for us! They are very confident that we will be so fearful of large Democrat majorities that we will now knuckle under.

But, are we? As the old phrase goes, if you’re to be hanged for a sheep as for a lamb, might as well go for the sheep. What real advantage do we obtain from having any GOPers in the Senate right now? The filibuster? As it turns out, that filibuster only has one remaining purpose: to make sure when we have a majority that our policies are blocked. Today’s vote shows that the GOP will not exercise the filibuster to stop Democrat policies. Perhaps it is time we went nuclear?

Sure, we understand that large Democrat majorities will quickly enact a whole host of things we can’t stand – but is that really worse than small Democrat majorities slowly enacting a whole host of things we can’t stand? Don’t see much of an upside to that.

I think that it is time to fight, one last time (because there won’t be another time), for what we think is right. All or nothing. We need to primary every GOPer who votes with the Democrats on anything. And if our primary challenge fails, stay home on Election Day. Let there be Democrat Senators from Utah and Alabama. Having Republican Senators from there hasn’t done us one bit of good so it is no real loss. Keep voting GOP at the State and local level! We have some good eggs down there – trouble is that once they head towards DC, they abandon us. But what we’re trying to do now is sift out the people who are warriors. And if we can’t have our warriors, then we’ll have nothing. And as we punish people for betraying us, the feedback loop will start to produce warriors or, at the least, people more terrified of us than of a bad notice in the Washington Post.

And, hey, if this gambit fails then we are no worse off than we would have been. Going along as things are now means we’ll have re-education camps by 2036. Play for high stakes and maybe we get them by 2032. Big whoop. But, also, if we go to the mat and insist it is our way or the highway, just maybe by 2028 we get a trifecta of power which will do what we want? It could happen. Things suck. They are going to suck even worse over the next few years. If we stand aside from it, building up a warrior class condemning everything and never being party to the ruin, then we might find that people turn to us – in desperation, sure, but power is power. Doesn’t matter why people gave it to you. It only matters that you have it – and if we have it with people who care and will do as they’re supposed to, it could be a glorious turn around for America.

At least that is how I see it. I can’t just sit here and wait for disaster – I must do something. This is it: nuke the GOP from orbit. It is the only way to make sure…and then build it as we wish.

Grumpy Open Thread

Mark Noonan80 Comments

Feeling grumpy. Lots of things got on my last nerve today.

McConnell says the Omnibus is great because it addresses what Republicans care most about.

Look, you know I’ve defended Mitch…but this is just an insult. He clearly no longer cares what we think.

That Omnibus has $3,600,000.00 in it for the Michell Obama Memorial Trail. This is the entire Ruling Class insulting us. Look. I don’t know Michelle from Adam. For all I know she’s the sweetest person who ever lived. But has she done that is worthy of a memorial? Has every last Medal of Honor recipient already had their memorial constructed? Are we simply out of real heroes to honor?

There’s also the $47 billion going to Ukraine – which is, apparently, not enough because Zelensky is heading to town to pan for more money. It is a bottomless pit – and I’ve seen no substantial Ukranian advance into Russian-held territory. What the heck are we paying for? And nobody knows where the money is really going. There’s no audit or oversight – we’re just supposed to take it at their word that none of it is being stolen.

Meanwhile, the J6 Committee referred Trump for criminal charges. I figure its 50/50 they’ll indict him – thought it will be an interesting legal issue when the House rescinds that referral next month. But the Democrat base has been shouting for a perp walk for two years and the Democrats may feel they owe them one. Another Committee also voted to release Trump’s tax returns…so, feel safe, guys! They’ll never do that to you!

A picture was posted by the NY Post showing a clearly happy Kellyanne Conway out to a swanky dinner with Andrew Cuomo. Think about that. This is the thing that started me being grumpy today. Supposedly, Conway was one of the good ones. We all defended her because she was one of us. Now, you might think, “hey, her personal life is hers and maybe she just sets politics aside on it”. Yeah, no. Andrew Cuomo is a woman-abusing, lying, corrupt thug who engineered sending Covid patients into nursing homes so that the death toll would spike and be blamed on Trump. I could set aside differences of opinion…I can’t set aside gross immorality. That Conway feels that Cuomo is a proper person to jump into the sack with means she approves. She probably is impressed with Cuomo’s “kill granny” program and how well it worked. And now we know where at least some of the leaks came from. We also, now, can see why her daughter went ballistic…she could see from the inside the corrupt game mommy was playing. And we also tip our hat to George Conway – his hatred of Trump was misplaced, but he probably figured that if Trump was aligned with Kellyanne, he must share her amorality.

Nothing better illustrates the Uniparty than someone we thought one of our champions turns out to be someone who couldn’t wait to join the Ruling Class. A lot of people blame Trump’s personnel picks and, sure, he must bear his share of the blame here…but, my goodness, was there anyone who wasn’t stabbing him in the back from Day One? He had people around him. He was politically inexperienced. He assumed that there was some basic amount of honesty and patriotism in all those who expressed a desire to work with him. How could he possibly have foreseen the depth upon depth of depravity?

Grumpy enough yet? No? Ok, then lets go on.

You might recall the Wi Spa incident where a woman and a couple minor girls where confronted by the swinging…stuff of a transwoman and the Official Word immediately became that We Must Stand Against Anti-Trans Hate and that anyone offended at a swinging…thing in the girls’ room was a bigot. Yeah, well now that its no longer a burning issue…the guy is a convicted sex criminal who became “trans” so that he could whip it out in the girls’ room because that is how this perv gets his jollies. Which, by the way, was exactly what we all said would happen as soon as you allowed biological males into female spaces. It is a red carpet for every flasher in the world to wear a dress and just get rocking.

Not only was Twitter censoring the news, the FBI was paying Twitter to censor the news. This violates a host of federal laws. But, the law doesn’t matter. Nothing will be done. Even if we get a Trifecta in 2024, nothing will be done.

Enough Grump? Ok.

Turning Citizens into Serfs

Mark Noonan55 Comments

You might recall back in the late 1990’s a quasi-religious movement in China called Falun Gong. It was, at least to a Westerner, a pretty conventional Asian set of practices regarding meditation and exercise to grow spiritually – but the Chinese government hated it. And, so, it was (and remains) heavily persecuted in China and is now actually headquartered in New Jersey. As to why the Chinese government hated it: Falun Gong held itself to be outside of Chinese government control. It wasn’t a movement of rebellion, but it appears to have rejected the the PRC’s totalitarian control over the minds of the Chinese. As far as that goes, just par for the course in China. But I was reminded of it yesterday.

What my mind went back to was some news reports when it was a big thing in China back in the 1990’s where one enterprising reporter decided to ask regular Chinese people what they thought about it. Naturally, given what was going on, you had to take anything said to a foreigner with a grain of salt but one bit of opinion stood out starkly: several Chinese asked about it came up with an opinion that religious faith should be free, but it was the responsibility of the government to protect the people from “bad” religion.

I put that answer down at the time to PRC propaganda combined with the basic Asian social structure which is tightly disciplined and hierarchical. I never imagined that any such thing could come to America. I was wrong.

As Musk has taken the lid off of what Twitter was doing what we’re seeing – aside from all the illegal censorship – is that plenty of people sincerely believe that the government has a role to play in “protecting Democracy”. That is, protecting it from people who put out dis- or mis-information. That the government must protect us from “bad” ideas. How very Chinese, huh?

This is, of course, an entire reversal of the very idea of the United States. It must be remembered that it was us, we Americans, who proposed and first implemented the idea that sovereignty resides with the people, not with the government. Under the European monarchies, the Monarch was sovereign. All power flowed out and down from the King. You were assigned your station and granted that power which the King thought best for you to exercise. We turned that around and said that we, the people, were sovereign and we lent the government such of our power as we thought necessary to promote the general welfare. Even in the Republics of modern Europe is it still the State holding the ultimate power as those States hold themselves the inheritors of Royal authority. We are pretty unique. But now we have very many of our own people saying that the government should assign our opinions and make sure that no bad opinions make it into the public square.

This is a gigantic problem and it may prove fatal to liberty. It has already de-facto killed off liberty in Europe, Canada and Australia: in the UK, if you question why biological males are in the female hospital ward they will kick you out of the hospital. Meanwhile, in Norway people are facing three years in jail for saying that men can’t be lesbians. Scores of examples like that are out there – if you have the “wrong” opinion then you will be punished. And the reason you’ll be punished is because your “wrong” opinion puts Democracy at risk. It is all very Orwellian. Kafkaesque, too.

And I’m not at all sure how we fix this – how, that is, do we turn people who have developed the mentality of a serf back into citizens? They are so far gone now that they positively crave someone to take charge and “protect” them…something, of course, our corrupt Ruling Class is all too willing to do. And they have a wide variety of reasons to “protect” – not just Democracy but also The Climate Emergency and Covid…we’ve all gotta be protected from that, too. And if there is some aspect of life not covered by Democracy, Climate and Covid, rely on it on that they’ll find some other thing they need to “protect” us from.

We will have to figure it out, though. Because if we don’t, then we’ll find ourselves all doing 20 years in the Happy Fun Re-education Camp because we once said “boys will be boys” or some such.

Open Thread

Mark Noonan25 Comments

Big Q1 2023 layoffs are coming for the Washington Post – word is they’ve lost half a million subscribers. This is good on so many levels.

And I think it is just the start – when Musk bought Twitter it had 7,500 employees. From what I can tell, he’s down to less than a hundred now and the thing is running just fine. These employees were being paid San Francisco wages – so, you gotta figure even the mail rook clerk (do they still have those?) was making north of 50 grand a year. The cost savings are immense. Additionally, there is rumor than Musk will move it to Texas, thus saving massive amounts in taxes and other fees. Other companies will be looking at this and wondering just how much they can cut.

To be sure, any of us who have ever lost a job knows that it is devastating. You suddenly don’t have assurance of paying the bills and with that worry, you scramble for another position. On the other hand, the bloat in corporate America is massive. Huge numbers of people are employed doing nothing that produces the product sold, whatever that may be. Empire building doesn’t just happen in government bureaucracies – it is a disease of all bureaucracies. The most positive aspect of this is that the people most likely to be fired are those who pester the American people the most: the woke with useless degrees are going to find that the 200 grand a year job attending a couple half hour meetings per day is gone for good.

As I’ve said before, a huge amount of America’s workforce is employed in useless jobs – and it wouldn’t be so bad if they were just useless, but these people also use their positions to push ever more wokeness on us…because that is their bread and butter. The more DEI you get, the more money you make.

Until, of course, there is no more money to make. We can’t sustain a pack of parasites. We need our workers to produce useful product.

I’ve been thinking about it and I don’t think we realize just how malevolently insane the United States has become. We are no longer the good guys in the world. We’re funding the war in Ukraine when that could have been almost immediately settled by Ukraine giving up the ethnic Russian territory. We’re refusing to produce our own oil and natural gas while pressing foreigners to ruthlessly exploit their own resources and workers so we can have energy cheap enough to keep political damage to democrats to a minimum. We’re arguing over whether or not a healthy 14 year old should have a double mastectomy. We’re allowing what amounts to a new slave trade to operate on our southern border. On and on it goes like that – not just bad policies which could result from mistakes, but directly baleful actions which hurt our own people and people all around the world…all the while with an MSM lauding our leadership and everyone passing out awards to each other for doing it. A reckoning will come for this – and I do believe that in God’s mercy we will have to pay a high price for it all.

But there is some good news – the Temecula Valley (CA) school district has banned critical race theory. This is in California. And this shows just how crucial things like school board elections are. Just put a few sane people into office and, presto, the hate-filled insanity stops. I hope we can get more and enough of this soon enough to avert total disaster.

Donald Trump is not having a good time – ignoring polls (most are created to manipulate rather than inform), he’s just not gaining much traction for 2024. His core supporters are still with him, but it looks like enough other GOP voters are out there to deny him the nomination if they can swiftly coalesce around one candidate (more tricky than it seems). Now he’s saying he has a big announcement coming tomorrow. I guess we’ll see if he’s got something that will restore his fortunes.

Freedom or the MSM can Survive: Not Both

Mark Noonan21 Comments

It is now clear that almost the entire MSM combined with almost all of Big Tech to censor some opinions and boost others – and it has been going on for a while, but only went into overdrive in 2020 with the effort to oust Trump. But the reason why they did it is far less important than the fact that they did it, at all. It is a huge problem – and the solution of it may determine whether we remain free, or not.

As of at least yesterday, none of the three major network newscasts had even mentioned the Twitter files. This silence could be because they haven’t worked out the talking points but it could well be that the word has come down that the files simply will not be discussed. This shows that the MSM is entirely a State-controlled media. It is a mere propaganda outfit and it is as the command of the DNC.

“Can you prove that, Mark!”

Don’t have to. I’m not stupid. Its a huge story involving one of the world’s richest men and one of the world’s largest social media platforms. This sort of thing is made for the news – and you only don’t mention it on command.

And now we have to think: the First Amendment protection for the press: does it extend to what amounts to a propaganda outfit for one party? It would be one thing if they would just admit that they are Democrat operatives dressing themselves up as news people…but they won’t admit that. They pretend to be reporting news when they clearly don’t report anything that is unfavorable to Democrats…and when it comes to disfavoring Republicans, they’ll repeat the most monstrous and stupid lies.

This is what the guys at Bunker Hill and Yorktown were fighting for?

I have my suspicions that Washington’s constabulary would have a particularly violent response to this. What will ours be? Pretend its all ok? Hope they get an attack of conscience? Pretend that when we protect CBS News we’re defending a principle?

We have to do something. We can’t let this stand. The MSM and Big Tech must be forced to kneel before the people and become, as far as humanly possible, fair and honest platforms for information. I don’t have a roadmap to this – but I think our first effort if we ever get a trifecta is to break up the large media corporations. That no one entity or person can control more than one media outlet. Joe Billionaire or MegaCorp X can own one TV network. Or one newspaper. Or one website. Or one movie studio – and they can’t own even a penny’s worth of any other. This would first and foremost restore real competition. You would get, in the end, more TV networks, more newspapers, more websites…more of everything presenting news and entertainment to the people because, my friends, there are buckets of money to be made doing that and huge amounts of fame to be had. People will still get into it even if they can’t own it all. And they’ll look for their markets and, guess what?, someone will figure out that the Right is a market.

The one thing we can’t do is nothing. We are doomed if we do nothing. Eventually – and probably very soon – you’ll see the MSM simply ceasing to cover reality. Their whole existence will be to praise Democrats and slander Republicans. They won’t even in passing mention anything that is bad news for Democrats. They will, combined with Big Tech, try to suffocate all dissent. We must find a way to breath, or we die.

Open Thread

Mark Noonan37 Comments

Yoell Roth, the former trust and safety capo at Twitter, tweeted back in 2010 a question about kids consenting to sex with their teachers. In case you were wondering why Twitter prioritized getting the Bad Orange Man rather than all the sexual abuse stuff off their platform.

That, by the way, is something to be wary of when going on Twitter. It isn’t shoved in your face, but sometimes rather innocuous searches can result in some astonishing results. So, best to have a care – I mean, you know if you search “boobs” what you’re going to get…but other words which have completely innocent meanings have been coopted by the naughty into other meanings.

Unlike Facebook, you can find actual rated X stuff directly posted on Twitter – but whether it is the real deal or just a scantily clad woman, the purpose is to get you to click a link which brings you to the adult website. Lots of us, of late, have been followed by bot accounts with all sorts of different names but they all share pictures of the same very pretty Chinese lady. We’re not sure if its Chinese spyware or just a come on for Chinese-themed dirty bits, but none but a fool would actually click the links. As for me, I just block them as they come up – must be at least a couple score by now. There is some hope that Musk will curb that – I mean, I don’t think Twitter needs to be the morality police, but certainly any links to sites which are not just dirty but downright evil should be banned. And now that Roth is out, it might happen.

On Twitter, a mutual posted a poll showing that support for Reparations now sits at 60% among Democrats. This is no surprise at all – Democrats are sheep who will just do what they’re told. But it is also going to be a tricky issue for the GOP. Given the way things are, passing out the cash is popular, as such. And the GOP is perceived as the party that will pass out cash to business and to wars, but always balks at giving money to regular folks. I doubt that Reparations will ever gain overall majority support, but its going to come close and soon – maybe as soon as 2024 and when it does get there, Democrats will campaign on it. This is especially so if trends in black voting towards the GOP accelerate. So, when the issue comes up, we’d better be ready for it and our answer can’t just be, “no”.

The Democrats, of course, just want a race slush fund – a pile of government money that their cronies control and pass out to loyal foot soldiers who will then agitate for even more money. To counter it, I think we need some sort of program to build business and home ownership among the black community. Real wealth owned by individuals, families and cooperatives. And we can’t ignore the fact that from 1776 to 1865 almost all wealth generated by blacks was stolen and from 1865 to 1965 wealth creation among the Africa-American community was hampered a thousand ways in law and custom. It is simply true that the African-American community would be per-capita richer today than it is had there not been nearly two centuries of effort to prevent black wealth creation. We should take that line with it – that those who are genuinely descended from slaves (with some sort of cut off percentage – say 33% at a bare minimum) didn’t inherit as much wealth as they could have, and so we should try to make up for that – perhaps with a program of selling federal land and using the proceeds to pay out? I don’t really know: I’m spitballing here. But some means whereby out of the national wealth, those who’s ancestors were actively prevented from accumulating wealth are granted some sort of benefit. Because, like I said, it can’t just be “no”. We’ll get destroyed on the issue if we just say “no”.

Side benefit to selling federal land: it gets land out of Uncle Sam’s hands. The less land the feds own, the less legal power they have to interfere on the State and local level.

There is a great deal of argument between anti-Trump GOPers and the Trumpsters. Each is arguing in their various ways that the other side getting their way means doom for the GOP. Nominate Trump and we’ll lose! Nominate Ron DeSantis and we’ll lose! The correct answer is: we’re going to lose.

It is always difficult to get the incumbent party out after one term. It only rarely happens – and that usually takes massive economic catastrophe. But even with such, it still won’t be easy – there is so much welfare out there that the pain felt in, say, 1980 or 1932 simply won’t be there. Nobody is going to be worrying about their next meal. So even if, as I expect, we have bad economic times in 2024, that is no assurance that we’ll beat Pudding Brain.

And this is absent fraud – which various laws in places like Georgia has made a lot harder. In a straight up race, we’ll lose. Not only because it is hard to beat an incumbent, we’re also simply too divided and too weak. The Never Trump and Trumpsters hate each other far more than they hate the Democrats. Nominate Trump and the Never Trump ‘burbs will stay home. Nominate RDS and the Trumpster rurals will stay home. In either case, I can’t see our guy getting to 270 absent something like 25% unemployment. And even then it would be iffy.

I think that for 2024 our prime effort should be on holding the House, gaining the Senate and flipping as many county commissions and school boards as we can. That is the seed corn for the future while holding part or all of Congress means that at least Democrat policies aren’t enshrined in law. Now, miracles can happen – and if we find ourselves with a trifecta in 2024, cool. But don’t count on it – and any result will be better if we also won a lot of counties and school boards, where the real power to shape the country lies.

The Truth is Hard to Desire

Mark Noonan29 Comments

We got Twitter Files Part II tonight – and it was all about shadow banning.

Twitter documents clearly showed that Twitter employees were suppressing the reach of right-of-center accounts. All officially because they were spreading “hate” and “misinformation”, but the reality was because they were telling the truth and that cut against the Democrat Narrative – especially in 2020 when they needed the Covid Narrative to work against Trump. That did work, by the way.

Among the accounts suppressed was that of Dr Jay Bhattacharya who was warning that the lockdowns and masks were doing more harm than good – something that all but the most devoted Covid Cultists now admit. The guy is a professor as Stanford – MD and PhD. His skillset include infectious disease. Now, that set of credentials doesn’t mean he’s automatically right – but he’s clearly someone who should have a seat at the table. If he’s saying something, we should hear it and bounce it against what other people are saying.

But none of that from Twitter – or, indeed, from social media in general. It was all that Covid is a uniquely horrific disease and we need to mask and lockdown.

The mask thing was always bizarre to me. I mean, come on: the reason why a surgeon wears a mask isn’t to protect himself against the patient, but to protect the patient against the doctor. Surgeons actually got very good and slicing and dicing people early on. It is, after all, mostly a matter of mechanics. Once you know where the parts are, you’re good to go. But, of course, in olden days they didn’t know about bacteria and so even the most successful surgeries would fail because of a post-operative infection. Once that was known, doctors started to scrub up and wear gloves and masks – to keep bacteria from the doctor entering the patient’s wound/incision and making all medical efforts moot. Masks are to stop bacteria – which are massively larger than a virus. Comparison? It takes a thousand nanometers to make a micrometer. Most viruses are about 20 nanometers. Bacteria can come in at 2 micrometers. We’re talking hole in the ground vs Grand Canyon, guys. A mask is sufficient to stop most bacteria…but it might as well not even be there when it comes to a virus.

And we all knew this. Or were supposed to know this. I learned the basics of it in High School biology. But I guess most don’t know…or were easily bamboozled by the TV. The call for masking to stop a virus should have been met with contemptuous laughter…but, as it turns out, I lost a friend of 20 years when I pointed out that masks were useless. She was sure they worked! Because the TV said so.

I guess, thinking back on everything, I should have realized we would have this problem when, years ago, I found that people were demanding – and doctors were prescribing – antibiotics for colds and flu. Antibiotics do absolutely zero against a virus. They can’t do anything against a virus. Bacteria and viruses are entirely different species of problem. But there is was – and now Covid hysteria does make some sense.

We’re really stupid as a people.

But we’re also highly propagandized. Huge amounts of what people think they know is actually just an ad campaign which got drilled into the brain by a corporation or a bureaucracy. Solzhenitsyn noted this in the USSR – that history isn’t what happened but what the government chose to hammer into the public mind. It takes an act of will to go beyond the Narrative. first to ask if the Narrative makes any sense and then, if it doesn’t to figure out what might have happened. Example:

The Official Story of WWII had it had it that the Soviets, by a miracle of organization and work, moved most of their heavy industry out of the Donbas in front of the advancing Nazis and set up shop in the Urals where they then produced what was needed to win the war.

Well, sure enough, there were a lot of factories set up in the Urals…but we’re supposed to believe that in the chaos of defeat and retreat, with the limited Soviet transport system giving priority to the armies at the front they yet found the manpower and means to move whole factories a thousand miles to the east. Yeah, sorry: no, that didn’t happen. On their best days the Russians couldn’t pull that off. With the Nazis at the gates, they sure in heck couldn’t.

The reality is that American and British arms, munitions and material keep the Soviets in the war. We sent, for instance, something like 400,000 trucks to the USSR. 13,000 tanks. About 120 tanks made up a Soviet tank corps (roughly equivalent to an armored division for other European military forces). Thirty one tank corps were formed by the USSR during WWII. Do the math: most Soviet tank corps were equipped to one degree or another with American tanks. Sure, they did build T-34’s. Lots of them – in factories in the Urals where US-made machine tools and US-supplied materials made it happen. But the bottom line is that without our help, they simply wouldn’t have enough to fight a war with.

Once you think about how ridiculous it is to move, say, a steel mill a thousand miles then the whole fantasy falls apart…and that makes you look up just what we sent to the USSR during WWII and you find it was a simply staggering amount of everything you could possibly need from boots to to fighter planes.

But we all believe it! The TV said so. Or some such.

The truth, as the catch-phrase goes, is out there. And it is pretty easy to find. But I think that most don’t desire to find it. Most these days prefer that others do their thinking for them. I think people by now are simply afraid of it – afraid that if they seek the truth and find it, they’ll be forced to act.

Open Thread

Mark Noonan21 Comments

As expected, Warnock won – and a lot of people are down on our prospects in Georgia in general. And there is much to be worried about. But I don’t think we need worry quite as much as some urge.

Yes, I do realize that the metro Atlanta area is getting a huge influx of northern voters who are ancestrally Democrat and so they are tilting the State Blue. But that same sort of people moved to Florida and look how that turned out.

Message and messenger: that is always going to be key for us. And they both have to be good. Walker has a past – a past not in any way as bad as Warnock’s (who seems a grade A jerk), but it must be kept in mind that our molehills will be made into mountains and the Democrat mountain will be hit with the SEP Field. I bet that just enough GOP voters were demotivated by Walker’s past. Meanwhile, ninety percent of Warnock’s voters – being consumers of the MSM – never even heard of the bad stuff about Warnock. So, our guys have to be first rate. I do, as an aside, think that even someone with a past can get around it – but only by being forthright about it. Get it out early and openly and don’t leave the least detail out. Once it is out and you can credibly show that it was a long time ago, you may have inoculated yourself: you’ve certainly lessened the effect of October Surprise stuff.

But it isn’t just candidates, messages and our ability (ala’ Florida) to eventually turn Democrats our way – that won’t be enough. No: we need more voters. Turns out, I know where they are.

Chicago.

“But, Mark: are you nuts! Biden won Chicago overwhelmingly!”

He sure did. But turnout in Chicago was 73 percent. More than 420,000 of Chicago’s voters didn’t vote. This isn’t residents or citizens – that is registered voters who didn’t vote. And that is just Chicago – not the rest of Cook County and surrounding areas which are the Democrat strongholds in Illinois (outside the Chicago area, Illinois votes like Alabama). And I’ll bet in the other Blue areas around the county we’ll find similar numbers.

So, there’s the votes: they are right there, waiting to be picked up. They are in the low-propensity voter and in the person who has never voted. Democrats area already doing a bang up job with some of these people. We can, too. And not just in getting Deep Red to turnout more…but going into Deep Blue and stealing some. You have to figure if you live in Deep Blue and don’t vote, you’ve gotta be disgusted with the system. That is fertile ground for us…if we can find the right message and messenger. Zeldin seems to understand this best, but others are coming around to it. The millions of votes we need to win are just waiting for us to ask for them. And, look, it isn’t about carrying Chicago and Los Angeles…it is about picking up enough votes in Deep Blue to lock down States like Georgia and North Carolina and put us in striking distance in places like California and New York.

But there is a catch. There always is, isn’t there? You’re not going to get these people with a traditional GOP message. They don’t even know who Madison is and aren’t at all concerned about tax rates or the problem at the border. They’re worried about their own poverty…their lack of safety. They feel they should be given more help.

And you’re going to have to give it to them. Sorry, guys, but the days of small government America are gone and they ain’t coming back any time soon. Right now, we’re just trying to preserve liberty and property, as such. It is either buy their votes and use the power to preserve your liberty…or stick to your small government ideals, lose, and have Communism imposed on you.

Senator Tom Cotton told woke Kroger corp to take a hike: that is one of those “first step” things we need to do. We can’t defend corporations which hate us and fund our enemies.

James Baker was an FBI guy who played a key role in the Trump-Russia drivel. When the heat came on, he was eased out of the FBI (rather than, say, being shot for treason) and got a job at … Twitter! Where he most recently was (briefly) in charge of vetting documents for Musk before they were released to the press. Well, someone pointed out that this probably wasn’t a good idea – so Musk fired him. I was wondering why in the first batch of documents, no names were being named. Now, I know: the Deep State had their finger in the pie. But now that finger is out – what comes out now may prove very interesting.

Trump’s Opponents Miss the Point. Again.

Mark Noonan77 Comments

Over on Truth Social, Trump made a statement asking if we should overturn the 2020 result. This has made lot of people very angry – with many saying it is disqualifying for any future office.

To be sure, it is an amazing thing for a former President to say. But I cannot see how it is a morally wrong thing to say.

For the sake of argument, let’s say that there was no voter fraud in 2020. Let us further stipulate that the laptop story would not have altered the result. In other words, lets pretend that it still would have all come out the same, laptop or no laptop. You are still left with the fact that elements of the Department of Justice conspired with Big Tech and the MSM to hide a story which would have been devastating to the Democrat candidate. This is election interference writ as large as you can write it. What it is saying is that if the people want the “wrong” candidate, then the top echelons of the American Ruling Class will conspire together to do whatever they think necessary to thwart the will of the people. As a side note, please remember that the DOJ had the laptop in 2019; this means they also interfered with the 2020 Democrat primary. The Democrats were not able to properly assess their candidates because the DOJ withheld crucial information from them.

Hate to break it to you, but a Republic cannot survive with that sort of thing going on. Even assuming that this time it didn’t work, the mere fact that such entities would make the attempt proves that the Constitution – the rule of law, itself – is a dead letter in the United States

There is no mechanism in American law for a do-over on elections. Once the result is entered into the books, it is what it is. So, Trump’s call for a re-vote or what have you is going nowhere even if the overwhelming majority would like it. But what we cannot do – what we dare not allow – is for this to go unanswered. Even if you’re willing to move on from Trump, you have no assurance that the same and worse won’t be done to the next candidate. We already know that people in high positions in Congress, the bureaucracy and the MSM are willing to assert the most fabulous lies about their opponents – now we know that those in charge of law enforcement are willing to ignore the law and help the liars make the lies stick. If they get away with this, they will do it again. Anyone running for office who doesn’t meet Ruling Class approval will simply be destroyed. So, while Trump’s call for a re-vote can’t happen, something must be done. People must go to jail. People must lose money. The victim must be compensated.

This is the turning point. There is no going back from this. If this sort of thing is allowed to happen unchallenged, then our votes will become worthless…our candidates will be destroyed, or will merely be tools of the Ruling Class from the get-go. What we, the people, may want, will no longer matter…we’ll get what the Ruling Class wants.

But it won’t just end with our corrupt and stupid Ruling Class living forever. That is what the Roman Ruling Class thought once they had disposed of the Gracchi. The people’s champion was destroyed and the people to all appearances knuckled under…and then once fine day Octavian, Antony and Lepidus issues proscriptions of hundreds of members of the Ruling Class and the people were entirely indifferent. What I’m saying is that if the people cannot elect their champions, then they will passively support the person who kills the people who destroyed their champions. If the law is dead and its just a competition to see who can hold power, then the winner of that power struggle is invariably the person most willing to kill those the people hate.

Just a cautionary word. I hope people figure this out fast – because it is either some DOJ people doing 20 years, or it is eventual civil war followed by a tyrant.