Jim's Random Blog on Family, Politics and Cancer - A Time Capsule

Yup.

2025-02-11T08:56:00.000-08:00

Glad the election is over...

2024-11-11T21:55:00.000-08:00

The stress level has been ridiculous.
So glad of the end result.

Halloween 2024 videos

2024-11-01T10:37:00.000-07:00

Observations:

No big trend this year.

No Trump -or- Kamala.

No doctors

A real diversity of costumes.

The entitlement (just give me candy) seemed more in pl

ay this year (I exempt the little ones) Adults were not hesitant to grab candy.

'Moms get chocolate' was a hit.

My stroke story

2024-10-08T21:35:00.000-07:00

Yea, last year i was having headaches, and the doc was trying to get my bp down, gave me a bunch of pills that didn't work or made me swell up like Veruca Salt or crush my energy. Nothing was working. So Kristin and my oldest go back east to see Kristin's parents, home alone (WHO-HO! Pants optional) and one evening Caitlyn had her work (she works at a pizza place) deliver me dinner. Well, I was feeling a little weird, after the pizza was delivered I couldn't get my wallet into my jeans... and I couldn't get my jacket on. I knew something was up, so I put the pizza in the kitchen and drove myself to Urgent care, wrote on the paperwork STROKE and waited. Called my Dad and said 'my brain isn't working' and he came down from Norco and met me at UC.

Well, nothing big, but go over to the ER and they will check you out better (they are a stroke center). So drove over there and got checked in... eventually... and they did a couple of scans and said I was 'ok', but here are more pills. Spent a few days at my parents, got scheduled for an MRI the day before Thanksgiving, all is cool.

Get to the MRI (oldest drove me), check in and my words are jumbled again. Go into the scanner and it was short (not my first rodeo) they stopped and said the doctor will talk to you in a minute... wheel me into ER and I get the room with the big windows (oh shit) daughter disappears, Kristin shows up... all sorts of questions, more scans,

I had one of my juggulars completely blocked and the headaches were new blood vessels pushing out. Get scheduled for a stent the next morning (Thanksgiving).
They go in through the crotch and insert a long tube through the heart and into my neck, insert the stent, then pull it out. no stitches... so they keep a sandbag on that area...every half hour a cute nurse comes in and looks at my cold junk to make sure there is no bleeding.

No dignity in the hospital...

Anyway, eating turkey isn't easy with hands all kludged up with monitors and tubes.

The rest is just home treatment stuff, and I am mostly normal (for me).

That's my story and that's all I have to say about it.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali: We Have Been Subverted

2024-06-04T13:36:00.000-07:00

https://www.thefp.com/p/ayaan-hirsi-ali-we-have-been-subverted

Ayaan Hirsi Ali: We Have Been Subverted

What is at stake in our ability to see the threat plainly? Nothing less than the preservation of our way of life.

By Ayaan Hirsi Ali

June 4, 2024

If you wonder why I—a woman of color, an African, a former Muslim, a former asylum seeker, and an immigrant—look at the antics of today’s anti-Israel, anti-American protesters with such fear and trembling, allow me to explain.

I was born in Somalia in 1969. The country had achieved independence nine years before. But less than a month before I was born—on October 21, 1969—a junior member of the brand-new Somali armed forces seized power with the help of the Soviet Union. The first two decades of my life were shaped by the upheaval that followed that coup.

The Somalia that gained its independence was a young, optimistic society full of national pride. We had such hope for growth, political stability, prosperity, and peace. But, in a story sadly familiar to many of my fellow Africans, those hopes were dashed.

What followed was a nightmare.

For me it is all captured in the earliest memories of my youth: statues of Mohamed Siad Barre, our dictator, sprung up across Mogadishu, flanked by a trio of dark seraphim: Marx, Lenin, and Engels. This particular communist experiment plunged Somalia into bloodshed, mass starvation, and a 20-year period of suffocating tyranny. I recall my grandmother and mother smuggling food into our house. I also remember the whispering: we felt the state was omnipresent. It could hear everything.

My father was thrown into prison. His friends—those other pioneers in pursuit of a democracy modeled on America—were either jailed like him or, in many cases, executed.

By the time I was eight, my family knew we needed to escape. We left in 1977. By 1990, the country had descended into a civil war from which it has never fully recovered.

I never stopped longing for the kind of freedom my father had taught me about. And at the age of 22, I fled to the Netherlands seeking it. There—and later, in America—I discovered what we’ve come to call “Western” values.

The West’s inheritance springs from a peculiar confluence of habits and customs that had been practiced for centuries before anyone branded them as “ideas.” But they are principles—radical ones—that have given us the most tolerant, free, and flourishing societies in all of human history.

Among these principles are the rule of law, a tradition of liberty, personal responsibility, a system of representative government, a toleration of difference, and a commitment to pluralism. Each of these ideas might have been extinguished in their infancy but for the grace of God and the force of their appeal.

Perhaps it is because I was born into a part of the world where these principles were nonexistent that I feel a particular love for them—and an instinct for when they are in danger.

Right now, so many Western nations are under grave threat from the twin forces of cultural Marxism and an expansionist political Islam familiar to me from my youth.

For a time, many refused to believe that anything was actually wrong. The tide of populism was, they insisted, a momentary manifestation of frustration. The decline of each of our institutions was viewed in isolation, as a problem of poorly selected leadership, which could be corrected after the next election or with a changing of the guard. The sense of hopelessness that people felt was explained away as the temporary consequence of the rapid transition away from industrialism and the ushering in of the digital age.

In this light, though there were problems, they were distinct from each other and would be corrected in time.

Can any serious person believe this now?

People are encountering our current crisis in different ways, though a compelling explanation, let alone a solution, remains elusive. I am reminded of the Buddhist parable of the blind men and the elephant. The story goes that a group of blind men, who have never encountered an elephant before, hear that one has been brought to their town. They go to touch the elephant to work out what it might look like. One man touches the elephant’s trunk and thinks it must be like a large snake. Another touches its leg and likens it to a tree. A third who grasps the elephant’s tail says it feels like a rope. A fourth presses its sides, and when it does not budge, compares it to a wall. The fifth touches its tusk and thinks it to be like a spear.

Each of the blind men touches the same elephant and comes up with a different interpretation. Although there is truth in each of their assessments, none is able fully to comprehend the elephant in its totality. Those who feel the decline in Western society are like these blind men, encountering the elephant in their own ways and grasping at explanations in the half-light of dusk.

When the omni-breakdown burst forth in 2020 with the crises the Covid-19 pandemic and the draconian controls that governments imposed, and the George Floyd riots, most of us awoke from our slumbers and behaved like the blind men, ping-ponging around theories with the tremulous (sometimes furious) chatter that heralds the turning of an age.

As one of those blind men—and surely I, too, am encountering only part of the elephant—my perception is that we are a society subverted. By this, I do not mean that we are subverted in the sense that a few spies and saboteurs are conducting covert operations, blowing up a bridge or an airfield. I mean we are subverted in a more systematic and totalizing way.

Listen to Ayaan read this essay today on Honestly:

Before I explain who might be doing the subverting, and for what reason, let me first explain what I mean by it. The best description comes from Yuri Bezmenov, who says that this form of subversion is very gradual, but ultimately transformational.

Bezmenov had been a KGB agent promoting foreign subversion when he grew disillusioned with the Soviet system. In 1970, he defected to the West—to Greece, then Canada. The rest of his life was dedicated to exposing the secret Soviet apparatus of subversion in the West.

Living in the West in 1983, Bezmenov gave a lecture in which he explained “Psychological Warfare, Subversion, and the Control of Society.” It begins:

Subversion refers to a process by which the values and principles of an established system are contradicted or reversed in an attempt to sabotage the existing social order and its structures of power, authority, tradition, hierarchy, and social norms. It involves a systematic attempt to overthrow or undermine a government or political system, often carried out by persons working secretly from within. Subversion is used as a tool to achieve political goals because it generally carries less risk, cost, and difficulty as opposed to open belligerency. The act of subversion can lead to the destruction or damage of an established system or government. In the context of ideological subversion, subversion aims to gradually change the perception and values of a society, ultimately leading to the undermining of its existing systems and beliefs.

This kind of subversion is familiar to me because of my background. Somalia wasn’t the only African country subverted by the USSR. And those that were warped by Soviet infiltration—such as Ethiopia and Angola—bear the scars to this day.

One of the key insights Bezmenov expresses about a subverted society is that, for a while, there is only a passing sense that something is wrong. It’s a mood—a vibe. I believe that’s what many of us have been witnessing for several years now, maybe even as long as a decade or two.

The pressure makes society rumble like a volcano, quiet one minute and flaring the next. Then, finally—and seemingly suddenly—the revolution bursts into view.

When, on October 8, protests erupted across the Western world in support of Hamas—and not the democracy that had been overrun by terrorists—I saw the revolution. When I look at the recent spectacle at Columbia or Yale or UCLA or Harvard or Stanford—students tearing down American flags and raising Palestinian ones; or chanting in Arabic “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free”—it is hard not to see the fruit of this long process. I hear the same when, week after week, the streets of London, Amsterdam, Brussels, and Hamburg ring with cries of “intifada” or open demands for a caliphate or Sharia law in the heart of Europe.

How did it happen?

Bezmenov described the subversion process as a complex model with four successive stages, a diagram of which I have provided. These are, in order: demoralization, destabilization, crisis, and finally, normalization.

Demoralization is the first stage and requires the subverters’ greatest investment of time and resources. Bezmenov claims the process of demoralization can take between 10 to 30 years, because that is the amount of time it takes to educate a new generation.

The demoralization process targets three areas of society: its ideas, its structures, and its social institutions. The targeted institutions include religion, education, media, and culture. In each realm the old ways of thinking, the old heroes, are discredited. Those who believed in them come to doubt themselves and their ability to discern reality itself.

Think of the cynicism and selective truth-telling young Americans encounter in most classrooms. You know Jefferson owned slaves, right? You know Columbus killed millions? Again, never mind that Jefferson set us on the path to emancipation, or that Columbus knew nothing about epidemiology. A little learning, as the saying goes, is a dangerous thing.

Once inside, it is very difficult to escape the mosh pit of civilizational self-loathing. Maybe you can climb to the top for a while by being the white person who hates white people most loudly, or the straight person who goes to the most debauched parades. But most people give up.

The ultimate intended outcome is that the afflicted willingly embrace self-destructive behaviors and ideas. Thus, all moral constraints can be eschewed in the pursuit of “just” and “virtuous” causes.

What else can explain the daily displays of moral panic attacks masquerading as righteous activism, from the destruction of artwork to self-immolation? As human life ceases to look inviolable, we might also expect measures like euthanasia to gain steam, not just to help end terminal anguish but to end all manner of non-debilitating hardship. It’s no surprise, then, that we are seeing movements speeding ahead for “assisted dying” in the U.S., UK, the Netherlands, Canada, France, Ireland, and the rest of the West.

Next, the fundamental structures of society—like the rule of law and social relations—are targeted. For example, demoralization in the rule of law would entail undermining our trust in legal institutions and eroding the basis for legal authority. This could be accomplished by presenting the justice system as corrupt or illegitimate and by sowing distrust in the mechanisms of law enforcement. Think of the movements to “defund the police” because of “systemic racism.” Or the conviction last week of the front-runner presidential candidate on 34 counts of obvious political charges.

As a consequence, citizens lose confidence in the administration of justice, paving the way for untold social disorders, including legal nihilism, where people disregard the law en masse.

In America in 2019, 14 unarmed black men were shot by police—most, apparently, in self-defense. And yet, when polled, most Americans who described themselves as “very liberal” estimated the number at 1,000 or more. A fifth thought 10,000 or more. Were the BLM riots, then, any surprise?

To be sure, this isn’t just a progressive problem. Republicans also demonized the Justice Department, the FBI, and members of the judiciary when it suited them. Conservatives are also losing their confidence in law enforcement, in part because of what they see as the lax enforcement of the law as applied toward groups like antifa, Black Lives Matter, and pro-Hamas demonstrators.

The subversion here appears to be working, with both sides agreeing: there is a two-tiered police and justice system—one set of rules for me, and another for thee.

The third area—which Bezmenov called “life”—includes core social institutions such as family, health, race, population, and labor. Demoralization of the family is probably a familiar concept to us all. It involves promoting ideas that weaken the bonds between members of the family, promoting narcissistic individualism over family unity, creating financial stressors that discourage family formation, acrimony between the sexes, and the replacement of parental authority with the state.

Thus, the retrograde practice of polygamy is rebranded as polyamory. The natural human urge to create and nurture new human life is treated derisively by “DINKS” with slightly more latte money, or, more seriously, as an irresponsible and selfish choice to make because of climate change. Meantime, parents are told at every turn that they don’t know what they’re doing—and to defer to the experts instead.

The result is that not only do individuals feel less attachment to family, the fundamental unit of a healthy civilization, but they even end up detached from society itself. As we now know, the breakdown of family is strongly correlated with the epidemic of mental health crisis and explosive rise in violent crime: 85 percent of American youth in prison come from fatherless homes.

The goal of demoralization is to gradually degrade the foundations of a healthy society across all domains by erasing moral lines and exploiting preexisting discontents. What a society used to call abnormal and pathological, subversion normalizes. Just consider, for example, our culture’s attitude toward pedophiles, now rebranded as “minor-attracted persons.” By hijacking the legacy and language of the civil rights movement, nearly any “marginalized” group has a vehicle to try to “mainstream” deviant behavior. Consider the fact that across civilized societies it is not just “wrong” to say that a man cannot become a woman. It is thought to be cruel. So cruel that the Scots have made it illegal.

What’s striking about the demoralization process is that the law doesn’t typically change—at least not initially. Subversion abuses the tolerance of an open culture, forcing the host society to accomplish its aims like a virus attaches to a host.

In the Soviet case, according to Bezmenov, a successful subverter could come to be employed by a major university and teach a class on communism. When professors, donors, and students raise eyebrows, they get labeled as cranks or retrograde. The subverter responds: “Who are you to decide what can’t be taught?” Meanwhile, the subverter works to indoctrinate more young and impressionable minds and to secure positions for allies or useful ideologues. If you oppose this, you are asked: “What do you have against intellectual diversity?” Or “Do you oppose free thinking?” Thus, dissenters are silenced.

Over time, as the subverters come to dominate an institution, they apply institutional pressure. Curbs on academic freedom, the curriculum, and alterations to the hiring process inevitably follow. Think of the novel instruments to enforce uniformity of thought among academics: DEI statements, now a requirement at universities across America. Repeat ad infinitum.

Even in the cases where subversive activity is clearly illegal, such as with destruction and violence during the 2020 riots and at many anti-Israel protests today, crimes committed in service of some larger goal—like “decolonization”—are presented as righteous. Decolonization is a word that’s become as common these days as social justice. But what does it mean? Gal Beckerman of The Atlantic has written about the Marxist origins of this concept and one of its chief proponents, Frantz Fanon. Fanon, Beckerman writes, is “the patron saint of political violence,” and his “concepts have provided intellectual ballast and moral justification for actions that most people would simply describe as terror.” Listen to Fanon himself: “whatever may be the headings used or the new formulas introduced, decolonization is always a violent phenomenon.”

When young people say “resistance is justified,” many—if not most—of them believe they are simply standing up for the downtrodden. But the deeper implications of that statement are about justifying the morally reprehensible. How else to explain that at our most prestigious college campuses, students can be found glorifying Hamas terrorists and openly praising North Korea?

As far as I can tell, we are on our way to being considerably demoralized. If you look at the last few years, standards have declined, and subversive content, like Fanon’s, fills the media and our children’s curricula from K–12 to college and beyond. By beyond I mean even the Girl Scouts: here’s a St. Louis chapter learning to cheer for “the intifada.”

Do most elementary school teachers really want to racially stratify fourth graders? No. I think they dislike the racism of the past and want to do what they can to fix it. Since their betters in college told them that diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) is the way to go, well, so be it. Likewise, I don’t think your local high school history teacher wants to bring about a Bolshevik revolution. He has simply been told to replace the focus on 1776 with something from The 1619 Project. So he gets with the times. And on and on and on.

We have also come to a place where it is difficult for anyone to dissent for fear of incurring the wrath of the adherents—witting or not—of subversion. So people go along, keep their heads down, and try not to make a fuss.

Destabilization is the next phase. This process is considerably shorter, taking anywhere between five months to two years. With demoralization now reaching its full maturity, society is increasingly paralyzed by harsh domestic turmoil across all sectors. Democratic politics take on the character of a vicious struggle for power. Factionalism takes hold. Economic relations degrade and collapse, obliterating the basis for bargaining. The social fabric frays, leading to mob rule. Society turns inward, leading to fear, isolationism, and the decline of the nation-state itself, leading to crisis.

It is important to understand that, at this stage, the process of subversion is largely self-propelled. What once required active involvement on the part of a subverter has now taken root and grows organically. Then, society ruptures all at once in a rolling series of crises as the full extent of the cancer manifests.

Finally, says Bezmenov, a subverted society enters the normalization stage, which is when the subversive regime takes over, installing its ideology as the law of the land. By then, the enemy has totally conquered the target society—without ever firing a shot.

A view of the Manhattan skyline with the Empire State Building in the center, as seen from Crown Heights in Brooklyn on January 18, 2023, in New York City. (Roy Rochlin via Getty Images)

The question, of course, is who is doing the subverting. Who is trying to unravel America and the West?

Again, I am feeling only my part of the elephant, but I can discern at least three forces.

The first: American Marxists. This category includes old card-carrying communists, red-diaper baby socialists, antifa anarchists, and many of whom we now call woke. Though the Soviet Union collapsed decades ago, the Soviet worldview has found familiar proponents: young Americans and their professors. They are no longer advancing their cause merely through class struggle, but through the fusion of racial, class, and anticolonial struggles. Theirs is now a cultural communism; they lead subversion through the institutions with the ultimate aim of overthrowing the West.

The thundering socialists of the past (think of poor Bernie) seemed to earnestly care about the working class. Perhaps they did so naively, but at least they loved the poor. Does AOC? Rashida Tlaib? My former countrywoman, Ilhan Omar?

The second force is the radical Islamists, who are riding the coattails of the communists to power. A good example is the Muslim Brotherhood and its many tentacles. Of these tentacles, some are openly religious, like the Council on American-Islamic Relations and the Muslim Students Association, each with chapters in nearly every American university. Other organizations don a secular mask, like the so-called Students for Justice in Palestine. These groups have become increasingly confident over the past months. Anti-Israel Muslim candidates recently won elected seats in countries like England, where imams talk openly about reestablishing the caliphate in Europe.

The third force is the Chinese Communist Party. The most obvious avenues through which the CCP has spread subversion in America is through its numerous Confucius Institutes. These organizations have been vehicles for Chinese espionage within major American academic institutions. Then there is TikTok, an addictive social media app controlled by the CCP, which presents Chinese children wholesome, educational content while wreaking havoc on American kids—polarizing them and feeding them anti-American propaganda.

I believe Vladimir Putin is currently waging his own subversion campaign by supporting and advancing the three other forces. That is why I do not place him in one particular category.

What unites these enemies? On the surface, they have little in common. We all know what happens to “Queers for Palestine” in the Palestinian territories. Or Muslims in China. We all know what CCP mandarins think of Black Lives Matter activists. Or rather, what they would think, if they deigned to do so.

But they have wisely chosen the same common enemy: the West.

I am not saying that Bezmenov’s formulation explains all that we are seeing. It clearly does not address all the West’s problems. But once I immersed myself in his formulation, many of the topsy-turvy developments in our institutions fell into place.

The widespread acquisition of useless, aggressively ideological degrees in gender and race, or the claims of the possibility of an unlimited number of genders, or the total racialization and “decolonization” of our political discourse, or the demands to defund the police, the toppling of statues, the defacing of art, the “spontaneous” protests to dismantle our structures, and much else, I now understand as acts of subversion rather than mere expressions of discontent or youthful energy run amok.

It’s important to note that not all activism is subversive. My life would not be possible without the righteous activism of those who fought for women’s rights and civil rights. So how to tell the good activism from the bad?

I regret to tell you that there is no easy way. One thing to pay attention to is your gut. Another is your mind: be discerning and skeptical of people recruiting you to their cause. Does their cause ask toleration of you or require compelled speech? Are you being recruited to fight for a cause you know nothing about? Is that cause maximalist and uncompromising; does it glorify violence?

Regardless of whether you agree with my interpretation of events, subversion is a risk to all open societies. As Bezmenov says, subversion is a two-way street. A closed society is immune to subversion because it simply tells potential subverters to leave. Free and open societies cannot rely on this defense.

During the Cold War, the United States was able to forestall subversion because its institutions and people had the necessary antibodies to stave off subversive ideas. Doing so is easier when you have a visible peer as an enemy. But when the Cold War came to an end and we declared victory, we mistakenly thought our enemies laid down their arms and that history had ended—so we let our guard down.

Orwell said that “To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.” Everyone with eyes to see is now scrambling to do just that.

What is at stake in our ability to see plainly? Everything. What is at stake is nothing less than the preservation of our way of life.

Now is the time for all of us blind seekers to come together. To restore what we have lost will be the work of our lifetimes. Can there be a more important project?

Ayaan Hirsi Ali is the author of several books, including most recently, Prey: Immigration, Islam, and the Erosion of Women’s Rights.

Subscribe to Ayaan’s Substack, Restoration, here. And follow her on X @Ayaan.

Missing a few friends...

2023-12-31T18:08:00.000-08:00

2023-10-31T09:26:00.003-07:00

@TonySeruga

This post will be attacked by the left, the marxists, the trolls, antifa, blm, even the intelligence community. I'm a 39 year intelligence analyst, I and my team’s clients include the United States Government, British Government, Israeli Government, Saudi Arabia Government, NEOM, Microsoft, Dell Computers, GE, IBM, General Motors Corporation, The Scott Fetzer Corporation, Managing Dutch East India Company Archives for UNESCO , Procter & Gamble, Raytheon, Mastercard, Walmart, Northrop Grumman, Berkshire Hathaway, General Dynamics, BAE Systems, Standard Oil aka ExxonMobil, Saudi Aramco, et al. Intelligence is NEVER perfect. It's a messy, messy business. Rarely can I 'guarantee' the intelligence. Many times just releasing it in the wild can stop a false flag or genuine attack. But with as close to 100% confidence as possible, there WILL be multiple terrorist attacks in the U.S. The attacks will come in waves for the next 14 months. Hundreds of thousands of CCP saboteurs trained to attack our electrical grid, poison our water supply, destroy our railways and main highway arteries, additionally at least a million, possibly two million terrorists are already here from Palestine, Yemen, Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Qatar, Lebanon, Iran, Somalia, etc., etc., and they are extremely well funded and get this, the Biden Administration working with the UN has given them debit cards that are reloaded every month. Below are links to 3 articles on Hezbollah Unit 910, a sleeper cell already in the U.S. awaiting the green light from Persia to launch attacks. This is just one group of hundreds here to destroy America. Todd Bensman led counterterrorism intelligence for the Texas Department of Public Safety’s Intelligence and Counterterrorism Division and its multi-agency fusion center, read his reports: Part I of III Hezbollah’s ‘Unit 910’ in America: Recruitment, Targeting Jews, and a Building with a Doorman toddbensman.com/part-i-of-iii- Part II of III Hezbollah’s ‘Unit 910’ in America: A Treasure Hunt for Fake Docs, Weapons, Explosives toddbensman.com/part-ii-of-iii Part III: Hezbollah’s Clandestine Terror Wing in America: the Michigan Mystery toddbensman.com/part-iii-hezbo

A bleak future... WHAT IS YOUR SOCCIAL CREDIT SCORE?

2023-06-14T10:27:00.002-07:00

Complex interface of factors - first this:

https://tomknighton.substack.com/p/this-is-why-you-should-be-wary-of

A smart home locked a guy out over a 'misunderstanding'.

Then:

https://www.wired.com/story/odni-commercially-available-information-report/
Flip a switch - for whatever reason- and they can lock you out of the banking system or indict you for any thing...misgendering, child abuse (trans your kid), whatever...

Such a bleak future...

https://thehill.com/opinion/finance/565860-coming-soon-americas-own-social-credit-system/

2023-05-30T09:28:00.002-07:00

Home

2022-11-25T15:17:00.002-08:00

Minor stroke

Poland? Poland. Poland!

2022-11-15T12:01:00.003-08:00

I have said this for years...

2022-08-08T10:03:00.002-07:00

...but no one listens.

https://thefederalist.com/2022/08/08/criminalizing-opposition-to-the-regime-is-how-the-republic-ends/

The FBI And DOJ Criminalizing Opposition To The Regime Is How The Republic Ends

A two-tier justice system is not a justice system. It is a totalitarian system. Its purpose is not justice but population control.

JOY PULLMANN

@JOYPULLMANN

On Thursday, Barack Obama’s Attorney General Eric Holder decided it was the time to bring the subtext of the Jan. 6 show trials and related domestic security state activities into the open.

“My guess is that by the end of this process, you’re going to see indictments involving high-level people in the White House, you’re going to see indictments against people outside the White House who were advising them with regard to the attempt to steal the election, and I think ultimately you’re probably going to see the president, former president of the United States indicted as well,” Holder told SiriusXM host Joe Madison.

Holder noted that the U.S. Department of Justice he formerly headed is working with the illegally constituted Jan. 6 Commission towards this goal. We know these entities are also working with the FBI, whose head bit his thumb at congressional oversight repeatedly in a public hearing last week.

Locking Up Opposition Politicians Is What Putin Does

An indictment of former President Donald Trump would be a breathtakingly authoritarian turn. It would amount to the U.S. security state refusing to accept “no” from America’s voters yet again. An indictment would be an unelected and unaccountable federal agency overruling voters’ two-time rejection of impeachment through their elected representatives.

This is the core danger of the administrative state: Its now open propensity to go rogue. It is apparently hellbent now on turning the United States into a banana republic.

Democrats called Donald Trump a fascist, authoritarian, and wannabe dictator for chants at his rallies of “Lock her up,” referring to his opponent Hillary Clinton. At the time, leftists pointed out that imprisoning, interrogating, investigating, and otherwise using government resources to harass and prosecute one’s political opponents was the mark of tyrannical regimes such as Vladimir Putin’s and Adolf Hitler. “Democracies don’t lock up political opponents,” the Washington Post editorial board told us in 2016.

That is still true when the ones pushing the interrogations, investigations, entrapments into committing felonies, show trials in unusual venues with no cross-examination or due process, early morning home raids, excessive detainment, and asymmetrical punishments are Democrats. Democrats are trashing republican institutions, expectations, and guarantees for political purposes, most visibly now in their Jan. 6 effort to destroy the lives of protestors largely charged with misdemeanors and to expand Spygate tactics more broadly.

Spygate Is Setting Up Field Offices In Swing States

It’s not just the de facto head of the opposition party whom powerful government agencies are putting in their sights, it’s down-ballot party leaders. The FBI has gone from using its spy resources to affect the results of presidential elections with Spygate and its Hunter Biden laptop disinformation to using its police powers to affect gubernatorial elections. And these are just the operations we know about.

In Michigan, the FBI openly meddled in the upcoming election by affecting the selection of candidates, arresting and charging the formerly leading Republican candidate for governor for misdemeanors. The FBI raided Ryan Kelley’s home while polls showed him leading the primaries. In the primary election last week, he came in fourth.

The Jan. 6 Committee is now demanding documents and interviews with Republican candidate for Pennsylvania governor Doug Mastriano, who attended the Jan. 6, 2021 rally. The sole allegation against him is that he walked past “police lines,” which could mean anything, as the scene was chaotic and police were woefully understaffed.

This means Mastriano is being targeted for peacefully exercising his rights to free speech and public assembly. The Jan. 6 Committee won’t allow him to record their planned interrogation, a basic feature of legal self-defense and impartial justice. In fact, selectively excerpted video clips and quotes from these secret interrogations have been a constant feature of the commission, further reinforcing its use as a political weapon against the right rather than a pursuit of justice.

Of the 120,000 people the FBI alleges were present on Jan. 6, 2021 — perhaps 1 percent of whom entered the Capitol building — the vast majority were garden-variety Trump supporters, which include numerous state and local officials. State and local lawmakers are a party’s farm team. Subjecting them to investigation for peacefully protesting is a way to kneecap their entire party.

Asymmetric Justice Is Injustice

Put all of this against the systematic refusal of Democrat DAs, judges, and juries to prosecute people who openly engage in political violence from the left. In 2020, leftist rioters who coordinated across state lines and in far greater numbers and criminal activity than Jan. 6 attendees firebombed federal buildings, murdered people, looted, burned down downtowns, and assaulted police officers. Of course, essentially nobody involved in perpetrating the Spygate setup of an American president has been brought to justice, most recently including Michael Sussmann.

This summer, a leftist group has allegedly attacked two dozen pro-life maternal care centers in multiple states and a congressional office and promises to continue, but Wray couldn’t provide almost any information on alleged FBI investigations into it. Despite an assassination attempt on one Supreme Court justice this summer, the DOJ has still not filed charges against the people harassing and threatening justices and their families at their homes. U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland failed for weeks on end to enforce laws against such harassment of justices, creating the conditions for the aggression to intensify.

This is unacceptable, and Wray and Garland should be fired. They won’t be, though, and that’s the problem.

Amplifying pre-existing double standards of justice is far beyond troubling, it’s a destruction of the justice system. A country that harshly prosecutes people or lets them off Scot-free based on their political affiliation is a banana republic.

A two-tier justice system is not a justice system. It is a totalitarian system. Its purpose is not justice but population control. The more people see that moving into place, the more likely it is that some guy gets raided by the FBI for political reasons one morning and — God forbid — goes postal because he has no hope for a fair trial after they take him in.

Certainly even more ordinary Americans are realizing through all of this that the entire federal deck is prejudiced against them. Desperation makes people do wild things. Whatever happens, Republicans can be sure it will be wrapped around their necks with ropes of lies to further subjugate them and everyone who votes for them with the further erasure of our constitutional rights and way of life.

Equality Under the Law Is the Nonviolent Way Out

Remember, 75 million people voted for Trump in 2020. This isn’t some fringe Davidian cult, it’s half of the nation’s voters. Democrats are scaring them, for good reason. And Republicans are doing jack nothing to calm things down.

We’re watching federal agencies use their powers not to catch criminals but to criminalize peaceful political views and actions. We’re witnessing a growing campaign to lock people up for their opposition to the ruling political party, which is not only profoundly un-American but profoundly dangerous societally. This is the prosecution of a political cold civil war that could very easily heat up again in another January 6-like outburst, or worse.

As Mike Anton writes, Democrats may want that. But do Republicans? Any who thinks he might after what we’ve been through in the past seven years is either fool or quisling.

If Republicans think this is all going to blow over just because they haul in the FBI director for another no-consequences hearing, or even if they promise yet another goes-nowhere, punishes-nobody investigation of agencies we know are meddling in elections, framing elected officials, and telling elected members of Congress what to do instead of the reverse, they’re idiots. Their only hope of averting even worse political circumstances is to make damned sure they kneecap these scary federal agencies as their top priority ASAP.

We aren’t in business-as-usual Kansas anymore, Toto. We’re in crisis times that call for serious leadership, not LARPing as leaders on screens.

Sending billions to Ukraine while China grows stronger and every domestic sector is on fire isn’t serious. Lambasting Joe Biden for inflation while not pledging to pass the policies that reverse it, starting with slashing the federal government’s spending, isn’t serious. Yelling at the FBI director Republicans helped confirm isn’t serious (get better vetting staff, folks). Confirming a Supreme Court justice who obviously hates the Constitution isn’t serious. Not going on a crusade to clean out the FBI and DOJ Agean-stables-style isn’t serious. And pretending the Jan. 6 commission is anything but a miscarriage of justice is disqualifying.

We need the GOP to provide serious leadership, because Democrats are a serious threat to equal justice for all, and that’s going to destroy the country for good if it’s not stopped post-haste. Americans desperately need swift and prudent action to avert even more unthinkably dangerous events. Those who refuse to plan and take that action despite accepting from voters the responsibility to do so will be infamous to history as cowards and traitors.

Joy Pullmann is executive editor of The Federalist, a happy wife, and the mother of six children. Sign up here to get early access to her next ebook, "101 Strategies For Living Well Amid Inflation." Her bestselling ebook is "Classic Books for Young Children." Mrs. Pullmann identifies as native American and gender natural. She is also the author of "The Education Invasion: How Common Core Fights Parents for Control of American Kids," from Encounter Books. In 2013-14 she won a Robert Novak journalism fellowship for in-depth reporting on Common Core national education mandates. Joy is a grateful graduate of the Hillsdale College honors and journalism programs.

My day...

2022-07-31T15:23:00.003-07:00

Something is happening here...

2022-07-28T22:54:00.000-07:00

...what it is, not entirely clear...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R7gAEkzIgvw

I was wondering...

2022-07-23T19:54:00.001-07:00

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/billionaire-family-pushing-synthetic-sex-identities-ssi-pritzkers

One of the most powerful yet unremarked-upon drivers of our current wars over definitions of gender is a concerted push by members of one of the richest families in the United States to transition Americans from a dimorphic definition of sex to the broad acceptance and propagation of synthetic sex identities (SSI). Over the past decade, the Pritzkers of Illinois, who helped put Barack Obama in the White House and include among their number former U.S. Secretary of Commerce Penny Pritzker, current Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker, and philanthropist Jennifer Pritzker, appear to have used a family philanthropic apparatus to drive an ideology and practice of disembodiment into our medical, legal, cultural, and educational institutions.

I first wrote about the Pritzkers, whose fortune originated in the Hyatt hotel chain, and their philanthropy directed toward normalizing what people call “transgenderism” in 2018. I have since stopped using the word “transgenderism” as it has no clear boundaries, which makes it useless for communication, and have instead opted for the term SSI, which more clearly defines what some of the Pritzkers and their allies are funding—even as it ignores the biological reality of “male” and “female” and “gay” and “straight.”

The creation and normalization of SSI speaks much more directly to what is happening in American culture, and elsewhere, under an umbrella of human rights. With the introduction of SSI, the current incarnation of the LGBTQ+ network—as distinct from the prior movement that fought for equal rights for gay and lesbian Americans, and which ended in 2020 with Bostock v. Clayton County, finding that LGBTQ+ is a protected class for discrimination purposes—is working closely with the techno-medical complex, big banks, international law firms, pharma giants, and corporate power to solidify the idea that humans are not a sexually dimorphic species—which contradicts reality and the fundamental premises not only of “traditional” religions but of the gay and lesbian civil rights movements and much of the feminist movement, for which sexual dimorphism and resulting gender differences are foundational premises.

Through investments in the techno-medical complex, where new highly medicalized sex identities are being conjured, Pritzkers and other elite donors are attempting to normalize the idea that human reproductive sex exists on a spectrum. These investments go toward creating new SSI using surgeries and drugs, and by instituting rapid language reforms to prop up these new identities and induce institutions and individuals to normalize them. In 2018, for example, at the Ronald Reagan Medical Center at the University of California Los Angeles (where the Pritzkers are major donors and hold various titles), the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology advertised several options for young females who think they can be men to have their reproductive organs removed, a procedure termed “gender-affirming care.”

The Pritzkers became the first American family to have a medical school bear its name in recognition of a private donation when it gave $12 million to the University of Chicago School of Medicine in 1968. In June 2002, the family announced an additional gift of $30 million to be invested in the University of Chicago’s Biological Sciences Division and School of Medicine. These investments provided the family with a bridgehead into the world of academic medicine, which it has since expanded in pursuit of a well-defined agenda centered around SSI. Also in 2002, Jennifer Pritzker founded the Tawani Foundation, which has since provided funding to Howard Brown Health and Rush Memorial Medical Center in Chicago, the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences Foundation Fund, and the University of Minnesota’s Institute for Sexual and Gender Health, all of which provide some version of “gender care.” In the case of the latter, “clients” include “gender creative children as well as transgender and gender non-conforming adolescents ...”

In 2012, J.B. Pritzker and his wife, M.K. Pritzker, worked with The Bridgespan Group—a management consultant to nonprofits and philanthropists—to develop a long-term strategy for the J.B and M.K. Pritzker Family Foundation. Their work together included conducting research on developments in the field of early childhood education, to which the foundation committed $25 million.

Ever since, a motivating and driving force behind the Pritzkers’ familywide commitment to SSI has been J.B.’s cousin Jennifer (born James) Pritzker—a retired lieutenant colonel in the Illinois Army National Guard and the father of three children. In 2013, around the time gender ideology reached the level of mainstream American culture, Jennifer Pritzker announced a transition to womanhood. Since then, Pritzker has used the Tawani Foundation to help fund various institutions that support the concept of a spectrum of human sexes, including the Human Rights Campaign Foundation, the Williams Institute UCLA School of Law, the National Center for Transgender Equality, the Transgender Legal Defense and Education Fund, the American Civil Liberties Union, the Palm Military Center, the World Professional Association of Transgender Health (WPATH), and many others. Tawani Enterprises, the private investment counterpart to the philanthropic foundation, invests in and partners with Squadron Capital LLC, a Chicago-based private investment vehicle that acquires a number of medical device companies that manufacture instruments, implants, cutting tools, and injection molded plastic products for use in surgeries. As in the case of Jon Stryker, founder of the LGBT mega-NGO Arcus Foundation, it is hard to avoid the impression of complementarity between Jennifer Pritzker’s for-profit medical investments and philanthropic support for SSI.

Pritzker also helps fund the University of Minnesota National Center for Gender Spectrum Health, which claims “the gender spectrum is inclusive of the wide array of gender identities beyond binary definitions of gender—inclusive of cisgender and transgender identities, gender queer, and nonbinary identities as a normal part of the natural expression of gender. Gender spectrum health is the healthy, affirmed, positive development of a gender identity and expression that is congruent with the individual’s sense of self.” The university, where Pritzker has served on the Leadership Council for the Program in Human Sexuality, provides “young adult gender services” in the medical school’s Institute for Sexual and Gender Health.

Pritzker’s philanthropy is also active in Canada, where Jennifer has helped fund the University of Toronto’s Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies, a teaching institution invested in the deconstruction of human sex. An instructor in the Bonham Centre and the curator of its Sexual Representation Collection—“Canada’s largest archival collection of pornography”—is transgender studies professor Nicholas Matte, who denies categorically that sexual dimorphism exists. Pritzker also created the first chair in transgender studies at the University of Victoria in British Columbia. The current chair, Aaron Devor, founded an annual conference called Moving Trans History Forward, whose keynote speaker in 2016 was the renowned transhumanist, Martine Rothblatt, who was mentored by the transhumanist Ray Kurzweil of Google. Rothblatt lectured there on the value of creating an organization such as WPATH to serve “tech transgenders” in the cultivation of “tech transhumanists.” (Rothblatt’s ideology of disembodiment and technological religion seems to be having nearly as much influence on American culture as Sirius satellite radio, which Rothblatt co-founded.) Rothblatt is an integral presence at Out Leadership, a business networking arm of the LGBTQ+ movement, and appears to believe that “we are making God as we are implementing technology that is ever more all-knowing, ever-present, all-powerful, and beneficent.”

We are making God as we are implementing technology that is ever more all-knowing, ever-present, all-powerful, and beneficent.

Copied link

For-profit medical corporations and nonprofit institutions that intersect with the goliath LGBT NGO infrastructure, many of which receive Pritzker funding, have created a political scaffolding to engineer the institutionalization of SSI ideology and medical practice in the United States—solidifying the concept of people being born in wrongly sexed bodies or wrongly being born in sexed bodies at all. At least two clinics in California are now providing nonbinary surgeries and nullification surgeries for individuals who feel both male and female, or like neither.

The Gender Multispeciality Service (GeMS) at Boston Children’s Hospital, “the first major program in the U.S. to focus on gender-diverse and transgender adolescents,” was founded in 2007. “Since that time,” says the GeMS website, “we have expanded our program to welcome patients from ages 3 to 25.” The first such clinic for children in the Midwest, the Gender & Sex Development Program at Lurie Children’s Hospital, opened in Chicago in 2013 with a $500,000-$1 million gift pledge from Pritzker. (The husband of Jean “Gigi” Pritzker, another cousin, sits on Lurie’s board of directors.) The Gender Mapping Project estimates that there are now thousands of similar “gender clinics” around the world, and over 400 that offer to medically manipulate the sex of children.

Like Stryker’s Arcus Foundation, the Pritzkers have forged a close relationship with the psychiatric establishment. The Pritzker Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Health at Lurie was launched with a $15 million gift from the Pritzker Foundation in 2019, and received another $6.45 million in 2022 to address “concerns about mental health consequences for children and adolescents arising from the COVID pandemic.” Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker, Jennifer’s cousin, signed into law SB 2085, Coverage of the Psychiatric Collaborative Care Model (CoCM)—the American Psychiatric Association’s model legislation requiring private insurers and Medicaid in Illinois to cover CPT codes for CoCM, which “requires a primary care (or other) physician or clinician to lead a team that includes a behavioral health care manager who checks in with patients at least once a month and an off-site psychiatric consultant who regularly reviews patients’ progress and offers advice.”

Jeanne Pritzker, married to J.B.’s brother Anthony, who is Jennifer’s cousin, is a training psychologist at UCLA where she and her husband established the Anthony and Jeanne Pritzker Family Scholarship to support medical students at UCLA’s David Geffen School of Medicine. Mrs. Pritzker is a member of the Board of Visitors at the Geffen School, which is affiliated with a children’s hospital named after Mattel—the multinational toy company that debuted a “transgender Barbie” recently made in the likeness of the actor Laverne Cox.

On June 30, 2019, Gov. Pritzker issued Executive Order 19-11, titled Strengthening Our Commitment to Affirming and Inclusive Schools, to welcome and support children with manufactured sex identities. A task force was established to outline statewide criteria for schools and teachers that recommended districts amend their school board policies “to strengthen protections for transgender, nonbinary, and gender nonconforming students.”

In August 2021, Gov. Pritzker signed into law a new sex education bill for all public schools in Illinois, the first of its kind designed in accordance with the second edition of the National Sex Education Standards (NSES) to update sex ed curricula in K-12 schools. Bill SB0 818 will be implemented on or before Aug. 1, 2022. Though the bill includes a written opt-out for parents (but not an alternative if they do opt-out), many are concerned with the material being brought into children’s schools under the auspices of teaching them sexual health—namely gender identity ideology and other related material.

FROM THE NATIONAL SEX EDUCATION STANDARDS

The NSES manual was crafted by The Future of Sex Education Initiative (FoSE) and funded by the Grove Foundation, which in turn has also worked with the David and Lucile Packard Foundation (of Hewlett-Packard fortune) and Ford Foundation to institute Working to Institutionalize Sex Education (WISE)—“A national initiative that supports school districts in implementing sex education”—throughout the country. The Bridgespan Group, which assisted the Pritzkers with their philanthropic trajectory in 2012, was retained by the Packard Foundation to review its collaborative efforts across its investment portfolio and to report on a series of case studies, including the WISE initiative.

FoSE is a collaboration between three other organizations: The Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States (Siecus), “a national, nonprofit organization dedicated to affirming that sexuality is a natural and healthy part of life”; Advocates for Youth, “partnering with youth leaders, adult allies, and youth-serving organizations to advocate for policies and champion programs that recognize young people’s rights to honest sexual health information”; and Answer, “which provides and promotes unfettered access to comprehensive sexuality education for young people.” Each of these is also funded by the Grove Foundation, whose fortune comes from the now-deceased Andrew Grove, former CEO of Intel Corporation.

FoSE has created a “scaffolding approach” to teaching kids about sex in public schools and teaching them very young. Its credo is that “not only are younger children able to discuss sexuality-related issues but that the early grades may, in fact, be the best time to introduce topics related to sexual orientation, gender identity and expression, gender equality, and social justice related to the LGBTQ community before hetero- and cisnormative values and assumptions become more deeply ingrained and less mutable.”

Critics of the NSES standards created by the FoSE collaborative and now being implemented in Illinois under Gov. Pritzker may have concerns about a 72-page manual in which the term “anal sex” comes up 10 times and the word “intimacy” only half as often. The word “gender,” for what it’s worth, is used 270 times.

While many Americans are still trying to understand why women are being erased in language and law, and why children are being taught they can choose their sex, the Pritzker cousins and others may be well on their way to engineering a new way to be human. But what could possibly explain the abrupt drive of wealthy elites to deconstruct who and what we are and to manipulate children’s sex characteristics in clinics now spanning the globe while claiming new rights for those being deconstructed? Perhaps it is profit. Perhaps it is the pleasure of seeing one’s own personal obsessions writ large. Perhaps it is the human temptation to play God. No matter what the answer is, it seems clear that SSI will be an enduring part of America’s future.

I think I screwed up...

2022-06-06T16:33:00.001-07:00

The replacement pads for this don't exist...?

Argh...

Oh well.

Thoughts on a Monday

2022-05-09T09:16:00.001-07:00

On protests at SCOTUS's houses: It's wrong.

Protest the policy AT THE COURT.

Protest the person at their house.

There is a difference.

Don't even get me started on protesting IN churches.

They are following Alinsky - "Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it. "

Another person that agrees with me...

2022-03-07T22:19:00.002-08:00

As I said in February: "Drip by drip... Step by step... Word by word...We are creeping into a bigger conflict than we know."

This is from the other side. He concurs.

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1500301348780199937.html

120,907 views

Igor Sushko

Mar 6 • 72 tweets • 10 min read

🧵My translation of the analysis of the current situation in Russia by an active FSB analyst. Buckle up for a long thread and definitely please share far & wide. The full text is over 2000 words. This is a highly insightful look behind the curtain - covers many subjects.

I will add clarification comments inside parenthesis where necessary. So, let's roll:
"I have hardly slept at all these days, at work at almost all times, I have brain-fog. Maybe from overworking, but I feel like I am in a surreal world.

The Pandora’s Box is open – a real global horror will begin by the summer – global famine is inevitable as Russia and Ukraine are main producers of wheat. (MY COMMENTARY: I disagree that this will result in global famine.)

I can’t say what guided those in charge to decide to proceed with the execution of this operation (Ukraine invasion), but now they are methodically blaming us (FSB). We are being scolded for our analysis. Recently, we have been increasingly pressured to prepare more reports.

All of these political consultants and politicians and the powers-that-be are causing chaos. Most importantly, no one knew that there will be such a war – it was concealed from everyone.

For example – you are being asked to analyze various outcomes and consequences of a meteorite attack on Russia (MY COMMENTARY: Here he most likely means the West’s sanctions) –

So you research the mode of attack, and you are being told that it’s just a hypothetical and not to stress on the details, so you understand the report is only intended as a checkbox for some bureaucrat, and the conclusions of the analysis must be positive for Russia,

otherwise you basically get interrogated for not doing good work. So, you have to write that we have all necessary measures available to nullify the effects of a given type of attack. We are completely overworked.

But then it turns out that the hypothetical has turned into reality, and the analysis we’ve done on that hypothetical is total trash. We have no answer to the sanctions because of this. No one knew there’d be such a war, so no one prepared for these sanctions.

It’s the flipside consequence of the secrecy – since everyone was kept in the dark, how could we prepare for it?

Kadyrov has gone nuts. We (FSB) were very close to a conflict with him because the Ukrainians claimed to having received intel from the FSB on his squad in Kyiv.

Kadyrov's squad was absolutely demolished before they even had a chance to fight and they got blown to pieces. I do not have any info that it was an FSB leak to Ukraine, so I’d give it a 1-2% chance – but can’t exclude this possibility completely.

Our Blitzkrieg has totally collapsed. It is impossible to complete the task: If Zelensky and his deputies were captured in the first 3 days, all key buildings also captured, and they were forced to read an address of their surrender to the country,

then Ukraine’s resistance would have likely dissolved to a minimal level. Theoretically. But then what? Even in this IDEAL outcome, there remained an unsolvable problem: Who is the counterparty to our negotiations?

If we remove Zelensky – fine – who is going to sign the agreement? If Zelensky signs, then that agreement is worthless after we remove him. ОПЗЖ (The Opposition Party in Ukraine collaborating with Russia) has refused to cooperate.

Medvechuk, the coward, ran away. There is another leader – Boyko, but he refused too, even his own people won’t understand him. Wanted to bring back Tsaryova, but even our guys are against him here in Russia. Bring back Yanukovich? But how?

If we are saying we can’t occupy, then the newly formed government will be overthrown in 10 minutes as soon as we leave.

To occupy? Where would we find that many people? Commandant’s office, military police, counter-intelligence, security – even at minimum resistance from the Ukrainians, we’d need over 500,000 people, not including supply & logistics.

There’s a rule - if you try to cover for bad quality leadership with quantity, you’ll make everything worse. And I repeat this would be the problem in the IDEAL SCENARIO, which does not exist.

And what now? We cannot announce general mobilization for two reasons:
1) Mobilization will implode the situation inside Russia: political, economic, and social.

2) Our logistics are already over-extended today. We can send a much large contingent into Ukraine, and what would we get? Ukraine – a territorially enormous country, and their hate towards us is astronomical.

Our roads simply cannot accommodate the resupply of such convoys, and everything will come to a halt. And we can’t pull it off from the management side because of the current chaos.
These two reasons exist concurrently, although just one of them is enough to break everything.

With regards to Russian military losses: I don’t know the reality – no one does. There was some information the first 2 days, but now no one knows what is happening in Ukraine. We’ve lost contact with major divisions. (!!)

They may re-establish contact, or may dissipate under an attack, and even the commanders don’t know how many are dead, injured, or captured. Total dead is definitely in the thousands, maybe 10,000, maybe 5,000, or maybe just 2,000.

But even at our command no one knows. But probably closer to 10,000 Russian soldiers killed. And we are not counting losses at DNR & LNR.

Now even we kill Zelensky or take him prisoner, nothing will change. The level of hate toward us is similar to Chechnya. And now, even those loyal to us in Ukraine are publicly against us.

Because all of this was planned at the top (in Russia), because we were told that such a scenario will not happen (Ukraine invasion) except only if we were to be attacked first.

Because we were told that we need to maximize our threats in order to negotiate an outcome through peace. Because we were already preparing protests against Zelensky in Ukraine without ever considering invading Ukraine.

Now, civilian losses in Ukraine will follow a geometric pattern progression, and resistance against us will only get stronger. Infantries already tried to enter cities – out of 20 paratrooper groups, only one had “provisional” success.

Recall the invasion of Mosul. It’s a rule – happens with every country, nothing new. To siege? Over the last decades in Europe – Serbia being the best example, cities can remain functional under siege for years. Humanitarian convoys from Europe to Ukraine is only a matter of time

Our conditional deadline is June. Conditional because in June there will be no economy left in Russia – there will be nothing left.

By and large, next week there will be a collapse (in Russia) to either of the two sides (for vs against war), simply because current tension (in Russia) is unsustainable.

We have no analyses, we can’t make any forecasts in this chaos, no one will be able to say anything with any certainty (in Russia).

To act through intuition, especially with high emotions, this is no poker game. But our bets will have to grow in size with hope that some option will succeed. The tragedy is that we can easily miscalculate, and as a result lose everything.

By and large, Russia does not have an out. There are no options for a possible victory, only of losses – this is it. (BREAK FOR NOW, WILL CONTINUE POSTING TRANSLATION IN A BIT)

(THIS UPCOMING 2nd HALF IS ARGUABLY MORE INTERESTING AND ENDS WITH A PLEASANT SURPRISE)
"100% we’ve repeated our mistake from last century, when we decided to kick the “weak” Japan in order to achieve a quick victory, and it turned our army was in a state of total calamity.

Then, we started a war till the victorious end, then we started conscripting the Bolsheviks for re-education in the army. Then these barely-known Bolsheviks picked up their anti-war slogans and started doing such things...

From the pluses: We did everything to ensure there wasn’t even a hint that we sent penal military units to the front. If you conscript political prisoners and the socially undesirables, the moral spirit of the army will be in the negative.

The enemy (Ukraine) is motivated. Monstrously motivated. Knows how to fight, plenty of capable commanders. They have weapons and support. We will simply establish a precedent of human catastrophe in the world.

What we are afraid of the most: The top is trying to mask old problems with new problems. Largely for this reason Donbass happened in 2014 – We needed to distract the West from the Russian Spring in Crimea, so Donbass’ so-called crisis had to pull in all of the West's attention

and become a bargaining chip. But even bigger problems started there. Then we decided to pressure Erdogan to get 4 pipes for the Southern Stream (gas) and entered Syria.

This is after Suleimani (Islamic Revolutionary Guard) knowingly provided false info to us to solve his own problems. As a result, we couldn’t resolve the problem with Crimea, and Donbass’ problems didn’t go away.

Southern Stream was reduced to 2 pipes (gas), and Syria is hanging – we leave and Assad will be toppled and we will look like idiots, and staying there is hard and pointless.

I don’t know who come up with the “Blitzkrieg of Ukraine.” Had we received all the real inputs, we would have at minimum pointed out that the initial plan is arguable, and that much has to be reassessed. A lot had to be reassessed.

Now we are in crap (PG language mine) up to our necks, and we don’t know what to do. “Denazification” and “demilitarization” are not analytical categories because they don’t have concretely formulated parameters by which meeting of the objectives can be evaluated.

Now we are stuck waiting until some mentally screwed up advisor convinces the top to start a conflict with Europe, with demands to reduce the sanctions – they either loosen the sanctions or war.

And what if the West refuses? In that instance I won’t exclude that we will be pulled into a real international conflict, just like Hitler in 1939. Our “Z” will be equated to the Swastika.

Is there a possibility of a localized nuclear strike (in Ukraine)? Yes. Not for any military objectives. Such a weapon won’t help with the breach of the defenses. But with a goal of scaring everyone else (The West).

We are plowing to create a scenario to blame everything on Ukraine. Naryshkin (Director of Foreign Intelligence Service of Russia) and his SVR is digging the ground to prove that Ukraine was secretly building nuclear weapons. F*&K.

They are hammering at what we’ve already analyzed and closed the book on: We can’t just make up any evidence or proof and existence of specialists and Uranium. Ukraine has a ton of depleted isotope 238 – this is nothing. The production cycle is such that you can’t do it in secret

A dirty bomb can’t be created in secret. Ukraine’s old nuclear power plants can only produce the material as a by-product in minimal amounts. The Americans have such monitoring at these plants with MAGATE that even talking about this is stupid.

Do you know what will start in a week? Let’s let it be even in 2 weeks. We are going to be so screwed we will start reminiscing about the good ol’ hungry days of the 90s.

As the markets are being closed, Nabiullina appears to be taking the right steps, but it’s like plugging holes on a ship with your fingers. The situation will break through anyway and even stronger. Nothing will be solved in 3 or 5 or 7 days any longer.

Kadyrov is kicking his hoofs not without reason. They have their own adventures. He created a name for himself as the invincible – and if he falls down once his own people will remove him.

Next. Syria. “Guys – hold on, everything will end in Ukraine and then we will fortify our positions in Syria.” And now at any moment our contingent stationed there may run out of supplies, and then ridiculous heat will come….

Turkey is closing the strait, and sending supplies to Syria by air is the same as heating an oven with cash. Please note – this is all happening at the same time, and we don’t even have time to throw it all in one pile for analysis.

Our current position is like Germany in 1943-1944 – but that’s our STARTING position in Ukraine.
Sometimes I get lost in this overwork, sometimes it feels as if this is just a dream and all is as it was before.

With regards to prisons – it will get worse. The nuts will start to get tightened till blood. Everywhere. To be frank, purely technically, this is the only way to maintain any control of the situation.

We are already in total mobilization mode. But we can’t remain in this mode for long, but our timetables are unknown, and it will only get worse. Governance always goes astray from mobilization. And just imagine: You can sprint 100m – but try that in a marathon.

And so, with the Ukrainian question we lunged as if going for a 100m sprint, but turned out we’d signed up for a marathon. And this is a rather brief overview of the current events.

To offer further cynicism, I don’t believe that Putin will press the red button to destroy the entire world.
First, it’s not one person that decides, and someone will refuse. There are lots of people involved in the process and there is no single “red” button.

Second, there are certain doubts that it actually functions properly.

Experience shows that the more transparent the control procedures, the easier it is to identify problems. And where it’s murky as to who controls what and how, but always files reports full of bravado, is where there are always problems.

I am not sure that the “red button” system functions according to the declared data. Besides, plutonium fuel must be changed every 10 years.

Third, and this is the most disgusting and sad, I personally do not believe in Putin’s will to sacrifice himself when he does not even allow his closest ministers and advisors to be in his vicinity.

Whether it’s due to Putin's fear of COVID or a possible assassination is irrelevant. If Putin is scared for the most trusted people to be near him, then how could he possibly choose to destroy himself and those dearest to him? ( END OF TRANSLATION )

ADDENDUM: I wrote the following thread on March 1st - my opinion of the situation.

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I have been asked where they could donate for this work. That's very kind.

Thought of the day.

2022-02-28T13:25:00.005-08:00

Drip by drip...

Step by step...

Word by word...

We are creeping into a bigger conflict than we know.

A lot of culting going on...

2022-02-02T10:47:00.001-08:00

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/02/01/the-transgender-movement-is-a-modern-day-castration-cult/

Armando Simón

“The further a society drifts from the truth, the more it will hate those who speak it.” — George Orwell

As a psychologist, I was invariably sympathetic with individuals who had gender dysphoria and/or became transgender, even though the latter was distasteful to me. However, in recent years I have become deeply antagonistic towards such persons, principally because they have targeted children for chemical and physical mutilation. I now consider myself — proudly — to be transphobic. And I have no problems in saying so publicly.

And you should, too.

As a rule, when someone gets accused of something that liberals don’t like the automatic reaction is to deny the accusation. I, however, have no problem in owning the label of “transphobic.”

The present-day transgender movement can best be understood as simply being one of those castration cults that crop up in history from time to time (some may argue that it is not truly a castration cult since girls are taking part, but the basic principle of genital mutilation applies). The movement began with a minor celebrity in America announcing that he had transitioned into a female identity and the subsequently coordinated torrent of adulation from the media that followed.

The popular media’s reaction was very effusive in its approval and of long duration. The clamor was such that he was suddenly awarded the Social Media Queen award, was named one of Glamour’s 25 Glamour Women of the Year, one of 2015 Entertainers of the Year, Barbara Walter’s Most Fascinating Person of 2015, was listed in Time 100, was put in the Vanity Fair and Sports Illustrated covers (both very photoshopped), and given the Arthur Ashe Courage Award. “For being courageous! So very courageous! I’m so inspired by how courageous he/she/it is! Aren’t you?”

Considering the unanimous, exaggerated, all-pervasive glorification of this individual by the national media hivemind (lasting for months), one would have been justified in thinking that he had found a cure for cancer, been the first person to walk on Mars, and singlehandedly rescued the passengers from a sinking ocean liner, all in the same week.

As the movement spread across the country, as in all cults, it acquired a religious-like character that persists to this day.

In the process, and befitting the present state of society, transgenders have donned the mantle of Victimhood, or perhaps it would be just as accurate to say that they were donned the mantle of Victimhood. Regardless, by pretending that they are victims, and are supposedly being targeted by “transphobics,” they have automatically garnered that aggressive segment in society that is forever posturing at being virtuous and defenders of the weak while simultaneously being obnoxious and persecutory. Simultaneously, they have utilized the tried and true tactic of pointing out that transgenders have occurred in history so there is nothing unusual about it and so no one should be upset over it.

At least there has been some good humor that has come out of this sorry state of affairs.

Transgender Regret: The Apostates

From the silence in the media hivemind regarding persons with transgender regret and the constant promotion of gender dysphoria transitioning, one would think that all transgenders are happy and well-adjusted because they changed genders. Not so.

There have been several individuals who became transgender and subsequently regretted their decision. This includes those individuals who transitioned, then subsequently voiced what has become known as “transgender regret,” basically realizing that they made a horrible mistake.

Some have even attempted “de-transitioning.” They have decided to warn others of the dangers and the disillusionment of transition from one gender to another. Such individuals are particularly concerned about children considering the idea. They have not always succeeded in transmitting their message because of the censorship that has become all too common in society. Nor is it just those individuals who have experienced the transition. Some doctors have also warned of the dangers, both physical and psychological.

A study found that 55% of those who began transitioning felt that they had not received adequate evaluation from a physician or mental health practitioner prior to transitioning, and had then de-transitioned.

Aside from the above individuals, it must be kept in mind that some individuals have reported that, prior to the emergence of the cult, they had entertained thoughts of becoming transgender, but with time outgrew such an absurd notion and went on to have a normal heterosexual or homosexual lifestyle.

Censorship and Persecution

Heretics who question or oppose the dogma of the castration cult have been set upon by the enforcers. The range of punishments have been from insults and overall harassment to being censored (“cancel culture”) and to losing their employment, the purpose in any case being to instill fear and intimidation upon the population so that conformity and obedience may result.

It is very surprising how easily people have let themselves be intimidated. The many ills of present-day society stem directly from the fact that very few people have the backbone to defy, much less confront, the many mediocrities that have reached ascendancy.

A century from now, people will look back on us with disgust.

We have seen already that censorship has been imposed on the apostates by liberals (as with so many other topics). The censorship has also been imposed on persons who interview heretics, and on their books, such as was the case with Candace Owens when she interviewed Abigail Shrier, the author of “Irreversible Damage.” It was taken down by YouTube. (Amazon blocked advertising of the book on its site. Earlier, Amazon had also pulled Ryan T. Anderson’s book, “When Harry Became Sally”). As is so often the case, attempts at censoring the book resulted in its becoming a bestseller. However, it is interesting that every major newspaper and legacy magazine summarily turned away interested journalists who wanted to review the book, while NBC did a hatchet job.

Incidentally, this was Owens’ response: “YouTube removed an entire episode of the Candace Owens show because we said that men are not women, and women are not men. I honestly cannot even believe how absolutely batshit woke you have to be to believe basic truth to be ‘hate speech.’” Which brings us to the fact that stating facts can be grounds for censorship in the social media world, even facts that transgender people themselves say.

In this regards, let me quote Lincoln: “How many legs does a dog have if you call his tail a leg?” asked the president, who answered his own question: “Four. Saying that a tail is a leg doesn’t make it a leg.”

Another instance of YouTube censorship over the transgender topic occurred with a commentator named Steve Crowder when he mentioned that transgender men who pretend to be women pose a rape threat to actual women and girls when they intrude in women’s spaces (which has, in fact, occurred on several occasions). And at least one transgendered individual has expressed interest in pedophilia.

National Public Radio host Jesse Thorn announced that he had hit the jackpot when his six-year-old child had decided to become transgender. While he was showered with praise and congratulations, a comedian by the name of Owen Benjamin called it for what it was: child abuse, whereupon Benjamin’s career took a nosedive as cancel culture made its presence felt. “I had people telling me that I was bullying a transgender child. I was actually bullying an adult that was committing child abuse. If anything, I am the only one standing up for the child.”

British researcher Maya Forstater lost her job for the unforgivable crime of blasphemy, tweeting that “men cannot change into women.” J. K. Rowling voiced support for her: “Dress however you please. Call yourself whatever you like. Sleep with any consenting adult who’ll have you. Live your best life in peace and security. But force women out of their jobs for stating that sex is real?”

When somebody as famous as Rowling disagrees with the cult, one can expect major harassment, which is what occurred to the point of having her life threatened with rape and pipe bombs (predictably, Warner Bros. reacted with the usual blather about “diversity” and “inclusiveness”). Attempts at censoring Rowling, however, was not only futile in a substantial sense, but counterproductive anyway, in as much as sales of her books went up and her net worth continues to be more than some countries’ GDP. Essentially, she shrugged off the temper tantrums.

Those individuals, including qualified physicians, who urge caution in becoming transgender are treated in the usual bullying manner that nowadays has become commonplace when voicing heretical opinions and facts on other socio-political topics. Temper tantrums are doubly disturbing when directed at doctors and scientists who are trying to shed light on the subject of gender dysphoria and transitioning into transgenders.

For 15 years, Dr. Allan Josephson led the University of Louisville’s Division of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry and Psychology. When he argued that psychological treatment of individuals with gender dysphoria should be done prior to rushing to inflicting chemical and physical mutilation on them, he received the usual hostility and his contract was not renewed by the university administrators.

Dr. Michelle Cretella, a pediatrician and executive director at the American Academy of Pediatricians, stated in an interview, “See, if you want to cut off a leg, or an arm, you’re mentally ill, but if you want to cut off healthy breasts or a penis, you’re transgender.” That interview was also censored out of existence by YouTube censors as was another interview, this time with Dr. Debra Soh, author of “The End of Gender.”

Aside from YouTube, Dr. Ray Blanchard was censored by Twitter for stating, “Transsexualism and milder forms of gender dysphoria are types of mental disorder,” while Twitter punished Republican Congressman Jim Banks out of his account for a tweet observing, “The title of first female four-star officer gets taken by a man.” The statement was considered to be “violence” (incidentally, it should be pointed out that the majority of politicians opposing the cult of castration are Republicans, whereas the majority of politicians supporting and promoting it are Democrats).

Academically, Dr. Nicholas Meriwether teaches philosophy at Shawnee State University but refused to address a male student as if he was a female, whereupon the student threw a temper tantrum and so did the university administrators, threatening to fire him if in the future he transgresses again (his colleagues came to his defense). Someone who was fired for the same reason was a Virginia teacher, but was ultimately reinstated.

Children themselves have been targeted for cancel culture. In Scotland, a high school teacher kicked a student out of class because the student stated that there are two genders: male and female. He was subsequently expelled from school. A local politician and sophist said: “The young man in question has not been permanently excluded from Mearns Academy, but rather at the age of 17, has reached the end of his time in compulsory education.” A GoFundMe page for raising money in order to attend another school was shut down by leftists.

Needless to say, there have been other cases of persecution and censorship. As I write this, there is an attempt to censor Dave Chappelle away from Netflix by the joke police. He remains defiant. Even so, he was disinvited from several film festivals and (not so surprising) universities.

Denial Of Reality

A characteristic of many cults is their denial of reality, usually in order to safeguard an ideology. This is why cults tend to be self-isolating, so that there is no information or persons who will jar the beliefs with facts, or logic. The same applies to totalitarian societies where incoming of entertainment, news, magazines are strictly prohibited; for example, the greatest threat to North Korea these days are television entertainment from the south, and Voice of America radio broadcasts eroded the Soviet Union. Likewise, in American and Canadian universities, there is a determined effort to block outside speakers and events that are heretical and will disrupt the ongoing indoctrination.

However, since the castration cult is not self-isolating, but is scattered throughout society, society must be altered and censorship maintained. Society must be remade to accommodate the delusions of the tiniest of minorities. Towards this end, the cultists have the support of some powerful, strategically placed allies. For example, the Democratic politician, Julián Castro, declared that transgender women should have free abortions. The ACLU has demanded that tampons be available in men’s restrooms (Cornell University, a PC bastion, has already began putting free “mxnstrual” products in them); it has also declared that “men who get their periods are men,” “men who get pregnant and give birth are men,” and that there is no difference between men and women when it comes to athletic ability. In fact, emojis of pregnant men have already been created to go along with emoji pronouns.

Another area of contention are bathrooms. There are legal battles regarding the use of bathrooms. On the other hand, some have demanded special “transgender bathrooms.” North Carolina passed a law in 2016 banning transgenders from using opposite sex bathrooms and the NBA immediately pulled its game as punishment. We all know that black basketball players spent a lot of sleepless nights agonizing over the fact that transgenders did not have their own bathrooms.

And of course, by now everyone is well aware of the hundreds of new pronouns.

But it gets better. Playboy magazine has a transgender on the cover. British Airways has told the flight attendants not to say, “Ladies and gentlemen.” For the sake of “inclusion.”

Words have specific meanings. Not so with fanatics. In recent years, we have seen the mutilation of the language to parallel the mutilation of bodies (and is not limited to the transgender movement). The writer, Philip Dick, nailed it (as did Orwell with Newspeak): “The basic tool for the manipulation of reality is the manipulation of words. If you can control the meaning of words, you can control the people who must use the words.”

One would think that some things are self-evident. Not so where the transgender movement is concerned, where it appears that the lunatics are running the asylum. And many transgender people do exhibit unmistakable signs of mental illness (this conclusion from my personal observation is reflected in a study that showed 62.5% of adolescent and young adults had been diagnosed with at least one mental health disorder prior to their gender dysphoria).

Recruitment and Child Abuse

Aesop gave us the fable of the fox who lost its tail in a trap. Embarrassed at such un-fox-like appearance, he hit upon an idea and went around to all the other foxes boasting about the new look and how anyone who was anyone should lose the tail. It didn’t work.

Hand in hand with the above is the recruitment of new adherents to the cult. Here is where it gets very dark as children in particular are being targeted. As incredible and repugnant as it sounds, some schools have become places where children are encouraged, directly or indirectly, to become transgender. This is child abuse, pure and simple. Parents who object are ignored and ridiculed. In other words, children are not considered mature enough to vote or drive cars, yet they are supposedly mature enough to become transgender without parents’ approval. Encouraging and convincing children to engage in physical and chemical mutilation is immoral, though some celebrities approve. Nonetheless, injecting children with hormonal blockers is immoral. Period. It is child abuse.

Some businesses like Burger King and Starbucks, however, subsidize this child abuse.

And then, of course, there are children’s shows. And cookies. And candy.

It will take years of therapy to undo the damage done to these children.

In fact, some parents seem to see it as a status symbol if their child “decides” to become transgender, instead of a tragedy, and they announce it to the world in order to garner accolades. They look for anything, the slightest thing that they can jump on and shout “Bingo! I have a transgender kid!!” This is simply Munchausen by proxy.

Politics

Lastly, I will touch on politics. Unlike most people from the right and the left who patronize only those sites that echo their beliefs, in what psychologists call “confirmation bias,” I make it a point to be exposed to the outlets of the entire political spectrum. No doubt that if the reader is an adherent of the political left and clicked on the links I cited, he/she was shocked to see that most came from conservative sites. And that is exactly my point. Almost all, if not all, of the reporting on the transgender absurdities and subsequent child abuse has come from the right. The mainstream media that caters to the political left is either suppressing this issue, (among others) or actively and enthusiastically promoting the castration cult, including the child abuse.

I have simply not come across any substantial condemnation coming from liberals regarding the urging of children to submit to chemical and physical mutilation. On the contrary. I periodically review the publications of the entire political spectrum and almost all, if not all, the expressed outrage in regards to this child abuse has come from conservatives and libertarians, whereas liberals promote, support and encourage children to become transgender. Any negative news about transgenders appears to be suppressed in the mainstream media, and if it is (finally and barely) mentioned, it is because conservative news outlets mention it at length — then complain that conservative news outlets mention it.

Mind you, almost all conservative politicians have been mum on the subject, both in the U.S. and in the UK for fear they will be called “transphobic,” while leftist politicians are openly supporting the castration cult behind the empty façade of “rights” and “inclusiveness.” Some Republicans in Congress have even decided to mount the transgender bandwagon. In short, conservative politicians (as usual) have proven to be cowards

Until this insanity ends, the casualties will continue to mount in the transgender wars. And children will be the primary victims.

Armando Simón is a native of Cuba, a retired psychologist and author of “Very Peculiar Stories, A Prison Mosaic” and “When Evolution Stops.”

The Ten Stages of Genocide Are Hitting a Little Too Close to Home

2021-11-16T17:27:00.003-08:00

SOURCE

November 15, 2021

The Ten Stages of Genocide Are Hitting a Little Too Close to Home

By J.B. Shurk

As we wait to see what our commie-fascist ruling class has planned for us next, this might be a good time to pull out Gregory H. Stanton's "Ten Stages of Genocide" as a helpful reminder for keeping track of how things are "progressing" (pun intended). Stanton, an academic and the founder of Genocide Watch, organized a sobering list of red-flag actions undertaken by governments over the last century on their way to committing mass murder. See if any of them rings any bells with how supposedly "free" governments are behaving today.

(1) Classification: Governments begin dividing people into "us" versus "them."

Hillary Clinton calls Trump voters "deplorables." Barack Obama disparages freedom-minded Americans as racists and rubes who "cling to guns or religion." Joe Biden says America is plagued by "white supremacy." Joint Chiefs chairman Mark Milley believes that the military must tackle "white rage." Attorney General Garland thinks parents who object to government schools indoctrinating their children with racial Marxism and hyper-sexualized curricula are "domestic terrorists." Black Lives Matter and Antifa rioters and looters are lauded as civil rights heroes, while Trump voters who protest for election integrity are denounced as "insurrectionists," hunted down by the regime enforcers at the FBI, and left rotting behind bars with little in the way of due process. Those who object to governments' totalitarian plans to spend hundreds of trillions of dollars and take control over free markets in order to combat the weather are ridiculed as "climate deniers." Those who believe governments' authoritarian reactions to the China Virus have been more harmful to humanity's well-being than the virus, itself, are demonized as "selfish," "ignorant," and "anti-science" villains. And now, even after denying that they would ever institutionalize "vaccine passports" as requirements for travel outside the home, governments are, in fact, remaking their nations into "papers, please" police states.

(2) Symbolization: Governments start forcing "unclean" people to wear symbolic articles of clothing, so they clearly stand out from everyone else.

Coercing people to submit to experimental injections with unknown health risks is prohibited by longstanding international treaties designed to prevent crimes against humanity. That certainly hasn't stopped most Western governments from throwing ethics and law out the window in order to rush out a medical treatment before anybody could possibly know the long-term consequences. What about those companies and government administrators who aren't quite ready to admit they've gone full Josef Mengele in the name of "science"? They have an easy solution: those who refuse to "vaccinate" must wear face masks until they do, even though numerous studies have proved that ordinary cloth masks do next to nothing to prevent the spread of disease and even though numerous studies have proved that the "vaccinated" still carry a viral load equal to or greater than those who have refused experimental treatment. As with everything that governments have done to use this "health emergency" for their own authoritarian "Great Reset" goals, the mask has nothing to do with health. It is, however, an effective symbol pushed by governments to publicly ostracize those who refuse to obey. And in those jurisdictions that have already gone back to universal masking regardless of "vaccination" status, those who refuse to play "mask theater" make themselves all the easier for governments to isolate and target.

Woke and religion - great article.

2021-11-11T08:50:00.000-08:00

Long read, but it covers a lot of points... the chart at the end is fantastic - read that even if you ignore the rest of the article.

https://michaelshellenberger.substack.com/p/why-wokeism-is-a-religion


Because things disappear, I will copy the entire article and paste it below:

Why Wokeism Is A ReligionIntroducing the Taxonomy of Woke Religion
Michael Shellenberger
3 hr ago281
Over the last year, a growing number of progressives and liberals have pointed to police killings of unarmed black men, rising carbon emissions and extreme weather events, and the killing of trans people as proof that the United States has failed to take action on racism, climate change, and transphobia. Others have pointed to the war on drugs, the criminalization of homelessness, and mass incarceration as evidence that little has changed in the U.S. over the last 30 years. 
And yet, on each of those issues, the U.S. has made significant progress. Police killings of African Americans in our 58 largest cities declined from 217 per year in the 1970s to 157 per year in the 2010s. Between 2011 and 2020, carbon emissions declined 14 percent in the U.S., more than in any other nation, while just 300 people died from natural disasters, a more than 90 percent decline over the past century. Public acceptance of trans people is higher than ever. The total US prison and jail population peaked in 2008 and has declined significantly ever since. Just 4 percent of state prisoners, who are 87 percent of the total prison population, are in for nonviolent drug possession; just 14 percent are in for any nonviolent drug offense. And many large cities including Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Seattle have effectively decriminalized public camping by homeless people. 
Progressives respond that these gains obscure broad inequalities, and are under threat. Black Americans are killed at between two to three times the rate of white Americans, according to a Washington Post analysis of police killings between 2015 and 2020. Carbon emissions are once again rising as the U.S. emerges from the covid pandemic, and scientists believe global warming is contributing to extreme weather events. In 2020, Human Rights Campaign found that at least 44 transgender and non-gender conforming people were killed, which is the most since it started tracking fatalities in 2013, and already that number has reached 45 this year. Drug prohibition remains in effect, homeless people are still being arrested, and the U.S. continues to have one of the highest rates of incarceration in the world.
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But those numbers, too, obscure important realities. There are no racial differences in police killings when accounting for whether or not the suspect was armed or a threat (“justified” vs “unjustified” shooting). While carbon emissions will rise in 2021 there is every reason to believe they will continue to decline in the future, so long as natural gas continues to replace coal, and nuclear plants continue operating. While climate change may be contributing to extreme weather events, neither the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change nor another other scientific body predicts it will outpace rising resilience to cause an increase in deaths from natural disasters. Researchers do not know if trans people are being killed disproportionately in comparison to cis-gender people, if trans homicides are rising, or if trans people are being killed for being trans, rather than for some other reason. Twenty-six states have decriminalized marijuana, and California and Oregon have decriminalized and legalized, respectively, the possession of all drugs. Progressive District Attorneys in San Francisco, Los Angeles and other major cities have scaled back prosecutions against people for breaking many laws related to homelessness including public camping, public drug use, and theft.
And yet many Americans would be surprised to learn any of the above information; some would reject it outright as false. Consider that, despite the decline in police killings of African Americans, the share of the public which said police violence is a serious or extremely serious problem rose from 32 to 45 percent between 2015 and 2020. Despite the decline in carbon emissions, 47 percent of the public agreed with the statement, “Carbon emissions have risen in the United States over the last 10 years,” and just 16 percent disagreed. Meanwhile, 46 percent of Americans agree with the statement, “Deaths from natural disasters will increase in the future due to climate change” and just 16 percent disagreed, despite the absence of any scientific scenario supporting such fears. And despite the lack of good evidence, mainstream news media widely reported that the killing of trans people is on the rise.
The gulf between reality and perception is alarming for reasons that go beyond the importance of having an informed electorate for a healthy liberal democracy. Distrust of the police appears to have contributed to the nearly 30% rise in homicides after the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests last year, both by embolding criminals and causing a pull-back of police. A growing body of research finds that news media coverage of climate change is contributing to rising levels of anxiety and depression among children. And there is good reason to fear that misinformation about the killing of trans and non-gender conforming individuals contributes to anxiety and depression among trans and gender dysphoric youth.
Social Media, NGOs, and the Death of God
Why is that? Why does there exist such a massive divide between perception and reality on so many important issues?
Part of the reason appears to stem from the rise of social media and corresponding changes to news media over the last decade. Social media fuels rising and unwarranted certainty, dogmatism, and intolerance of viewpoint diversity and disconfirmatory information. Social media platforms including Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram reward users for sharing information popular with peers, particularly extreme views, and punish users for expressing unpopular, more moderate, and less emotional opinions. This cycle is self-reinforcing. Audiences seek out views that reinforce their own. Experts seek conclusions, and journalists write stories, which affirm the predispositions of their audiences. It may be for these reasons that much of the news media have failed to inform their audiences that there are no racial differences in police killings, that emissions are declining, and that claims of rising trans killings are unscientific.
Another reason may be due to the influence of well-funded advocacy organizations to shape public perceptions, particularly in combination with social media. Organizations including the American Civil Liberties Union, Human Rights Campaign, and Drug Policy Alliance have misled journalists, policymakers, and the public, about police killings, drug policy, and trans killings, often by simply leaving out crucial contextual information. The same has been true for climate activists, including those operating as experts and journalists, who withhold information about declining deaths from natural disasters, the cost of disasters relative to GDP growth, and declining U.S. emissions. 
But neither of these explanations fully captures the religious quality of so much of the progressive discourse on issues relating to race, climate, trans, crime, drugs, homelessness, and the related issue of mental illness. A growing number of liberal, heterodoxical, and conservative thinkers alike use the word “woke” to describe the religiosity of so many progressive causes today. In his new book, Woke Racism, Columbia University linguist John McWhorter argues that Wokeism should, literally, be considered a religion.
As evidence for his argument McWhorter points to commonly held myths, like the debunked claim that the American War of Independence was fought to maintain slavery, or that racial disparities in educational performance are due to racist teachers. He points to Woke religious fervor in seeking to censor, fire, and otherwise punish heretics for holding taboo views. And McWhorter suggests that, because Wokeism meets specific psychological and spiritual needs for meaning, belonging, and status, pointing out its supernatural elements is likely to have little impact among the Woke.
But just because an ideology is dogmatic and self-righteous does not necessarily make it a religion, and so it is fair to ask whether Wokeism is anything more than a new belief system. There is no obviously mythological or supernatural element to Woke ideology, and its adherents rarely, if ever, justify their statements with reference to a god, or higher power. But a deeper look at Wokeism does, indeed, reveal a whole series of mythological and supernatural beliefs, including the idea that white people today are responsible for the racist actions of white people in the past; that climate change risks making humans extinct; and that a person can change their sex by simply identifying as the opposite sex.
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Woke Religion: A Taxonomy
While reading McWhorter’s new book, I was surprised to discover many similarities between woke racism and apocalyptic environmentalism, which in Apocalypse Never I describe as a religion. Each offers an original sin as the cause of present-day evils (e.g., slavery, the industrial revolution). Each has guilty devils (e.g., white people, “climate deniers,” etc.) sacred victims (e.g., black people, poor islanders, etc.) and what McWhorter calls “The Elect,” or people self-appointed to crusade against evil (e.g., BLM activists, Greta Thunberg, etc.). And each have a set of taboos (e.g., saying “All lives matter,” criticizing renewables, etc.) and purifying rituals (e.g., kneeling/apologizing, buying carbon offsets, etc).
I also saw parallels between woke racism, apocalyptic environmentalism, and victimology, which in San Fransicko I describe as a religion complete with the metaphysical (essentialist) view that people can be categorized as victims or oppressors, by nature of their identity or experience. 
I reached out to a new friend, Peter Boghossian, a philosopher who recently resigned his post at Portland State University in response to Wokeist repression, and other experts in different Woke movements, and together we constructed a Woke Religion Taxonomy (below). It includes seven issue areas (Racism, Climate Change, Trans, Crime, Mental Illness, Drugs, and Homelessness) covered by Woke Racism, Apocalypse Never, San Fransicko, Peter’s research, and the writings of other critics of Wokeism. And it cuts across ten religious categories (Original Sin, Guilty Devils, Myths, Sacred Victims, The Elect, Supernatural Beliefs, Taboo Facts, Taboo Speech, Purifying Rituals, Purifying Speech). We were surprised by how straightforward it was to fill in each category, and by the fascinating similarities and differences between them. 
We decided to publish the Woke Religion Taxonomy because it was helpful to our own understanding of Wokeism as a religion, and we felt it might help others. The Taxonomy identifies common myths and supernatural beliefs and helps explain why so many people continue to hold them, despite overwhelming evidence that they are false. We are under no illusion that the Taxonomy will reduce the power that Wokeism holds over true believers. But we also believe it will help orient those who are confused by its irrationalism, and are seeking an accessible overview. Finally, we are publishing it because we recognize that we might be wrong, either about matters of fact or classification, and hope it will encourage a healthy discussion and debate. As such, we have published it with the caveat that it is “Version 1.0” with the expectation that we will revise it in the future.
Both Peter and I would like to stress that we have published the Taxonomy in service of the liberal and democratic project of social and environmental progress, which we believe to be under threat from Wokeism. We believe the U.S. is well-positioned to reduce police killings, crime, and carbon emissions; protect the lives and the mental health of trans, non-gender conforming, and cis-gender people; and better treat of the mentally ill and drug addicted. But doing so will require that Wokeism weaken its grip over the American psyche.
As Peter writes, “bigotry and racial discrimination are real and they have no place in society. Yes, there is ongoing racism. Yes, there is ongoing homophobia. Yes, there is ongoing hatred of trans people. These are morally abhorrent and we all need to work together to bring about their end. The woke religion, however, is not the way to stop these moral horrors. It is making our shared problems more difficult to solve.”

What if the only thing holding Biden in office is...

2021-10-29T11:34:00.000-07:00

What if the only thing holding Biden in office right now is that he has no opposition on the left... NONE.

The Squad is silent on his leadership.

Moderates are embarrassed, but holding.

How?

GIVE 'EM WHAT THEY WANT!

No matter how silly, how outrageous, how expensive... you got it!

More (fill in the blank of random uberminority group) being unrepresented - ZAP - you have them in droves at cabinet level ranks! Give 'em 4 stars for showing up!

That weird program you have been pushing for since High School - ZAP - it is in the Build Back Better plan! Free crack pipes for junkies!

Protect the unions over the supply chain - ZAP - only green trucks driven by union drivers can apply!

That is what protects him... and his wife.

The attached article shows just how long the long knives are in the White House.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/10/is_jill_biden_asking_about_a_process_for_removing_kamala_harris.html

Is Jill Biden asking about a 'process' for removing Kamala Harris?

By Monica Showalter

It's been known for a while that the honeymoon between Joe Biden and Kamala Harris has pretty much congealed.

In August, Kamala Harris was reportedly asking about how to get rid of failing old Joe:

Now in October, Jill Biden, who's Joe's gatekeeper and Mrs. Wilson, reportedly is asking the same of Kamala:

Another person coming around to my POV...

2021-09-27T07:02:00.004-07:00

https://www.creators.com/read/wayne-allyn-root/09/21/police-fire-military-being-gutted-by-vaccine-mandate-is-this-chinas-plan-to-destroy-the-usa

Police, Fire, Military Being Gutted by Vaccine Mandate: Is This China's Plan To Destroy the USA?

By Wayne Allyn Root

September 26, 2021 6 Min Read

A- A+

I have bad news and good news.

I'll save the good news for the end — because you need to know there is hope.

The bad news is that the country is on fire, thanks to the brain-dead, feeble, old man with dementia (aka President Joe Biden). If you don't believe me, just see the 14,000 Haitian migrants hiding under a bridge in Texas, now released into America by Biden. That should help the COVID-19 pandemic.

But the worst is yet to come. I'm referring to Biden's vaccine mandate. This is the most dangerous threat to our national security in history.

As a nationally syndicated radio host, I get thousands of emails a week. The ones I'm getting right now are downright tragic. I'm getting heartfelt letters of anguish from police officers, firefighters, paramedics, nurses, corrections officers, active-duty military, military fighter jet pilots, even Navy SEALs.

They're all getting ready to quit or be fired because of vaccine mandates. They do not want the vaccine. Even if they have to give up their pensions. Even if they are one year away from retirement and a six-figure pension.

They've studied the vaccine. They know the dangers. They know it's crippling, killing and weakening the immune systems of millions of Americans. They've seen the Project Veritas undercover videos of U.S. government health care workers admitting the COVID-19 vaccine is killing and injuring Americans — and admitting our government is covering it up.

As first responders, many have seen the carnage up close and personal. They see the vaccine-injured every day in the emergency room or intensive care unit.

The mainstream media is blacking out this story like it's on Hunter Biden's laptop. But the number of first responders who quit, retire or get fired will be shocking. The damage to our country will be devastating.

Think about it. These are the frontline defenders of America. What if one-third of cops resign? One-third of the firemen? One-third of the nurses? One-third of prison guards? Good luck.

You think I'm exaggerating? I've only seen one poll made public on this topic. In San Diego, 65% of the cops say they'll quit rather than take the vaccine.

It turns out my educated guess is low.

What happens when one-third of the military quits? How about one-third of fighter jet pilots? How about one-third of Navy SEALs? Who is going to defend America? This is the greatest national security threat in history.

Our national defense will be a shambles. China can just sit back and watch us self-destruct. Did you ever think maybe that's the plan? Just this week, a whistleblower reported China intentionally released COVID-19 at the Wuhan Military Games in October of 2019.

So, maybe, just maybe this whole vaccine mandate disaster is "made in China." Dividing America, weakening our economy, gutting our military and creating a shortage of frontline first responders is a dream come true for China.

This is how China wins WWIII without firing a shot.

So, what's the good news? I have a solution. You can read about it in my brand-new No. 1 bestselling book, "The Great Patriot Protest & Boycott Book." It's the conservative version of "Rules for Radicals." It teaches conservatives how to use protest, boycotts, intimidation and civil disobedience — just like liberals have done to us for decades. Two can play at that game. It teaches conservatives how to become the LOUD MAJORITY.

This book even includes the actual phone numbers and emails to contact the top liberal and woke CEOs in America.

And I have proof it works. A book buyer contacted me yesterday. He was giddy. He emailed three CEOs of the biggest companies in America — with the contact information provided in my book. Within hours all three CEOs personally responded. He sent me their emails. All three big shots were clearly scared to death by threats of a boycott by this conservative. That was from only one person contacting them.

Can you imagine what we can achieve when 100,000 or 1 million conservatives contact corporations and politicians to threaten a boycott? This is the game changer.

This battle isn't over yet. Not by a long shot. I believe we can keep the wolves at bay with the strategy found in my book. And then in 2024 ...

The latest Rasmussen poll shows former President Donald J. Trump beating Biden by a 10-point landslide and beating Kamala Harris by 13 points.

As Winston Churchill said, "Never give in, never give in, never, never, never."

Never give up. Keep the faith. The cavalry is coming!

Wayne Allyn Root is known as "the Conservative Warrior." Wayne's new No. 1 bestselling book, "The Great Patriot Protest & Boycott Book." Wayne is host of the nationally syndicated "Wayne Allyn Root: Raw & Unfiltered" on USA Radio Network, daily from 6 p.m. to 9 p.m. EST and the "WAR RAW" podcast. To find out more about Wayne Allyn Root and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

Similar to my journey...

2021-09-23T10:35:00.002-07:00

https://twitchy.com/samj-3930/2021/09/23/you-all-own-this-crapfest-merciless-thread-takes-holier-than-thou-nevertrump-apart-for-giving-us-president-biden/

‘You ALL own this crapfest’: MERCILESS thread takes holier-than-thou #NeverTrump APART for giving us President Biden

Posted at 10:41 am on September 23, 2021 by Sam J.

Many of us tried to tell our ‘betters’ in Never Trump that Biden would be a disaster but they just kept on insisting electing him would be putting the adults back in the White House.

If Biden is what it looks like when adults are in charge, please, by all means, bring back the kids.

Seriously.

This thread does an exceptional job taking these holier-than-thou conservers of conservatism APART and reminding them THEY are the problem.

Not Trump

Not his supporters.

Them.

And they have been for decades.

Take a look:

Yup.

Oof.

Harry ‘Nuke the Filibuster’ Reid.

Excellent point.

He wanted to be liked and invited to all of the best cocktail parties.

They threw their principles out the window just so they could punish Trump and his supporters.

Sad, ain’t it?

They were tired of getting ‘beat like a drum’.

If we’re being honest, Trump governed nearly as conservatively as Reagan did.

Dogcrap donuts.

We will be stealing that one, thank you very much.

YAAAAAAAS.

And gold star for the ‘your mom’ joke.

Just did a teensy little fist-pump.

Some of them openly supported Biden.

See Kristol.

See Rubin.

See Nichols.

And we all know Never Trump is a tribe and a cult, all in one.

Grab two mops.

Biden makes Trump look like the best president ever … Hell, he makes Jimmy Carter look almost tolerable.

Thanks a lot, Never Trumpers.

***

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Police, Fire, Military Being Gutted by Vaccine Mandate: Is This China's Plan To Destroy the USA?

By Wayne Allyn Root

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