Here a link, there a link, everywhere a link link!

A Taxonomy of Fear

There is a pattern in the way speech is silenced. Understanding it can help us stand up to the illiberalism of this moment.

Once you get through the pro-forma but irrelevant up-front Trump dumping, the article seems right on target. And obviously related:

Survey: Majority of Americans Afraid of Expressing Political Beliefs

Too Many Jobs Feel Meaningless Because They Are

If work that is of no real value has proliferated, no wonder productivity is stagnant.

Overall, many good points, but I wish it had explained the influence of government in rendering so many American jobs meaningless. And speaking of jobs, look at what Seattle;s leftist leaders have done - on purpose - to job creation there:

Seattle’s Tarnished Dream
A generous safety net doesn’t mean much if you can’t find jobs or afford housing.

What went wrong?

Lots. Social benefits for the poor aren’t worth much if the poor can’t afford housing in the city that offers them. A family looking to find a place to live in Seattle must navigate a market where the median two-bedroom apartment lists for more than $2,600 per month. Lower-income families have been priced out into the suburbs. Drive south from Seattle into neighboring Tukwila, and you’ll see the child-poverty rate nearly triple, from 10 percent to almost 30 percent.

Remember - this was done to Seattle on purpose.

If Joe Biden is elected, the effort to remove him by those now supporting him will begin the day after the election and it will not be as crude as rounding up a Yale psychiatrist to testify to his dementia in Congress or shaming the White House physician to give him the Montreal Cognitive Assessment Test in the manner that the Left went after Donald Trump. It will be far more insidious and successful: leaked stories to the New York Times and Washington Post from empathetic White House insiders will speak of how  “heroically” Biden is fighting his inevitable decline –and how gamely he tries to marshal his progressive forces even as his faculties desert him. We would read about why Biden is a national treasure by sacrificing his health to get elected and then nobly bowing out as he realized the cost of his sacrifice on his person and family.

Democratic National Committee platform mentions ‘whites’ 15 times, all damning

They hate half the country. 

Now let's look at the American media:

The Media and the Virus
American press coverage of Covid-19 was first dismissive, then alarmist—but always condescending.

As it unfolded in the media, the story of the pandemic was initially that of a nonevent. On January 31, Vox ran a supposedly comprehensive “explainer” about the coronavirus. There was no need for Americans to wear protective face masks, Vox said, and “really no reason to worry.” On Twitter, Vox was still more blunt: “Is this going to be a deadly pandemic? No.” The hectoring tone and sham certitude are Vox specialties. But Vox wasn’t alone in dismissing the virus. USA Today, the Washington Post, Canada’s National Post, and many other outlets treated the Wuhan virus (as it was then known) less as a matter of objective concern than an instance of mass hysteria.

Their cardinal error, in almost every case, was to rely on the WHO, an organization at best egregiously mistaken and at worst politically compromised, carrying water for the Chinese Communist Party and President Xi Jinping.

If a video is viral, who cares if it’s fake?

Welcome to the age of unreality

Remember, for the Left, which includes almost all the media, truth means the Leninist concept of Revolutionary Truth, and that is how they speak and act and write and broadcast. All the time. 

Like this:

New FBI Notes Re-Debunk Major NYT Story, Highlight Media Collusion To Produce Russia Hoax

The New York Times in 2017 falsely reported that the Trump campaign had 'repeated' contacts with Russian intelligence officials during the 2016 campaign, and instead of being held accountable for publishing lies, the story's authors received Pulitzer prizes.

Deepfake Journalist Is a Terrifying Sign of Things to Come

We have entered a time when there is not merely fake news, but fake journalists. That is, byines and images of a writer who does not exist in the real world. We are entering the time of Matrix reality, where material and virtual reality are merging.

Nets’ Portland Coverage Evaporates After Antifa Attempted to MURDER Agents

Wednesday night saw a major escalation in the conflict at the federal courthouse in Portland, Oregon as Antifa terrorists and rioters barricaded federal agents inside the building and tried to set the building ablaze. It was a provocation that could have killed the untold number of agents in the building. Luckily, Antifa failed. But during the Thursday evening newscasts of ABC, CBS, and NBC, the Portland coverage largely evaporated, with only NBC Nightly News daring to downplay the attempted murder.

Fox Sports to add virtual crowds to MLB ballparks

Fox Sports announced Thursday it will include computer-generated fans in otherwise empty stadiums for its telecasts this season, starting on Saturday.

“We believe that what we’re doing is creating a natural viewing experience,” said Fox Sports Vice President Brad Zager. “Sports is supposed to be an escape and when people have that escape we want it to feel as normal as possible when there’s very little normalcy, like a crowd at a baseball game on a Saturday."

"We’re not looking to fool everyone. We know it is a virtual crowd. But we also know how jarring watching a game in an empty stadium is on TV," Zager added. 

And that's a wrap.

Link this, sucker!

Fertility rate: 'Jaw-dropping' global crash in children being born

Why is this a problem?You might think this is great for the environment. A smaller population would reduce carbon emissions as well as deforestation for farmland.

"That would be true except for the inverted age structure (more old people than young people) and all the uniformly negative consequences of an inverted age structure," says Prof Murray.

The study projects:

• The number of under-fives will fall from 681 million in 2017 to 401 million in 2100.

• The number of over 80-year-olds will soar from 141 million in 2017 to 866 million in 2100.

Prof Murray adds: "It will create enormous social change. It makes me worried because I have an eight-year-old daughter and I wonder what the world will be like."

Who pays tax in a massively aged world? Who pays for healthcare for the elderly? Who looks after the elderly? Will people still be able to retire from work?

"We need a soft landing," argues Prof Murray. ...

Prof Ibrahim Abubakar, University College London (UCL), said: "If these predictions are even half accurate, migration will become a necessity for all nations and not an option.
"To be successful we need a fundamental rethink of global politics. 

"The distribution of working-age populations will be crucial to whether humanity prospers or withers."

‘We Teeter On The Brink Of Catastrophe’

"The center cannot hold. We teeter on the brink of catastrophe."

The Revolution Is Winning
Radicals from the 1960s and 1970s now hold powerful positions in government and academia

Twenty Years A Fool: My Long Journey Home From The Left

Elizabeth Nickson’s story has all the makings of a Hollywood bio pic: A Westmount exile, who rebels against power and privilege, becomes a globe-trotting leftist journalist chronicling the great revolutionary narratives of her time. Then she sets out to discover the awful truth about her patriarchal 400-year-old colonist clan and everything changes. But Hollywood won’t touch her script because what she finds are eternal truths, about love, charity, sacrifice, Christianity and genuine freedom. ...

"The first thing I discovered was that they were Christian. And I mean very, very Christian. This was unnerving since on the intellectual left, faith in God, and particularly Christ, signifies a weak mind. But these people were anything but weak."

Historic Moon Landing Footage Has Been Enhanced by AI, And The Results Are Incredible

That is no exaggeration.

Why Rioters Will Eventually Turn Their Rage On Christianity If Not Stopped
The outrage over statues and the 'white' depictions of Christ is meant to detract us from the real endgame: the 'canceling' of Christianity itself.

The dream of Marxism is to eradicate Western civilization and replace it with itself; its reaction to the legitimate evils that have been committed by Occidentals is not reform but obliteration.

Marxism assumes that because the windows are dirty and cracked, the entire house must be demolished. We see this same hatred today in the insurrections occurring right now. There is no reason for mobs pulling down statues of Ulysses S. Grant or Hans Christian Heg or calling for statues of Abraham Lincoln as the Great Emancipator to be removed.

But if Western Civilization is evil, that means all the elements that went into creating Western Civilization must also be destroyed. That includes Christianity.

Connecticut pathologist’s study shows CDC coronavirus test kits generate 30% false positive results
Other issues with the COVID-count include motorcycle fatality classified as COVID-19 death, Rhode Island reporting 113 false positive results, and Florida labs lacking negative COVID-19 results.

Democrats, The Party Of Science (Fiction)
A record going back decades.

Has America 2020 become like Germany's Weimar Republic?

Yet there are some disturbing parallels, or at least echoes, of what happened during the Weimar years. First, the very emergence (or re-emergence) in the US of ideologically inspired rioting, looting, and street violence. Second, the fact that at least some of the violent factions – like Antifa – appear to be systematically organised and funded, with fairly sophisticated recruitment, training, and communications capabilities. Third, there is the truly disturbing fact that violence seems to winked at – if not actively encouraged – by sympathetic office-holders and by the ever-more-politically-one-sided media, in thrall to the political Left.

(In Weimar Germany, too, the political armies represented the political parties, and they were protected by office-holders – and also by the courts – which were sympathetic to them. In the Weimar Republic, it was especially right-wing governments and judges who winked at right-wing or Nazi violence. Hitler, for example, was liable for severe punishment, or even the death penalty, for the Beer Hall Putsch – his attempted coup by armed force in Bavaria in 1923. Instead, after a trial by sympathetic judges, he served less than nine months “fortress confinement” in Landsberg Prison, where he  was accommodated comfortably and free to write, or rather to dictate, Mein Kampf.) 

Politically-inspired rioting, looting, arson; bitter racial and ethnic grievances and divisions; deepening ideological antipathies. Colleges and universities that foster one-sided extemism. (The Nazis were especially strong in the Weimar-era universities.) Public officials and media who minimise or cover for violence – creating an atmosphere of impunity for one side in the political struggle. None of these are healthy symptoms.

History – thankfully – may not repeat itself. It’s worrisome though, or at least rather creepy, when it begins to rhyme.

Let's link to everything!

In no particular order:

Vote-by-mail would create chaos and distrust in November
Which is of course the whole point.
_____________

Scamocracy in America, by Angelo Codevilla
How a fraudulent ruling class plundered our most precious inheritance.
_____________

Press Now Plumbs Its Own Depths Of Depravity
However, I do not think they reached bottom yet.
_____________

Narcissists, Psychopaths, and Manipulators Are More Likely To Engage in 'Virtuous Victim Signaling,' Says Study
"The consequences and predictors of emitting signals of victimhood and virtue," published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, by University of British Columbia researchers.
_____________

Crushing an Inwood eatery just because you don’t like how its owner voted
This is how the Left works: "if your oh-so-tolerant, oh-so-open-minded progressive customers find out about your grave political transgressions, they might just organize a boycott campaign against your firm and seek to destroy your livelihood." As they are also trying to do with Goya foods right now.
_____________

Cult Programming in Seattle -- The city is training white municipal employees to overcome their “internalized racial superiority.”
 In conceptual terms, the city frames the discussion around the idea that black Americans are reducible to the essential quality of “blackness” and white Americans are reducible to the essential quality of “whiteness”—that is, the new metaphysics of good and evil.
_____________

Princeton students cyberbullied, called racist for their open letter defending academic freedom
American colleges and universities have been educationally destroyed. Academic freedom is now being defined by universities' administrators as a white supremacist construct.
_____________

America Held Hostage -- This is how the Left campaigns to remove President Trump

We’re in the middle of a chicken game, where the Left tells us they’ll let this go on as long as Trump is president. The liberal media will ignore the riots, the liberal mayors will tell the local police to stand down, the liberal prosecutors will promptly release anyone arrested. Try to defend yourself, and you’ll find yourself prosecuted.

The message is: this is what you’ll get, America, if you reelect Trump. Elect our guy, and the madness will stop, pronto. A Democratic president would forcefully suppress the riots without a peep from the press. But until then we’re held hostage.

They don’t even need a candidate. They can run Biden from his basement.

____________

You Might Not Be Interested in China, But China Is Interested in You
A review of You Will Be Assimilated: China’s Plan to Sino-form the World by David Goldman. "Biden, like previous administration leaders of both parties and Congresses, including Trump, has no cogent China strategy."
____________

Margaret Thatcher on Socialism: 20 of Her Best Quotes
"There is no such thing as 'safe' socialism. If it’s safe, it’s not socialism. And if it's socialism, it’s not safe. The signposts of socialism point downhill to less freedom, less prosperity, downhill to more muddle, more failure. If we follow them to their destination, they will lead this nation into bankruptcy."  
___________

This, too:

__________

And finally, what hath the riots and the MSM's unabashed celebration of them and Defund the Police wrought? This: Colt Resumes Civilian AR-15 Production as Gun Sales Soar Across US. 

Need to know info

America's Jews and Christians Are Failing the Test of Their Lives
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2020/06/23/americas_jews_and_christians_are_failing_the_test_of_their_lives_143520.html

C.S. Lewis on Fake News.
It is not encouraging. https://parkersettecase.com/2017/02/21/c-s-lewis-on-fake-news/

Raheem Kassam says the Democratic Party has declared war on America and its institutions. 
Stating the obvious is sometimes necessary.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/raheem-kassam-says-democratic-party-022911031.html

Nice to see others catching up to what I wrote a week or so after the 2016 election: America's low-intensity civil war.
https://senseofevents.blogspot.com/2016/11/americas-low-intensity-civil-war.html

Why socialism always fails
Key word: Always 
https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/why-socialism-always-fails/

It’s Not Mindless Violence We’re Seeing. It’s a Violent Mindset.
There are 100 years of history behind the street violence in our country today.
https://stream.org/its-not-mindless-violence-were-seeing-its-a-violent-mindset/

You better believe it is not mindless because these people have definite targets in mind:

When Marxist Mobs Come for the Liberals
Understand that the Marxist radicals in the streets condemn liberals and progressives just as severely as white supremacists.
https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/06/marxist-mobs-are-coming-after-liberals-daniel-greenfield/

Why Is The Mob Winning?
issuesinsights.com/2020/06/29/why-is-the-mob-winning/

Defund the Thought Police
Yeah, good luck with that.
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2020/06/24/defund_the_thought_police__143523.html

Why Facts Don’t Matter to People
https://www.aier.org/article/why-facts-dont-matter-to-people/

Speaking of ignoring facts: Surrounded by Government Failure, Why Do People Still Believe?
https://www.aier.org/article/surrounded-by-government-failure-why-do-people-still-believe/

Nearly Half Of All COVID-Related Deaths In The US Are Directly Tied To Nursing Homes: Report
https://dailycaller.com/2020/06/28/covid-nursing-homes-pandemic-deaths/

Are You An Oppressor Or Among The Oppressed? Is ‘Critical Theory’ Biblical?
The answer is no.
https://hillfaith.blog/2020/06/29/are-you-the-oppressor-or-one-of-the-oppressed-is-critical-theory-biblical/

Welcome to full-on socialism, Comrades! In the Still of the Night: Those peaceful protestors in that occupy zone in Seattle…
The law there is only the law of the jungle.
http://americandigest.org/in-the-still-of-the-night-those-peaceful-protestors-in-that-occupy-zone-in-seattle/

Readings for today

By the way, blogger is really screwed up. When published, this post had about a dozen links other than the first two. And the URLs for are working now, even though they did not before. 

Jonathan Chait's article on progressive intolerance both describes and illustrates the problem:
The Revolution is Eating its Own

Speaking of progressive intolerance: UC Berkeley History Professor's Open Letter Against BLM, Police Brutality and Cultural Orthodoxy

This is where Leftism always winds up: Politics as Religion After George Floyd. This Isn't an Orwellian Novel. This Is Your Country

Who is the worst enemy of black people? 

Dershowitz On Statues: Liberals Are Doing What Stalin Did, "Erasing History"

Denounce your family, says NYT

The real history of Antifa

This is making the rounds:

A short reading list

Left-Libertarian Alliance Introduces House Bill to End Qualified Immunity for Police Officers

Police Union Privileges Revisited

New Undercover Video Blows Lid Off Antifa Domestic Terrorists

THE TRUTH BEHIND RACIAL DISPARITIES IN FATAL POLICE SHOOTINGS

The Myth of Systemic Police Racism
Hold officers accountable who use excessive force. But there’s no evidence of widespread racial bias.

Officer characteristics and racial disparities in fatal officer-involved shootings

Civil rights veteran Bob Woodson rejects claims of 'systemic racism,' says black struggles issue of class

“The White Man is the Jew of Liberal Fascism”

The 1619 Riots

I Must Object - A rebuttal to Brown University’s letter on racism in the United States

Violent Protest and the Intelligentsia

Shop owners reveal financial and emotional struggles of being looted -- because of course the best way to bring down racism is to loot and burn the businesses owned by racial and ethnic minorities.

And speaking of stupid people:

Die Linkensturm

Mainly tabs in my browser that I want to keep track of.

CNBC: Trump stock market rally is far outpacing past US presidents

City Journal: Journalists Against Free Speech

Once unswerving defenders of the First Amendment, members of the press increasingly support restricting expression.

New Criterion: Leninthink

On the pernicious legacy of Vladimir Lenin.

 Victor Davis Hanson: The Era of ‘Good’ Fascism?

If and when fascism comes to America, it will not arrive with jackboots, stiff arms, and military uniforms. To modern progressives, laws are fluid, to be enforced when they champion the “good,” to be ignored or subverted when they empower the “bad.”

NY Post: Donald Trump’s ‘they’re after you’ tweet says it all: Goodwin

SCOTUS: No Articles of Impeachment or a Trial Are Required For The Senate to Acquit President Trump

A thread listing some of what Trump has done in 3 years.

Claremont Review of Books: Odysseus Against the Matriarchy - A Homeric battle of the sexes.

David Goldman: ‘1917’ is the worst war movie ever. Sam Mendes’ new production’s strengths are vitiated by a wrongheaded conception of cinematic time

Upside Down Kingdom: Kanye West Is Preaching The Gospel, But Pope Francis Is Telling People Not To Evangelize

Geographic Evidence that Gun Deaths are Cultural

Trump saved the world

Once again, the experts were wrong. President Trump did not kill the world economy. In fact, the opposite happened.

Mayor Pete Buttigieg Lies About Jesus to Politicize Christmas

Washington Examiner: No, the Senate is not a jury, and other misconceptions about impeachment

Housing the homeless: “everyone deserves a granite countertop”

WSJ: Rank-and-File Workers Get Bigger Raises. Wage workers' incomes are rising at a greater rate than anyone else's.

Pay for the bottom 25% of wage earners rose 4.5% in November from a year earlier, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta. Wages for the top 25% of earners rose 2.9%. Similarly, the Atlanta Fed found wages for low-skilled workers have accelerated since early 2018, and last month matched the pace of high-skill workers for the first time since 2010.

The Week in Pictures: Year End Clearance Edition

And that's a wrap!

Update:

Best  movies on Disney-Plus, ranked

Why Non-Christians Don't Understand Christian Prayer

Democrats Just Betrayed Working-Class Americans To Appease Environmentalists

On Wednesday, there are facts that do not matter. And more.

What facts do not matter? "All of them," when it comes to verified firearms data. For example, the facts about "assault" rifles: Does it matter to the Left that Research refutes ‘assault weapon’ bans or  buybacks? Of course not. Or even that more than 20 years of FBI data show that such firearms pose relatively little threat to public safety? Nope.

So what's going on, then?

Gun control—whether an assault weapon ban, prohibition on concealed carry, or restrictions on gun shows—is the simulation of a tough-on-crime measure.

Gun control is how Democrats pretend that they are serious people thinking serious thoughts about a truly serious fact: that in America today, young black men are murdering other young black men -- and occasional bystanders, including children -- in carload lots. But almost all these killings are in jurisdictions where Democrats have ruled without a break for many years, usually decades. So that subject and associated facts are simply off limits.

Because:

So why do they beat their chests about confiscating guns from everyone else? Well, the pretense is one reason, but also they just hate firearms, they hate the (white) people who use them, and they do not care about the facts. After all, as Biden and AOC have both said, they deal in Truth, not mere facts. And the only important Truth in their minds is that they must be in charge, they must have control, and the rest of us must submit. Gun control is merely a presenting issue.

Iran attacks Saudi Arabia - the facts and background. Retired US Army Col. Austin Bay explains, no politics.

So the guy who made up "social construction" eats humble crow. Confessions of a Social Constructionist:

Back then, quite a few people disagreed with me. Almost nobody who hadn’t been exposed to such theories at a university could bring themselves to believe that sex was wholly a social construct, because such beliefs went against common sense. That’s what makes it so amazing that the cultural turnaround on this issue has happened so quickly. Reasonable people might readily admit that some—and maybe a lot—of gender identity is socially constructed, but did this really mean that sex doesn’t matter at all? Was gender solely based on culture? Yes, I would insist. And then I would insist some more. There’s nothing so certain as a graduate student armed with precious little life experience and a big idea.

And now my big idea is everywhere. It shows up especially in the talking points about trans rights, and policy regarding trans athletes in sports. It is being written into laws that essentially threaten repercussions for anyone who suggests that sex might be a biological reality. Such a statement, for many activists, is tantamount to hate speech. If you take the position that many of my ’90s-era debating opponents took—that gender is at least partly based on sex, and that there really are two sexes (male and female), as biologists have known since the dawn of their science—uber-progressives will claim you are denying a trans person’s identity, which is to say, wishing ontological harm upon another human being.

If you don't know exactly what "social construction" means, read the whole article and also my essay on linguistic deconstructionism.

As I said years ago, now more and more people are realizing that the global warming scare is really just The Perfect Trojan Horse For Tyranny.

So just pray for atheists in secret, as Jesus said to do. Not sure I care what they want:

Ah, those peaceful, placid socialist Swedish people! Wait, what ... ? Even Swedish Socialism was Violent.

Violent socialism? There has in fact never been another kind. When Sweden was full socialist from the 1930s to the 1970s, their,

... welfare system developed in explicit conjunction with a violent and coercive eugenics policy, intended to ensure its fiscal solvency and prevent abuses of its programs by persons who were deemed genetically “unfit” by the state.

One of the priorities socialist governments always have, everywhere they come into power, is to start identifying what classes of people they are going to kill. Because socialism is based on class struggle, and you better believe that all classes are not equal when socialists take over.

We gotcher UFOs rat cheer! The Navy Says Those UFO Videos Are Real. Which is to say, the videos are real, but the Navy is not saying the UFOs are. They are “unexplained aerial phenomena,” doncha no. Like this:



And finally... 


Ya'll have a nice day!

The Tuesday Madhouse

Gallup: 8 percent of Americans are either vegetarian or vegan. Meanwhile, Democrat candidates are insisting that Americans - Kamala Harris and Andrew Yang said the whole world - have to stop eating meat. 

So the winning 2020 campaign platform is to tell 92 percent of Americans that you will make them stop eating foods they love. Please, please, please keep saying this, Democrats, louder and more frequently. 

The brutal childhood of New York elites, it's just horrible. Especially When the Culture War Comes for the Kids. So a man discovers that the political culture he voted for and supported his entire voting-age life is terrible for his children. But I missed where he said that he would vote differently from now on.

If you ain't got no abilities, you don't get no needs. In which a high school teacher in 1951 explained why "Socialism Eventually Results in a Living Death." Just read it. I will relate this directly to our day when I finish my essay on the Left's proposal everyone older than 75 should be given only hospice-level medical care.

Gun control depends on whose voting block is being controlled, not who is being gunned.
Democrats have been screaming for years that anyone who is named on the No-Fly List should have his/her Second Amendment rights immediately revoked. I wrote at some length about that stupidity. The NF List is nothing at all but a list of names. Absolutely no other information is on the list. So if your name is James Smith - the most common name in the United States - and one of the 40,000 men named James Smith skips a bail hearing, resulting in that name being placed on the NF List - then you do not get to fly, along with all 40,000 other men named James Smith.

So when a Republican Congressman proposed that known violent-gang members be red-flagged at the federal level to prohibit them from buying firearms, you would think that the Democrats would be ecstatic that at last Republicans have come around to red-flag laws and that they would enthusiastically agree with the amendment to the bill. To which I can only reply:

Because of course they didn't. Too many locked-down Democrats votes were at stake.

I wrote three years ago why the gun control debates were over, and that was long before Beto started cussing in a national debate about confiscating guns. From 2016:

My liberal colleagues don't know anything about guns. They do not know what the gun-crime rate is in America, what it's trendline is and they do not know that the most heavily gun-controlled cities in the country also have the highest murder rate. They do not know that one of those cities, Chicago, suffers an Orlando-equivalent every month. Every. Month. (And it's getting worse.) 

They do not try to assess whether their same old ideas about banning "assault rifles" would be workable. They do not know what the effect of the 1994-2004 ban was. They cannot define what an "assault rifle" is except to parrot Obama's latest bumper-sticker-slogan, "military-style weapons." They do not know that Obama himself has said that the Second Amendment protects the right of individual Americans to own firearms. They do not know that the US Supreme Court has ruled the same in multiple cases (and the few who do know simply dismiss the rulings as wrong). 

They do not know because they do not care. They just want firearms to be outlawed for everyone, everywhere. That being so, actual knowledge about the difference between automatic and semi-automatic, between clip and magazine, between the No Fly List and the Terrorist Watchlist and the crushing implications of Democrats' unConstitutional desire to dispense with due process to forbid people from buying guns -- all such information is irrelevant and unimportant. They just want everyone to be disarmed.  

That's why the gun-control debate in the country is over.

But now even Democrats agree that thanks to Beto, the debate is really over. And more and more voters are going to comprehend that,

Democrats regard the Constitution as an illegitimate product of white supremacy, written by a bunch of dead white males who were racists. Why should it command any respect? In their eyes, it doesn’t. Once they achieve power, it will be a dead letter.

Democrats have adopted the Erdogan philosophy: democracy is a streetcar. When you get to your stop, you get off. Let them win one more election, and the Constitution will protect no one. Bernie Sanders has made this explicit. Power is an opportunity to jail your opponents. For a crime? No. Who needs a crime?

Speaking of gun control:

How amazing is America's semi-socialized medical system? It's so good that even the dead get health care.

Reminds me of the old saw, "My grandfather voted Republican every election of his life right up until the day he died. And after that, he voted Democrat."

And that's a wrap.

The September 12 list

Remember when IPCC chief Ottmar Edenhofer  said that the purpose of climate science was not protecting the climate, but wealth transfer? 

Yes, he said that. Well, now comes the clearest and most straightforward explanation so far on why climate change is a hoax to begin with.

Get read for a fact-free, reason-free Democrat-candidate debate tonight. But there will be plenty of impenetrable, gloomy rage.

How do you make liberals' heads explode? Like this:

Democrat Chief Justice Roger Taney predicted this would come about in the infamous Dred Scott decision:

For if they were so received, and entitled to the privileges and immunities of citizens, it would exempt them from the operation of the special laws and from the police regulations which they considered to be necessary for their own safety. It would give to persons of the negro race, who were recognized as citizens in any one State of the Union, the right to enter every other State whenever they pleased, singly or in companies, without pass or passport, and without obstruction, to sojourn there as long as they pleased, to go where they pleased at every hour of the day or night without molestation, unless they committed some violation of law for which a white man would be punished; and it would give them the full liberty of speech in public and in private upon all subjects upon which its own citizens might speak; to hold public meetings upon political affairs, and to keep and carry arms wherever they went. And all of this would be done in the face of the subject race of the same color, both free and slaves, and inevitably producing discontent and insubordination among them, and endangering the peace and safety of the State.

Speaking of guns, did you know that the Constitution delegates the authority to Congress to require that all members of the national militia, as defined in Title 10, US Code, keep military-type firearms and ammunition in their homes? Well, it does.

And here is the definition of the militia, Title 10:

§246. Militia: composition and classes(a) The militia of the United States consists of all able-bodied males at least 17 years of age and, except as provided in section 313 of title 32, under 45 years of age who are, or who have made a declaration of intention to become, citizens of the United States and of female citizens of the United States who are members of the National Guard.(b) The classes of the militia are—(1) the organized militia, which consists of the National Guard and the Naval Militia; and(2) the unorganized militia, which consists of the members of the militia who are not members of the National Guard or the Naval Militia.

That is a complete copy and paste, btw, nothing omitted.

Americans are too wealthy! And their money is in the wrong hands - namely, yours and mine. So Elizabeth Warren's new campaign slogan may as well be, "All your money are belong to me." And she hates retirees. 

Who owns the vast wealth of America? Old folks. According to the Federal Reserve, households headed by people over the age of 55 own 73% of the value of domestically owned stocks, and the same share of America’s total wealth. ...  

A socialist might see injustice in that inequality. But seniors know this wealth gap is the difference between the start and the finish of a career of work and thrift, making the last mortgage and retirement payments rather than the first. Seventy-two percent of the value of all domestically held stocks is owned by pension plans, 401(k)s and individual retirement accounts, or held by life insurance companies to fund annuities and death benefits. This wealth accumulated over a lifetime and benefits all Americans.  

That means it’s your life savings on the line—not the bankroll of some modern-day John D. Rockefeller—when Democrats push to limit companies’ methods of enriching their shareholders. ... Yet among all the Democratic taxers and takers, no one would hit retirees harder than Sen. Elizabeth Warren. Her “Accountable Capitalism Act” would wipe out the single greatest legal protection retirees currently enjoy—the requirement that corporate executives and fund managers act as fiduciaries on investors’ behalf. To prevent union bosses, money managers or politicians from raiding pension funds, the 1974 Employee Retirement Income Security Act requires that a fiduciary shall manage a plan “solely in the interest of the participants and beneficiaries . . . for the exclusive purpose of providing benefits to participants and their beneficiaries.” The Securities and Exchange Commission imposes similar requirements on investment advisers, and state laws impose fiduciary responsibility on state-chartered corporations.  

Sen. Warren would blow up these fiduciary-duty protections by rewriting the charter for every corporation with gross receipts of more than $1 billion. Every corporation, proprietorship, partnership and limited-liability company of that size would be forced to enroll as a federal corporation under a new set of rules. Under this new Warren charter, companies currently dedicated to their shareholders’ interest would be reordered to serve the interests of numerous new “stakeholders,” including “the workforce,” “the community,” “customers,” “the local and global environment” and “community and societal factors.”

And of course, that means people who have contributed nothing to your retirement or mine would have the final socialist say in who get our money. And it won't be you or me. Because fairness, comrades!

Enlaces para pensar - 2 de septiembre

Socialist medicine will work great! Just look at the VA! When my liberal friends tell me that government-controlled medical care is unarguably the best America could ever get, I always reply, "So show me. Fix the VA and when it is running just like you want Medicare for All to work, tell me and I will take you more seriously." Then they get mad at me.

Well, here ya go: Officials are investigating 11 suspicious deaths at a VA hospital. Two have been ruled homicides.

But wait! There's more! Horror: VA Failed To Stop Pathologist Who Misdiagnosed Thousands — And Showed Up Drunk For Work

My point is not that stuff like this never happens in our current, private hospitals. It is that government bureaucrats always protect their own, and when the medical staff becomes, basically, another group of bureaucrats, then you get more of that code of omerta, and it is protected by the bureaucracy. Remember 2015's Gold King Mine Spill, caused exclusively by federal EPA employees? How many federal bureaucrats got fired or disciplined for it? Zero.

Stanford University makes segregation official policy. Stanford pushes separate physics course for minority students

• In an effort to achieve “diversity” within its physics department, Stanford University is offering a separate physics course in order to ensure retention of “underrepresented” physics majors.
• The initiative also includes two other physics courses focusing entirely on “diversity” and “inclusion” within the discipline.

The second bullet means that the "two other physics courses" are not actually physics courses. They are political courses. Stanford says as much:

Other courses offered to bridge the supposed diversity problem at Stanford include two one-unit physics courses that address not physics itself, but rather concepts of diversity within the discipline.

But they will count toward fulfilling a physics major, you betcha. In fact, they will soon be required for a B.S. in physics if they are not already.

Science courses used to be about, well, science. Now, like everything else the Left touches, they are increasing about political indoctrination. Not even the Soviet Union went that far.

How long will it be until you board an airliner designed by engineers whose major in aeronautical engineering had a principal focus on diversity and inclusion in engineering? Good luck with that!

"Religion is a check on moral relativism, so naturally the left hates it." Well, Left-wing politics is a religion and it does not tolerate competition. Like this: WBAP Morning News: Beto Supporters Boo Man Who Said America Needs to ‘Return to Jesus’

At a recent Town Hall event, Beto O’Rourke supporters booed a man who told the crowd that America needs to “return to Jesus” in order to heal. 

You will need counseling after clicking this link: Truly awful, idiotic, and just plain inexplicable but real kitchens in real houses. Don't say I didn't warn you. 

And then there are the living rooms. Living Room Design Fails So Bad, They'll Scare the Living Daylights Out of You

Love that it is for sale for more than one million dollars.

Shooting down drones is now easy. Well, for now. New military system could aloows soldiers to eliminate drones with one shot

With the system, the user selects and locks onto the target, and as soon as the trigger is squeezed, the system calculates the target’s movement and predicts its next location by means of advanced image processing and algorithms. SMASH 2000 prevents the bullet being fired until the target is precisely in its crosshairs.

It is also being tested by US armed forces.

"Senegal was not a hellhole." What I Learned in the Peace Corps in Africa: Trump Is Right

Very poor people can lead happy, meaningful lives in their own cultures' terms.  But they are not our terms.  The excrement is the least of it.  Our basic ideas of human relations, right and wrong, are incompatible.

Take something as basic as family.  Family was a few hundred people, extending out to second and third cousins.  All the men in one generation were called "father."  Senegalese are Muslim, with up to four wives.  Girls had their clitorises cut off at puberty.  (I witnessed this, at what I thought was going to be a nice coming-of-age ceremony, like a bat mitzvah or confirmation.)  Sex, I was told, did not include kissing.  Love and friendship in marriage were Western ideas.  Fidelity was not a thing.  Married women would have sex for a few cents to have cash for the market.

What I did witness every day was that women were worked half to death.  Wives raised the food and fed their own children, did the heavy labor of walking miles to gather wood for the fire, drew water from the well or public faucet, pounded grain with heavy hand-held pestles, lived in their own huts, and had conjugal visits from their husbands on a rotating basis with their co-wives.  Their husbands lazed in the shade of the trees.

Yet family was crucial to people there in a way Americans cannot comprehend.

The Ten Commandments were not disobeyed – they were unknown.  The value system was the exact opposite.  You were supposed to steal everything you can to give to your own relatives.  There are some Westernized Africans who try to rebel against the system.  They fail.

Read the whole thing.

Have a great Labor Day! Even though This Labor Day, Unions Are Gunning for Workers' Free Speech Rights

What you need to know today - 8/29

OK, you don't want Trump. But exactly what do you want? And the answer is that you do not know. 

To counter every signature Trump issue, there is almost no rational alternative advanced. That void helps explain the bizarre, three-year litany of dreaming of impeachment, the emoluments clause, the Logan Act, the 25th Amendment, the Mueller special-counsel investigation, Stormy Daniels and Michael Avenatti, Trump’s tax returns, White Supremacy!, Recession! — and Lord knows what next.

When the family is vanishing, you only have "identity." ‘The Great Scattering’: How Identity Panic Took Root in the Void Once Occupied by Family Life 

Let’s try a new theory: Our macro-politics have become a mania about identity because our micropolitics are no longer familial. This, above all, is what happened during the decades in which identity politics went from being a phrase in an obscure quasi-radical document to a way of being that has gone on to transform academia, law, media, culture and government.

Yes, racism, sexism and other forms of cruelty exist, and are always to be deplored and countered. At the same time, the timeline of identity politics suggest another source. Up until the middle of the twentieth century (and barring the frequent foreshortening of life by disease or nature) human expectations remained largely the same throughout the ages: that one would grow up to have children and a family; that parents and siblings and extended family would remain one’s primal community; and that, conversely, it was a tragedy not to be part of a family. The post-1960s order of sexual consumerism has upended every one of these expectations.

Who am I? is a universal human question. It becomes harder to answer if other basic questions are problematic or out of reach. 

There are fires in the Amazon. But "the Amazon" is not burning. The Great Amazon Fire Fraud

Hysterics (like President Macron) robotically describe the Amazon rain forest as the Earth’s “lungs.” And it is true that over the years, there has been some deforestation in Brazil and other countries in the Amazon region, as they continue to develop. But what liberals never mention is that overall, the Earth is getting greener. Forested areas, worldwide, are growing, not shrinking, in large part due to the increasing concentration of CO2–plant food–in the atmosphere. (CO2 is great for the environment.) You can see this easily in satellite photographs. Deserts are shrinking and vegetated areas are growing.

Segregation today. Segregation tomorrow. Segregation forever! Kentucky district to open STEM school to support girls of color

The district plans to open the academy for the 2020-21 school year. It will initially serve about 150 sixth graders with plans to expand to serve grades six through eight. The district expects the school to serve a total of 450 students from all over the county. The district opened a similar school last year aimed at supporting boys of color.

So racial segregation is official government policy in Kentucky. Well.

Today's "tell me another one" entry.  From presidential candidate Kamala Harris:

Let's fill in the rest of the story.

"The root of this is the strange obsession with racism that has become a religion of its own over the last two decades. The anointing of Obama as the completion of the Second Founding, the event that was supposed to wash the stains of slavery, segregation and racism from America, instead ushered in an era of race panic. The Left is in a near frenzy over racism, which they now see everywhere. It is an obsession to the point where even the so-called Right is infected by it." Read the rest at Civic Anti-Racism.

I got that from Gerard's link-fest so go there and read all his good stuff (after you are done here, of course!).

And finally:

Der Link zeug tägliche Post

Hey, ya want ya some Medicare for All? Well, a self-described "left wing liberal" physician who worked for several years in one of the federally-funded test locations says to do this:

OK, actually, she wrote this in I Was a Physician at a Federally Qualified Health Center. Here's Why I No Longer Believe Government Health Care Can Work.:

So, I put my head down. I shut my mouth. I stopped suggesting improvements or changes that might make the system more efficient and improve patient care. I humbled myself before my managers and administrators, saying “yes, sir,” and “no, ma’am.”

This technique worked like a charm. No one screamed at me anymore. I even got a large raise.

But inside I seethed. My blood pressure spiked. My neck ached. I was anxious and depressed.

The day that my government contract expired was one of the happiest days of my life. I was free. Never again would I sell myself into indentured servitude—not to the government or any other agency.

Because doctors bail when they become serfs of the state. Why the UK Suddenly Is Suffering from a Physician Shortage -- If only someone had warned them.

The NHS is in a state of perpetual crisis characterized by doctor shortages, long wait times, and rationing. The UK lost 441 general practitioners last year and had 11,576 unfilled vacancies for doctors as of last June.

But in the last six years, 585 surgical practices have closed down, affecting 1.9 million patients. Last year alone, 138 surgery facilities closed their doors, up from 18 in 2013.

But it's okay, comrades, because fairness!

Speaking of socialism, what this country needs is to make pencil manufacturing great again! Elizabeth Warren's Pitch for 'Economic Patriotism' Is Full of Intellectual Dishonesty and Economic Fallacies

"There are a lot of giant companies who like to call themselves 'American,' but face it: they have no loyalty or allegiance to America," she says in the video.

As proof, Warren points to the "famous no. 2 pencil," which is mostly manufactured in Mexico and China. Her video doesn't make clear why pencils should have to be made in America—or why that lack of good, pencil-making jobs in America is a problem.

That Warren chose to use pencils to illustrate the supposed need for "economic patriotism" is darkly hilarious to anyone familiar with "I, Pencil," Leonard Read's 1958 parable about the merits of free markets and comparative advantage. Reed's lesson is that no one on the planet has the means or knowledge to make an item as mundane and ubiquitous as a simple pencil. A pencil requires wood, graphite, brass, and rubber, but each component part is the result of supply chains that might stretch around the world—from the forests of the Pacific Northwest to the mines of Mexico to the factories of Indonesia.

But what does that have to do with election sound biting? We need a pencil factory here, dang it! And Warren is going to build that!

First thing we do is keep all the poor people poor. If you were a national leader and decided to make sure that poor people stayed that way, what would you do? Well, this, of course: 7 Things I'd Do if I Wanted to Keep Poor People Poor

First on the list? Socialism, baby! Because remember:

Speaking of destruction of the nuclear American family, The tragic — and overlooked — fallout from the ’60s sexual revolution.

The fracturing of the post-1960s family and the flight to collective identities have not only been occurring at the same time. As the timeline and other evidence show, they cannot be understood apart from one another.

Identity politics is also a product of the revolution in another way. Whether one looks left or right, to politics or culture, the question, “Who am I?” has become the most frantic of our time. Traditionally, that question has been answered at least in part via primordial relations: I am a sister, a daughter, a cousin, a mother, a grandmother.

When answers that revert to family identity are more attenuated than ever before, “Who am I?” gets answered in a different way. 

White privilege check!

But s'okay because the Obamas Strike Blow for Economic Justice, Donate Millions in Exchange for Massive Beachfront Estate: Former president conquers ‘wealth anxiety.’ 

What a relief, because for awhile there I was afraid that America was too racist for the Obamas to move to Martha's Vineyard. But I was wrong!

What are the seven deadly sins of progressivism? PEWSLAG, of course.

Long ago, there was a mnemonic for the seven deadly sins, PEWSLAG. In order, it meant Pride, Envy, Wrath, Sloth, Lust, Avarice, and Gluttony.  So common have the elements of PEWSLAG become in our time that they can no longer be considered as ‘The 7 Deadly Sins,” but rather as the PPAF, The Progressive Platform for America’s Future.

Let’s review the PPAF in greater detail:

Explained in detailed by the inimitable Gerard Vanderleun, who was a founding member of the SDS at UC-Berkeley back on the 60s and so knows what he is talking about.

Finally, some Truth here by the late Nabeel Qureshi.