It’s All a Grand Plan (swallow this post after you read it!) – A Blast From The Past From November 4 2013
So two days ago a friend sent me this “quote”:
“America is like a healthy body and its resistance is threefold: its patriotism, its morality, and its spiritual life. If we can undermine these three areas, America will collapse from within.” – Josef Stalin
It appears it has been all over face book. It seemed wrong to me. I mean, it appeared on the order of “Ninety percent of quotes on the internet are wrong,” George Washington.
What appeared PARTICULARLY wrong was, so to say, the “psychology” of the quote. It’s clearly how some Americans view America, but is it how Josef Stalin would see it?
Let’s leave aside the whole question of how much he believed in communism or whether he did. He was a psychopath, but that doesn’t mean he didn’t dress his wishes in some form of ideology, and if he did it was communism. If he believed in communism, the idea that America was “moral” is right out. In fact, we know he had this idea that America just pretty much was promiscuously commercial from his quote about selling us a rope. (And that one sounds real.)
In any case, whether he believed in communism or not, he would not say that aloud if he believed it. Think how bad it would be for someone continuously denouncing us for that criminally evil regime – capitalism – to say we were moral.
Besides, children, veddy bad news, but despite our puritan streak, no one in the rest of the world views us as moral. Mostly because we’re more open at our weirdness than they are. It’s like a friend tells me the Japanese are in general very straight-laced, which is why their porn is so wild. But HERE we get the porn and the tentacle anime and… and we assume that Japanese is a seething mass of bizarre and sex. That’s sort of how the rest of the world sees us. If you start an internet rumor that a fad of putting goldfish in your ears for sexual satisfaction is spreading in America, they’ll believe it. And they would probably even more so when murderous uncle Joe was alive.
The “America is a healthy body” is also something he would not say aloud. Because again, whether he believed communism or not, that was what they were selling to the masses, and in communist doctrine no capitalist country is healthy as such. (It’s in conflict, in contradiction, just waiting to be transitioned, you might say.)
Then we have “its spiritual life” – oh, BROTHER. Let alone that communists are atheists, and that there is a good chance Stalin saw his god in front of the shaving mirror every morning… Even if he subscribed to the idea that a spiritual life of some sort was good, he would look at us and think we had none.
Look, it’s unfair. It’s like our being the prudes that everyone else thinks are the class sluts, because we wear makeup and our skirt is a bit short (meaning we don’t pretend to be holier than thou) but as much as America is more religious than other Western countries, measurably, statistically, this is NOT how the world sees us. They see our multitude of religions. If you’re devout, how can you be friends with people who believe differently? Clearly, you’re not devout. They see our crazier manifestations – and that’s mostly what they see there, the snake handling sects, the spiritist sects, and then the fake churches like the idiots who picket soldiers funerals. It’s mostly what they see because it’s what their media finds “interesting” – and they think of our religion, here in America as somewhere between a carnival and a freak show.
Why would someone viewing that think of it as a strength? It would be more “Keep those crazy Americans busy with their crazy religions, they’re less likely to believe we’re infiltrating.”
Of all of that only patriotism makes sense, since communism is an international creed and us such believes that undermining patriotism is essential to its spread.
So, yes, I went to snopes and the quote is fake. Or at least “likely fake.” (Trust me, it’s fake.)
Which bring us to why I spent so much time analyzing it. No, it’s not to inure you about future bad quotes. They will go around, and all of us will fall for some of them sometime.
The reason I spent so much time introducing this is that when I went to Snopes, [it’s adorable that back then I still believed Snopes – SAH 2020] I found this listed under one particular kind of lie. The “The enemy is so clever” lie.
We’ve seen this with the Russians far too much and all through my life. “They’re so clever, that they engineered this and that and the other thing.” “They’re so brilliant, this is happening just according to their plan.”
Guys, take a deep breath, step back. If this is all according to their plan, it’s the only plan of theirs that ever went right. I mean, seriously, they couldn’t feed their own homeland with all those five years plans, but they can do a near hundred year plan to take over the rest of the world?
But Sarah, you’ll say, you say we’re still suffering from the effects of Soviet agit prop!
Oh, sure we are, but agit prop is not a careful plan. Look, communism is very good at proselytizing. Arguably it’s the one thing it’s good at. It hits, like all other communitarian doctrines, the part of the human brain that’s both looking for “fair” and longing for a return to childhood, with benevolent overseeing parents.
Put enough agit prop over there (and they put a lot) and some of it is going to hit and corrupt the vision of other countries. Besides, communism is so tailor made for intellectuals, explaining how things would be better if the intelligentsia ruled us.
BUT that is not a plan. Not unless it’s in the sense of “we do this, and this just might happen.” Witness for instance, that a plan would have come to fruition much earlier – like, before the USSR collapsed. Also, people that good at planning would have made sure that their system worked. (It is one of the funniest things about communism that they are central planners, but their plans never work. Okay, funny in a bitter way. I’m not laughing at the mass graves their delusions have caused.)
There is a tendency to look at trends we don’t like in society and things that aid ideologies we don’t approve of, and think that it’s all a fiendish plan.
Both sides do it. The left looked at the tea parties and panicked, because it doesn’t fit their conceptual universe for people to protest high taxes. So they invented the boogey man of the Koch brothers (rather libertarian old bachelors whom a friend who worked for them assured me are very nice.)
Soros is not on the same level – because, well, we KNOW he finances all sorts of left causes (and given his history, anyone who thinks he’s one the side of angels and works for good causes he endorses, should think again. Once you sell out your own people as a kid, well… you’re done, morally speaking. Particularly when you still brag about it as an old man.) And he has more money than the Kochs ever did.
But does that mean it’s all his “plan”? Is it all going according to his plan? Oh, please, guys – OWS. No, seriously. OWS. Yes, we all saw the ads on Craigslist, but nowhere did it say “must poop on police cars” okay?
He’s a man who wants to see the world burn and to that end tosses a lot of money at various disruptive causes. But he does not have a detailed plan, and everything does not go according to his plan, or you’d be looking at his face in a big screen every morning, while you did your mandated exercises. (Big Soros is watching you. Ick.)
Here’s the thing and the reason I don’t believe in the “conspiracy theory of history” except in the sense that some humans will look for power, and that the way they do it is always predictable: humans are strange.
No, seriously, humans are strange. There has never been a satisfactory enough theory to the way the individual human mind works. Oh, somewhat… but each school of psychology has hold of an end and no one has the full elephant. Which is why psychology remains a semi-soft science.
This simplifies somewhat when you have a crowd, but it’s still not conclusive. And when you have something like a country, which is a conglomerate of crowds… well…
History takes sudden turns, precipitated by events and one or two odd individuals in a crowd who don’t react the way you expect. “Scientific history” is poppycock. If it weren’t, the United States wouldn’t exist.
Yes, it is all explainable in retrospect, how we came to be. It’s easy to make up just-so stories about the past.
I doubt there’s ever been a human plan that worked, throughout history, and those of us who believe in a divine plan also believe it has taken some weird turns to accommodate us. Or as grandma would say “G-d writes straight on crooked lines.” (Or for those of you don’t believe, yes, those could be “just so” stories too, but if it’s all the same with you, I’ll throw my lot in with grandma. You see, I knew her, and I trust her judgement.)
We’re not G-d. Yes, I know. Very upsetting. But we’re not. This means that any plan that takes more than a generation will take some very weird turns, go sideways, and slide upside down, in the game of telephone that’s multi-generational belief.
Take for instance old Joe’s supposed quote above. Even if it had been true, could he have predicted the effect of a massive demographic bulge on American culture which did most of the loosening of said culture? I doubt it. I think the man had a talent for killing and terror, but no demonstrable intelligence otherwise.
Then why are we attributing G-d like intelligence to him?
Well, both because it puts the other side in the light of traitors and because it means we can’t do anything – see how comfortable that is? We can’t do anything, so why try? We can be absolute lumps and lecture all our friends still trying to turn things around and save us from a crash with “You fools. It’s been planned for decades. There’s nothing you can do.” Which is very comfortable and morally superior.
I see it all the time, even now, even from respectable thinkers, about the debacle that is Obama Care. “They planned this all. It’s all incredibly smart. Game over, man.”
Oh, please. You don’t need to drink their ink. No one in their right mind could have planned that insanity. Did they plan for the plan to collapse into single payer? Surely. But not by the sheer incompetence of governmental administration.
We’re well outside their plan, guys. They’re the gang that can’t shoot straight. No, this doesn’t mean they’re completely ineffective. They’re very good at destruction and destruction is half of their job. BUT it means when their plan goes wrong (and it always does) there is an opening for us to come in, to save things, to fix things, to make things work the way we want.
Will it go exactly according to plan for us? Oh, heck no. BUT we can push it in the right direction and keep working.
We’re good at working and at building. That’s what we do.
This morning, I got up and I cleaned poop from the hallway. Our geriatric cat is having diarrhea.
Being a conservative/libertarian is sort of like that. You’re always cleaning poop you didn’t make. And you don’t want to, because you have no interest in power over others. But if you just leave it there, someone will slip on it and make a bigger mess.
It’s not a plan. It’s just that you know where the spray cleaner is, and the paper towels, so you do it. And you change what would otherwise have happened. Most of the time for the better.
Be of good cheer. Destruction is not a plan and incompetence is not a destination.
Giving up would be premature and despair is a sin. In the long run, destroyers always lose, and you always need the person who knows where the cleaner is kept and how to use the paper towels.
Square your shoulders and be alert. You, those you love, and perhaps the entire country depend on you. This is no time to go wobbly.
According To Hoyt 
Silly Sarah. You are supposed to have the post self destruct five seconds after reading it. Or “dispose of it in the usual manner” e.g. fire.
And now to read it
No, you’re supposed to burn it and THEN read it.
…I may have been binging on mission:impossible this weekend
Just don’t get Fluffy to burn it. Some of our other dragons, maybe, but Fluffy doesn’t have the level of control necessary. (And doesn’t want it, either.)
But then, who barbecues ants for the aardvark, if not Fluffy?
BBQ is slow heat. Not dragonfire burn. Fluffy curls up about it.
No grand plan (unless it’s by the Person Downstairs) but more likely is Group Think.
The architects of Obamacare openly stated, when they thought it would not become public, that they knew it would not succeed and that it would cause problems and that they would then use that to achieve their true goal which was a fully nationalized healthcare system in the mode of the British NHS. Even Obama in an apparence with SEIU stated that ‘we may not get there (referring to such a nationalized healthcare system) at all at once, but we will get there’
While it is folly to overstate the craftiness of ones opponents, it is equally folly to underestimate it as well.
Yeah, but they also think that nationalized health care will work. Thus proving again that intelligence is not the same thing as wisdom, and very bright people are often only very bright in very narrow areas, and very dumb at assuming that they’re bright outside those slices of fields… and unwilling to prove themselves wrong.
They don’t care whether it works or not as their goal is not a working healthcare system. Their goal is obtainment and maintenance of power so they can be the boot stamping on the face of humanity forever.
It is no accident that they are pursuing the VI Lenin trifecta of control of healthcare, finance and education (those things Lenin said were necessary for the Communists to achieve and maintain communists remaining in power).
Just because such systems have always collapsed under their own dead weight in the past doesn’t mean that they aren’t going to try to be the poster child for Einstein’s definition of insanity by doing the same thing again and expecting a different outcome.
Well, the useful idiots may care. This is why the British Socialist Party tried to spin their famous meme.
View at Medium.com
Yah, but they honestly didn’t expect it to fall apart so far so fast.
It’s still the law isn’t it. Modifying it is a lot easier than passing it in the first place.
On that note… Stalin…. appears the real way WW2 started was that Stalin tricked Hitler (Stalin’s unwitting patsy) into starting it. The goal, according to a contemporary source I read a while back, was to weaken Western Europe enough fighting one another that Stalin’s forces could conquer it without too much bother. Of course the plan didn’t survive contact with the enemy, and Mustache Boy was just as perfidious as Steel Man, but it *almost* worked — after all, it did let the USSR conquer what became the Eastern Bloc.
So, yeah. Don’t underestimate them. We’re still living with the fallout from the KGB’s demoralization operations (see Yuri Bezmenov), which succeeded beyond their wildest dreams, just a generation too late.
As to Soros, I’ve probably mentioned this before, but circumstantial evidence indicates he probably started as a KGB asset (no penniless 19 year old walks unhindered across a tightly closed border, and somehow lands in London with enough money for a top university). And of course after the USSR fell apart, having the morals of a stoat, he turned on the remains, raped Russian finances, and is reportedly unwelcome there to this day.
Why do you hate stoats?
Hmm. I should have said wharf rat, my bad!
[thinking]
More like a face-hugger.
(Come to think of it, now I want a face diaper decorated that way…)
for the cat:
Yon cat gives me a smile.
This does seem like a good time to open a tinfoil haberdashery.
Nah, a thin layer of aluminum does very little to attenuate electromagnetic waves. The hardcore Conspiracy Theorist demands a Mu-Metal whole-head helmet with neck guard!
That is not a happy cat, by the way.
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At my house, the ‘things that go bump in the night’ are cats.
No. Aluminium amplifies the mind control waves. You need real tin foil to block them.
You mean “Stand up straight with your shoulders back”.
Yeeeeah, but you see; we didn’t inherit the perfect system so we should abandon it completely and curse how evil it is. Adopting the enemy’s stance with slightly different window dressing always works ya’know.
She wrote this in 2013, before Jordan Peterson wrote his book – but good advice proliferates, doesn’t it? And comes around again, because it works.
I’ve never been able to stand up straight by trying to do it. Or pull my shoulders back by trying to do it. One of those “your instructions make no sense” things, because people without good posture have trouble with muscle memory for good posture. Maybe people who are taught good posture, like people in the military, can associate commands with the stance.
The Bob and Brad physical therapists guys say to put your arms back so that they make a W for “win”, a la Y M C A dance style. You can do this standing, sitting, or even lying down, at various times during the day, and it really helps me with posture.
I also like the “little cat” exercise from a choir workshop, which is basically deliberately shrinking down like a scared kitty, and then putting your shoulders back in a “cat reared back and ready to attack” position, and then relaxing from that.
My father attempted. My mother tried. Various physical therapists have, with patience and titanium thumbs, demonstrated… So I know *how* to stand up straight, and I try, I just don’t reflexively *do* it. I have set my monitor heights to induce less hunching, to encourage straightness.
Then I started weightlifting. And if you don’t keep a straight back under load, Bad Things will Happen. So I learned to keep my back perfectly straight… and I learned that my sore muscles will pull me straight.
Still not reflexive, but getting better!
The “mess with your weightlifter demonstration guy” variant was to stand with your back against a wall, make the W… and then reach upward without letting your arms leave the wall. Like doing squats against the wall – more difficult than one would think.
One of the Bob and Brad guys had one of the other younger physical therapists in his practice demonstrating this, and it looked like it might have been a tad painful on the day after he’d been lifting a lot of weights.
Today in happy news, Trump is expanding his play from “merely” California to include New York and Illinois.
Slightly related to that I discovered that the IL voter registration deadline isn’t. And I dealt with the blocking issues. (Reading TMIAHM and ST over the last week probably had nothing whatsoever to do with it)
It’s a cheap way for Trump to try to get votes and at the least give an appearance that he is making enough inroads in those states to get Democrats to divert money and other resources to those states, and thereby taking away from Democrats’ efforts in battleground states such as PA.
I think he knows, particularly with California, that it will be impossible to beat the margin of fraud in a statewide election. Perhaps he helps Republicans win a House seat or two.
At the absolute bare minimum he forces the other side to go on the defense. Taking the initiative forces your opponent to react to you, who knew?
No doubt this is Grand Heresy in some Conservative playbook.
Romney would have won in 2012 if he had shown half the aggressiveness in punching back that Trump has. And even though he would have been purely a creature of the swamp, he would have been denounced by the same Democratic Party propaganda arm as “the next Hitler” and ‘literally Hitler” the way Trump is now, and the way GWB was before.
There were a number of seats flipped in 2018 because Democrat vote-harvesting caught the Republicans by surprise — which means there are a number of House seats that can potentially be reclaimed.
The California Dems would not be so furious about GOP vote-harvesting efforts were that not the case.
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Note he’s not even in CO. That’s OUR margin of fraud.
I’ve noticed that even the most optimistic Electoral College maps have your state and mine (VA) blue.
We’re all fraud by mail, so…..
If the republicans win seats in the states with high margins of fraud… what has been done can be undone. Nowhere is it written that the margin of fraud shall be enough to hold their power forever (except in their playbooks and their expectations.)
I don’t expect it on this round. But if they flip a few seats, then a few more, and the 9th circus… things change. Slow and steady can win the race.
I will say, one of the first things the Republicans did when they took Texas was introduce a slate of voting security reforms, i clouding requiring members of both parties staff all polling places.
We should have a slate of proven vote security measures to implement in any state that does flip blue to red.
As shown by their efforts to put it in the CCP Virus bills they are pushing, it is clear that one of the first things Democrats will do if they win in November is to eliminate voter ID requirements, enact national fraud by mail and national ballot harvesting. They have made it clear that if they achieve power, they have no intention of ever surrendering it ever again.
That’s a good point, but I’m not sure there’s any lack of money. *Someone* is pouring millions of Democrat dollars into Montana, which is hardly a significant swing vote at any level. But one of the Dem candidates, while presenting herself as an outdoorswoman of the people, reportedly is a communist behind closed doors. And get rid of Daines, yeah, that solid pro-Trump vote in the Senate…
…I suspect they’re going to try to pull a Minnesota on us, and flip the state by taking over the handful of cities. We already had significant apparent vote fraud with the last Senate election, to ensure Tester-D (the most lobbying money of any congresscritter…why??) got re-elected.
There is A LOT of money pouring into Democrat races and somebody is going to spend the post-election period determining its source.
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IS he just messing with them?
Could be. Could be calculated.. if the Fraud Machine has limited resources then make the damn thing expend them where it will do the least damage. Or maybe ox have too much rye. Wait. Is 2020. No such thing as enough.
Thinking about it – what is the cost of a tweet? To Trump, the cost of his limited, valuable time. To the opposition party? Could be $24 million of mis-allocated resources here, $154 million there. Could be an election. Could be fifteen elections.
They’re up against a negotiator. Whom they pissed off, and let know they’re operating in bad faith. Not a wise move, there, chums.
Amen to that, and I don’t drink….
I prefer single pot still mash to rye mash … :shrug:
Given the name you go by here, that is no surprise. And there ain’t nothing wrong with single pot mash, I say.
Well, I wouldn’t be after objecting to learning, sez I, but I wouldn’t know what would be a good start, so.
God above, you could peel that bróg like a spud! 😀
I shall refrain. As for the single pot mash, I have little knowledge. As for ryes, I do not know what is available (should you be interested) where you might happen to be. I will say that the only truly disappointing rye I’ve had was “artificially aged” and while such a thing might one day be possible, I do not foresee experiencing it being successful.
What I have seen/been told is that Scottish whiskys (esp. peaty) tend to be smoky (though some experience peatiness as medical preservative…), Bourbon is sweet, rye is spicy (seems more an aftertaste or after-feel, to me). I presume in this that Irish Whisky is something of a baseline – it simply IS, and most all just is a particular variation on that theme. Oh, and wheat (if you can deal with it. Oddly, I can in everything EXCEPT whisk(e)y it seems!) adds some ‘smoothness’ somehow.
But the Ultimate Truth is: Drink what YOU like. If I ain’t buying it (or drinking it) it’s none of my business. And if I am drinking but NOT buying, it’s best to politely accept* or VERY politely decline.
* There is that class of liquors, etc. that are in the strange category of, “I would not buy this myself, but I will not object or turn down if offered.” and that is not a matter of price. There are plenty of things I do not buy simply as economics does not reasonably allow it. That/Those is/are different category.
Monday, I got a letter about “early voting” from the Illinois Secretary Of State.
And yes, I live in Illinois so they got that right but I have no interest in voting early or voting by mail.
As usual, I’ll be voting in person and yes I’ll be voting for Trump. He’s the smart choice.
Forget smart, hon. He’s the SANE choice.
Yes, the republicans can suck. But the dems want us dead and/or starving.
Fuck the dems.
Well, considering Biden, Trump is Both the Smart Choice and the Sane Choice. 😉
And Harris as dumb as a box of bricks, with an attached suction gadget.
Y’all fuck ‘em. I’m picky about who I touch with that part of my anatomy.
Indeed.
Well, it may be happening, probably not in sufficient numbers to turn California’s vote, but get a load of this Trump rally in Beverly Hills, of all places:
Conversely… couple days ago Z-Man posted a video of a Biden rally… omg, that’s just pathetic, and embarrassing. A dozen reporters, a teleprompter, and a few curious passersby… and no visible enthusiasm, even from the podium. (That runnin’ for President retirement hobby sure ain’t no fun when it’s your day job, eh, Joe?)
So, ~4000 in hostile territory, vs a dozen on friendly ground. Yeah, I sure believe those polls that say Gropin’ Joe in a landslide, don’t you?
Trump will drop out any day now.
January 21, 2025.
12 more years!
Dynasty.
I am not sure Trump wouldn’t attempt to become the second US president to serve non-sequential terms. It would require he lose to Biden but that would not leave him with a hard act to follow, would it now?
Especially if her spent the intervening period building his case that he was knifed in the back of the campaign.
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Nope, Trump knows better. He may mess with people up until the last moment, but he won’t go for another term.
That said, I would laugh if Pence put Trump in as his VP. Because it would be hilarious, as well as Constitutional. Plus it would be a great guarantee for Pence not to get assassinated.
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Plus Pence could take advantage of Trump’s twitter habits …
I remember the “Trump is not a serious candidate” claims in 2016. Now his campaign might have started as a “Hold my beer” exercise, but he was completely serious by the time he got nominated. Certainly more so than John McCain was in 2008. Remember how McCain suspended his campaign?
No, sorry. I can’t swallow that.
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Swallowing things sometimes is easier with whiskey.
It’s tempting to see the Left as some grand conspiracy. The temptation attributing great skill and tenacity to The Enemy; it excuses your failures and magnifies your successes. But International Communism barely existed on anything but a propaganda level. Oh, they’d trade small arms around, especially between puppet states and puppeteer states (and vice versa), but actual long term cooperation? Not so much.
And in the West what we had was not dedicated bands of revolutionaries, but assorted strata of malcontents. People who had no real talent for being productive, useful, or content. People SURE that the World was unfairly failing to grant them their due. They don’t hate the free market because they are fervent Marxists. They hate it because it leaves people free to ignore their wonderful selves. They don’t hate Christianity and devout Judaism because they are fervent Socialistic Atheists. They hate those religions because they are deathly afraid that their IS a higher power that will judge them on their tissue paper ethics, their tacky morals, and their sordid lives. And they hate the ‘deplorable shape because we consider them tiresome annoyances rather than our Obvious Betters.
In some cases it’s downright tragic. Barbara Streisand couldn’t be content with being a talented singer and decent comedienne; she wanted the World to acknowledge her as a Great Actress…and the ‘deplorables’ rated her as about as deep as damp pavement.
While true for the masses, the leadership has plenty of true believers (such as BLM activist organization’s self-proclaimed trained Marxists) and those true believers are in positions of immense power. Just like in the Soviet Union the masses who repeated the ritual Marxist dogma often did so out of fear, rather than belief, many people do it here out of fear of being “cancelled”. For those in and seeking power, those useful idiots are always tolerated in the rise to power; it is once power is achieved that attention will be turned to ensuring that they not only obey Big Brother but love Big Brother. Those who don’t will simply become “unpersons” and be vanished:
I’m unconvinced. I think even the higher-ups (with some poisonous exceptions in the Democrat power structure) are frustrated Aristocrats rather then True Believers. They glommed onto Marxism because it promises a world where people like them – pseudo intellectual nonentities with no real skills other than bossiness – will run things. If professing Fundamentalist Christianity (which they understand about as well as they understand quantum physics) looked like the way forward, they would work to bring about THE HANDMAID’S TALE (which has the same chance of working as Communism: one-half the square root of fuck-all) with equal fervor.
The Democrat panjandrums are another matter. They already consider themselves to be Aristocrats, and are fighting desperately to keep their positions. They are using the Marxists in the same way the German Aristocracy tried to use the Nazis, thinking they can control them.
Well, she’s going to go down in history for something much more lasting than her comedic routines or singing. When those have long fallen out of fashion and popular memory, there will still be The Streisand Effect.
*shrug*
I could wish she would be remembered for work like WHAT’S UP DOC?, done before her ego took over her brain.
You’re probably right, though.
I’d known that in a lot of ways, I was walking ground trod on before by Wretchard and esr. Now that I think back, I even recall that one memo in the 40’s/50’s from that US diplomat in Germany that got things right that so many later got wrong.
I’m not sure the right word. It almost humbles me to see how much of what I’ve thought I’ve discovered ‘on my own’ is in fact from prior influences.
Thank you. It helps to be reminded that I make these mistakes.
I’m not really even convinced that Stalin cared about defeating the US. He was focused on the more short-term stuff like Europe and Asia. The US would be a project for someone long after he was dead. So it likely didn’t matter to him.
Having said that, we know that stuff happened. The CPUSA does exist, and has existed, and was a useful tool for the the Soviets. The Communists apparently took over a good-sized chunk of Hollywood. And there’s an interview with a Soviet defector from back in the ’80s in which he mentioned having seen evidence of a long-term undercover Soviet agent whose goal was essentially to corrupt the US (said interview was used in the reveal trailer for the upcoming video game Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War).
So influences have existed. But on reflection, I suppose the question is how much of those influences are a result of fortuitous happenstance versus decisions made by the Soviet leaders versus decisions made by lower-ranking functionaries to hasten the victory that they’d been told since birth was inevitable (whether or not they actually believed it).
The defector of whom you speak: Yuri Bezmenov. His talks and interviews are on Youtube, and should be required viewing at every level. (The 15 minute clip someone tacked a dumb title onto is a good place to start, if you’re in a hurry.)
Dude. 1.3 million views on the full interview… 6 million views on the CoD trailer. Now that’s harnessing the power of entertainment to get the word out!
(It’d be interesting to know how many of those are from the CoD trailer, looking for more in depth explanation.)
[blink] Call of Duty?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Call_of_Duty:_Black_Ops_Cold_War
I did mention it in my original post. 😛
The Bezmenov interview was used as the basis for the reveal trailer for the upcoming Call of Duty: Black Ops game that releases on the 13th of next month. The game is set in the ’80s, involves trying to track down the spy mentioned by Bezmenov, and includes at least one briefing with President Reagan (clearly shown in a later trailer). To quote a comment I saw posted elsewhere online, “Committing war crimes for The Gipper! Yeah!”
My personal suspicion is that the game plot will end up with a surprise twist that will take it in a depressing direction. But maybe those who play through the game will be pleasantly surprised. After all, depressing plot twists don’t really fit thematically with the ’80s.
Tell that to ‘Watchmen’…
Watchmen was set in an ’80s that never was, with Nixon still in the White House. It wasn’t the optimistic ’80s that existed in real life.
Also, I very much disliked the Watchmen comic book. Didn’t see the movie.
Alan Moore, who created Watchmen, was a complete cynic IMO.
What’s funny is that apparently he never understood why people liked Rorschach. 😈
He was trying to preach a message of defeatism with regard to the cold war.
The cheating he did to accomplish that screwed up his ability to accomplish the other parts of what he was trying to do.
Rorschach was sane, Rorschach was a hero, and Rorschach won the moral victory.
Rorschach wasn’t able to compromise with Evil.
The other characters were willing to compromise with Evil in the name of a “Greater Good” (which was only Good in Moore’s mind).
Of course, Rorschach could have had lied, left and then published the Truth. 😉
But yes, he was a hero and compared to the other characters he was sane.
I think the movie actually improved it, which is why so many people were angry at it. It undercuts the cynical, misanthropic intent of Moore’s original without changing much of the actual story.
A word note– misanthropic is exactly the right word, here.
A lot of people use it to mean folks who don’t like people– but it’s more people who actively dislike people.
I don’t like people. That doesn’t mean I won’t treat folks decently, it just means I don’t have warm fuzzies about them.
Folks I actually dislike, I would have to remind myself to treat decently.
A lot of Moore’s writing seems to be firmly in the camp where “I really like them” is the only reason to treat someone half-decently.
(Note: not soul-reading, here; I don’t know the motives for folks reading it, and I assume his motives in writing it are roughly “money is nice.”)
I try to treat everybody decently, unless they give me a reason not to.
There’s a fragment of a scene, I don’t know if I actually read it or if it’s just in my head. Two guys in a hurry are getting service from robots. One is demanding, berates the robot and calls it a ‘stupid tin can’. One is pleasant, and thanks the other robot when the job is done.
First guy: “Why do you waste your time being polite to a stupid robot?”
Second guy: “Why do you waste your time being rude to a robot?”
Because it’s not about the robot. It’s about who you choose to be. In one of the stories I’m working on, a main character will observe:
“I have found that people who are casually rude and abusive to inoffensive clerks and waiters are not worth knowing.”
———————————
Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!!
Here’s the initial trailer with the small snippet from the Bezmenov interview –
Somewhere or other I have a book on the Hollywood Reds. So far as I can recall, it’s position was that they were basically Stalinist dilettantes much more concerned with bullying their fellow actors/writers/etc. than anything concrete, and that anything they did that actually aided International Communism was probably accidental. Many of the people who ‘named names’ to the HUAC were simply getting back at their tormentors.
That said, the Intellectual Left USED the narrative of The Blacklist and the real history of that sonofabitch McCarthy ( if he hadn’t existed the Left would have had to invent him) to EVENTUALLY take over Hollywood. But it didn’t really happen until Psycho Joe was long dead.
c4c
The Federalist has the below linked piece regarding leftist activist (i.e. Democratic Party paramilitary arm) openly stating and preparing for rioting to “shut the country down” in the event Trump wins the election; i.e. they will never accept a Trump win and intend to pursue outright violent revolution to ensure that Democrats seize power:
https://thefederalist.com/2020/10/20/trump-resistance-plans-mass-mobilization-after-election-to-shut-down-the-country-if-biden-doesnt-win/
I don’t think there are enough of them to do that if the local governments don’t go along.
Which is why places like Denver are f*cked. But others will be fine.
I am soooooo glad I’m out of DC.
It’s been twelve years, and I’ve never lacked a reason to praise the heavens for my escape.
(You’d think NY wouldn’t be a step up. But I’d do time in the Mohawk Valley on my head before going back. :p)
‘… an internet rumor that a fad of putting goldfish in your ears for sexual satisfaction is spreading in America”
That’s just absurd! Goldfish are the wrong shape for that!
It’s neon tetras.
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Please, don’t do that to the neon tetras. They haven’t done anything to deserve that.
Try Zebra Muscles instead. Just make sure it is in the lake you got them from and take a hot shower afterwards, for safeties sake.
Babel fish can talk sexy to you in any language.
“[Soros]’s a man who wants to see the world burn and to that end tosses a lot of money at various disruptive causes. ”
It is worth putting “the man who broke the Bank of England” into your searchengine, just to note what pops up. Such as:
This shines a spotlight on Soros’ morals and aims.
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Thing that I ran into recently is, how does one deprogram someone who believes in government healthcare? I keep running into people who either came from a country with government medicine and thought it was fine, or people who are convinced that Obamacare must have a replacement before it is removed.
Numbers just don’t persuade people, and a lot of people feel like they would be losing aiming I’d the “lost” obamacare, so I think we need to find a way to show the opportunity of free markets, rather than just the risks of government inattention.
I’m thinking the other thing we should poke at is that medicine is not a durable good, but rather a service, and poor systems can prevent anyone from getting any service at all.
Finally, we need to find some way to wrap it up into an elevator pitch; two three pithy lines that can be stuck in someone’s head and get them curious enough to do the research themselves.
Need to think more about this…
A) research how much it costs to train a doctor. They can’t and shouldn’t be conscripted.
B) ask them if they really want a bureaucrat deciding whether they live or die.
No, no, Death Panels are just a nasty Conservative Scare Plot!!
Tell that to Charlie Gard. And the other British baby boy who had pretty much the same thing happen to him just a few months later (but whose name I can’t recall). People will no doubt say, “Oh, he probably would have died anyway.” But that’s not the point. The point is that resources were found that would have allowed his parents a chance – even if it was only a slim one – to save his life. Those resources wouldn’t have cost the British NHS so much as a single pence. And yet a government board still said that no attempt could be made to save his life.
There’s also the case from several years ago of a teenage girl in New England who had a disorder that her family knew about. A doctor who was not her usual physician misdiagnosed her. And when the family informed the doctor that the diagnosis was a misdiagnosis of a known condition, the doctor obtained a court order that took the teenage girl from her family, and put her on a treatment regimen based on the misdiagnosis, and that nearly ended up killing her before sanity finally prevailed.
Did anything happen to the doctor? License revoked, prison, fines, or even just administrative discipline? Or is that pompous bastard still out there, just waiting to kill the next patient with that huge ego?
That’s a typical left-wing response. Screw the pooch, then attack whoever caught them doing it. Just like Shrillary did, and Komrade Joe Biden is doing now.
Dunno. Reporting about the story more or less stopped after the girl was saved. Finding out what happened to the doctor would have required checking in months – or possibly even years – later.
Justina Pelletier was the Boston girl, held against her will in a psychiatric hospital for 16 months, while her physical ailments got worse, 9 months of it in a locked ward. She had mitochondrial disease, which is rare, and she had had to go to the hospital with dehydration and stomach pains. The hospital doctors decided in retrospect that it was a psych problem, that her parents were delusional and abused her, and that the hospital had to hold her in its care with CPS help. She was in a wheelchair and couldn’t escape, and was treated with negligence or patient abuse as well. (Because she couldn’t complain to parents, and of course the doctors can’t trust what a delusional girl says about the staff, can they?)
The shrink who called all this down testified at the trial that for some reason, the parents were fixated on making sure their kid was okay. And they were contentious with the hospital after their kid was taken away for no reason. And they weren’t allowed to ask about their daughter’s treatment, because that might make Justina feel like she was unwell and sad.
The family put through a malpractice suit this year. Somehow, the jury didn’t decide in their favor?!? Which just shows you how messed up the court system is. Apparently the hospital buried the court in expert witnesses that worked for the hospital, although honestly an expert who has bad judgment would seem to be a less impressive witness. Sigh. Oh, and it’s all Justina’s fault for somehow not impressing the psychiatrists correctly, and for being depressed when she had to meet with her parents without touching them or talking about anything that had been happening.
Oh, this makes my blood boil. Apparently if you take your kid for treatment a lot, trying to find out what’s wrong, or if you find out your kid has a rare disease and you talk about it to the doctor, and it annoys the hospital or doctor, you can be charged with “medical child abuse,” which is like Munchausen’s by proxy but includes whatever parental behavior that the shrink wants to include. It’s something that does happen, but apparently the Karens of this world are using it against anybody they don’t like.
So now the parents of rare disease kids are sort of hunkering down, because a lot of their kids have been taken away by CPS because they actually do care and advocate for them sufficiently.
But it’s okay for doctors to start giving minors a bunch of hormones to change their bodies, or a bunch of hormone blockers to prevent puberty, without the parents even being involved in consent! And interfering with that sacred process is child abuse too! Yay!
“But it’s okay for doctors to start giving minors a bunch of hormones to change their bodies …”
Newly Discovered Letter Shows Endocrine Society Urged Experimenting On Trans Children
In his recent townhall, presidential candidate Joe Biden endorsed experimental, irreversible medical interventions for gender-confused eight-year-olds. His reflexive and indeed casual approval of medical child abuse illustrates how successful the transgender industry, including politicized elements of the medical profession, has been in obscuring the issues and normalizing the abnormal. A recently uncovered letter shows how the Endocrine Society (ES) in particular has deftly misrepresented scientific reality to advance the agenda of that lucrative and increasingly powerful industry.
[SNIP]
California endocrinologist Dr. Michael Laidlaw has delved into the swamp of this politicized research to determine how the National Institutes of Health could have been persuaded to fund it. His efforts recently unearthed a 2013 Endocrine Society letter that combined scientific deception with political activism to overcome qualms about experimenting on gender-confused children.
The 2013 letter appeared over the signature of the Endocrine Society’s then-president Dr. Teresa Woodruff and was sent to NIH’s “LGBTI Research Coordinating Committee.” While the broader membership of Endocrine Society, which includes Laidlaw, was never notified of or asked to approve the letter, the letter urged more taxpayer funding for experimental interventions on trans-identifying patients, including children:
Perhaps anticipating the glaring ethical objections, the Endocrine Society obscured the issue by lumping together trans-identifying patients with individuals suffering from a physical medical condition called Disorders of Sexual Development (also sometimes known as “intersex”). The letter repeatedly called for more research into medical treatments for “transgender and intersex patients,” as though the two conditions are related and should both be subject to medical experimentation. In truth, gender dysphoria and DSD are wholly separate and unrelated.
There are no medical tests to diagnose trans-identification, more formally known as gender dysphoria. These patients have normal biological markers for their biological sex, such as chromosomes, anatomy, hormone levels, and other clear identifiers. Trans-identification is purely psychological — a “feeling” that he or she should be the opposite sex.
Disorders of Sexual Development conditions, however, are another thing entirely …
–
So, following in Dr. Money’s steps, and to hell with the victims?
Hanging…..Dropped into a vat of cement…..Torn apart by a pack of tame hyenas…..Roasted over a slow fire…..Locked in a psychiatric ward and treated for a random selection of diseases…..
Every single doctor and psychiatrist was cleared of malpractice. Every single one.
I see no particular reason the consequences couldn’t be extended to those who condoned their actions.
Why tame hyenas? Seems … inefficient.
Slower that way.
Alfie Evans.
re: B – Why would I want to receive veterinary care? The government already treats us like dogs as is.
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Actually, the instant response to B is “What’s the difference between a government bureaucrat and an insurance company bureaucrat?!?!?”
There is a great deal of difference – insurance bureaucrats can be held accountable by government bureaucrats, government bureaucrats are held accountable like Lois Lerner.
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You know that; I know that. They have been brainwashed into that belief, and can’t be argued out of it.
Alternate: I don’t want my medical treatments determined by people who want their political opposition to die horrible deaths. You may not like Rush Limbaugh, but do you want your medical decisions made by the people cheering his cancer?
Or just discuss the Chinese organ harvesting. Or how they imagine having the same bureaucrats who designed and implemented the Obamacare online sign-up system will do at determining location, size and staffing of hospitals.
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I think the challenge there is most people don’t personally run into that.
I’m wondering if it would be more effective to point out that the government would be, basically, the ultimate HMO?
One of the obvious problems with govt healthcare is that patients are a liability rather than an asset, so their main incentive is to find ways not to treat you. That’s basically the same problem HMOs had.
On the cost of healthcare, that’s the remnants of the last time the govt did wage and price controls. It blew up heath insurance budgets and they hid it by making it pre-tax.
“Great. You want your healthcare run by the same people who run the DMV?”
“We’ve already been trying that; it’s called the VA. And it’s been killing the people who use it, until they did a huge reform bill to let vets get private treatment instead of dying in the waiting line. If they can’t even manage it with just our vets, you think they’d be able to manage every single person in the entire USA?”
“Have you heard of all the problems NHS is having, including where they’re deliberately starving elderly to death to free up the beds, and refusing treatment to preemies? The USA has four times the population, and you want the bureaucrats who manage the water in Flint, Michigan and won’t let any underbrush be cleared in California so we got all these fires be in charge of your kid’s health care?”
Depressing thing– when I was going through various state’s death counts, I noticed that hospitals with “VA” in the titled seemed to have a rather high number of deaths, even in counties that didn’t have many deaths otherwise.
To be fair, a lot of men without relatives go to VA hospitals to live out their lives and then die.
*nods* Looking at VA hospitals would also catch the guys who were “fine” and basically only checked in to the hospital at death’s door– but they were having numbers that looked like the places labeled “hospice,” which is supposed to be end-of-life.
But. Even with those considered. Even after they’ve finally made some movement in the “I stay military because there are no malpractice lawsuits in the service.” That is worrying.
And this is not cause for immediate court marshal…….. why?
…they literally kill people, Ian. Making dumb jokes about it is rather small beans compared to that.
The doctors who tried to write a guy up for ignoring their “diagnosis” that his wife was hysterical and menstruating, and instead taking her to a doctor out on town which meant she didn’t die of the ruptured ectopic pregnancy, was only noteworthy because the guy’s CO decided to make a fuss about saying “no.”
I knew the VA was bad. I didn’t realize that it needed a napalm enema.
I’ve been suggesting that Congress be required to use the same doctors as the military for decades, now.
There area lot of good doctors who are there because they view it as a calling– there just wasn’t a way to remove the ones who are showing up for the paycheck.
Congress critters ought be restricted to proctologists … for reasons that ought need no explanation.
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Most of them need a proctologist to treat their sinuses…
Along with the rest of the military healthcare system.
And please note that those changes in the VA management happened under the Trump administration . . .
There is a slow but certain argument. This is the analogy of a national bureaucracy to control eating and shitting. Eating and shitting have a profound role in health, so a federal benefit in over seeing other health would be expected to be similar to the federal benefit in over seeing eating and shitting. A million bureaucrat organization would oversee 300 americans per bureaucrat, and a thousand bureaucrat organization would oversee 300k americans each, and hence one can easily see that it would be impossible to expect to be able to get good or even sane service. Of course, the delay in discussing how effective hypothetical organizations means that it takes a significant time, so no one has patience, and they are certain to tune you out.
Since you speak of immigrants, you can quickly compare the size of the US and the originating country, and ask them how well they think the scaling would works. Forex, the US is five times the population of France; are Americans five times smarter than Frenchmen?
There are shorter arguments.
Bob is crazy. Potentially, Bob can persuade well enough to get his preferences implemented in national medical policy. How much risk of that is tolerable?
Immigrant version, Bob is an ultranationalist who has argued for the extermination of all foreign populations. Wouldn’t you object to that determining your standard of care?
Item the second, pooling money at the national level to pay for healthcare gives taxpayers incentive to control health costs of whole population. This has two implications. One, a moral right to control personal decisions that impact health costs. Two, persons that don’t pay taxes, and have high medical costs are attractive targets for forced euthanasia. The bureaucrats will find themselves thinking this direction even if no one else is.
Item the third, vexatious public health policy proposals. Forex, Cambodian Killing Fields means that the disease of communism is lethal enough that euthanizing carriers is defensible. It is unlikely that there will be a faction with a permanent monopoly on controlling medical policy, and a situation deformed enough for a ‘permanent’ monopoly is going to have a lot of other issues develop. (Power changing hands via competition ensures that organizations don’t keep the same blind-spots. Break the first, you break the second, and the unseen hazards will eat your lunch.) This isn’t the same as ‘crazy Bob’, this is more about there always being an opposition, and there not always being agreement on tolerable policy.
Newest Biden ad, on 100.3 The Bus for Des Moines– it’s “we all need to pull together” and “Biden will lead everybody” and… basically, like Greenfield’s “Democrat? Who, me?” ads.
Like two minutes long, too.
And he has, “middle class values, ” and “doesn’t need to be the center of attention.”
To which my instant response was, “Of course. He’s running for President because he doesn’t need to be the center of attention.”
And he sure doesn’t seem to have MY “middle class values.”
cdc
Off-topic but please look — My dad has been having some nerve/balance problems; and it turns out he was accidentally taking too much B6, which can cause that. So apparently you get better pretty quickly after you stop taking B6, because it just heads on out of the body; and it’s a thing that usually takes a year or more to cause problems. But it is a thing, and the magic number is apparently somewhere between 100-130 mcg and up. So please check your supplements that you take, and make sure you’re not going too high in your daily dosage.
And apparently one of the treatments for the problem is to drink coffee, so there you go!
Oh.
He was taking a multivitamin, and a B-complex, and some supplement his doctor gave him because they were worried about his heart, and so forth. Not all the same doctor, which is where the problem came from. Also, some people are more sensitive than others; and he was prescribed certain dietary restrictions because of his meds, and so he was not eating some of the foods that “stop” B6 from doing as much.
Of course, those of us who always forget to take vitamins only have to worry every few days….. Sorry, I have to joke about it.
I feel really bad that I never thought about all the pills that aren’t medicines, when we were looking for medicines with nerve/balance side effects that he might have been prescribed. But I guess this is a thing, and they call it “Hypervitaminosis B6” or “Megavitamin B6 Syndrome”
I meant “you” as in “all you blog readers,” not “you the blogmistress.” But it’s probably good to know.
Sorry, not making sense, still freaking a little because I just found out what Dad was diagnosed with. And I’m glad it isn’t permanent, but cripes!!!
Because I’m the one who’s the vitamin freak, and everybody would ask _me_ if I were taking some weird potion or home remedy or thing that singers do. But my dad just takes the normal stuff he’s prescribed, like a sensible person.
To explain: I take Vitamin B, haven’t looked at dosage (it’s downstairs.)
SO — I’ve been worried because I had two weird moments of loss of balance recently. Now, only when VERY tired, and I’ve pretty much given up sleeping apparently, but….
Well, check it out. And there’s also niacin/B2 that can do that, but it has much more spectacular symptoms.
But you don’t have to check it out right now!
Balance has a lot of things that can be going on. Heck, sinusitis can cause balance problems, just from normal air pressure annoyances, not even a bad sinus infection.
Apparently people can bang you with a tuning fork and diagnose nerve problems, as this is something they did to my dad. So if you have a son and a tuning fork… mwahahah! medicine a capella!
Shouldn’t that be medicine a patella?
I’ll be going now…..
That would depend on whether you’re looking for a knee-jerk reaction, or to kneecap somebody…
“Everything is a poison; what matters is the dosage.”
Dietary supplements can have unwanted side effects, and Vitamins B and C fall into “some is good, but more is not necessarily better.”
Some people “rotate” supplements, taking each for a few weeks, skipping a week, etc.
I gather for right now that they just told my dad to cut out everything but the normal multivitamin. (Because obviously you still need normalish levels of B6 for your body.) But maybe in the future his various doctors will work something out.
Apparently there’s also “coasting” of the bad effects, which is like withdrawal symptoms, for 2-6 weeks after you stop taking too much B6. So he might actually get a tad worse for a while, but that will go away. Anyway, I told my dad and mom this, so they can watch out for it, if it happens.
*hugs*
Am passing it along to my mom– I push the Bs, too, and figured out I need to juggle electrolytes or I start getting funny heart issues while dieting; haven’t looked at B6 specifically yet.
Thank you, and thank Goodness that someone did pay attention.
Apparently women don’t get hypervitaminosis B6 as much as men, probably because our bodies use it up faster. Or maybe we just get rid of it with Number 1 more…..
Anyway, for about a year or two before this, they have had my dad not eating potassium, and potassium is one of the things that “control” how other vitamins and stuff work (and vice versa). Whereas a few years ago, they had my dad adding more potassium to his diet, and that’s probably what his body was used to. So more B6 and less potassium might be part of the problem.
But some people are just more sensitive, and a lot of this isn’t well-understood.
Anyway, probably a good idea to do a vitamin levels check with all vitamins, with a skosh of room to have different levels to eat every day. I only take one supplement, so it was pretty easy to check my multivitamin with it and make sure I would never be taking too much (whenever I remembered to take stuff). But my mom and dad have a lot of pills kicking around. I’m going to have to print something off and go over there.
I was talking my obgyn about increasing my B6 dose, and she mentioned it was more difficult to overdose on B6 while pregnant because the kidneys are in overdrive….
Maybe that’s why drinking coffee is a treatment — it’s antioxidants that make you do Number One!
Well, in that case, beer should work, too!
Were you the one who mentioned that blindly taking vitamins ‘because they’re good for you’ mostly results in really expensive pee?
Very possibly. And for a lot of vitamins and stuff, it’s true. It’s just a problem when it’s not true, and you are also pushing too much stuff into your body too quickly to… eliminate.
There are a lot of studies on food absorption in horses. The dream is to create a horse fodder that doesn’t produce much poo, but which still keeps the horse’s innards and elimination systems in good shape. The problem is that horses need different stuff at different times, and their bodies evolved to eat a fair amount of different stuff to make sure they’d always have enough to live. So a lot of stuff gets digested and then comes right back out again, no doubt enriching the earth but definitely keeping the flies happy.
Mcg, or mg? Because the recommended daily amount is 1.3 milligrams, or 100 times more– I know there’s dietary stuff to think of, too, but….
Whatever the medical sites say is correct. Do not trust me on measurement abbreviations!
Our nurse practitioner has my husband scarfing up lots of Vitamin D. Mostly to ramp up his immune system. I have to say, it seems to have cut down on the number of colds. Though as soon as we got home from our summer trip he started sneezing like mad and felt bad for a day. Now he’s fine. Is it the D or the fact we got the Himalayan salt lamp back up?
I’ve been taking my lunches outside, weather allowing. (This time of year, that’s less to do with temperature, and more to do if the wind is strong enough to blow the tupperware off the picnic table. Ah, Texas.)
I don’t know if it’s the increased vitamin D from getting more natural sunlight, or the decreased stress from half an hour away from the phones/computers/coworkers, in the solitude of wind and sun and sky and birds (and occasional butterfly), but it is good for me.
Back in 2010 we spent two weeks at the Romanian-American University in Bucharest. For our weekend, they took us on a minivan tour of Transylvania. So here we are, having arrived at the Best Western in Sibiu – in a thunderstorm, after dark, in Transylvania- sitting at a table with our dinner, glasses of Romanian wine and shots of Romanian whiskey, when the talk turned to religion. At our table of American grad students we had two Methodists, some Baptists, Church of Christ and a Mormon. And everyone was busy asking the Mormon questions and going, “OK. That’s interesting. ” (Meanwhile my spouse, who had settled next to the Mormon, was drinking his hootch).
The Romanian students were flummoxed that we were of so many denominations and weren’t killing each other.
If we have anyone who is a Mormon who comments here, I’m somewhat curious:
What sort of food/supplies actually keep for 7 years? I’ve been having some canned stuff go off (probably never really canned right to begin with.) Is there some sort of official “prepper-list”?
There are a few of us.
What keeps? I don’t can, so I’m not the person to ask about that. I do have food storage, but it’s all in pre-packaged #10 cans. That sort of stuff is generally inexpensive enough that I would encourage anyone who wants to build up a long-lasting emergency supply of food to get a core of it for their food storage. If you can your own stuff, then you can add that to supplement your purchased supplies.
And if you do buy, say, freeze-dried strawberries (which iirc are one of the items in my own collection), then it should include information about how long it’s supposed to last.
Traditionally it’s supposed to be a two year rotating supply.
they can do a near hundred year plan to take over the rest of the world?
In 14 days a majority of the American people will accept the “election” (by fraud) of a man who government will be filled by those educated in Soviet agitprop by a generation educated in Soviet agitprop, someway there was still a USSR.
It might be their only plan to succeed, but it is enough to be the death of us.
Kind of. Sort of. Things also broke their way.
And sure, i agree with you.
But they can’t hold it. It took too lonng. 4th generation incompetence.
It is easier to destroy than create. That has long been where we disagree. We agree they cannot win long term. But you seem to conclude that means we win. I allow for it to mean we all lose.
We win, in the LONG run. That doesn’t mean our lives, Herb. Though I think so, because this batch REALLY are extra special DUMB.
Alternate formulation: After we die, our cause is still being fought by entropy. Thus, long run the left cannot win. Short run, before we die, the current left are chumps, so maybe they lose faster.
In the past 3-6 months, I think Foxfier has suggested that the current leftist cohort can make bombs as well as the 1960s cohort. I’m not sure this is true.
Their influence over mass media disinformation operations has less profound consequences. They would not be fussing about social media having a harmful effect on democracy if they weren’t scared.
Then, “if the blacks revolts over their mistreatment, their support will make the communists dangerous”. Now the communists are relying on white guilt over ‘mistreatment’ of blacks to have enough freedom of action to revolt.
Sex ed based in scholarship tracing back to Kinsey is using a theory of human behavior fit to criminals, who are in prison partly thanks to disordered minds and self destructive habits. To the extent that what Kinsey studied and disordered self destruction have a causative correlation, kids are being raised to self destruct and get themselves arrested. That, and being raised in the cult are problems, but cohorts have been shaped by these issues for longer than I have been alive. If we were not predestined to failure in the 1960s and 1970s, we are not now. There may be a state space that can be used to predict future dynamics, but it is the inner hearts of every American; this is not measurable or humanly knowable.
If our worse models are true, there are things that would be predicted by those models that are not happening.
Yes, my blindness is determined. Our minds are constantly perturbed by new information. At times, we go into depression. But emotions and factual analysis are separate processes, even if coupled. I make mental models that are much more complicated than I can keep in my mind. I sometimes forget that aspects even exist. (I bounce between problems, sometimes I have to focus on a single one to the point that I forget others exist.) It is easy for me to look at a new political detail, really study it, and completely forget that it is a small part of the whole. When that has negative implications, I get agitated, and hurt my focus.
We are anxious now, and our instinct is trying to have us hoover up as much information as possible to help us make good plans. However, a major scam of politics is pretending that certain situations are actually uncertain. The grifting technicians have only two more weeks of fundraising to put aside savings for 1.75 to 3.25 or so lean years. The activists have served their purpose, and can be disposed of for this cycle so long as a few more donations can be extracted. Yes, the activists are also influenced by longer term betters like Soros, but the technicians will be satisfied if the activists cause more panic and hence more donations. Yes, maybe things are ready for the real revolution, and I will be dead in three weeks.
I have a project I’m wanting to get done in the next day or so; panic won’t help. Not that my emotions are utilitarian. I need to get it done early so I have time for a mandatory task that will definitely freak me out. I need some recovery time in the schedule, because I have some stuff that needs doing medium term soon, and panic stops the work. The goals I am working towards are a bet that I won’t die of heart attack tonight, or be murdered by leftists in three weeks, because the pay offs are much longer. We need people taking precautions against the left, but we also need people working on things with long term pay offs. Fighting the left is definitely a long term project, with a generational pay off, but it is not the only long term project in the world.
Clear ether.
In the past 3-6 months, I think Foxfier has suggested that the current leftist cohort can make bombs as well as the 1960s cohort. I’m not sure this is true.
*waggles hand*
They probably could, my point has been that making bombs isn’t as effective as it use to be; you can get caught more effectively while getting the materials, you can get caught more effectively after you plant them, and you’re less likely to manage to hurt anybody because at the very least one of every Tom, Dick and Harry is familiar with anti-terrorism steps, from hobby, work, school or military exposure.
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Your point on Kinsey is one I hadn’t considered, but is sound.
Thing is, the fraction of population occupied in farm labor has apparently changed significantly. Non-farmers may have significantly narrower technical skills, and we additionally do not apparently have a majority of men as veterans.
That may make a difference. I deleted a more in depth analysis of skills, but it developed a final conclusion that your observation about the counter terrorist surveillance that everyone knows about and does is part of the picture. My argument is only really valid for indirect diffusion of skills.
I do think your background in farming and in the military might make you overestimate widespread levels of skill in the American population, and underestimate how many people have very narrow or entirely absent technical skills. On the other hand, my background in being useless may cause me the opposite wrong estimate. 🙂
On the devil’s advocate side– while I generally support assuming that my sample is not representative!– when folks find out I have a military background, they’re a lot more likely to talk about military-related stuff.
Heck, my father in law had a silly notion that I don’t like guns, but once he found out that not only do I rather like guns, but I had been carrying pretty much every single time he had ever been around me, suddenly he was talking guns with me this visit. Up to this point, I had no idea that he WASN’T a Virginia-town-dude “well, not our thing” type re: guns.
People don’t generally want to upset others, and “hey, isn’t that a great place to drop a bomb off? Why is that guy acting strange with the obviously new backpack right next to it?” is definitely in the “going to upset” folks. 😀
As for Obama care, the GOP refused to real it. It is still there, an empty she’ll for their next attempt at it. That’s progress over Hillarycare.
Somebody set fire to a ballot collection box in L.A. today. The ones that didn’t burn were destroyed in putting out the fire. Gee, who would ever have thought such a thing could happen? Surely it wasn’t in one of the few Republican districts!
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How can Leftoids create a better world when everything they do makes this one worse?
Because of course they did.
So everyone who put their ballot there should march to the nearest precinct and demand their voting rights.
Actually, I saw that story.
1. Official .gov ballot box.
2. Democrat district.
Which may be cover for the next 6 happening in R districts…..
Farcebook has at least half a dozen communist Chinese censors running their ‘Hate Speech Engineering Team’ right there in Seattle. They are the ones that determine what you can post, and what you can see.
How do I know they’re communists? Because all of the Chinese around the world are communist agents. That’s not RRRAAAACIIISSST!!, or prejudice, or xenophobia, it’s just a fact. China is a totalitarian state, and nobody is allowed to leave the country unless they ARE communist agents. A few escape illegally, but even those are seeded with communist agents, and you never know which ones.
Letting communist Chinese agents into our country on student and work visas is a policy of incomprehensible stupidity.
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Everything the Democrats do makes perfect sense once you realize that they have given up on getting people to want to vote for them, and are putting all their efforts into making people afraid to vote against them.
a) Chinese from Malaysia, Singapore, Taiwan, etc. may not be communist agents. b) PRC lets a lot of people travel overseas. Their bureaucracies are not so functional that everyone they consider an agent is an agent. Look at that guy they probably murdered to shut up in Philadelphia. c) Big Tech employs PRC Chinese on H1B visas, and these do have to be understood as one of the mechanisms of the PRC influence over Big Tech.
The only reason BLM should not be considered a white supremacist terrorist organization is if it should be considered a Han supremacist organization.
The LDS Church has missionaries in the US from mainland China. I’ve met at least one of them. She was supporting a primarily Mandarin-speaking congregation in Southern California. I’ve also met members of the LDS Church who emigrated from mainland China. One of them recently joined the US Army. I’m confident that the US military did some thorough background checks before sending him to boot camp. Given the Communist Party’s views on religion, this doesn’t match up with your theory about only Communists being allowed to travel overseas.
The fact is that there is no “bamboo curtain”. Control of the population is handled through other means, generally involving cultural expectations and familial ties to those still in China.
And China has progressed to threatening American nationals in China if we prosecute Chinese arrested for visa fraud.
Extradite them NOW, and then start shooting agents provacateurs.
Reading at the NY Post Biden’s policies would strangle US economy just as it’s bouncing back from COVID-19 I noted this paragraph:
and got to wondering whether anybody has seen analysis o a) how much Biden/Harris policies would drive up the price of oil and b) how much extra income that would produce for our oil exporting “friends” in Russia, Venezuela and Iran?
Further analysis might investigate how much that would impede the economies of China (I suspect they’re shielded against price rises), India, Europe and developing nations.
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Today on Twitter we had several hours of “New Borat Movie Shows Giuliani In Compromising Position” trending followed by the abrupt “Never Mind” when it was revealed the movie showed nothing of the sort.
And this is why you wait before jumping on the Outrage Train.