[RedState] There is no forgiveness on the progressive left. There is no assurance of salvation. There is no safety net. There is only constant penance. It is the only sacrament they can allow.
Leftists can never rest easy in their beliefs because at any moment they could face the wrath of cancel culture. The best they can do to protect their reputations and their egos is to keep pushing leftward, keep pushing toward the fringes. They must be the loudest, the angriest, the victim-est. Even then, it’s just a matter of time before each one of them comes face to face with the impossible rules of their religion.
Case in point, actress Jameela Jamil. The actress, best known for her role on ’The Good Place’ (an excellent show that you should watch if you haven’t already) has been a very vocal social media advocate since the award-winning show ended its in run in 2020. For what? Well...everything. Green energy. Feminism. Hashtag me too. And most notably, for LGBTQ causes. In fact, you might imagine that all that leftist activism has been great for Jamil’s brand, but in fact, it has often had the opposite effect. The British beauty has been accused of "gay-baiting" after she declared herself "queer", despite being in a heterosexual relationship and only ever having male romantic partners. Jamil tried to jump on the "you are whatever you identify as" train just for clicks, but she didn’t understand that the rules are not consistent and the people who decide the rules are changing every day.
BLUF:
[ALT-Markket.US] But the destruction of heroes goes even deeper than historical rewrites.
Leftists are also targeting the very foundations of heroic archetypes and mythologies by attacking heroic representations in our society. They are seeking to change the nature of heroism by hijacking cultural pillars and erasing beloved stories and characters in order to "reboot" them in the image of the leftist cult. This is usually done under the cover of "diversity and equity" as a means to obscure the true agenda. Let’s break down the tactics and motives behind this trend...
#7
Horatio Jackson: Six enemy cannon and rescuing...
Functionary: Ten.
Horatio Jackson: Ten of our men held captive by The Turk.
Heroic Officer: Yes, sir.
Horatio Jackson: The officer about whom we've heard so much.
Heroic Officer: I suppose so, sir.
Horatio Jackson: Always taking risks far beyond the call of duty.
Heroic Officer: I only did my best, sir.
Horatio Jackson: Have him executed at once.
Soldier: Yes, sir. Come along.
Horatio Jackson: This sort of behavior is demoralizing for the ordinary soldiers and citizens who are trying to lead normal, simple, unexceptional lives. I think things are difficult enough as it is without these emotional people rocking the boat.
#8
/\ Another fan of The Adventures of Baron Munchausen(1988). This reminds me of some Fantasy authors, Stephen Brust comes to mind, that deliberately wrote a "non"-Hero 'heroic fantasy'. Never understand that idea... if I want to read books like that I read books on History.
I also wonder if the Leftists are so involved in the Totalitarian View, 'We are all faceless cogs in the almighty State', that they don't want anybody that is an elite.
[YouTube] Part 1 Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA
For the last sixty years, the CIA has managed to maintain a formidable reputation in spite of its terrible record, burying its blunders in top-secret archives. Its mission was to know the world. When it did not succeed, it set out to change the world. Its failures have handed us, in the words of President Eisenhower, “a legacy of ashes.”
Now Pulitzer Prize–winning author Tim Weiner offers the first definitive history of the CIA—and everything is on the record. LEGACY OF ASHES is based on more than 50,000 documents, primarily from the archives of the CIA itself, and hundreds of interviews with CIA veterans, including ten Directors of Central Intelligence. It takes the CIA from its creation after World War II, through its battles in the cold war and the war on terror, to its near-collapse after September 11th, 2001.
[ALT-Market.US] All people seek to control their environment to a certain degree. They want a reliable level of management over their world, and to remove whatever doubts they might have about their survival in the future. If they can, people will take measures to remove any potential pain or struggle and establish a life of perpetual comfort. The easy road is the dream for most, and in order to get it human beings see power as a formidable tool.
I’m exploring this common condition because I want to make it clear that almost ALL PEOPLE desire power to a degree. Sometimes this even means controlling the actions of others to prevent them from disrupting the oasis of comfort we construct around us. Sometimes there are destructive people that we feel we are forced to inhibit and cage in self defense. And still other times, we try to control those around us out of irrational fear.
The tyrannical mindset is not exclusive to the Stalins, Maos and Hitlers of history, it is a deep rooted shadow that lurks in the majority of us at times. It is this condition that political tyrants try to exploit to their advantage, because no authoritarian government can ever be successful without the help of millions of little tyrants supporting them. They find a way to feed our desire for control and predictability while simultaneously enslaving us.
The point is, tyrants need us. We all have a little dash of tyranny in our souls; we are linked, but we are different.
This is not to say that order in itself is evil or that social structures are inherently oppressive. People need boundaries because not all people are good or sane; some are vicious, some are lazy, some are crazy, some are incompetent and some are dishonest and they drag the rest of us down. Anarchy is not the solution, but neither is totalitarianism. It’s all about who sets the boundaries and how.
This is where we uncover a specific human element that is obsessively attracted to control, not because they are afraid, and not because they want comfort, but because they enjoy the feeling of power. They are addicted to it. I’m speaking specifically about narcissists, sociopaths and psychopaths; they are members of our species but they are lacking the key psychological traits that make us human, such as empathy, conscience, imagination, love and shame. In almost every case of government gone wrong it is because these types of people were able to slither into positions of authority and take advantage.
Despite the exaggerated depictions in movies and TV, your average psychopath is not all that complex or interesting — The fact of their existence is interesting, but as people they tend to be boring. The idea of them is fascinating because they are a biological anomaly, an evolutionary mistake or maybe a spiritual deformity. Around 1% of any given population is prone to psychopathy and an even smaller percentage are high functioning psychopaths that are adept at hiding their monstrous natures.
Most average psychopaths eventually end up in prison or involved in an endless succession of life failures. They can’t get it together and maintain relationships and build a normal life because they are too self obsessed and dangerous and eventually the people around them notice. These types of people are what I would call the "little tyrants." They seem to rise to the surface of society when times are desperate; when people are distracted by crisis is when psychopaths feel it’s safe to show their true natures.
A taste from the famous essay by Leonard E. Read, the founder of FEE, first published in 1958:
[FoundationForEconomicEducation] I am a lead pencil—the ordinary wooden pencil familiar to all boys and girls and adults who can read and write.
Writing is both my vocation and my avocation; that’s all I do.
You may wonder why I should write a genealogy. Well, to begin with, my story is interesting. And, next, I am a mystery —more so than a tree or a sunset or even a flash of lightning. But, sadly, I am taken for granted by those who use me, as if I were a mere incident and without background. This supercilious attitude relegates me to the level of the commonplace. This is a species of the grievous error in which mankind cannot too long persist without peril. For, the wise G. K. Chesterton observed, “We are perishing for want of wonder, not for want of wonders.”
I, Pencil, simple though I appear to be, merit your wonder and awe, a claim I shall attempt to prove. In fact, if you can understand me—no, that’s too much to ask of anyone—if you can become aware of the miraculousness which I symbolize, you can help save the freedom mankind is so unhappily losing. I have a profound lesson to teach. And I can teach this lesson better than can an automobile or an airplane or a mechanical dishwasher because—well, because I am seemingly so simple.
Simple? Yet, not a single person on the face of this earth knows how to make me. This sounds fantastic, doesn’t it? Especially when it is realized that there are about one and one-half billion of my kind produced in the U.S.A. each year.
Pick me up and look me over. What do you see? Not much meets the eye—there’s some wood, lacquer, the printed labeling, graphite lead, a bit of metal, and an eraser.
INNUMERABLE ANTECEDENTS
Just as you cannot trace your family tree back very far, so is it impossible for me to name and explain all my antecedents. But I would like to suggest enough of them to impress upon you the richness and complexity of my background.
My family tree begins with what in fact is a tree, a cedar of straight grain that grows in Northern California and Oregon. Now contemplate all the saws and trucks and rope and the countless other gear used in harvesting and carting the cedar logs to the railroad siding. Think of all the persons and the numberless skills that went into their fabrication: the mining of ore, the making of steel and its refinement into saws, axes, motors; the growing of hemp and bringing it through all the stages to heavy and strong rope; the logging camps with their beds and mess halls, the cookery and the raising of all the foods. Why, untold thousands of persons had a hand in every cup of coffee the loggers drink!
The logs are shipped to a mill in San Leandro, California. Can you imagine the individuals who make flat cars and rails and railroad engines and who construct and install the communication systems incidental thereto? These legions are among my antecedents.
Consider the millwork in San Leandro. The cedar logs are cut into small, pencil-length slats less than one-fourth of an inch in thickness. These are kiln dried and then tinted for the same reason women put rouge on their faces. People prefer that I look pretty, not a pallid white. The slats are waxed and kiln dried again. How many skills went into the making of the tint and the kilns, into supplying the heat, the light and power, the belts, motors, and all the other things a mill requires? Sweepers in the mill among my ancestors? Yes, and included are the men who poured the concrete for the dam of a Pacific Gas & Electric Company hydroplant which supplies the mill’s power!
#1
I remember this in our English essay text book from soooo long ago. Gave you a sense of wonder for human industry, a gestalt of the constant... business of progress.
None of the Robespierres of the world knew how to make a pencil, yet they wanted to remake entire societies. How utterly preposterous, and mournfully tragic! But we will miss a large implication of Leonard Read’s message if we assume it aims only at the tyrants whose names we all know. The lesson of “I, Pencil” is not that error begins when the planners plan big. It begins the moment one tosses humility aside, assumes he knows the unknowable, and employs the force of the State against peaceful individuals. That’s not just a national disease. It can be very local indeed.
#4
Theres an interesting book by Henry Petroski titled simply, The Pencil. Pencils are the first precision made commercial product ever sold. The amount of technology that goes into making a simple #2 wooden pencil is more complex than many realize. Plus the "lead" in that pencil is the result of one of the first government sponsored industrial research projects.
BLUF:
[American Thinker] The evidence shows that Mayor Bowser and the District of Columbia public school system have become the public face of vaccine supremacy. Disregarding contrary evidence, the conduct of the mayor and the school district underscore a necessity for Americans and others. We must reclaim our freedoms from a world of often ungracious authoritarians who have sought to cage our minds, censor our speech, and limit the practice of our faith after enclosing us in our homes in the face of what may be the least deadly pandemic on a per-capita basis in 2,000 years.
[PJ] In Marxist theory, the final stage of socialism is true communism, when everyone shares of his or her resources equally, the state withers away, and true justice finally dawns upon the earth. We never have seen that stage and never will, because Marxism is rancid pseudo-religious hogwash that runs directly contrary to human nature. The real final stage of socialism is what we saw in the last ten years of the Soviet Union: an entrenched, all-encompassing, corrupt and inefficient state bureaucracy nominally presided over by a succession of senescent, barely-there incompetents. With his disgraceful descent into open authoritarianism Thursday evening, Old Joe Biden and the Democrats signaled their intention to skip right to that final stage: they’ve already got the doddering figurehead and the ravenous bureaucracy firmly in place.
During the first stages of socialism in Russia right after the Bolshevik revolution, the new workers’ paradise appeared from the outside, where the gulags weren’t so easy to see, to be youthful, dynamic, and promising. The American journalist Lincoln Steffens visited Soviet Russia in 1919 and was enthusiastic, declaring: "I have seen the future, and it works." Other American intellectuals visited the Soviet Union and were likewise enthused; the New York Times’ Walter Duranty was so enamored of the place that he willfully covered up evidence of Stalin’s Ukrainian famine so that Times readers wouldn’t get a negative view of the new Russia.
This sort of thing went on for years. Two decades later, with the U.S. on the brink of entering World War II, three young folk singers named Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie, and Josh White, who called themselves the Almanac Singers, recorded Songs for John Doe, an album of peace songs. This was the time of the Nazi-Soviet pact, and as Seeger, Guthrie, and White were all hardcore Communists, they didn’t want the U.S. joining any war against Stalin’s ally Hitler. Hitler soon betrayed Stalin and invaded the Soviet Union, and suddenly these pacifists were passionate for the war and able to pose as patriots. For decades, Seeger, Guthrie, and multitudes of others worked tirelessly to make the Soviet Union and Marxism chic among American Leftists. It worked.
The Soviet Union itself, meanwhile, was governed first by Lenin and then by Stalin. Both were unscrupulous, inhuman, murderous thugs, and both remained in power only by ruthless reigns of terror and cults of personality that made them into gods more efficiently and comprehensively than any Roman emperor was ever deified. Even today, in post-Soviet Russia, Lenin is respected, and Stalin is revered. Lenin’s Tomb is still situated prominently in the Kremlin and gets a million visitors a year. Not far from it are the much more modest graves of most of the other Soviet leaders; Stalin’s is the only one that Russian visitors regularly decorate with flowers.
#1
Given the many states, enacted Voter Rights Laws to ensure an honestly conducted election. The LSD's know they will lose their A$$es.
So, they understand their only hope of avoiding Criminal Indictments for Treason, Sedition, voter civil rights violations etc. It is to either create a national emergency to support a dictatorial style system. Where they, as ruling elites, cannot be touched.
OR MAYBE the LSD's will write a speech where Mindless Joe reads it and grants all illegals full citizenship with full voting rights. Along with the warning, the LSD's need to stay in power if they are to keep their illegally granted citizenship and monthly Federal handout $$$$$.
#2
"A progressive racist is a liberal democrat who, in spite of total and obvious failure, keeps implementing the same policies over and over. At some point, you've got to realize that it can't be a mistake. The policies that hurt young black males are being implemented for that very reason- to hurt young black males." Author Unknown but dead right
#4
The communists freaking hate Biden and the Dems. Biden and the Dems freaking hate communists.
And each thinks to use the other to get/stay in power. As we saw when Hitler and Stalin united to take Poland, and we see now in Shiite Iran, where the current head of Sunni Al Qaeda was sheltered along with half of the leadership and their families, hatred doesn’t matter if they can be useful to each other against a more hated target — in the case of the Democrats and the Communists/Socialists, that means against the Republicans.
[ZERO] On Thursday night Joe Biden was propped up behind the presidential seal in front of historic Independence Hall and gave the most provocative and divisive speech in modern American history. With the site of the signing of the Declaration of Independence cloaked in an ominous blood red, Biden sputtered his way through an attack on "insurrectionists" he labeled as threatening American democracy, political norms, and the rule of law.
The optics of the event were likely the idea of a proud Biden staffer, fresh off receiving a $10,000 subsidy to their student loan debt, leaning into the "Dark Brandon" aesthetic that has become popular among regime loyalists on Twitter. To Americans outside of this Very Online echo chamber, the imagery drew connotations of sinister authoritarian regimes ranging as Nazi Germany, the Empire of Star Wars, or the fascist regime of V for Vendetta.
The substance of the speech supported these comparisons. It was the display of a weak regime projecting strength at a time of mass unpopularity and rising polling numbers of political opponents in pivotal midterm elections.
None of this is a surprise.
As I noted after the chaotic 2020 election, the federal government faced a threat it has not seen in over a hundred years. Concerns over the integrity of the 2020 election struck at the core of the institution’s democratic legitimacy. The result was a Biden inauguration fortified with thousands of national guard members that the Democrat Party didn’t trust with ammunition.
The path the Biden administration took could have gone one of two ways. The regime could have fallen back on the power of moderation, restoring the isolated Washington uniparty by staffing the executive branch with prominent Republicans who always preferred the Clintons and Bidens over Trump—even if the smart ones refused to say so explicitly—while pursuing a standard policy agenda of foreign intervention, reckless spending, and fortifying the supremacy of the federal government over state control. These policies would have continued American decline but could have served to lull Americans to pre-Trump apathy by reminding them that federal elections have no real consequences for Washington.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
[ALT-Market.US] All people seek to control their environment to a certain degree. They want a reliable level of management over their world, and to remove whatever doubts they might have about their survival in the future. If they can, people will take measures to remove any potential pain or struggle and establish a life of perpetual comfort. The easy road is the dream for most, and in order to get it human beings see power as a formidable tool.
[ZERO] On Thursday night Joe Biden was propped up behind the presidential seal in front of historic Independence Hall and gave the most provocative and divisive speech in modern American history. With the site of the signing of the Declaration of Independence cloaked in an ominous blood red, Biden sputtered his way through an attack on "insurrectionists" he labeled as threatening American democracy, political norms, and the rule of law.
