The Political Spectrum In A Nut Shell

 

Source: Barnhardt Memes

Meme of the Day: Simon's Car Says "Feed Me"

Source: Barnhardt Memes

I like watching the Simon's Cat shorts on YouTube.  

Meme of the Day: They Don't Think Like You

A graph that I saw over at The Tactical Hermit:

Here are the Pew articles based on the survey:

• "Most black adults say race is central to their identity and feel connected to a broader black community" (Feb. 5, 2020).
• "Race Is Central to Identity for Black Americans and Affects How They Connect With Each Other" (April 14, 2022).

The graph is apparently based on data in the first article. The second article appears to be a follow on that completely focuses on blacks. From the first article:

    About three-quarters of black adults say that being black is extremely (52%) or very (22%) important to how they think about themselves, according to a 2019 Pew Research Center survey. By comparison, about six-in-ten Hispanic (59%) and 56% of Asian adults say being Hispanic or Asian, respectively, is extremely or very important to their identity. Only 15% of white adults see race as a central piece of their identity. The share of black adults who say their race is central to their identity varies by age – adults younger than 30 deem race a less important part of their identity than do their older counterparts.

    In addition, in a Pew Research Center survey conducted in 2016, most black adults (81%) said they felt at least somewhat connected to a broader black community in the U.S., including 36% who said they felt very connected to a black community. By contrast, 18% said they didn’t feel too connected or didn’t feel connected at all. This finding holds true across genders and age groups.

    However, there are some differences by income and educational attainment. Black adults with annual family incomes of $30,000 or more are more likely than those with lower incomes to feel connected to a broader black community in the U.S. Similarly, those with at least a bachelor’s degree are more likely to feel connected than those with less education. Conversely, about one-in-five black adults with some college (18%) or with a high school diploma or less education (20%) said they feel not too connected or not at all connected to a broader black community, compared with 11% of black college graduates who said this. And about one-in-five (22%) black adults who have annual family incomes less than $30,000 said they feel disconnected from a broader black community. This number declines to 13% among those with incomes between $30,000 and $74,999 and to 12% for black adults with higher incomes.

    Black adults who said they feel strongly connected to a broader black community are more likely than those who don’t to have engaged with organizations dedicated to improving the lives of black Americans by donating money, attending events or volunteering their time. About six-in-ten black adults who said they feel very connected to a broader black community (58%) said they have done at least one of these activities in the 12 months prior to the survey, compared with 45% among those who felt somewhat connected and 35% among those who said they feel not too or not at all connected to a broader black community.

In other words, the importance of race and racial activism increased with education and income. 

    I have three main takeaways from this. First, it is obvious that other ethnic groups are tribal and will think and act in ways to benefit their own tribe over being neutral or finding common ground. Second, the racial animus exhibited by blacks against whites is going to be stronger among the more educated blacks, which means that black elites are going to be the most anti-white and most likely to pursue anti-white policies. Which probably explains why the greatest vitriol comes from those in academia. Third, as I say in my title, they don't think like you. That is, based on the survey, it appears that more than half of other ethnic groups are going to view the world through racial lenses. 

Meme of the Day: Bidenomics In Action

 Seen at The Feral Irishman:

Meme of the Day: Reason for the Second Amendment #2023

 As seen at Western Rifle Shooters Association:

Meme of the Day: Border Insecurity

 As seen at WRSA:

Related story: "It's business as usual at the border while Biden deals with the Middle East: Daily Mail catches hundreds of migrants squeezing through the wall"--Daily Mail. At just one location near Lukeville, AZ, the Daily Mail reporter saw at least 550 people cross the border--through a section of border wall--in just over a one hour period. 

    ... On Thursday they included people from Senegal, Gambia, Guinea, Nepal, India, and Pakistan.

    The routes are well-worn by now. From Senegal to Morocco to Spain to Ecuador to Colombia to Mexico City and north by bus, for example.

    And the stories are just as well worn. The night's big contingent from India all told a similar story, rehearsed on the 15 or so days traveling.

    'It's the political thing,' said 22-year-old Dhruv Patel, as he described how people from politically connected families like his face the constant threat of kidnap.

    'Threatening calls,' said another young man in his group.

    'Criminality,' said a third. 

And:

    ... Data released by U.S. Customs and Border Protection revealed there were 269,735 encounters at the southern border in September, beating last December's record, and bringing the total for 2023 so far to 2.47 million.

    The Biden administration has tried to respond. It  announced recently that it would grant temporary legal status for nearly 500,000 Venezuelans already in the United States on July 31, while at the same time promising to deport those who arrived illegally after that date and failed to get asylum. 

    And the deportation flights to Venezuela have begun as part of a diplomatic thaw with the government of Nicolás Maduro.

    That might bring temporary respite, said Chris Clem, former chief patrol officer in nearby Yuma sector, but does not change the overall trend.

    'It's a couple of hundred people a day, that's a drop in the bucket,' he said. 

    'Until there's a significant policy shift, until there is a significant focus on reestablishing our border security as a priority, I think we're gonna suffer and morale will suffer.'

Meme of the Day: The Jezebel Spirit

Source of this and the other memes below is Western Rifle Shooters Association

In Ephesians 6:12, Paul warned that "For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places." You can't honestly say he's wrong when you read headlines like these:

• "Oregon high school sparks fury after asking students to write x-rated 'sexual fantasy' including three items such as candles, massage oil or feathers"--Daily Mail.
• "ABC’s ‘General Hospital’ Star Nancy Lee Grahn Compares Ron DeSantis to Hitler for Removing Pornographic Books from Schools"--Breitbart. What type of books? According to the article, "One of the books instructs readers on masturbation, anal sex, and sexting for minors. Another book encourages transgender top surgery for young girls." Well, she isn't completely wrong: Hitler's book burning was mostly focused on burning the trash produced by the LGBTQ movement and Communists (but perhaps I repeat myself) of the time.
• "Bronx English teacher is caught using school email to solicit THREESOMES and exchange 'indecent' photos with men on Craigslist - after forcing out white principal in row over Black History Month"--Daily Mail. 
• "RuPaul Attacks Laws Prohibiting Drag Shows for Children: ‘Drag Queens Are the Marines of the Queer Movement’"--Breitbart.
• "'I'm now a proud criminal': Trans activist boasts about illegally supplying cross-sex hormones to youth by ordering four times the estrogen and testosterone blockers she needs and redistributing medication for free"--Daily Mail. 
• "Governor Makes Minnesota ‘Refuge’ for Doctors to Provide Genital Mutilation, Chemical Castration"--Breitbart. This isn't about radical treatments on sex offenders, but doctors that want to abuse and mutilate children.
• "Students at America's biggest Catholic college DePaul University call for Christian group to be 'eliminated' from campus for labelling LGBTQ as sinners: 'They're spreading hatred'"--Daily Mail.
• "Queer People Must Use History as a Guide to Fight Hate"--Time Magazine. Even as "the queer movement has simultaneously grown more politically powerful and visible in mainstream society—including the securing of critical legal victories and prominence in the culture at large," the authors are calling for a return to the "radical politics and strategies of groups like ACT UP and Queer Nation". 
• "VP Harris's husband likens outraged parents at school board meetings to hatred that led to the Holocaust"--WLOS.com. Harris' husband, Doug Emhoff, does not specify any particular comments from parents but is just generally upset that parents are questioning authorities or seeking control over what their kids read at school. Of course, if you follow the news, you know that what parents are upset about are the rampant sexualization of children, pushing LGBTQ agendas, and allowing male students use female restrooms and dressing rooms. 

At one time, teachers were required to exhibit high morals as befitted someone that would be shaping the minds of the young. The type of behavior exhibited from today's educators would not only have been unacceptable, but would probably have resulted in their being run out of town, tarred and feathered, or even charged with crimes and imprisoned. But now the inmates run the asylum, and it is those who seek to protect their children that are being compared to mass murderers. Heck, even trying to model your life after what is good and beautiful is now considered hateful (see, e.g., "There's a Growing 'Trad-Wife' Trend That's Making Feminists Furious"). Society truly is calling good "evil" and evil "good".

    How did we get here? Basically, it is because the moral and intellectual force behind modernity--Protestantism--abandoned Christianity. The Social Pathologist has written a series of articles about the origin of technological and philosophical modernity and how it is a result of Protestantism. The articles are:

• "Modernity"
• "Protestant Modern"
• "Protestant Modern: The Collapse of Protestantism"
• "Protestant Modern: Teal Kooyong"

    The first article discusses how modern technology is not something divorced from religion, but that, in fact, the investigative and experimental mindset that gave rise to science and technology was derived from and because of the reformation and nurtured the scientific endeavor through its most creative periods, well into the 20th Century. 

    The second article delves into how the intellectual and technical flowering of the modern age could not have happened in the Catholic world. I don't have a bone in this fight, so I will leave it at that.

    The third article expands on ideas in his first article, and discusses further the collapse of Protestantism.

    The fourth article provides a real world example of how the collapse of Protestantism in the electoral seat of Kooyong in Australia that has been traditionally conservative politically and religiously, recently swung 180 degrees and elected a slate of "woke" politicians.

    I think this excerpt from the first article, however, illustrates the basic argument and why we face overwhelming forces of evil calling themselves woke:

    ... Formally, technology shouldn't really impact upon our values system but materially it does, and the medium of the interaction, from a civilisational level, is the midwit. Culture isn't just a product of the guys at the top of the intellectual food chains, it is a product of all levels of society and I don't think what isn't recognised enough is just how powerful this midwit engagement with science and technology is in the shaping of culture.

    "A little science distances you from God, but a lot of science brings you nearer to him" is a quote attributed to Pastuer but it captures the essence of things. Not thinking deeply about things is problematic but its how most of the human race lives and the midwit engagement and being satisfied with superficialities is a powerful solvent of traditional religious morality.  The experience of penicillin and fertiliser have probably been more effective de-Christianisers than nominalism.  For the day to day believer, penicillin cures, prayer doesn't. Fertiliser, rather than fasting, ensures the crops. God becomes increasingly irrelevant to our day to day lives.  Faith atrophies rather than is rejected and it is lived as if it is increasingly irrelevant. Only the troubled and the deep end up engaging religion. 

 

    The point here is that technology, in it's success, undercuts a powerful psychological mechanism which powers moral values, namely dependency, especially in the midwit class. As they say, "there are no atheists in foxholes" which simply is a recognition that in desperate times the midwit is prepared to give God some consideration: atheism and degeneracy being luxuries of comfort. 

    Christian forensic philosophers have laboured to identify and combat the errors of modernist thought but the fact is that stupid ideas have been around since time immemorial. What distinguishes the  modern world from the past is the traction these stupid ideas have now, or appear to have now. The average man does not engage life like a Pascal, Nietzsche, Heidegger or Kant: in fact he's probably never even heard of them. The fault of Christian philosphers has been to map the thought of dissident philosophers on the brains of midwits, combating a process that isn't naturally occurring in their minds, wondering why their arguments don't work. The fault lays in the failure to recognise that  Homer Simpson doesn't do Heidegger and the widespread consumption of internet porn is not due the average man's acceptance of the arguments of Foucault.

    Rather, how modernity attacks religion is "psychologically", through material comfort, security and abundance. The "argument" of modernity is not logical but existential. God is not needed, or sought, among people who are fat, happy and in-control enough.  Stupid ideas, which never would have been given the time of day in  a precarious world are suddenly given a hearing. Hubris, ingratitude and sloth act on a population-wide level consigning "hard" religion as an irrelevancy. The rejection of God is more pragmatic rather than philosophical. The relationship of Christianity to modernity is much bigger than just the world of ideas.

In other words, religion isn't important to the midwits (which, I would observe, includes most actors, politicians, business people, and intellectuals) because they are fat and happy and, therefore, don't believe they need God. In fact, it being fashionable to do so, they mock God and his teachings.

    Moving on to the third article, and the collapse of Protestantism, the author writes:

    Furthermore, the civic institutions that these societies built were models of trust, efficiency and honesty, at least when compared to the rest of the world. Leaders were held accountable and were meant to be honorable. Now, of course there were exceptions to the rule, sometimes widespread, but compared to the rest, the Protestant world was in a different league. Good governance, wealth and technological advancement were the markers of it. Contemporary writers were also aware of it and the unique position the  Protestant world had found itself in in the late 19th C.  Much of the opposition to immigrant migration at that time was a based up[on] a fear of corruption of the system by cultures which did not share its values.

I think we can safely say that this fear was borne out. The author continues:

    One of the distinguishing features of modernity is the rise of the bourgeoisie. They were the managerial class which bought the practical skills which enabled modernity. Much is made of the elite, but it is the middle, particularly the upper middle where the cultural "center of gravity" lies. It's the senior lawyers, doctors, economists, journalists, bankers, engineers, etc, that set the moral tone of the professions. The Protestant world was able to produce a large, well qualified, honest and technically able group of senior bourgoisie who were the "managers" of modernity, and it was their cultural values which shaped it. In the U.S. this bourgeois group by and large belonged to the "Mainline" religions but similar "mainline" faiths were in operation in other parts of the Protestant world. These mainline faiths provided moral instruction particularly to the bourgeois who ensured that the commence, law, science, medicine,etc operated with their moral limits. 

    The "health" of modernity is in many ways then a reflection of the health of Protestantism and this is why the collapse of " traditional" Protestantism has been the greatest western calamity of the 20th Century. The bottom line is that that Christian guardians of Modernity are no longer there.  It is the corruption of these particularly Mainline strands of Protestantism--to which the senior bourgeois belonged-- which is the mechanism by which the modern world became de-Christianised: Christianity meaning Christianity in a "traditional" sense. As Mainline Protestantism de-Christianised so did the upper managerial classes, who took their moral instruction from it.

    It's beyond the scope of this post to elaborate on the mechanics of de-Christianisation, but as Buckley noted at his time in Yale the process was in full swing. Chesterton noted similar changes in England in the 1920's . And what do I mean by de-Christianised? Most of the readers of this blog will intuitively grasp at what I'm getting at but to formally define it is much more difficult as one of the core problems of Protestantism  is inability to self-police its limits. Protestant expression is protean. However if one take the position of sola scriptura, then readings of scripture which broadly deny its everyday textual meaning can be taken as being unsound.  A Christianity which can theologically align Christian approval with the concept of "Gay Marriage" or other modern "innovations" is a false Christianity.

    If anyone wants to understand why our institutions are becoming more corrupt and left leaning it is because the space occupied by "sound Protestantism" in the governing  and administrative bourgeois class has been filled by either it's pseudo-Christian variants or by outright atheism. The number of "sound Protestants" in the appropriate administrative positions simply aren't there to push back. 

Or, when they are there, they are too cowardly to push back. 

    In short, then, the Social Pathologist has described how material prosperity caused the mid-wits of our society to remove the whole armor of God (see Eph. 6:11), leaving us vulnerable to Satanic influences.

    And to certain people, the abandonment of Christianity and Christian morality is enough to explain the sorry state of our society today. But I disagree. It doesn't explain the craziness of it all. There periodically come along times in a society, culture or civilization where it seems that society has become mad: the mass murders of tyrants like Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot made with the full complicity of the larger population; the degeneracy of Weimar Germany and pre-WWI France; the violence and anti-Christian excesses of the French Revolution; the degeneracy and excesses of the Roman emperors Caligula and Elagabalus. And the list could go on.  

Unfortunately, post-Weimar solutions are probably where we are headed.

    Vox Day recently linked to an article from "Rev. Matt" that seems to get us closer to the mark of why things are so crazy today, entitled "The Jezebel Spirit." As a bit of a background, although most of us are familiar with the Book of Revelation because of its prophesies of the last days and Second Coming, it doesn't just jump into the apocalyptical visions of John. It actually begins with a series of letters filled with praises, instructions, and rebukes directed at various of the early Churches under John's care. In Chapter 2, beginning at verse 18, John is directed to write a letter to the church in Thyatira, including the following from verses 20-24:

    Notwithstanding I have a few things against thee, because thou sufferest that woman Jezebel, which calleth herself a prophetess, to teach and to seduce my servants to commit fornication, and to eat things sacrificed unto idols.

    And I gave her space to repent of her fornication; and she repented not.

    Behold, I will cast her into a bed, and them that commit adultery with her into great tribulation, except they repent of their deeds. And I will kill her children with death; and all the churches shall know that I am he which searcheth the reins and hearts: and I will give unto every one of you according to your works.

    But unto you I say, and unto the rest in Thyatira, as many as have not this doctrine, and which have not known the depths of Satan, as they speak; I will put upon you none other burden.

As Rev. Matt indicates in his article, a Jezebel type person or persons are often at the rot of a society. Rev. Matt explains:

Throughout history whenever a society has accepted women leadership (matriarchy), or worshipped a female Deity, this has been followed by the acceptance of homosexuality and transgenderism. Without fail. It is a remarkable convergence, especially considering that this is observed in cultures that had nothing to do with each other and could not have influenced each other, because they were separated by centuries and continents.

He later adds:

    What people, including Mark [Driscoll], commonly call the Jezebel spirit is really the goddess Astarte, Ashtoreth, Ishtar, Aphrodite, Artemis, etc. In other words an active demon or demons that shows up in a consistent pattern throughout history, in every continent, in unconnected cultures, but always with the same tricks. Mark notices this too, but a key difference is that I call it the Asherah Spirit. If you read my works you'll see why.

    Our society is under the sway of these same demonic influences today. Whenever culture accepts feminine leadership it invariably follows that homosexuality and transgenderism rise up. ...

 In other words, it isn't just a secular movement or philosophy that got us where we are. Perhaps in the 1960s or 1970s we could point our fingers at various anti-Western and anti-Christian (they were one and the same) philosophies like Marxism and its bastard offspring of critical theory and modern feminism, or institutions that were largely under the control or influence of anti-Christians such as our federal court system and Hollywood, but it has gone beyond that to something that is decidedly Satanic. 

    Others have noted and commented on this. For instance, Vox Day comments: 

    ... we don’t need a fresh, objective, historical secular perspective. That’s the very outdated sort of thinking that has placed humanity in its current peril. We need to return to the old moral language, and specifically, the historical Christian perspective upon which Western civilization was built and by which humanity advanced intellectually, morally, and technologically to heights it had never seen before.

    All ideology is deception. Whether it is an ideology of the Right, such as free trade, free speech, libertarianism, Objectivism, or conservatism, or an ideology of the Left, such as socialism, communism, feminism, anti-racialism, or social justice, it is a deception and a distraction from the true and ancient conflict.

    Satan is real. He rules this fallen world. And he is determined to root out every last vestige of the truth, because the truth inevitably leads to the Truth, which is Jesus Christ. That’s why the satanic imperialists lie about everything from economics to race, from science to sex, and from math to phonics. It is the essence of the truth they fear, not the specific fact in question.

    We are living in a post-ideological time in a manner that exceeds mere identity politics, because every single identifiable ideology is poisoned with falsehoods in its core axioms. None of them are built on the truth, indeed, they are literally designed to deflect their adherents from the truth. And all of them observably lead to the exact same evil destination, as we are seeing take place in real time with “capitalism”, “democracy”, and “free market economies”.

And the Proof Positive blog recently decided to switch its emphasis from a secular explanation of our current politics and culture to one based on matters of the spirit:

    As Ferris Bueller once asked at the end of his movie, "Are you still here?" The blog "Proof Positive" as we knew it is gone. Never to return. For nearly 15 years its objective was to change America through politics and the political system. You can see what a great difference THAT made! I love my country, and I thought that, built upon such a great foundation, it could be restored to its former glory. I was mistaken. Not in that America was once a proud and free country, but about the means any such restoration should take.

    America needs revival.

    Not a new president, or a new party or by repealing this law or passing that one. It needs a spiritual revival, much like the Great Awakening of the past. Politics is not going to cut it. And politics was mostly what Proof Positive was all about. Politics, polititians and other celebrities...quoting them, mocking them, refuting them...spitting in the wind! Take for example the following picture:

Before, I saw that as a political problem! Liberals influencing society. Conservatives tolerating liberals, etc. But that's a SIN problem! Sinners violating the laws and precepts of God, trying to influence young children to follow in their footsteps. ...

Read the whole thing.

    Now, I want to note something about the picture above of the drag queen. It knows that it represents something demonic. It is reflected in the costume and decorations. It is seated in front of a rainbow, something stolen from Christian denominations which had long used a rainbow flag as a symbol of God's protection; therefore its use of the rainbow represents a false alternative to Christianity. It didn't dress as a kind, matronly woman. It didn't dress as a princess or queen. It isn't trying to pretend to be a unicorn. It picked an outfit using a crown with multiple horns, chose scarlet hair, and applied makeup to look like a sorceress or demon. Symbolism is important to these people because they are obsessed with signaling that they belong to a certain group or class. This drag queen is signaling her allegiance.

    The Jezebel Spirit is real, it is demonic, and it is present throughout all our institutions including our churches. Be careful out there and make sure that you have on the whole armor of God.

Meme of the Day: Deep State At Work

The relevant article today is "How to Cut Through the New Gordian Knots" by Paul Frijters, Gigi Foster, and Michael Baker at The Brownstone Institute. Their thesis is that government has become so complex and so large that it is impossible to discern who is in control, let alone reform it. They write (bold added):

    The deep problem is that the sheer size and complexity of vast systems such as education, health, and defence make it impossible for any single person or work team to understand them in their totality. That insight is now known as the problem of embodied knowledge: just as a body can provide its own immune defence services without the mind knowing how it’s done, bureaucracies can produce valuable services (e.g., in education, defence, and public health) without any one person or team knowing how it’s done.

    Rather, each of hundreds of specialists understands a tiny part of the full picture, with the details of that picture changing constantly with the incomings and outgoings of personnel and technology.

    Because no one understands these systems, insiders are able to concoct emergencies and other excuses to expand them until populations are fed up with them, an insight emphasised by William Niskanen. We are now at the point that Niskanen, writing in the 1970s, predicted would arrive: bureaucracies have become so bloated that they are no longer a net benefit to their society. 

    Also, when no one truly understands a system in its totality, it is hard to know where the biggest problems are. How to deduce which bits are rotten and who is corrupt, when everything is so entangled? So many strings are being pulled that identifying the puppet masters, or whether they exist at all, is virtually impossible.

    Corruption in a very complex system arises in a way known to economists as ‘market discovery:’ over time, those who stand to benefit most from the corruption of particular parts of these mammoth systems are those who have found ways to corrupt them. By trial and error, top civil servants and cashed-up outsiders have identified the buttons that need to be pressed to get mutually beneficial results, and have organised themselves to control those buttons and obscure them from others. Many corruption buttons will not be widely known to exist. After all, the better hidden the corruption, the longer the relevant players can hope to enjoy the benefits of that corruption.

    One well-known corruption tactic is the revolving door. Thousands of civil servants now hail from particular parts of the private sector that benefit from corrupting them. For instance, Loyce Pace, the HHS’s Assistant Secretary for Global Affairs and the person responsible for selling the World Health Organisation on plans to institutionalise the profits of Big Pharma, came into that position from the job of executive director of a health-industry lobby organisation called the Global Health Council. 

    A fox turned keeper of the chicken coop, invited in by elected politicians. According to Open Secrets, a non-profit group that monitors the revolving door: “public servants switching to careers as lobbyists (and back again) come from agencies as varied as the Department of Defence, NASA and the Smithsonian Institution.”

    Relatedly, politicians have an incentive to vandalise independent self-analytical units inside the state bureaucracy, such as audit offices. They can sell that vandalism to their sponsors, and by avoiding scandals from being discovered, keep their public image immaculate. A typical example is that in Australia’s state of Queensland, the anti-corruption commission was neutered by politicians from both main political parties after the reform period of the 1980s, as noted bitterly by former judge Tony Fitzgerald who led those 1980s reforms. The playbook to corrupt self-critical units inside the state bureaucracy is to put one of the shady insiders in charge, reduce the mandate, reduce the funding, make legal what was previously illegal, and punish whistleblowers. 

The authors also explain:

    The problems are far worse than even this dismal depiction indicates. Not only have leaders in our state institutions been captured and made subservient to special interest groups, but the very fabric of operations of both politics and the bureaucracy has become captured, procedurally and technologically, by special interest groups. These mechanisms of capture are not fully seen by anyone, create consequences that reach decades into the future, and are virtually impossible to pick apart.

    Think of the thousands of international treaties to which the US is beholden that collectively bind the hands of future generations when it comes to the taxation and regulation of industries. On top of this, the US is estimated to enter into a further 200 international treaties every year, many written by special interest groups to secure their future profits at the expense of the public. 

    Think also of the use of privately-owned technology to run key infrastructure and weaponry, where continued functionality depends upon maintenance and upgrades. Think of the thousands of ‘public-private partnerships’ that are essentially written by private partners and pushed through by bought politicians, locking in future generations to excessively expensive toll roads, medicines, broadband, and so on.

    In such an environment, one cannot isolate a few corrupted parts of the state bureaucracy, excise them, and start afresh. The system has become entangled precisely to prevent such a solution: to do any serious reform ‘from the outside’ you would not merely have to axe all the major departments, including the army, but also the legal structures and the major businesses that have grown around the state bureaucracy. Even whispering about such matters would put one on the radar of the security apparatus and the propaganda machinery of both government and Big Business. Beware the fate of Edward Snowden and Julian Assange.

    We can forget about seemingly simple fixes, like giving politicians the right to fire civil servants on the spot. Besides, giving clueless and corrupted politicians yet more power is not going to make matters better. Real reform will have to be dramatic, and it will come about only in dramatic circumstances.

The authors observe that, historically, this Gordian Knot of a bloated bureaucracy is dealt with through losing a war and the conquerors dissolving the government (e.g. Austria-Hungary) or outright government collapse (the Soviet Union). Their solution has six main point: (i) using small citizen committees (juries) to appoint bureaucrats; (ii) eliminating or walking away from the vast majority of laws, treaties, public-private partnerships, and so on; (iii) "unravel the influence of dead or blind money, such as that wielded by the huge philanthropic organisations that run much of science today (e.g., the Gates Foundation and the Ford Foundation); (iv) "we need to think about radical changes to our democracy and our legal system, including the use of referenda, citizens’ assemblies, and international arbiters"; (v) adopting different, simpler tax systems; and (vi) and reform journalism. 

    The problem I see with the proposed reforms is that they do not necessarily address the basic problem, which that "bureaucracies have become so bloated that they are no longer a net benefit to their society". I believe the simpler solution, at least in the United States, would be to repeal the 16th Amendment, which permitted the government to implement the income tax, and simply starve the federal government of its tax revenue. If the government didn't have so much money and influence, there would be no incentive to "game the system" or engage in much of the corruption. I suspect that with that change alone, much of the other problems would fall away. 

    Another point I want to make is that the phrase I bolded above--"bureaucracies have become so bloated that they are no longer a net benefit to their society"--reminds me of Joseph Tainter's work, The Collapse of Complex Societies (Cambridge Press, 1988). (You can see my review and commentary of Tainter's book at the following links: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6). Essentially, though, Tainter postulated that societies will collapse when they become too complex and too expensive to allow a society to respond to a crises. Or, as he otherwise expressed it, when the marginal increased cost of an additional bit of complexity exceeds the marginal benefit of that increased complexity. For instance, a new law that has a large cost and little or no benefit; or a new bureaucracy that costs much more than any harm it might prevent. 

    It should be noted that a collapse, as envisioned by Tainter, need not be a complete collapse of a society and loss of the rule of law (although it could be), but a shift from the more complex state to a simpler state. For instance, the United States dissolving into its separate member states. 

Related articles:

• "RFK Jr. Says CIA Is Connected to 2001 Anthrax Attacks"--The Gateway Pundit. The article notes that "[t]he attacks consisted of anthrax being sent through the United States Postal System via letters and delivered to several news organizations, Sen. Patrick Leahy and Sen. Tom Daschle." Kennedy is claiming that the letters went to Leahy and Daschle's offices because the two were trying to stop passage of the Patriot Act in 2001. "The son of the late US Attorney General Robert Kennedy then captivated Dore’s listeners by sharing that the FBI discovered anthrax in the letters originally 'stemmed from a CIA lab in Fort Detrick, Maryland.'"
• "Sure enough, NewsGuard gets federal funding" -- American Thinker. NewsGuard is ostensibly an organization that tries to vet news organizations so that users can supposedly avoid disinformation. The article notes that NewsGuard has received funding from the Department of Defense. Another similar organization mentioned in the article is the U.K.-based Global Disinformation Index, which apparently received funding from the U.S. Department of State. Discussing some recent Congressional testimony on the topic:

    On Thursday, independent journalists Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger appeared before the House Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government to testify about what they had discovered during a review of internal Twitter communications. An hour before the weird hearing began, Taibbi released the latest installment of the "Twitter Files."

    Halfway through his thread, titled "The Censorship-Industrial Complex," Taibbi wrote: "Some NGOs, like the GEC-funded Global Disinformation Index or the DOD-funded NewsGuard, not only see content moderation but apply subjective 'risk' or 'reliability' scores to media outlets, which can result in a reduction in revenue." Embedded in the post was a picture of a nearly $750,000 award from the Department of Defense to NewsGuard, an organization the independent journalists characterized as a "government-funded" entity implicated in the Censorship Complex.

• "Pentagon Developing Deepfakes To Deceive the Public"--Truth11. 

    United States Special Operations Command (SOCOM) is “gearing up to conduct internet propaganda and deception campaigns online using deepfake videos,” according to contracts with the federal government reviewed by The Intercept.

    In what many would attribute to the likely behavior of rogue regimes targeting the United States, the activities that SOCOM is carrying on overseas include “hacking internet-connected devices to eavesdrop in order to assess foreign populations’ susceptibility to propaganda,” the Intercept article reports.

    The information revealed in the report is taken from a procurement document published by the Department of Defense, a sort of wish list of technological tools the Pentagon is looking to secretly deploy throughout the world.

• "Whistleblower: FBI Agents Colluded To Illegally Intercept Proud Boy Defendant’s Communications With HIS OWN Attorney" – enVolve. The FBI was intercepting communications between the Proud Boy defendant and his attorney to learn their trial strategy and then passing that information on to prosecutors. 
• "The Persecution of Ricky Vaughn"--Vox Popoli. Vox quotes from an article discussing the fact that the government's case against Doug Mackey (aka Ricky Vaughn) is partly reliant on a confidential witness (CW), but the government refuses to name the CW. Per the quoted article:

In its filings, the government declines to say what CW’s current role with the government is, except that he is “presently engaged in proactive investigations, working with the Federal Bureau of Investigation (“FBI”), and may engage in additional investigations in the future.” Based on that statement, the government is asking that CW’s identity be kept secret, and that Mackey’s defense team be barred from asking any questions about CW’s current work.

The same article indicates that typically a CW's identity will only be protected if there is a current, specific and credible threat of harm. In this case, the DOJ claims that the threat is that the CW might be harassed on the Internet. Vox Day adds:

    This particular federal informant is widely rumored to be none other than “Baked Alaska”. But that’s not what is interesting, at least to me. What I believe to be more significant is this observation from AC [Anonymous Conservative]:

Notice, Ricky had an informant before he had any hint of anything prosecutors might try to charge him with, going on around him. He was just a a squeaky clean, preppy guy, posting funny memes on Twitter. With an informant sent in. Which means an FBI/intelligence agent assigned to him.

So one guy posting on Twitter had an informant sent in and an intelligence operation dedicated to him on nothing more than the basis of his rhetorically-effective memes. What this means is that literally everyone with more than 200+ followers on any social media platform is being targeted, tracked, and infiltrated. 

• "DHS Just Turned 20. It's Time To Abolish It."--Reason. One of those agencies whose costs, both direct and indirect, far exceed any benefit it provides.
• "CIA and Mossad-linked Surveillance System Quietly Being Installed Throughout the US" -- Activist Post. The company in question is Gabriel which, according to the article, "offers a suite of surveillance products for 'security and safety' incidents at 'so-called soft targets and communal spaces, including schools, community centers, synagogues and churches.'" Also:

Gabriel, since its founding, has been backed by “an impressive group of leaders,” mainly “former leaders of Mossad, Shin Bet [Israel’s domestic intelligence agency], FBI and CIA.” In recent years, even more former leaders of Israeli and American intelligence agencies have found their way onto Gabriel’s advisory board and have promoted the company’s products.

But adoption of its products were languishing in the U.S. until "an 'anonymous philanthropist' gave the company $1 million to begin installing its products throughout schools, houses of worship and community centers throughout the country." The same philanthropist "has promised to recruit others to match his donation, with the ultimate goal of installing Gabriel’s system in 'every single synagogue, school and campus community in the country.'"

Meme of the Day: Not With A Bang, But With A Whimper

    I see that California has achieved its dream of becoming essentially a third world country. And as California is a social trend setter for the United States, this is a foreshadow of what will happen elsewhere. From UnHerd, "The corruption of California" by Matthew Crawford, as summed up by California's Department of Motor Vehicles and his resort to a "fixer" appropriately called "Smog Lady" to get a smog certificate. Some excerpts:  

    I grew up in California, moved away in the early Nineties, and moved back in 2019. One of the new things I noticed upon my return was small signs stuck to the side of a car, or printed on posterboard and erected on a street corner, advertising “DMV services”. After some intercourse with a few of these, always conducted in halting, heavily accented English, I came to understand that these entrepreneurs are “fixers”, a species that most Americans are unacquainted with. If you want to get something done in the developing world, you often need to engage the services of a fixer. This is someone who has connections in the bureaucracy, often by virtue of kinship. Being a naïve visitor without connections, you couldn’t possibly know whom to bribe, how to approach them, or what forms must be observed. These things must be accomplished with delicacy. You, brainwashed to believe in the Weberian version of bureaucracy as impersonal rationality, are too naive to navigate a real one in most parts of the world. Too European.

    They say California is the future. However that may be, the state has become more like the rest of the world, less like the erstwhile United States. The old European ways of procedure-following are anomalous, and perhaps never made a lot of sense. Or maybe they made sense only within a framework provided by something like Calvinism, Prussian organisation, ecclesiastical administration, or some similarly ascetic institutional morality that is “no respecter of persons”. By contrast, ties of kinship are easy to grasp, more robust, and make sense to more of the world’s peoples as the ground of cooperation, particularly in societies where the clan may be as far as trust extends.

* * *

    ... California has become a polyglot of unrelated diasporas, opportunity-seekers, guest workers, tech Brahmins and multiple-passport-holding functionaries posted to the Pacific Rim economic zone. It is more like the bar scene in Star Wars than like Tolkien’s Shire. We are all wanderers.

    I think Smog Lady is not to be understood as a service nomad, then. Rather, the necessity of her services may be taken as an indication of the direction that state bureaucracy takes under conditions of multiculturalism (think Brazil), particularly in the absence of partisan political competition (think Soviet Union). These two features, multiculturalism and political monopoly, interact in interesting ways.

    With the collapse of the Republican Party in California, there soon emerged a political landscape resembling what the Yugoslav Communist official (turned dissident) Milovan Djilas termed the “party-state”. That is to say, there is little meaningful distinction to be made between the government and the Democratic Party. Competition for control of California takes place, not between two rival parties with different political visions and corresponding electorates in a general election, but between aspirants within the Democratic Party, under a shared political vision. In practice, this means competition for money from organised interests that fund the activist networks, which in turn translate those interests into various moralisms and thereby shape the vision of the party. The electorate largely drops out of consideration as a constituency.

    Only what happens within the Party matters. In Yugoslavia in the Fifties that meant the deliberations of the “political forums”. In California, what happens within the Party is mostly determined by NGOs and foundations, public sector union leadership, expert bodies willing to generate Science in support of the Party’s program, and tech firms that are permitted unlimited capital accumulation on condition of alignment with the Party. Together these entities make up a sort of government-by-cabinet that is effectively insulated from the pressures of electoral politics. The citizenry isn’t feared.

* * *

    Having now spent some time in DMV offices in the new California, my impression is that the shop floor operates along the lines of ethnic fiefdoms that overlap somewhat, and work fairly smoothly together when necessary. The Hispanic customers speak their own language with a Hispanic teller, the warm tones and easy gestures of which seem very unlike the bureaucratic mode of address that institutional English is adapted to. There are other languages spoken as well, each with its own characteristic emotional repertoire, and some of these seem better adapted to the haggle — at least to the naïve and suspicious ear of one feeling beset by a cacophonous Babel.

    The occasional appearance of an unaffiliated Anglo-American such as myself is accommodated easily enough, and in such cases tellers are able to code-switch into officialese. But one does wonder if one is being offered quite the same menu of services as those who can make appeal to one of these fiefdoms. In 2021, five employees at a DMV office in the Los Angeles area pled guilty to taking weekly cash bribes to process drivers licences for unqualified drivers. According to ringleader Atanacio Villegas, a licence registration examiner in Torrance from 2010 to 2016, “a network of ‘brokers’ would contact him on behalf of drivers who could not pass their driver exams”, and then forward the drivers’ bribes to DMV employees. The scheme involved sending the drivers to the window of a participating DMV employee who had an “identifier”, such as a red hat, as reported in the Press Democrat and LA Times.

He goes on to discuss other instances of bribery rings and operations involving the DMV. He concludes:

You, tender reader, might be scandalised by the ways of California’s DMV, but such a response is a hangover from another era. Under conditions of bureaucratic dysfunction typical of a party-state, corruption isn’t a problem, it is the solution. These new populations have found ways to get things done. Bribery is more efficient (and far less crazy-making) than clinging to first-world expectations in a world that has changed. For my part, I am sincerely grateful for the services of Smog Lady. Diversity is our strength.

 And, in truth, it is hard to tell if some of the "bribes" he describes are really bribes per se--paying someone to make a discretionary decision in your favor--or a "grease payment" intended to simply get the bureaucrat to do his or her job in the first place. The former has always existed in the United States, but the latter--although a fixture in the Third World--has largely been rare. But import lots of people from foreign cultures and they bring that culture and how it operates with them, even the dysfunctional parts.

    Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis delivered a speech in California this past Sunday, railing against California and its progressive policies, blaming its "woke" policies for the exodus of people and jobs leaving California. Notwithstanding his quip about Florida being where "woke" goes to die, the reality is that California is our future because California represents what happens when you have uncontrolled immigration. And the country, as a whole, has uncontrolled immigration.

    Brian Lonergan, writing at American Greatness, writes on this topic, noting that "Biden’s White House Is Infested with Foreigner Supremacists." Lonergan explains:

Foreigner supremacy is the belief that non-Americans are intrinsically endowed with greater integrity, work ethic, and value than American citizens. Therefore, local, state and federal policies should prioritize the rights of foreigners over Americans whenever possible because, after all, they deserve them more than we do.

He continues:

    The most glaring example of the Biden Administration’s foreigner supremacist beliefs can be found in its immigration policies. 

    Start with the 5.5 million foreigners who have been allowed to enter the United States illegally since Biden took office. That deluge has run roughshod over border communities, ranches, police and healthcare resources. What about the rights of those residents who have had their lives turned upside down as a result? At the highest levels of our government, those people have no advocates, no voice, and no one concerned for their plight.

    Under this pernicious ideology, those from other countries also have a greater right to work in the United States than Americans do. The White House is currently weighing a rule change that would allow temporary and seasonal workers to apply for permanent U.S. residency, which would only serve to increase the competition American workers face for jobs and drive down wages.  

    Such a change, however, complies with the goals of agribusiness, Big Tech, and other sectors to flood the country with a pool of comparatively cheap foreign workers to reduce bottom-line labor costs. ...

Because lax immigration benefits big business, Lonergan observes, it is championed by Republicans as much as it is by Democrats. And, he warns, "[w]hether it is borne out of self-loathing, political opportunism or something else, foreigner supremacy is very real, and it is contributing to America’s decline."

    Of course, it isn't as simple as saying that immigration caused all of this. Obviously, this country was built on immigration, but immigration that was overwhelmingly from a small number of culturally and linguistically similar states in north-western Europe. What came later was immigration from increasingly dissimilar cultures and peoples. 

    This latter immigration is as much a symptom or result as it is a cause. "[T]he love of money is the root of all of evil," wrote Paul, and it certainly has been the case with America and immigration. In particular, the quest for ever lower labor costs has been one of the main drivers of immigration, particularly from those cultures and peoples that are incompatible with American culture: the importation of slaves in the 18th and 19th Centuries, the allowing of mass immigration in the late 19th and early 20th century, and the justification for renewal of open borders since 1965. And as each wave of immigrants were enfranchised, the country has lurched farther left on the political spectrum and felt more obligated to become involved (or entangled) in foreign matters. There is a difference between maintaining a strong navy and open trade routes and, as an example, taking the side of Israel over that of pro-Western Arab countries as we did in the 1960s.

    And each wave of immigration reinforces the subsequent waves. For instance, today's radicals pushing for every greater immigration benefited from the Immigration Act of 1965. That Act was the result of the work and political pressure of progressive forces in the 1940s and '50s. Those progressive were largely led by the immigrants and their children that came in the early 20th Century. 

    It's hard to quantify the changes wrought on the country and decline in the American nation due to this influx. But one thing is clear: Absent this influx the United States would be much more conservative. Certainly the statistics and polling data from the last several presidential elections show that white men and married white women overwhelmingly voted for the Republican candidate. I would further argue that without the large foreign contingent, single white female voters would have followed the herd, so to speak, and voted more conservatively as well. This isn't to say that Republican party would have politically dominated in an American nation (as opposed to our polyglot United States) but that the Democrat party would not have moved so far to the Left.

  Related articles and headlines:

• Trapped in hell: "'Atlanta would die': Georgia senators slap down wealthy suburb Buckhead's independence bid 'for now' - as leaders claim Governor Brian Kemp 'coordinated behind closed doors to kill the bill'"--Daily Mail Online. One politician quoted in the article described the suburb as the "heart of Atlanta." Buckhead is 93% white versus Atlanta, overall, being 49% black. 
• "Terrifying moment United passenger threatens mass-murder, before trying to stab flight attendant in neck with broken spoon and attempting to open emergency exit in mid-air"--Daily Mail Online. Name of the would be terrorist? Francisco Severo Torres.
• "'A strong black woman runs this b***h now': Staten Island superintendent claims text messages appearing to show her vowing to sack white principals amid push to hire more BIPOC staff are fake"--Daily Mail Online. The Department of Education claims that the texts are fake, but they did appear at the same time as the black superintendent was pushing to hire more BIPOC staff.
• "SPLC lawyer charged with domestic terrorism over Antifa attack on police facility in Atlanta"--The Post Millennial. I've long contended that the Southern Poverty Law Center is, itself, a hate group, so no surprise that one of their own would be a domestic terrorist and member of Antifa. But other Antifa terrorists arrested included members from Canada and France. Most of the other members of the terrorist group had the normal "woke" credentials, including a handful of trans activists.

Not all will be sporting multiple piercings or pink hair!

• This seems to be cropping up more and more where Bible verses are deemed hate speech or racist: "Texas Tech suspends men's basketball coach Mark Adams for citing Bible verses referring to 'SLAVES serving their masters' to a player as University acts after 'inappropriate, unacceptable and racially insensitive comment'"--Daily Mail Online. 

    'On Friday, Director of Athletics Kirby Hocutt was made aware of an incident regarding a coaching session between Adams and a member of the men's basketball team. 

    'Adams was encouraging the student-athlete to be more receptive to coaching and referenced Bible verses about workers, teachers, parents, and slaves serving their masters. Adams immediately addressed this with the team and apologized.

* * *

    Adams spoke to Stadium and insider Jeff Goodman, saying, 'I was quoting the scripture. It was a private conversation about coaching and when you have a job, and being coachable.'

    'I said that in the bible that Jesus talks about how we all have bosses, and we all are servants,' Adams added. 'I was quoting the bible about that.'

    Stadium also reported that Adams addressed the team the next day to explain what happened. 

    'One of my coaches said it bothered the player,' Adams said.

• "Mass. school under investigation after barring white students from auditioning for school play"-- Daily Mail Online.

    The Massachusetts school's Theater Ink program put on a show titled 'Lost and Found: Our Stories as People of Color,' which according to the show's audition packet acted as 'a reserved safe space for this exploration and for people of color to be vulnerable and support one another.' 

    At the time of auditions last fall, the student director posted a video to the company's website declaring that 'All BIPOC [Black, indigenous and people of color] students at North are invited to audition.'

    It was at that point that the grassroots national movement Parents Defending Education got involved and filed a complaint with the federal government that the school districted discriminated against students on the basis of race.

    The claim noted that the audition criteria, which included asking students about their race and ethnic identities violated 'both Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 … and the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment to the US Constitution.'

    PDE President and Founder Nicole Neily told Fox that the school's administration 'failed their student body by allowing a racially-segregated production to move forward - and missed the opportunity to impart the lesson that racial discrimination is always wrong.' 

    In the Lost and Found audition packet, students were told that weekly rehearsals for the production would include 'organized discussions about race and identity in our lives.'

There is plenty of precedent for actors to play the role of a historical person of a different race from that of the actor, so that is no excuse. 

• I think this is called "blackmail": "Now California reparations panel RAISES amount it wants to give 1.8m black people from $220,000 to $360,000 each in $650 BILLION give away - as hearing is told payments are 'only way to stop our children busting into liquor and grocery stores'"--Daily Mail Online.
• "Cops investigate after black schoolkids attacked white students and forced them to say 'Black Lives Matter' on camera at Ohio elementary school"--Daily Mail Online. 

    A criminal investigation at an Ohio elementary school has been launched after black students forced their white peers to say 'Black Lives Matter' on camera and assaulted those who didn't.

    The incident at Kenwood Elementary on February 10 showed the altercation play out as two students were initially seen escorting their peer to an area on the playground while punching the student in the head.

    Footage of the 17-minute video showed the student being tossed on the ground while another student joined seconds later. About 10 minutes later a third student was thrown right beside them.

    The students involved in the incident were interviewed by school staff as Springfield Police attempt to charge the suspect for menacing and assault for knowingly harming a victim, according to Dayton247now. 

    The incident is being treated as an Anti-White hate crime and lists at least four students involved. The names of the students weren't immediately available.

• She certainly got the exciting relationship she was seeking: "U.S. swimming champion's boyfriend who 'found her' dead on floor at her Virgin Islands home is 'bad boy' who was jailed for ten years for his role in beating death of U.S. tourist in 2007"--Daily Mail Online. The dead swimmer is Jamie Cail, 42, who was white and blonde. The alleged killer is Kamal Thomas, who is black. 

Note: most of the memes were found at Western Rifle Shooters Assoc.

Meme of the Day: Shock Therapy

 

Source: Stone Toss

Some News Stories You Might Have Missed:

• "Africa Didn’t Follow WHO’s Pandemic Script. Guess What Happened?"--The Burning Platform. Even though African nations have the lowest jab rates in the world, but have suffered no ill effects, the WHO is still urging them to inject more of their population. From the article:

    The statements made by the WHO contradict a number of real-world situations. For starters, while developed nations with high jab rates struggled with COVID-19 throughout much of 2021 and 2022, Africa avoided this fate, despite its single-digit jab rate.

    Scientists are said to be “mystified” as to how Africa fared so well, completely ignoring data showing that the more COVID-19 shots you get, the higher your risk of contracting COVID-19 and ending up in the hospital.

    Over the past year, researchers have been warning that the COVID-19 jabs appear to be dysregulating and actually destroying people’s immune systems, leaving them vulnerable not only to COVID-19 but also other infections.

    It stands to reason, then, that Africa with its low injection rate would not be burdened with COVID-19 cases brought on by dysfunctional immune systems.

    Secondly, variants have gotten milder (less pathogenic) with each iteration, albeit more infectious (i.e., they spread easier).

    So why is the WHO worried about “the risk of new variants creating large waves of serious disease and death in populations with low vaccination coverage”? What is that “risk” based on?

    And, since COVID-19 infection keeps getting milder, and has had a lethality on par with or lower than influenza ever since mid-2020 at the latest, why is it still a “crucial priority” to accelerate delivery of COVID-19 treatments?

    As a reminder, according to a Sept. 2, 2020 study in Annals of Internal Medicine, the overall noninstitutionalized infection fatality ratio for COVID-19 was a mere 0.26%.

    Below 40 years of age, the infection fatality ratio was just 0.01%. Meanwhile, the estimated infection fatality rate for seasonal influenza is 0.8%.

• "America Forgot the 1918 Flu. Will We Also Forget Covid?"--Wall Street Journal. An excerpt:

    My grandfather, Walter Kirschner, was born in Philadelphia in 1910, the sixth of eight children. His wife, my grandmother Rebekah, was also born in Philadelphia, in 1907; she was one of 10 children. Most of my grandparents and great-aunts and -uncles, all born between 1900 and 1913, lived into their 80s or 90s. I knew them well.

    In other words, I was raised among old people who, as young people, had seen their world rocked by the flu. When they were children or young adults, the Spanish flu pandemic hit their hometown harder than anywhere else in the U.S. On just one day, Oct. 18, 1918, 759 people died of flu in Philadelphia, according to John Barry’s definitive history, “The Great Influenza.” That same month, the month my grandfather turned eight, Mr. Barry writes that “the Bureau of Child Hygiene publicly begged for neighbors to take in, at least temporarily, children whose parents were dying or dead. The response was almost nil.” Bodies decomposed in their beds, with no one to remove them.

    The poor and immigrants—like my grandparents’ families—were hit hardest. So it stands to reason, doesn’t it, that some of my family got sick, or watched a neighbor or schoolmate get sick or die? But I don’t know for sure. Despite having spent thousands of collective hours with my grandfather and grandmother, with my uncles Gabriel and Sidney and Henry (and the other Henry), my aunts Nettie and Ruth and Ann, and numerous others—not to mention their spouses, all Philadelphians—I never heard any of them mention the Spanish flu. Not once.

    That absence has me wondering how Americans will remember Covid-19 once it is finally behind us, or when it has become a manageable nuisance. Right now, it’s hard to imagine it will be regarded as anything less than a generation-defining phenomenon, like the antiwar protests of the late 1960s, the AIDS crisis of the 1980s or the attacks of 9/11. But I think it’s just as likely that it will disappear from our consciousness, as the influenza pandemic of 1918-19 did.

    The Spanish flu was deadlier than Covid-19 and was more likely to kill those in the prime of life, yet it has been largely obliterated from historical memory. As Alfred W. Crosby noted in his 1989 book “America’s Forgotten Pandemic,” the Spanish flu was omitted from all the great midcentury American history textbooks, including volumes by Samuel Eliot Morison, Henry Steele Commager, Richard Hofstadter, Arthur Schlesinger Jr. and C. Vann Woodward—all men who had lived through the pandemic.

    The Spanish flu killed perhaps 50 million people worldwide, the equivalent, as a percentage of the population, of 200 million people today.

    The one major textbook that Crosby could find that mentioned the pandemic, Thomas A. Bailey’s “The American Pageant” (1956), gave it one sentence and, Crosby says, “understates the total number of deaths due to it by at least one half.” Today, a U.S. history student is still unlikely to learn about the 1918-19 pandemic. The latest, 17th edition of “The American Pageant,” by David M. Kennedy and Lizabeth Cohen, mentions the pandemic on two pages.

    Popular culture did at least as poor a job in commemorating it. The Spanish flu killed perhaps 50 million people worldwide, the equivalent, as a percentage of the population, of 200 million people today. Yet there is no great film about the Spanish flu pandemic, and the literature is sparse. Katherine Ann Porter’s novel “Pale Horse, Pale Rider” (1939) and William Maxwell’s novel “They Came Like Swallows” (1937) offer the principal treatments by major writers. Then there is John O’Hara’s short story “The Doctor’s Son,” which ran in The New Yorker in 1935, and Willa Cather’s minor 1922 novel, “One of Ours.”

    At the time, people remarked upon this gap in the literature. “Novels, one would have thought, would have been devoted to influenza; epic poems to typhoid; odes to pneumonia,” Virginia Woolf wrote in her 1926 essay “On Being Ill.” But she was lamenting the general inattention to illness in literature, which she attributes to the fact that fiction writers concern themselves with affairs of the mind rather than the ordeals of the body. The flu pandemic was less than a decade in the past, yet it did not seem to loom larger in her mind than typhoid or any other malady.

    Nobody seems to have a good answer for why the extraordinary, worldwide die-off of 1918-19 imprinted so little on our collective imagination. “The whole issue of how quickly it was forgotten is one that historians have not really grappled with,” said Naomi Rogers, who teaches the history of science at Yale. John Barry concurred: “No satisfactory explanation,” he wrote to me in an email, when I asked about this forgetfulness. “No research that I know of” on its causes, he added.

    The best theory I’ve encountered is that the pandemic simply couldn't compare with World War I. The whole civilized world turning on itself in an orgy of warfare was more traumatizing than an act of nature; it demanded more of a response. It was an event that poets cared about and that political leaders had answers for (the Treaty of Versailles, the League of Nations). It seemed like something mankind could, with diligence, prevent from recurring.

    Acts of God are, I think, more forgettable than our own acts. Even though we can mount a response to pandemics—immunologists, working overtime, made great strides in response to the pandemic of 1918-19, even if they did not have the tools that Covid scientists had a century later—there is an inherent futility in the face of disease. It will always be with us, in a way that, we dare to dream, war and human cruelty might not.

    In that light, I wonder if we’ll look back on the present moment and remember Black Lives Matter and the polarization around the Trump presidency, the war in Ukraine and the rise and fall of Twitter, rather than Covid-19. If that’s the case, I would say we have cause to celebrate. Past generations’ reluctance to talk about influenza—not to mention diseases like polio, which terrified my parents in their youth and whose effects are still visible in the limps and disabilities of old people I know—should not, I think, be read as stoicism or avoidance, but as adaptability. Forgetting is one of the great human gifts; we cannot reasonably carry with us all the wounds of our past. Especially since, alas, there is always more suffering around the bend.

I'm sure that the authorities will soon be wanting the public to forget Covid as more and more comes out about how harmful was the government's reaction to it and how harmful is the vaccine becomes more apparent. We are already seeing the Left wanting everyone to forgive and forget how vicious and hateful they were toward anyone that didn't get vaxxed or wear masks.

• Yes. Yes they did: "Did the FBI collect the fingerprints of unvaccinated NYC teachers?"-- American Thinker. From the lede:

One year ago, New York City fired over 1,430 city employees who refused to take the COVID vaccine. Several of those workers filed a class action lawsuit against the City. During that lawsuit, the teachers’ attorney introduced a sworn deposition stating that, when teachers refused the vaccination, the city flagged them as “problems” and handed their fingerprints over to both the FBI and the New York criminal justice system.

• I don't know if it is evidence, but it is certainly suggestive: "EVIDENCE: Government sent deadlier covid 'vaccines' to red states to depopulate conservatives"--NaturalNews.com. From the lede:

Mike Yeadon, the former head of respiratory research at Pfizer, and independent researcher Craig Paardekooper have sourced Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) data on vaccine deaths and injuries in the United States showing that “red,” or conservative-leaning, states are seeing, on average, twice the number of covid “vaccine”-related deaths compared to “blue,” or liberal-leaning, states.

• Demographic winter: "45% Of Women Are Expected To Be Single And Childless By 2030, Per Recent Projection"--Evie Magazine. From the article:

We're told by our culture that a woman who is unmarried and has no children is empowered and in charge of her own life. She has escaped the unnecessary burden of raising a family and being a slave to her husband. At least, that's what our society has convinced us. Sadly, many women have adopted the modern feminist lifestyle and have chosen to sleep around, abort their baby if they unexpectedly get pregnant, and swear off marriage. But these cultural trends are going to have a tremendous impact on the future of American society. Morgan Stanley estimates that 45% of women in their "prime working years" (ages 25 to 44) will be single and childless by the time 2030 arrives.

Of course, if it means that r-selected females won't pass on their genes, it will be a good thing over the long run. 

• Election integrity in action:
• Just a conspiracy theory? "Israeli firm 'sought to influence more than 30 elections around the world'"--Daily Mail Online. 

    An Israeli firm sought to influence more than 30 elections around the world for clients by hacking, sabotage and spreading disinformation, according to an undercover media investigation published Wednesday.

    The firm was dubbed 'Team Jorge' by investigating journalists who posed as potential clients in order to gather information on its methods and capabilities.

    Its boss, Tal Hanan, is a former Israeli special forces operative who boasted of being able to control supposedly secure Telegram accounts and thousands of fake social media profiles, as well as planting news stories, the reports say.

    The investigation was carried out by a consortium of journalists from 30 outlets, including the Guardian in Britain, Le Monde in France, Der Spiegel in Germany and El Pais in Spain, under the direction of the France-based non-profit Forbidden Stories.

    It adds to a growing body of evidence that shadowy private firms across the world are profiting from invasive hacking tools and the power of social media platforms to manipulate public opinion and to sway voters. 

• "The State Department helped defund conservative websites"-- American Thinker. The State Department went to advertisers and suggested (wink, wink) that they might want to consider not advertising on the sites because the sites were, according to the Department, spreading misinformation. 
• "Left Wing Support Collapses After Berlin Re-Runs Election Over 'Errors'"--Breitbart. 

    Support for left-wing parties has collapsed in Berlin after elections were re-run in the city on Sunday over “errors” in the previous ballot.

    An election re-run in the German capital of Berlin has seen support for the political right surge, with the centrist Christian Democratic Union (CDU) seeing a seismic ten-point rise over the previous ballot.

    Although the city had already seen elections take place in 2021, numerous “errors” and other anomalies in the voting process eventually resulted in the ballot being struck down in court, with the vote finally being re-run on Sunday.

    According to a report by Der Spiegel, this re-run has seen the mandates for every major left-wing party in the German capital decline significantly, with the three outfits that previously ruled the city — the Social Democratic Party (SPD), Die Linke, and the Green Party — all seeing their support drop between 0.5 to 3 per cent. 

Fortunately for the left-wing government, they were able to find a batch of uncounted mail-in ballots casting the new election into doubt. Amazing how that happens.

• Immigrants welcome: "U-haul driver told police murderous spree sparked by 'an invisible object' coming towards car"--Daily Mail Online. Weng Sor went on an hour long killing spree in New York using a U-Haul truck killing Yijie Ye and injuring 7 others after, he claims, he saw an invisible object nearly strike his vehicle, causing him to go into a rage. 
• Diversity, Equity and Inclusion: "Whistleblower: Grooming Gangs Preying on Girls on a 'Shocking Scale'"--Breitbart.

    Mostly Muslim child rape grooming gangs continue to prey on young girls throughout Britain a decade on after being exposed to the public, a documentary has claimed.

    Through a combination of access to more advanced technology and continued police “neglect of duty”, mostly Pakistani Muslim grooming gangs are still operating on a “shocking scale” in the United Kingdom, according to former detective turned whistleblower Maggie Oliver, who appeared in the GB News documentary Grooming Gangs: Britain’s Shame.

    A decade on from first being exposed to the public, Oliver warned that it was wrong to view the issue of grooming gangs only as a historical issue, saying: “This is going on today. We’ve been approached by 60 victims in the last three days who are currently being failed by the police.

    “It is not a historical problem. Very little has changed. We have seen trials. But all too often these children are still being judged and fobbed off and that is not good enough.”

• Diversity, Inclusion and Equity: "ABOUT 35 BLACK-ON-WHITE HOMICIDES (GIVE or TAKE A FEW ASIANS): January 2023—Another Month In the Death of White America"--The Unz Review. The author adds: "We found just four white-on-black homicides, none of them murders."
• I'm sure the solution will involve paying teachers more to do what they are already doing: "Baltimore: 23 Schools Have Zero Students Who Can Do Math at Grade Level"--Legal Insurrection.
• The Biden crime family: "Jim Biden negotiated deal with Saudis 'because of relationship' to Joe"--Daily Mail Online.

    President Biden's brother was hired to engage in secret negotiations with the Saudi government on behalf of a US construction company because of his relationship with the then vice president, legal documents claim.

    Jim Biden was selected because Saudi Arabia 'would not dare stiff the brother of the Vice-President who would be instrumental to the deal,'  bombshell affidavits obtained by DailyMail.com allege.

    Joe's younger brother Jim, 73, was at the center of a $140million settlement negotiation between Hill International and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia in 2012.

• But I Feelz! "Research Confirms the Stereotype: Liberals Confuse Emotion With Rationality"-- The New American. From the lede: "Liberals are not only more likely than conservatives to suppose that 'emotion is a feature of rationality,' a series of three studies has shown, but also apparently believe it should be. In fact, they consider emotions more “functional” (utilitarian, essentially) than conservatives do despite reporting less emotional well-being." 
• Leftists are evil: "Satanic Idaho group planning a 'gender affirmation ritual'"--KTVB.com. Even in Idaho you can't get away from it. The article begins: "Satanic Idaho is a self-described, 'atheistic altruistic satanic religious organization,' that has planned a 'gender affirming ceremony' to take place at the Idaho State Capitol." But get this: they don't believe in a literal Satan. So, if they don't believe in the entity which they allegedly worship, can they actually be a religious organization? Satan was a liar from the beginning and, as I've noted before, so are leftists.
• Are your kids watching this? "Disney's wildly woke show Proud Family shames character for having 'white fragility'"--Daily Mail Online. 
• Speaking of racism aimed against whites: "University of South Florida adopts radical diversity program that segregates students by race"--Daily Mail Online. The program will also teach that white students should "feel bad for being white" as part of their "identity development". And they want us to believe that "the great replacement" is a conspiracy theory?
• Related: "Berlin University Tells Students Not to Call Cops on Sex Offender. Can You Guess Why?"-- PJ Media. Apparently having white women call police about an immigrant sex offender would be racist, according to the university. Of course, if a group of German men were to give the sex offender an educational beat down, the full force of the German nation would be unleased to hunt them down.
• Masks and lockdowns were good for the children: "A Shocking 30% Of High School Girls ‘Seriously Considered’ Suicide Last Year"--Nation & State. Suicidal ideation was also up among boys, although the rate was about half that of girls.
• Skynet grins: "A military AI program successfully piloted a live F-16"--Not the Bee. Even legacy aircraft like the F-16 can make higher G maneuvers than pilots can handle, thus it will only be a matter of time before pilots are removed from high-performance aircraft.
• But at least they aren't taking away anyone's guns! "What Constitution? State House moves to ban firing guns on private property"--Colorado Peak Politics. The bill would allow counties to pass ordinances prohibit the firing of weapons on private property with the only exceptions being for hunting or managing livestock. So bye-bye shooting ranges. This is the act of tyrants. They pass these laws even though they are unconstitutional because they want to wear down the opposition.
• Speaking of petty tyrants: "More From Green Bay City Hall: City Officials Install Secret Video and Microphone Recording Devices in City Hall to Spy on Political Foes and Citizens ...Update: City Defends Spying"--Gateway Pundit.
• Shoot first, ask questions later: "Latest three UFOs shot down likely not Chinese spy devices: US"--New York Post. If the statements from the Administration and the military are to be believed, they don't know what they shot down: could have been private research balloons, experimental aircraft (or airships), the house from "Up"....
• Related: "Cockpit audio reveals F-16 pilots who shot down UFO over Lake Huron didn't know what it was"--Daily Mail Online.

• Wait until this, or something like it, comes through the Darien Gap and across our unsecured southern border: "Now Marburg virus spreads to Cameroon"--Daily Mail Online. The two cases reportedly have no travel connections with neighboring Equatorial Guinea where the outbreak started.
• Speaking of the southern border: "Arizona rancher denies killing Mexican shot dead by border"--Daily Mail Online. He claims that he came across a group of men dressed in camouflage and carrying AK rifles. One of the men pointed the AK at him and the rancher fired a warning shot. He later found the body. He indicated that he called law enforcement about the initial shooting and after he found the body, which suggests he was the "anonymous" person that initially contacted police. 
• More: "Arizona Rancher Held on $1 Million Bond Fired Warning Shots After an Armed Group of Men 'Pointed an AK-47 Right at Him'"--Gateway Pundit. 
• Christians need to be more like this and sue officials when they treat Christian complaints differently: "Muslim students force Minnesota college to close Iranian American artist's exhibition"--Daily Mail Online.

    A college in Minnesota temporarily closed an exhibition displaying veiled women in various raunchy poses after some Muslim students were offended by the art.

    The exhibition in Macalester College in St. Paul was put on by Iranian-American artist, Taravat Talepasand, 44, whose work challenges Islamic conservatism and the oppression of women.

    Items on display included drawings of women in niqabs and high heels lifting their robes to reveal underwear, as well as porcelain sculptures of similar women with huge exposed breasts.

    The exhibition opened on January 27 but the art was swiftly covered in black drapes after a group of students signed a petition suggesting that Talepasand's work inflicted 'deep pain' and 'perpetuated harm', reported the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression.

    The gallery remained covered for a weekend before it reopened with a content warning and frosted glass on some windows to prevent offended students or anyone else from seeing the art without first being made aware of its contents.

• "Cyclone Gabrielle: National state of emergency declared in New Zealand with flooded cities"--Daily Mail Online. This is only the third time a national state of emergency has been declared in New Zealand. The article indicates that this is the most severe weather event the country has experienced "this century" (i.e., last 22 years).
• The shooter was black ... again: "Straight-A student, 18, is shot and killed while driving home from Tennessee basketball game"--Daily Mail Online.
• Wink, wink, nod, nod: "Vladimir Putin: Former Russian general fired by Russian leader is found dead in 'suspected suicide'"--Daily Mail Online.
• "NSA is scooping up laid off Big Tech workers in largest hiring spree in past 30 years"--Daily Mail Online. Can't let all those H1B visa holders return home.
• Heh: "Utah Gov to Californians: Stay Home"--PJ Media. Of course, being in Idaho, I could say the same about Utahans.