Monolith meme

 

From Powerline’s “The Week in Pictures: Monolith Mystery Edition:

Click to embiggen or click at link

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Sundance on civil disobedience

 

Over at Conservative Treehouse, Sundance reports on a shop owner in North Carolina who is not requiring customers to wear masks.  He includes a link to the store so that readers can have a way to show their support.  And he expands on the options we all have to stop petty tyrants – governors, county officials, etc. – from exceeding their authority.  Here’s a brief extract:

Local, regional and state officials know they can control the behavior of an individual. If one barber shop opens, the owner becomes a target. However, those officials also know they cannot control the behavior of the majority. If every barber shop and beauty salon in town opens… there is absolutely nothing the government can do about it.

If one restaurant and/or bar opens, the state can target the owner. But if every bar and restaurant in town opens; and if everyone ignores and dispatches the silly dictates of the local, regional or state officials; there isn’t a damned thing they can do about it.

The power of the local, regional or state authority comes from the expressed consent of the people. As soon as the majority of people in that municipality deny that consent, those officials and state authoritarians lose all of their power.

Yes, it really is that simple.

They want you to think otherwise, but it is not true.  If WE THE PEOPLE demand freedom and stand together the control authority is useless.

Those who construct the systems of control need to weaponize fear.  Fear of arrest; fear of losing a business; fear of losing liberty or financial security.  Local, regional and state officials rely on fear.  As soon as the people are no longer fearful, the control ends.

The overwhelming majority of dictates around COVID-19 mitigation are not laws. There was no debate; no input from representative government; and no option for the public to weigh-in on the decisions.

All unilateral rules are arbitrary, and despite many proclamations to the contrary, they rely upon voluntary compliance.  As soon as citizens no longer voluntarily comply, the term of the rules has expired.  If masks are so effective then why didn’t government give masks to prisoners, instead of releasing the inmates?

Read the entire posting here.

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President Trump’s speech on election fraud

From the Daily Caller:

‘The Most Important Speech I’ve Ever Made’ — Facebook And Twitter Immediately Flag Trump’s 46-Minute-Long Alleged Voter Fraud ‘Update’

President Donald Trump posted a 46-minute-long video Wednesday afternoon to Facebook and Twitter that was immediately marked as misleading by both companies.

Our household went around the dial to see if it was being broadcast.  We found it on One America News.  Otherwise, you can access it online at 100percentfedup here.

We also watched some of the election fraud hearings in Arizona, Michigan, and Pennsylvania.  Awful.  But the mountain of evidence of election fraud will probably lead to some of the controversial ballot tallies to be de-certified. 

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David Horowitz on “Where We Are”

 

David Horowitz of Freedom Center posted an article today on FrontPageMagazine titled “Where We Are and What We are Facing.” He was raised in a Communist family and figured out as a young man that the Communist party was pure evil;  he analyzes today’s crises through that lens.  Here is an extract:

The “social justice” radicals still have the best slogans. They call themselves progressives but are actually reactionaries. They call themselves liberals but are actually bigots. They say they’re for peace when they are organized for war. It is always the same war: to bring down the United States of America.

Thanks mainly to their growing influence, we live in extreme times, where things are not what they are made to seem, and monstrous accusations are leveled at individuals without restraint. As a result, we live in an atmosphere of intimidation, where people can lose their livelihoods, their careers and even their lives if they get on the wrong side of leftist crusaders. That is a terrible thing to have to say in this once free country, but it is something that has become too obvious to deny.

. . .

Forty years ago, I left the left when I saw that it was a destructive force that would never change. Leftists do not tolerate dissenters in their ranks. They suppress politically incorrect ideas and cast out their perpetrators, demonizing them in the process. As a result, leftists never learn from their “mistakes” or take responsibility for their crimes. Thus, in every generation a new destructive crusade for “social justice” is launched, oblivious of the disasters previous radical campaigns left in their wakes.

The leaders of Black Lives Matter proclaim “We are trained Marxists,” as though that were a badge of honor rather than a confession of dangerous ignorance and a kiss of death. Every successful Marxist revolution without exception has established a ruthless police state, which more often than not conducts genocidal persecutions of ethnic minorities. In other words, social injustice on an epic scale. Yet that is the prospect we face in a reactionary left that has learned nothing from the past and is intent on destroying the most tolerant, inclusive, egalitarian society ever created. The good news is that a patriotic movement has risen, rededicated to the propositions that all men are created equal and endowed with God-given rights to life and liberty, and is prepared to defend them.

The full article is here.  

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Election fraud indicators

If you are having a hard time following all the election fraud hearings, threads, and updates, you are not alone.  Over at American Thinker, Andrea Widburg has a summary of 20 points that indicate massive election fraud (“A compilation of twenty alleged election 'facts' that don't pass the smell test”).  If you want to follow up on any of these summary points, she links to her sources -- reports, analyses, videos, etc. Here are four of her points:

Then there are the indicia of fraud that Dr. Navid Kershavarz-Nia detailed:

9. The fact that Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Arizona, Nevada, and Georgia simultaneously pretended to halt ballot-counting while continuing to count is evidence of election fraud collusion.

10. Optical scanners were set to accept unverified, un-validated ballots.

11. The scanners were almost certainly programmed to fail to keep audit records.

12. In the contested states, the voting machines were alleged to have processed hundreds of thousands of ballots within a short time, which is a physical impossibility.

The rest is here. 

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TV News Updates: Fox, One America News, Newsmax

 

Here’s a chunk of JD Rucker’s article at NOQ Report a few days ago:

Fox News revealed its true colors on election night. At least that’s the common narrative spoken in conservative circles. But the truth is more nefarious, more sinister. Fox News has been quietly working against President Trump and conservatives since shortly after his election. They just did it stealthily and attempted to shift their network and their formerly massive audience to the center.

This is why they must be pushed even further. If there’s one thing we can say about CNN, MSNBC, and network news channels, it’s that we know the enemy well. There is no subterfuge in their ideology, no false pretense behind their actions. They are progressives, unabashedly, through and through. That makes them less dangerous than a network like Fox News who hides their true intentions. It’s better to face a wolf in the woods than a rattler in your sleeping bag.

What we saw on election night was them turning on the faucet of what had previously been a drip campaign. They did not want to lose their audience too soon, not as long as they could continue to manipulate them. They wanted to carry the mantle as the only major news channel conservatives could go to with the expectation of not being bombarded with Trump Derangement Syndrome. But what they gave us was subtle. 

Read the full report here.  Our household has removed Fox from our “Favorites” menu.  We’ve tried a little bit of Newsmax, which can be accessed online.  But we have decided to turn the dial to One America News Network in prime time.

OANN’s daytime news coverage broadcasts on roughly one-hour cycles.  Once you’ve watched one hour, you’re going to be seeing most of the same reports in the next hour. But it’s the 8pm and 9pm weeknight slots that have interested us the most.

Dan Ball is the host at 8pm (“Real America”).  It’s an opinion format, similar to Tucker Carlson’s, but we had never watched him before, since we were always on Fox, with or without the Mute button.  Mr. Ball is accessible, informed, and refreshingly in-your-face with his conservative values.  His guests are a mixture of A-listers as well as unknown but excellent resources on various topics. And he lets them talk!  Without interrupting!

The 9pm slot is hosted by Kara McKinney (“Tipping Point”).  Her delivery is a bit stiffer, but considering how young she is, she puts a lot of her commentary into historical perspective. She also has good guests.

We’ll continue watching and report again in due course.

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What Thanksgiving means To Americans

 

Image credit: en.wikipedia.org

Re-posted from earlier Cleveland Tea Party Thanksgiving blogs:

What Thanksgiving really means To Americans

A couple of years ago, Jerry Bowyer, writing in Forbes Magazine, recounted the real significance of Thanksgiving, a significance that is too often lost among the turkey dinners, football games, and stories about Indians who befriended the early settlers. 

In 1620, the Plymouth pilgrims based their original community on Plato’s Republic, a collective model that appealed to their religious convictions and morality. But the communal model didn’t work for them. After two years of failing harvests and resulting malnutrition, disease, starvation, and deaths, the pilgrims replaced the communal model with a model based on private property. The ensuing harvest was abundant, with surpluses available for trade.

Their Thanksgiving celebrated the triumph of the individual, private property, and incentive, over collectivism. At first, the pilgrims felt guilty because they were putting self-interest over the seeming altruism of socialism. Yet the devout survivors had learned two lessons: 1) that a theoretical and Utopian collective society fails, and (2) in real life, private property and capitalism produce prosperity. For them, God, not Plato, knew best. Accepting the principles of private property and self-interest was God’s way of harnessing self-interest to the greater good. We know all of this because an elder and Governor of the Plymouth plantation, William Bradford, kept a journal and it survives today. Mr. Bowyer’s earlier article, with additional historical background, is here.) 

Here’s Bowyer's “How A Failed Commune Gave Us What is Now Thanksgiving.”

It’s wrong to say that American was founded by capitalists. In fact, America was founded by socialists who had the humility to learn from their initial mistakes and embrace freedom. One of the earliest and arguably most historically significant North American colonies was Plymouth Colony, founded in 1620 in what is now known as Plymouth, Massachusetts. As I’ve outlined in greater detail here before (Lessons From a Capitalist Thanksgiving), the original colony had written into its charter a system of communal property and labor. 

As William Bradford recorded in his Of Plymouth Plantation, a people who had formerly been known for their virtue and hard work became lazy and unproductive. Resources were squandered, vegetables were allowed to rot on the ground and mass starvation was the result. And where there is starvation, there is plague. 

After 2 1/2 years, the leaders of the colony decided to abandon their socialist mandate and create a system which honored private property. The colony survived and thrived and the abundance which resulted was what was celebrated at that iconic Thanksgiving feast.

As my friend Reuven Brenner has taught me, history is a series of experiments: The Human Gamble. Some gambles work and are adopted by history and some do not and should be abandoned by it. The problem is that the human gamble only works if there is a record of experimental outcomes and if decision makers consult that record. For many years, the story of the first failed commune of Plymouth Bay was part of the collective memory of American students. But Progressive Education found that story unhelpful and it has fallen into obscurity, which explains why (as I alluded to before) a well-educated establishment figure like Jared Bernstein would be unaware of it.

I’m often asked why our current leadership class forgets the lessons of the past so often. They are, after all, very smart men and women. Don’t they know that collectivism will fail?

No, they don’t. Not anymore. For much of our history, our leaders were educated in the principles which were to help them avoid errors once they have joined the ruling class. They studied to learn how to not misuse power. Now our leaders learn nothing of the dangers of abusing power: their education is entirely geared to its acquisition.  All of their neurons are trained on that one objective – to get to the top. What they do when they get there is a matter for later. And what happens to the country when they’re done with their experiments is beside the point: after all, their experiments will not really affect them personally. History is the story of the limitations of human power. But the limits of power is a topic for people who doubt themselves and their right to rule, not the self-anointed.

That’s how it is now, and that’s how it was in 1620. The charter of the Plymouth Colony reflected the most up-to-date economic, philosophical and religious thinking of the early 17th century. Plato was in vogue then, and Plato believed in central planning by intellectuals in the context of communal property, centralized state education, state centralized cultural offerings and communal family structure. For Plato, it literally did take a village to raise a child. This collectivist impulse reflected itself in various heretical offshoots of Protestant Christianity with names like The True Levelers, and the Diggers, mass movements of people who believed that property and income distinctions should be eliminated, that the wealthy should have their property expropriated and given to what we now call the 99%. This kind of thinking was rife in the 1600s and is perhaps why the Pilgrim settlers settled for a charter which did not create a private property system.

But the Pilgrims learned and prospered. And what they learned, we have forgotten and we fade.  Now, new waves of ignorant masses flood into parks and public squares. New Platonists demand control of other people’s property. New True Levelers legally occupy the prestige pulpits of our nation, secular and sacred. And now, as then, the productive class of our now gigantic, colony-turned-superpower, learn and teach again, the painful lessons of history. Collectivism violates the iron laws of human nature. It has always failed. It is always failing, and it will always fail. I thank God that it is failing now. Providence is teaching us once again.

Happy Thanksgiving!

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