A Turkey in Every Pot?

An A F Branco cartoon via Townhall to follow up Thanksgiving:

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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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Special Counsel: sabotaging the GOP House Majority

 

Note to readers:  This report demonstrates why I so often link to Sundance at Conservative Treehouse.  Most of us could not dig into the weeds to this extent – and make sense of it – as he does.  The appointment of Jack Smith as Special Counsel is not just about Trump;  it’s about blocking the slim GOP House majority from exercising its majority.  Here’s an extract:

Sunday Talks, Democrat J6 Committee Confirms Intent
to Transfer Evidence to Special Counsel
During Lame Duck to Begin Republican Targeting Operations

If you doubted the intent of the primary function of the appointment for Special Counsel John Smith, you can put that doubt to rest now.  . . .

Primary goal, create enough of a legal mess as to obstruct any republican legislative effort against the Biden White House.  Additionally, if Smith’s DC team can pick-off a few republican House members under charges of “supporting an insurrection“, the political power will revert back to the Democrats in office.

They didn’t just think this up overnight.

This is why the January 6 committee never ended.  They are using J6 as a weapon against their losing the House to republicans.  The Democrats are now structurally targeting Republicans with the appointment of Jack Smith.  It’s actually a brilliant move.  The executive is now investigating the legislative branch; the legal structure of this eliminates the separation of powers issue.

The DOJ is not investigating republicans, they are investigating defined criminals; insurrectionists that are national security threats, that happen to be republicans.  See how that works?  

Read the rest of Sundance’s analysis here.  This “investigation” will not only neuter some of the GOP in the House, it will be the reason the Special Counsel can block any public explanations under cover of not being able to compromise the ongoing investigation.  And it gets worse:

Then you have the congressional representatives under investigation and search warrants on their phones, text messages, emails, etc…. AND the added benefit of using DOJ-NSD defined terms of “national security threat” (that’s why they emphasized insurrection) to gain FISA warrants on an entire incoming congressional delegation.

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New World Order: Conrad Black’s perspective

 

Klaus Schwab is is the head of the World Economic Forum (WEF). He is famous for saying that "You Will Own Nothing and You'll Be Happy."    

Conrad Black has participated in WEF sessions, so he knows whereof he speaks.  His column at The Burning Platform offers this:

As one who attended for 20 years — and, following the controversial death of Bob Maxwell, was co-leader (with the late Lord Rothermere) of the WEF media group — I found the sessions interesting and informative, and sometimes even entertaining. (On one occasion, I was speaking with the doyen of conferenciers, Henry Kissinger; when someone approached, Kissinger said, “Here comes that goddamn Indian.” I remarked that he was quoting General Custer; the networker turned out to be the prime minister of India.) Klaus Schwab thought the leaders of the international organizations he featured at Davos — the European Union, the World Bank, the United Nations, World Court, World Trade Organization and all their affiliated agencies — should play an increasingly important role to implement his vision of universal supranationalism.

As the Cold War ended, and the international left presciently clambered aboard the accelerating bandwagon of environmentalism to attack capitalism from a different direction in the name of saving the planet, Schwab became a fully paid up advocate of the most comprehensive version of the virtues of global governance. This evolution rushed back to me these last days as I watched Schwab at the G20 meeting, as part of the Business-20 portion of the summit, with his heavy Teutonic accent that sounds like the Marx brothers imitating Kaiser Wilhelm, advising the world’s 20 most prominent political leaders that the Davos reset of a universal, heavily regulated, post-national, post-religious world of synchronized egalitarian toiling was inevitable and infinitely desirable. For a moment I wondered, in Margaret Thatcher‘s phrase, “Do my ears deceive me?” They did not.

As the editor of a just-published collection of essays titled Against the Great Reset, (Bombardier Books), Michael Walsh points out, “The World Economic Forum (WEF) advocates a complete reimagining of the Western world’s social, economic and moral structures.” This book contains 18 mostly very stimulating essays from such noted authorities as Victor Davis Hanson, Douglas Murray, Roger Kimball, Michael Anton and Walsh himself (including a modest contribution from me). Klaus Schwab has expressed pride that Justin Trudeau, Chrystia Freeland and Mark Carney (who converted the Bank of England into a rabid partisan of Britain’s continued membership in the European Union and a crusading promoter of militant environmentalism) are all Davos alumni. And federal Opposition Leader Pierre Poilievre has publicly warned against the WEF’s globalist agenda: “Freedom means making our own decisions here at home.”

For Schwab, stakeholder capitalism means the overarching requirements of society as interpreted and enforced by an emergent international class of theoretical regulators that would enforce the interests of everyone in society in the activities of the entire private sector. He calls this the “Fourth Industrial Revolution,” which, he says, is “fusing the physical, digital and biological worlds, impacting all disciplines, economies and industries, and even challenging ideas about what it means to be human.” The 2020 book, “The Great Reset” was inspired by the COVID crisis to present a full frontal exposé of the Davos ambition 50 years after its gestation: “It will steer the market towards fairer outcomes, environmental, social and governance metrics.… To ensure that investments advanced shared goals such as equality and sustainability.… And harness the innovations of the Fourth Industrial Revolution to support the public good, especially by addressing health and social challenges.” 

As Victor Davis Hanson points out in his essay, “The viper tongue of totalitarianism is most often bathed in palliatives before it strikes.” As I wrote, the whole concept of the Great Reset is based on the fervent endorsement of “democracy, as long as everyone votes for increased public-sector authority in pursuit of green egalitarianism and the homogenization of all peoples in a conformist world,” under the direction of the Davos claque of world bureaucrats and redistributors.  . . .

Much more at the link here.  This is no wild and crazy conspiracy theory.  It’s happening today.  And recall that among the WEF / Davis alumni are Justin Trudeau, Angela Merkel, Jacinda Ardern, Tony Blair, and closer to home, Huma Abedin, Pete Buttigieg, Sen. Tom Cotton (Ark-R), Rep. Dan Crenshaw (TX-R), Brian Deese, National Economic Council, Tulsi Gabbard, Nikki Haley, Bobby Jindal, Adam Kinzinger, Gavin Newsom, Samantha Power, and Rep. Elise Stefanik  (NY-R). 

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Neil Oliver on the Great Betrayal

 

Neil Oliver’s weekly monologue is always a must-hear / must-read.  In this installment, “Betrayal of Britain,” he’s talking about Britain, but every single one of his points applies to American and Americans.  It’s scary but at the same time inspiring.  Here’s the beginning of the transcript (at Conservative Treehouse):

I keep waiting for the betrayal too far – that action by the State against Britain that finally pushes every last citizen of the country that used to be Britain into the grim realization that those illegitimates are out to get us.

The Green Agenda that guarantees the impoverishment of the peoples of the West by pursuing the lie that wind and solar can take the place of gas, oil and coal? The Green Agenda that pushes the palpable nonsense those of us with petrol and diesel cars today are meant to have electric cars tomorrow – when all the evidence makes plain that you and I are meant to be going nowhere while our self-appointed masters go anywhere and everywhere?

The Green Agenda that invites us to think that Net Zero and the rest are about anything more than stealing our rights and freedoms while further enriching the already rich?

The delegates for COP27 flying in private jets to luxury accommodation in Egypt, where they sat down to meals of 100 pound a time cuts of prime Aberdeen Angus beef, foie gras – which is the liver of force-fed geese – salmon and sea bass and cream sauces – while pausing between burps to lecture us proles about carbon emissions and the need to eat bugs and genetically modified grass?

Those delegates discussing plans to eviscerate the farming industry – to cut farming around the world by anything up to a half in a time of food insecurity for millions?

The blindingly obvious realization that these schemes are nothing to do with saving the planet but merely the means to bankrupt the farmers and drive them off the land so it may be acquired by trans-national corporations?

The realization that governments and physicians together oversaw the most disastrous medical intervention in history – that by setting aside “First do no harm” and “informed consent” and opting instead for ruinous lockdowns and coercion they took a bad situation and made it much worse?

The revelation that those so-called vaccines were never even tested to see if they would stop transmission of Covid – which they absolutely do not do – thereby revealing that all the government and media driven propaganda demanding submission to the needle to save granny was a blatant lie?

And Mr Oliver concludes:

What will it take, I ask, before the rest of this country awakens to the realization that we are being had, being played, taken for fools? What will it take before those citizens see that we have put ourselves at the mercy of a criminal enterprise shaped only to rob us blind, hobble all ambition and see to it that we are cowed and submissive with our hands held out for a few shekels from our self-proclaimed lords and masters.

Here’s the thing: all of it stops when we say it stops.

It doesn’t require every one of us – just enough of us – simply to realize that no cavalry is coming, no help is at hand.

It is up to us to see these charlatans for what they are, to disregard them – red, blue and every color in between – to turn our backs on them, and work together to make something else, something decent, something that is ours.

Read the rest here.  Recommended.

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Dr Robert W Malone: more on "Lies the Govt Told Me"

 

The other day, this blog linked to Dr Malone’s website and parts of his Introduction to his just-released book Lies the Govt Told Me.  Now there’s more from a video and remarks at The Liberty Loft.  Here’s part of it:

In a new book, “Lies My Gov’t Told Me and the Better Future Coming.” he recounts going from – in the eyes of establishment media and government – esteemed vaccine inventor to purveyor of “misinformation.”

Malone sets the stage with an opening chapter intriguingly titled “How I Got Red-Pilled, and the Gradual Reveal.”

In a video interview (embedded below) with WND, he recalled once being a devoted reader of The New York Times and The Atlantic magazine.

“There was a time when I believed what I was hearing from the Democratic Party. There was a time when I believed that the government was really focused on trying to do the right thing,” he said. “I believed in the vaccine enterprise. I believed in public health. I believed in the CDC and the FDA – I was aware of a lot of the problems with the CDC, but I thought the FDA was truly committed to ensuring the safety of the public in food, drugs and health.”

He devoted his career, he said, to learning and assimilating good practices and adhering to ethical standards.

“And then to see all these things just thrown right out the door, as if they’re the trash, with no awareness of consequences.”

When Malone began speaking what he believed to be the truth – he believes “time has validated pretty much all of what I have said” – he “encountered this weaponized information ecosystem of derision and lies and defamation and slander.”

The book – written with his wife, Jill Glasspool Malone – includes chapters by other outspoken physician scientists, Drs. Meryl Nass, Paul Marik and Pierre Kory. And there’s one by Ed Dowd, the former Wall Street analyst who has compiled evidence from the insurance and funeral industries, and government databases showing a spike in excess deaths corresponding to the rollout of the COVID mRNA vaccines.

Read or watch the rest here.

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Chip Bok cartoon : for Browns fans

Chip Bok cartoon via Townhall  

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