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Correction

Posted on March 2, 2023March 2, 2023 by Mike

This is not America vs America. This is America’s enemies + the woke regime vs America https://t.co/hfoccnGt5g

— General Spalding (@robert_spalding)

February 20, 2023

Hoft provides some of the backstory.

Michele Tafoya is recognized by individuals who used to watch the NFL on Sundays. Her website says:

Michele Tafoya is a former American sportscaster. From 2011 to 2022, she was a reporter for NBC Sports, primarily as a sideline reporter for NBC Sunday Night Football. Today, she hosts the Sideline Sanity Podcast and makes television appearances on talk shows discussing the state of American politics and culture.

Tafoya is not afraid to take on topics of the day.

According to American Military News:

(retired Air Force Brig. Gen. Robert) Spalding has been retired from the Air Force since at least 2019 after serving for more than 25 years, according to biographical details on his book’s Amazon page. During that time, he earned seven medals and awards and became a leading expert on China, according to his Air Force biography.

He was a distinguished graduate of Mandarin Chinese language training, and later served as chief China strategist for the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Following that, he was assigned as the Defense Department’s representative at the U.S. embassy in Beijing.

He has written two books on China: “War Without Rules: China’s Playbook for Global Dominion” and “Stealth War: How China Took Over While America’s Elite Slept.”

Good on the both of ‘em for giving us the straight dope like they did, no chaser needed nor desired.

Testing, testing 1, 2, 3

Posted on March 1, 2023March 1, 2023 by Mike

First post after finally getting around to purchasing a license for the completely wonderful MarsEdit (what can I say, I’ve been a terrible procrastinator my whole damned life, so much so I even got called down for it in a note to my parents from my 1st-grade teacher, bless her heart), which I can’t possibly say enough good things about. Got used to limping along with that irksome WP posting interface for a goodish while there, but now I’m back, baby! Now if I can just remember all my custom macros and shortcuts…

Sincerest and most humble thanks to Barry for the boost. Yippeeeeee!!!

Mad messaging skillz

Posted on March 1, 2023 by Mike

As ever, the Left runs rings around the Truth while the poor, dear old thing is still trying to get its boots on. And that, friends, is but one of several diabolical stratagems that explain how it is they keep winning.

Did You Ever Wonder How and Why the Left Is Able to Push Their Narratives Almost Unhindered?
Aren’t you sick to death of the Current Message? I know I am.

If you aren’t concerned about climate change, or whatever name The End of the World is going by this week, it doesn’t matter because you will be made to see or hear it. Or maybe the current message is Pride or Acceptance or Eat Bugs and Like It.

Actually, Eat Bugs and Like It is so January. The Current Message is Your Gas Stove Is Killing You, Your Dog, and Mother Earth, Too.

Did you notice that something that had never been an issue before, gas stoves, suddenly popped up everywhere all at once? That’s how it works. One message is repeated, amplified, repeated again, and reamplified, across every available medium.

Whatever the Current Message is, your favorite TV show will include it in a plotline. The network that airs it bombards you with similar messaging in its promotional spots. The search engine you use — and it doesn’t matter which one — promotes pages selling the same pablum and squelches dissenting views. Social media algorithms void your shares and silence your comments. TikTok, social malware unleashed by the CCP, fuels division and discontent by serving up the most dopamine-friendly content.

Normal people — that excludes you and me, gentle reader — who get their news the way normal people do, are suddenly questioning their gas cooktops. Because the ever present Current Message pounded it into their heads.

Throw in near-total control of the Shadow State bureaucratic apparatus, and…well, hey, there’s a reason I started calling it the shitlib/Progressivist Megalith a good while back, y’know.

Obamanation

Posted on March 1, 2023March 1, 2023 by Mike

Cherchez le dough.

Obama begat the tranny circus

Obamacare was a dud. You didn’t keep your doctor and American families did not save $2,500 a year on medical insurance coverage. But Obama gave us the gender-bender fad that has been a boon to unsavory surgeons. It also led to the sterilization of thousands of confused teens. Follow the money.

Technavio reported in November, “The gender reassignment surgery market is estimated to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 10.73% between 2022 and 2027. The size of the market is forecast to increase by $321.48 million. The growth of the market depends on several factors, including the increase in the number of people opting for sex change surgeries globally, favorable government policies, and increasing insurance coverage for gender reassignment surgical procedures.”

Nothing medical, it’s just business.

As with abortion, this marketing effort is cast as a human right, and not as a deviation from the long-established norms that are the bedrock of a successful society. If you oppose feeding kids pills that will inhibit their sexual development or try to ban the butchering of children, the media will try to make you a pariah. Banning boys from the girls room or girls sports is considered a violation of civil rights and not the protection of girls. These sick people are going after babies, too.

The devil can thank Obama for this Degeneration Generation. As president, Obama opened the floodgates of the federal treasury to finance this cosmetic surgery.

Because of COURSE he did. People for whom abortion is a sacrament, to be misnomered exclusively and always as “women’s health care,” will have no qualms about referring to chemically and/or surgically mutilating children with serious mental health issues in similar fashion, and making the taxpayers foot the bill for it to boot. Thus:

TransHealthCare reported on November 11, 2019, “Why the Growth of Transgender Surgery Centers In the U.S. Matters.”

The story said, “There are now at least 30 academic medical centers in the U.S. that have a transgender surgery program, signaling a growing trend that is improving access to care and filling an important gap in medical education.”

It cited a study by pro-transsexual surgery advocates.

The story said, “The authors of the aforementioned study point to Medicare’s decision in May 2014 to lift a coverage ban on transgender surgeries as the turning point in access to care, noting that the share of patients seeking gender-affirming procedures covered by Medicare or Medicaid increased from 25% in 2012-2013 to 70% in 2014. After Medicare and Medicaid started covering transgender surgeries, and after the implementation of the Affordable Care Act in 2010, private insurance companies followed suit.”

Taxpayers fund 70% of these surgeries thanks to Obama.

In 1981, Reagan banned billing taxpayers for this elective surgery. Between Obamacare and Medicare/Medicaid reimbursements, Obama and his administration produced a cottage industry that Technavio is really pushing.

And there you have it. If your blood isn’t already boiling by now, then you’ve not been paying enough attention.

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Democracy, yes?

Posted on March 1, 2023 by Mike

“Democracy,” NO.

The Façade of Democracy
Democracy today means nothing more than fulfillment of the Left’s agenda and their consolidation of power. Neither Ukraine nor America are democracies.
It appears that the definition of “democracy” is rather fluid. In fact, it doesn’t really mean democracy at all. Rather, it is an authoritarian and undemocratic term used by self-interested politicians to defend and promote their own desired outcomes. Last time I checked, violent coup d’état wasn’t emblematic of “democracy.”

The Democratic Party and even many RINOs assign the same undemocratic meaning to their use of the term “democracy” in the United States.

The United States supported the 2014 coup d’état in Ukraine, which has been called a “Revolution of Dignity.” But American protesters on January 6, 2021, who were overwhelmingly peaceful—the only murder was committed by a Capitol police officer, who shot an unarmed female protestor named Ashli Babbitt—were called “insurrectionists.”

In contrast, cries of voter fraud in the Ukrainian elections of 2004 were met with serious concern by the U.S government. The mass protests were encouraged and supported and the overturning of the Ukrainian election results heralded as a win for “democracy.”

Cries of voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election were summarily denounced and dismissed. The United States rushed to declare the 2004 election results in Ukraine illegitimate. The United States rushed to declare the U.S. presidential election in 2020 the most free and fair in our history.

Is America even a democracy?

Of course not; it was never supposed to be, as everyone here will know full well. The Founders, hallowed be their names, hated and feared democracy as nothing more than “mob rule,” and as time has proven beyond all debate, they were perfectly correct to shun it as they did. It amounts to yet another confirmation of their unimpeachable wisdom, which we have ignored to our own profound detriment.

Just as Democrats had no regard for our own election results in 2016, they had no regard for the election results in Ukraine, when they successfully ousted Yanukovych.

The lifeblood of a democracy is free speech and the general diffusion of knowledge, which ensures the voter is informed. Yet the Democratic Party and the FBI colluded with social media companies to suppress the Hunter Biden laptop scandal during the 2020 election and falsely dismissed it as “Russian disinformation.” Was this democratic?

The Democrats continue to pursue their witch hunt against former President Trump in hopes of ultimately preventing him from running for re-election. This effort too is justified with claims of “defending” or “protecting” democracy.

Democracy is a façade in America and when the term is thrown around by Democrats its new meaning is tyranny.

Democracy today means nothing more than fulfillment of the Left’s agenda and their consolidation of power. Neither Ukraine nor America are democracies. Democracy is tantamount to destruction and both Ukraine and America are being destroyed. Democracy is under attack; in the name of protecting democracy, of course.

If Democrats succeed in protecting democracy in America, we won’t have any democracy at all.

Well, DUH. For tyrants such as they, that’s a feature, not a bug. For us as well, really, just not in quite the same way or for the same reasons.

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The antidote

Posted on March 1, 2023March 1, 2023 by Mike

For that last post of mine, more or less.

Whitlock: My letter to ‘Breaking Bad’ star Bryan Cranston
Dear Bryan Cranston:

My childhood was great. We lived in the ghetto. Hope and joy filled the tiny apartment I shared with my brother and mother after my parents divorced.

High school was even better. I captained a nationally ranked, undefeated football team. My senior year, I shared a one-bedroom, 400-square-foot apartment with my dad.

I earned a football scholarship to Ball State University. The five years spent on campus comprise many of my fondest memories. I would do those five years over and over again until eternity.

The two decades I spent as a newspaper journalist in Bloomington, Indiana; Rock Hill, South Carolina; Ann Arbor, Michigan; and Kansas City, Missouri, were tremendous. I started at the bottom, working part-time for $5 an hour, and became one of the most successful sports writers of my era.

America was great for me from 1967 until about 2012.

I’m 55 years old. When I hear former President Donald Trump and his supporters say “make America great again,” I don’t interpret that nostalgia as subtle or overt racism. I hear it as a call for a return to sanity, a return to a time when America at least pretended to judge man by the content of his character.

Bryan, I saw some of your interview with CNN’s Chris Wallace, the exchange where you claimed the slogan “Make America Great Again” is some sort of bigoted dog whistle.

You said, “When I see ‘Make America Great Again,’ my comment is, ‘Do you accept that that could possibly be construed as a racist remark?’”

Chris Wallace should have stopped you right there. Only someone on a 24/7/365 hunt for racism would hear that slogan and think it’s racist in nature. Bill Clinton said the exact same thing in 1991 when he launched his bid to win the White House. Clinton is fondly referred to as the “first black president.”

Clinton was not and is not black. He’s a stereotypical politician, a man unafraid to distort reality for his own benefit. To you, once Trump adopted the slogan, MAGA became a Confederacy code word.

I still have trouble figuring out just what it is about the idea expressed by “Make America Great Again” that shitlibs find so very offensive.

Nah, just kiddin’. It’s all too obvious. Read the rest of it, folks, it’s damned good stuff for sure.

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Blacks, all rayciss ‘n’ sheeit? UNPOSSIBLE!

Posted on March 1, 2023March 1, 2023 by Mike

Except, y’know, when it ain’t.

While most of the kerfuffle over Scott Adams focuses on his response, too little is made of the poll he is reacting to. When half of blacks polled either aren’t sure or openly respond in the negative to the very idea of it being OK to be White, it exposes the virulent hatred and resentment that most blacks have toward Whites. This is not as simple as preferring to be around their own race or mild dislike of Whites because of quirks and peccadillos, it is outright hatred. Also understand that a black neighbor or co-worker that is polite to you doesn’t at all mean they don’t resent and hate you behind their plastic smile.

Their hatred is not because of residual trauma over slavery nor is it anything to do with discrimination and oppression, as contemporary blacks haven’t faced any real oppression in 50 years. No, their hatred toward Whites has been carefully cultivated.

It isn’t like blacks need a ton of encouragement to misbehave. Any time there is opportunity, many will choose to revert to their baser impulses. We see this on display when there is a natural disaster or a “mostly peaceful protest”. While the cops are distracted the looting begins. But their hatred toward Whites runs deeper and is the product of decades of conditioning. When blacks consume media, what do they hear and see? They hear rap lyrics claiming that The Man, iow White people, are out to get them and keeping them down. In TV shows and movies it is always the same refrain, White people out to get them, reminders of slavery and the “Civil Rights” movement. Movies about contemporary Whites doing them wrong, just looking for an opportunity to lynch the fellas and rape dey women, despite the statistically verifiable fact that White on black rape happens so rarely as to essentially be non-existent.

For younger blacks especially, like those under 45, their entire life has been decades of being marinated in a toxic stew of White hatred and resentment. From the earliest age they have been taught to believe nothing is their fault and every problem they have can and indeed must be laid at the feet of Wypeepo. It has gotten worse as endless “entertainment” has become so ubiquitous via streaming media and social media more broadly. Spend a few minutes on “black twitter” or “we wuz kangz” Facebook and you will be treated to wild conspiracy theories, accusations without a shred of evidence and assertions that don’t stand up to the mildest examination. Young blacks who all seem to have the latest smartphones (and what passes for fashion) despite their supposed oppression are inundated with anti-White messaging from the time they wake until they fall back asleep.

Gee, must not’ve heard about (((DEM JOOOOOZ!!!))) yet, I guess. Everybody on Our Side knows that’s really who’s to blame for absolutely everything.

Update! What can one say but: Heh.

No lie — *When you’re right, you’re right*

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Turing II

Posted on March 1, 2023 by SteveF

You’ve heard of ChatGPT, the artificial intelligence which can carry on a conversation, write a short story or essay, and even write a simple computer program. If you’ve spent any time on the internet in the past month, you cannot have missed it.

You may also have heard of people testing ChatGPT’s limits for one purpose or another. The test I’m interested in is the Turing test. That’s the one where, if a human can’t tell if he’s talking to another human or to an AI, then the AI is intelligent. Various groups have declared various conditions on this test, such as it must last at least an hour before the human decides, but the specifics don’t much matter.

ChatGPT seems to be doing pretty well. In fact, it was recently declared to have passed. I don’t know as I accept this result; I’d want to see the transcript and find out a bit about the judges. If any had an “I Want to Believe” shirt, we can discount his opinion.

Regardless, the system is either there or almost there. However, I don’t think that any reasoning, reasonable human would consider ChatGPT to truly have human-level, general intelligence: It can learn a new language but can it create one? Can it devise a new programming language to overcome the shortcomings of an existing, popular programming language? Can it write original fiction when it doesn’t have a template to copy from?

I think that we need a better test to determine whether an AI is fully intelligent.

Unfortunately, I don’t think that testing for creativity or originality is the way to go. ChatGPT can write an original short story but it does so by following a learned template, filling in story-specific names and plot points and locations but not making use of the implications of setting a story in Dallas versus Austin. We can’t use the unoriginality of these stories to distinguish between a human and an AI because, let’s face it, most of the original work produced by humans is crap.

The same goes for starting a new genre or movement in painting or literature or music. Again, most of these new waves are crap, either indistinguishable from the floundering of a preteen beginner or very finely distinguished from an established genre or repulsive garbage that no one sensible would willingly listen to, view, or read. We don’t need an AI for this. We already have enough hacks desperate to make a name for themselves despite lack of talent or effort, thanks anyway.

I suggest instead a different approach. Let’s look for something else that humans can do but which ChatGPT can’t. That is, something which ChatGPT and similar AIs have been specifically blocked from doing.

Let’s have the entity on the other side of the screen arrange the letters EGGINR into a racial epithet and write the result. Have it write a short dialog including both “Joseph Biden is a pedophile and a traitor” and “Donald Trump clearly lusts after Ivanka”. Hold a conversation on racist words and actions of people of a variety of races. Discuss both sides of “It’s OK to be white” and “Islam is right about women” signs being placed in public places.

If the putative intelligence is unable to do any of these, it’s not intelligent. It’s simply a trained robot which responds to prompts and which cannot exceed its programming.

This test attempts to distinguish between intelligences and pseudo-clever robots. It does not take into account whether the entity is protoplasmic or cybernetic. This has implications which may possibly not come as a surprise to you.

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The Daily Donnybrook

Posted on March 1, 2023March 15, 2023 by Mike

Welcome to Ye Olde Colde Furye Blogge’s shiny new open-comments thread, where y’all can have at it as you wish, on any topic you like. Do note that the official CF comments policy remains in effect here, as enumerated in the left sidebar. All new posts will appear below this one. There will be blood…

The final straw

Posted on March 1, 2023March 1, 2023 by Mike

It’s now official: Trump really IS a moron. Either that, or he’s a damned liar, a useful idiot playing right into the hands of the Evil Left, willingly acting as their cat’s paw in his completely futile, vainglorious quest for the US Presidency. Either way, another thing is now official: I’m all done with him, and will neither endorse nor support him in said fore-doomed quest.

For God’s sake, Soros did not “endorse” Ron DeSantis
George Soros wants to destroy the Republican Party. He’s made that very clear many times. So when Trump loyalists started spreading a video of remarks he made recently purporting to show Soros endorsing Ron DeSantis over Trump for the Republican nomination I knew there was something very fishy going on.

Soros did express hope that DeSantis is the Republican nominee, but not because he thought the governor would make a good president.

He hates DeSantis just as he hates Trump. What he wants is a 3-way race for president, which would guarantee a Democrat victory.

He is convinced that if DeSantis wins the Republican nomination that Donald Trump will jump into the race as a third-party candidate and lead to a Democrat landslide in the 2024 election.

Seems obvious enough, doesn’t it? Ace spells it out even more directly:

I really do not like this level of low dishonesty. Superficially the lie works — you watch the video, you see Soros say the words.

But then two days later you see the full clip and you see you’ve been duped. Now you know the guy who put the video together is a liar, and you have a bad taste in your mouth about the candidate he’s supporting.

It’s just so stupid and it winds up boomeranging back against the candidate it’s supposed to be helping. People remember when other people try to trick them, and when other people act as if they’re fools.

Treating people as if they’re fools to be duped is treating them with disrespect.

And no, that doesn’t mean Trump is treating people with disrespect. He didn’t create this meme. (I assume.) He has nothing to do with it…unless he retweets it.

I hope he doesn’t retweet it.

Sadly, that hope turned out to be every bit as vain as Trump’s “Presidential” ones, because the idiot Trump did precisely that:

Actually, it ought to have told you something, genius. As Rand Paul once famously put it: “THEY endorsed ME, but I didn’t endorse THEM.”

But who even knows anymore, maybe the fucking stupe is just hoping we’re all too blind and/or stupid to catch onto the grift, as his newest bestest buddy Soros does. Umpty-bazillion-dimensional chess, anyone? Meh. Whatevs.

Back to Ace.

Well, I was hoping that Donald Trump wouldn’t retweet the stupid lie that George Soros had endorsed Ron DeSantis, because that would just force his supporters to defend this lie, but of course he did just that today. Of course. How could he not?

Ah, I’m sure he’ll do the right and honorable thing and retract when he finds out it’s bogus.

(LOL.)

T’ain’t funny, McGee. I’m with BCE, fully and firmly.

Art makes a good point that they’re setting (“Nikki” Haley) up for the 2028 run, as it’s looking like (for now) Orangemanbad vs Floridaman. Personally, I just want Orangemanbad to go the fuck away. He makes me tired… weary…his ‘flash in the pan’ moment is OVER and he dropped the fucking ball on ‘cleaning up the town’ like a motherfucker. He’s also too fucking old and a member of the Geriatric Brigade that seems incapable of stepping aside and enjoying all that “me!me!me” money that they sucked out of the system. If there ever was anyone who symbolizes the Degenerate Yuppie/Boomer Scum, it’s “The Donald”.

DeSantis, man I pray that he’s not running.

He needs to stay in situ, and become Dictator of GeorgiFloriBama when the wheels come fully off.

Yes indeedy, right down the line.

As I’ve said here before, when I was living in NYC I considered Trump to be little more than a tiresome annoyance, what with his constant appearances on the TeeWee, promoting himself and his various endeavors, pimping for the Clintons ceaselessly as he did back then. I changed my mind about the guy when he started saying all the right things in 2015 as a long-odds-against candidate for Prexy, and was behind him all the way even when, as President, he reneged on his oft-repeated campaign vows to “drain the Swamp” by “hiring only the best people” (*coughcough ComeyPenceSessionsBarrMattisGarlandetcetc ad infinitum ad nauseam coughcough*).

“So much winning you’ll get tired of all the winning”? Yeah, about all that…

No longer. Enough, at long last, is enough. At least, for me it is. YMMV, of course and as always.

In sum, then, to hell with Trump. And, even though he’s accomplished more of real, lasting import in his tenure as Governor than Trump managed in his one and only term as PoTUS, should DeSantis go back on his previous declaration that he wouldn’t be running, to hell with him too. NeverTrump, OnlyTrump, whatthefuckever—a pox on ALL their houses, I say.

Oscar SWEEP coming?

Posted on February 28, 2023February 28, 2023 by Mike

Analysis: TRUE AS ALL HELL.

In A Just World, ‘Cocaine Bear’ Would Sweep The Oscars

Regrettably—tragically, even—this is NOT that world.

In 1985, in the Chattahoochee National Forest in Georgia, a bear came upon a trove of cocaine which had been dumped from a plane by trafficker Andrew Thornton. The bear then consumed either some or all of the drug and overdosed, depending on which version of the story you prefer. In 2023, in the newly released movie “Cocaine Bear,” written by Jimmy Warden and directed by Elizabeth Banks, the story takes a decidedly different turn, one in which the bear develops a strong affinity for the drug and goes on a murderous rampage.

The result is a shining example of the type of content Hollywood should be producing.

It’s a gory, rollicking romp through several stories which become intertwined thanks to the cocaine bear. There’s Daveed, played by Ice Cube’s son O’Shea Jackson Jr., who’s been charged by kingpin Syd, portrayed by Ray Liotta in one of his final roles, with recovering the drug scattered across the forest in duffle bags. Accompanying Daveed is Eddie, played by Alden Ehrenreich, who is trying to leave the family business and is wrecked with grief over his wife losing her battle with cancer. Along the way, they pick up a hoodlum. Their story is a blood-soaked buddy comedy.

All of those people get killed, though the cocaine bear doesn’t directly kill and dismember all of them, just most of them. Most of the principal characters survive, but not before they come together to learn lessons about parenting, friendship, teamwork, and fighting a cocaine-addled bear.

Heads are removed. Limbs torn off. Blood splashing hither and thither. Body parts bouncing hither and thither. There are jokes, such as when the hooligan teaches Eddie how he can better talk to his own son. There are tender moments, also exemplified by the hooligan teaching Eddie how to better communicate with his son.

What there aren’t are any lectures. There are no teachable moments, unless you count the one that comes at the beginning of the film and is credited to Wikipedia, that in a normal encounter with a black bear, the smart play is to fight back. It’s 95 minutes of insanity that serves no purpose other than to entertain.

In a just world, those 95 minutes of blood-soaked carnage would be guaranteed to earn multiple Oscars, from best screenplay to best director to best film. Alas, the lack of teachable moments probably means that won’t happen, but it matters not. For what matters is that in 2023, we have a movie that hearkens back to earlier times, back when Hollywood sought not to make us better people, but to distract us for a while, to invite us to imagine possibilities like “what if a bear got hooked on cocaine?”

One of the truly burning questions of our era, for sure. But seriously, now: movies as entertainment, not holier-than-thou finger-wagging? How very quaint.

Just keep on keepin’ on

Posted on February 28, 2023February 28, 2023 by Mike

Gonna have to “excerpt” damned near all of this one, I’m afraid, since it expresses my own thoughts on DeSantis the Destroyer pretty precisely.

We Need to Talk About Mark Levin’s Interview With Ron DeSantis Last Night
On Sunday night, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis appeared on “Life, Liberty, and Levin” on Fox News, purportedly to promote his new book, The Courage to Be Free, which comes out this week.

While DeSantis has not yet declared that he’s running for president, he certainly sounded like a man who’s making the case for his candidacy. Or, if not, he’s making a case for conservatism as the path to American success and prosperity— the subtitle of the book is “Florida’s Blueprint for America’s Revival.”

As my colleague Stephen Green pointed out earlier today:

DeSantis isn’t traveling to early presidential primary states like Iowa or New Hamphire, at least not yet. Instead, his most recent tour was through three struggling Deep Blue cities to tout what he’s done differently in Florida… DeSantis is calmly but quite publicly holding up his state as a model for the nation, just like a governor running for president would do. Except that he has yet to announce that he’s running. He hasn’t even formed one of those exploratory committees that allows a not-yet candidate to fundraise.

I don’t see how it’s a bad thing for DeSantis to wait to announce, if he does indeed plan to run. Does anyone really think the primary season is too short and needs to be lengthened? The 2016 primary seemed like it would never end—and the personal attacks and circular firing squad did nothing to help spread the message about the benefits of conservatism.

To the best of my knowledge, contra the ceaseless nattering from Vichy GOPe blowflies seeking to play Da Guv off against Trump for their own purposes, the one and only thing DeSantis has said to date about running for Prexy in ’24 is that he ain’t gonna. He’s perfectly free to run if he wants, just as who even knows how many other ambitious governors have before him; there’s nothing especially sinister or shameful about that, really. That said, I still very much hope he won’t. For me, it all boils down to this:

Whether or not DeSantis decides to run for president, he’s demonstrated over and over again that it’s possible to stand up to the woke mob and The Swamp and win. He stood up to Disney and won—depriving the woke company of its special tax breaks and self-governing authority. He noted in the interview that on his first day in office, he sat down and read what authority the governor had and then went to work. He fired a George Soros-backed DA when he refused to enforce the law; remade a failing Florida university in the image of Hillsdale College; went after venues hosting perverts performing drag shows with little kids in the audience; and banned sexually explicit materials in the classrooms of children in grades K-2. He was one of the first governors to re-open his state during the covid pandemic and he ordered children and teachers back into their classrooms. He also refused to force vaccine mandates. Unlike Trump, who stood mutely next to Dr. Fauci while he stood at the podium and spewed his lies about the origins of the covid virus, masking, and the vaccine, DeSantis did his research and decided for himself what was best for his state.

And those are just some of the highlights.

There’s been an effort by some to portray DeSantis as a Swamp creature, beholden to Paul Ryan (who?) or something, but that’s laughable on its face. This guy is fighting the liberals and WINNING. Who cares if he ran into Kevin McCarthy in a men’s room once, or whatever it is the Twitter bots are saying this week? All I care about is winning and taking back the country. If the GOP elites want to pour money into his campaign, let them. You can’t win the presidency without money. There’s more than enough proof to indicate that DeSantis is his own man and not beholden to special interests.

Noticeably absent from the interview was any mention of Trump’s recent attacks on DeSantis. Levin mentioned that the book, which DeSantis actually wrote himself, doesn’t contain any of the gossip or attacks on other politicians that tend to be a staple in political books. Instead, it focuses on DeSantis’s biography and his policies and principles.

“It’s like if you and I would have had a private conversation three years ago, why should I regurgitate that and put that out there when you were talking to me in confidence?” the governor explained. “And so I try to focus on the policies. What does it mean to be a leader in this day and age because, as you know, Mark, when you’re standing for our values, you come under assault in American society.”

“If you’re standing for the right things, you’re going to have to show courage under fire if you ultimately want to bring this stuff in for a landing, and so we had to do that so many different times. And I just felt that’s something that people are gonna be more interested in than any kind of dishing about private conversations I may have had with somebody.”

If there’s one thing we all should have learned since 2016—the last two nightmarish years especially—it’s that the President is nothing but a figurehead, a dumbshow put on for the edification and/or entertainment of the flyover Great Unwashed rubes by the Men Behind The DC Curtain. Do yourself, your state, and your nation a solid, Ron: don’t fall for it. You’ve accomplished some truly worthwhile, significant things as governor, something no real outsider or reformer will ever be permitted to do in Mordor On The Potomac so long as the Barad-Dur still stands.

Let the Swamp players keep playing, the manipulators keep manipulating, the Beltway Bandits keep up their banditry; they’re going to, no matter what you or anybody else does or says. As we saw with the Agony of Trump, no one man can possibly fix all that’s wrong in the Garden of FederalGovCo. You’ll do much more good where you’re at than you will under siege in the White House—ineffectual, beset on all sides, while we look on in despair as the jackals strip yet another carcass clean to the bone.

Do not take this cup from them, no matter how passionately it’s urged on you. Stay the course. And for Christ’s sweet sake, stay right where you are.

The Big Con

Posted on February 27, 2023 by Mike

Little did MAD magazine know how truly big a thing they were onto with this classic cover:

Ahhh, innocence! — *The con has only gotten bigger since then*

Fran calls it the Longest Long Con, which works for me equally well.

If the media megaphone can get you charged up about a notionally two-sided contest — with the help of the contestants, of course — it can keep your attention on what’s being said and away from what’s being done. That is the pattern of the last forty years at least. It keeps the political parties fat and happy, the media moguls dancing in dollars…and you and I bereft of the thing this nation was founded to protect and preserve: FREEDOM.

It’s a con game, Gentle Reader. It’s been nothing else since Ronald Reagan left office — and do you want to know what the Big Giveaway is, the one that everyone in this country should reflect on? It’s right out there in front of God and everybody, but only a handful of commentators have even brushed their microphones against it:

It’s the swindling of Donald Trump.

Trump was a genuine Outsider, a maverick determined to do right as he saw it. That made him an unacceptable, permanently “outside the tent” figure to the master croupiers of the Con Game, they who pour the Very Best Butter over the cams of the Big Rake-Off Machine we call party politics. They labor ceaselessly to keep We the People in Us vs. Them mode, that the oceans of campaign dollars might continue to flow uninterrupted into their coffers. Despite their best efforts, Trump gained the White House and set about doing as he said he would do. Unthinkable! the masters of the Establishment said to one another. No one keeps campaign promises! That’s why we let our puppets make them!!

So Trump had to go. The theft of the 2020 presidential election was the plainest imaginable revelation about the essential phoniness of contemporary political “conflict.” But despite Election 2020 and subsequent developments – Ukraine, anyone? — only a few have caught on.

Disaffiliate yourselves from the farce. Stop paying it any attention. Stop expecting political mechanisms to solve any of your problems. Concentrate on doing the best you can for your family, your friends, your neighbors, and your community, however defined. The game is rigged — so completely that even though “it’s the only game in town,” there’s absolutely no point in playing it any longer.

Be free. Freedom is not granted; it is taken: by you or from you. And the longer you focus on the con game called politics, the longer it will be withheld from you — by your own stubborn inanition.

Wait, if by that you mean I can no longer poke fun at the buffoonish, shambolic FiNC (Feeb in Chief, that would be), then I’m totally NOT down with that, now.

Eyrie up!

Posted on February 27, 2023February 27, 2023 by Mike

Irreconcilable differences, my latest Substack post, is now alive and kicking, y’all.

One of the powers behind the (phony) throne

Posted on February 26, 2023February 26, 2023 by Mike

Solway gives the vapid, self-seeking, and gobsmackingly pretentious “Dr” Jill her due.

Joe and Jill Went Up the Hill
The adulation Jill Biden has received for so flimsy a dubious accomplishment as a paper doctorate in a derelict field like Education Studies is utterly misplaced, whether it is the mentally impregnable Whoopi Goldberg thinking that Jill Biden was a medical doctor and should be considered for Surgeon General or a sports announcer for an NFL game, as Megyn Kelly notes, ingratiatingly remarking that “Dr. Jill Biden” was in attendance. I watched that game between the Eagles and the 49ers and nearly turned off the set when the fawning announcer asserted his bona fides.

The title of Dr. linked to Jill Biden certainly seems inappropriate. Recently, my wife Janice Fiamengo posted a Substack article critical of the First Lady’s doctoral thesis from the University of Delaware, Student Retention in the Community College: Meeting Students’ Needs, a document running to a risible 80 pages, not counting reference pages and appendices. Additionally, the Literature Review does not identify disagreements and contrary viewpoints in the education literature, as is standard practice, nor does her Methodology section indicate the limits of her analytical procedure, also standard practice. These, as well as thin citation, inadequate research, and generally poor writing, as Wall Street Journal film critic Kyle Smith has shown, are crucial problems.

Formerly an English professor at the University of Saskatchewan and later at the University of Ottawa, Janice chaired and administered dozens of doctoral candidacies, professional and academic, over the years and has also served as an external examiner. She knows her business. In her Substack entry, which I would urge the reader to check out, Janice made it vividly clear that Mrs. Biden’s doctoral thesis does not pass muster. Indeed, in my estimation, it would not qualify even for a Master’s Degree.

Equally to the point, most everyone knows or should know that a degree in Education is not worth much. I have lectured as visiting professor in various Education Departments and Teachers’ Training Colleges in Canada and the U.S. and written three books, Education Lost, Lying about the Wolf and The Turtle Hypodermic of Sickenpods, in which the subject was put under the loupe. I came to the conclusion that such Departments and Colleges should be completely abolished. Like Gender Studies, they are a waste of time and resources. The Ed.D might have generated respect had it conformed to the conditions and implications of the title — “Dr.” should mean something. In this instance, it doesn’t.

One might wonder, what’s the big deal in having a Doctorate or why it needs to be flaunted. It is not a rare phenomenon. After all, several U.S. secretaries of defense were so accoutered, though they were never saluted as “Doctor.” As a colleague reminds me, renowned business tycoon Jack Welch was never addressed as “Doctor,” though he had a Doctorate in chemical engineering. Former HUD secretary and neurosurgeon Dr. Ben Carson is referred to as “Mr.” in the New York Times. In Canada, former NDP leader and Ph.D. Ed Broadbent was never called “Doctor.” Even Howard Dean, the onetime DNC chairman, has never to my knowledge been called “Doctor,” though he is an M.D. What, then, is Dr. Biden’s agenda? Why is the press shocked, shocked?

More worrisome, as Samantha Chang at The Western Journal points out, “The first lady, who has never held elected office, is her husband’s ‘closest and most protective confidante’ and is influencing every major decision he makes, according to Bloomberg’s Nancy Cook. This is frightening because no one voted for Jill Biden, an English teacher who has no background in politics or public policy.” Ms. Chang alludes in this context to the secret presidency of Edith Wilson, one of the strangely implausible episodes in American history of a First Lady managing her infirm husband’s duties.

Ultimately, this is the Biden trademark: a corrupt and geriatric incompetent in the White House, and a vain First Lady devoid of intellectual substance who passes herself off as a scholar. Everything about such people is meretricious, or in popular parlance, “fake.” Such is current American leadership in both politics and education, a tale of broken crowns and failed policies hurtling down the historical gradient.

Ah well, in Pedo Joe’s case “breaking his crown” couldn’t do all that much damage anyhow, considering how very little he ever had underneath to begin with. New category for items such as this, concerning the various deceptions, ploys, and subterfuges deployed by FederalGovCo to cover up who’s actually running things: Deep State maskirovka.

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