Do they really want to push impeachment even if it means they lose in 2020?

In his Morning Report today, JJ Sefton writes, Suffice it to say, that barring something completely out of the blue, after post-natal infanticide, disarming of the citizenry and open borders with welfare and healthcare for foreigners, impeachment will not only insure Trump is reelected a scant 13 months from now, but by a huge margin.

Do they really want to push impeachment even if it means they lose in 2020? Sefton links to an article in FrontPage Magazine by Daniel Greenfield that answers that question in the affirmative.

So why the unpopular impeachment push that can’t succeed because of the composition of the Senate?

The purpose of Random Treason Accusation #17 has always been justifying the use of surveillance, espionage and secret evidence ld against the political opposition. Or Watergate to the power of ten.

...Elections are a humiliating process that force lefties to lie to voters, hide their agendas, and appeal to the people they despise to be allowed to rule them. Even when they win, a sour taste lingers afterward.

The Left desperately wants impeachment proceedings because it wants to exercise direct power.

Impeachment is not just meant to be a trial of President Trump, but of the voters who chose him. Its outcome, whatever the composition of the Senate, is meant to be an argument for remaking the system of elections, whether by abolishing the Electoral College or tampering with the judiciary, that would take the power further out of the hands of the voters and concentrate them with the right sorts of people.

Outside the media and social media, where the purges of cancel culture are a daily event, the Left lacks the power to regularly drag its political enemies before its bar, to put them on trial and break them. And yet it craves that terrible power above all else. All its obsessions, political correctness, cancel culture, political protests, demonization and impeachment bend toward that consuming evil obsession.

The Mueller investigation enraptured lefties with its spectacle of police state tactics, night raids, prolonged interrogations, eavesdropping, and then finally trials that bankrupted their opponents.

Nothing else, not even winning in 2020, excites the Left as much as the prospect of more show trials.

That’s why it must have impeachment even if attaining it will destroy its chances of victory.

Read more here.https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2019/09/disturbing-reason-why-dems-really-want-impeach-daniel-greenfield/

Grateful? To Whom?

Maria Popova drew me to her site today by asking the question, "Is there a God?" Then she added, "Stephen Hawking answers the question in his final book."


Some excerpts from Hawking's last book:

I use the word “God” in an impersonal sense, like Einstein did, for the laws of nature, so knowing the mind of God is knowing the laws of nature. My prediction is that we will know the mind of God by the end of this century.

...Despite the complexity and variety of the universe, it turns out that to make one you need just three ingredients. Let’s imagine that we could list them in some kind of cosmic cookbook. So what are the three ingredients we need to cook up a universe? The first is matter — stuff that has mass. Matter is all around us, in the ground beneath our feet and out in space. Dust, rock, ice, liquids. Vast clouds of gas, massive spirals of stars, each containing billions of suns, stretching away for incredible distances.

The second thing you need is energy. Even if you’ve never thought about it, we all know what energy is. Something we encounter every day. Look up at the Sun and you can feel it on your face: energy produced by a star ninety-three million miles away. Energy permeates the universe, driving the processes that keep it a dynamic, endlessly changing place.

So we have matter and we have energy. The third thing we need to build a universe is space. Lots of space. You can call the universe many things — awesome, beautiful, violent — but one thing you can’t call it is cramped. Wherever we look we see space, more space and even more space. Stretching in all directions.

...As I was growing up in England after the Second World War, it was a time of austerity. We were told that you never get something for nothing. But now, after a lifetime of work, I think that actually you can get a whole universe for free.

The great mystery at the heart of the Big Bang is to explain how an entire, fantastically enormous universe of space and energy can materialise out of nothing. The secret lies in one of the strangest facts about our cosmos. The laws of physics demand the existence of something called “negative energy.”

To help you get your head around this weird but crucial concept, let me draw on a simple analogy. Imagine a man wants to build a hill on a flat piece of land. The hill will represent the universe. To make this hill he digs a hole in the ground and uses that soil to dig his hill. But of course he’s not just making a hill — he’s also making a hole, in effect a negative version of the hill. The stuff that was in the hole has now become the hill, so it all perfectly balances out. This is the principle behind what happened at the beginning of the universe.

When the Big Bang produced a massive amount of positive energy, it simultaneously produced the same amount of negative energy. In this way, the positive and the negative add up to zero, always. It’s another law of nature.

So where is all this negative energy today? It’s in the third ingredient in our cosmic cookbook: it’s in space. This may sound odd, but according to the laws of nature concerning gravity and motion — laws that are among the oldest in science — space itself is a vast store of negative energy. Enough to ensure that everything adds up to zero.

I’ll admit that, unless mathematics is your thing, this is hard to grasp, but it’s true. The endless web of billions upon billions of galaxies, each pulling on each other by the force of gravity, acts like a giant storage device. The universe is like an enormous battery storing negative energy. The positive side of things — the mass and energy we see today — is like the hill. The corresponding hole, or negative side of things, is spread throughout space.

So what does this mean in our quest to find out if there is a God? It means that if the universe adds up to nothing, then you don’t need a God to create it. The universe is the ultimate free lunch.

...Something very wonderful happened to time at the instant of the Big Bang. Time itself began.

To understand this mind-boggling idea, consider a black hole floating in space. A typical black hole is a star so massive that it has collapsed in on itself. It’s so massive that not even light can escape its gravity, which is why it’s almost perfectly black. It’s gravitational pull is so powerful, it warps and distorts not only light but also time. To see how, imagine a clock is being sucked into it. As the clock gets closer and closer to the black hole, it begins to get slower and slower. Time itself begins to slow down. Now imagine the clock as it enters the black hole — well, assuming of course that it could withstand the extreme gravitational forces– it would actually stop. It stops not because it is broken, but because inside the black hole time itself doesn’t exist. And that’s exactly what happened at the start of the universe.

[…]

As we travel back in time towards the moment of the Big Bang, the universe gets smaller and smaller and smaller, until it finally comes to a point where the whole universe is a space so small that it is in effect a single infinitesimally small, infinitesimally dense black hole. And just as with modern-day black holes, floating around in space, the laws of nature dictate something quite extraordinary. They tell us that here too time itself must come to a stop. You can’t get to a time before the Big Bang because there was no time before the Big Bang. We have finally found something that doesn’t have a cause, because there was no time for a cause to exist in. For me this means that there is no possibility of a creator, because there is no time for a creator to have existed in.

It’s my view that the simplest explanation is that there is no God. No one created the universe and no one directs our fate. This leads me to a profound realisation: there is probably no heaven and afterlife either. I think belief in an afterlife is just wishful thinking. There is no reliable evidence for it, and it flies in the face of everything we know in science. I think that when we die we return to dust. But there’s a sense in which we live on, in our influence, and in our genes that we pass on to our children. We have this one life to appreciate the grand design of the universe, and for that I am extremely grateful.

Disappointed? Looking for an explanation? It can be found in his introduction to his book. He was a Leftist who believed in a Leftist Utopia!

One day, I hope we will know the answers to all these questions. But there are other challenges, other big questions on the planet which must be answered, and these will also need a new generation who are interested and engaged, and have an understanding of science. How will we feed an ever-growing population? Provide clean water, generate renewable energy, prevent and cure disease and slow down global climate change? I hope that science and technology will provide the answers to these questions, but it will take people, human beings with knowledge and understanding, to implement these solutions. Let us fight for every woman and every man to have the opportunity to live healthy, secure lives, full of opportunity and love. We are all time travellers, journeying together into the future. But let us work together to make that future a place we want to visit. Be brave, be curious, be determined, overcome the odds. It can be done.

Read more here.

He is not exaggerating!

Stand up to the Left!

Dennis Prager writes at American Greatness,

...If you send your children to a university, you are endangering both their mind and their character. There is a real chance they will be more intolerant and more foolish after college than they were when they entered college.

When you attend an American university, you are taught to have contempt for America and its founders, to prefer socialism to capitalism, to divide human beings by race and ethnicity. You are taught to shut down those who differ with you, to not debate them. And you are taught to place feelings over reason—which is a guaranteed route to eventual evil.

...The Left is increasingly poisoning sports. In most football stadiums this past season, one could not attend an NFL game without being subjected to left-wing contempt for America and its flag.

So, too, one cannot watch late-night television if one desires to simply be entertained before drifting off to sleep. Jimmy Kimmel, Stephen Colbert, and other hosts have changed late-night TV into left-night TV. Why merely be funny when you can use your monologues to advance your left-wing views?

The Left is destroying the unique American commitment to free speech. Almost half of incoming college freshmen do not believe in free speech for what they deem “hate speech” (merely taking issue with a left-wing position is, in the Left’s view, “hate speech”). They do not understand that the whole point of free speech is allowing the expression of opposing ideas, including what we consider “hate speech.”

The Left has poisoned race relations. America is the least racist multiracial society in the world. On a daily basis, Americans of every race and ethnicity get along superbly. But the black left and the white left constantly poison young minds with hate-filled diatribes against whites, “white privilege,” “systemic racism,” black dorms, black graduations, lies about the events in Ferguson, Missouri, and the like.

The Left has made innumerable women unhappy, even depressed, with its decades of lying about how female sexual nature and male sexual nature are identical—leading to a “hookup” culture that leaves vast numbers of young women depressed—and its indoctrinating of generations of young women into believing they will be happier through career success than marital success.

And, in some ways scariest of all, the Left is poisoning our children with its commitment to ending male and female as distinct categories. One of the great joys of life, celebrating one’s sex, is now deemed nothing more than a hateful idea in many of your children’s schools.

For these and other reasons, if you treasure American and Western civilization, fighting the Left—something all liberals and conservatives need to do—is the greatest good you can engage in at this time.

Read more here.

Will you stand up to the Leftist onslaught?

Ben Domenech writes at The Federalist,

If you have wrongthink, you will not be allowed for long to make your living within any space the left has determined they own – first the academy, then the media, then corporate America, and now the public square. You will bake the cake, you will use the proper pronoun, and you will never say that what Planned Parenthood does is murder for hire, and should be punished as such under the law.

Read more here.

Robert Zimmerman writes at Behind the Black,

...The problem however is not really the behavior of these oppressive leftists. The real problem is with the inability of Americans, both on the left and the right, to come to grips with this hateful subculture and its intolerant ways. People simple do not wish to believe that this subculture really and sincerely plans to do harm to its political opponents. They continue to view them as nothing more than another political movement expressing its opinions. Few are willing to admit that should these people take power, they truly plan to wield that power aggressively, and they will very likely follow the path of the leftists in Venezuela, who once they gained power quickly moved to suspend the rule of law so that they could rule unopposed.

Worse, these leftist fascists are not very far from obtaining such power, since in the past two years it appears that this violent subculture has wholly captured the Democratic Party.. While a decade ago that political party might have held back, fearful of a backlash should it take such radical positions, since Donald Trump’s election they have dropped their mask and have become as intolerant of opposition as the worst campus leftist bully. Kamala Harris is not an exception, she is now the rule.

Read more here.

Bringing an ideology to the table that those that wrote the test want them to have.

Robert Graychik reports at Breitbart,

“Go in and think like a liberal” was the advice two FBI agents gave Jonathan Gilliam prior to his taking an FBI entrance exam. Gilliam shared his anecdote during a Wednesday interview on SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Tonight with co-hosts Rebecca Mansour and Joel Pollak.
Gilliam, a retired Navy SEAL and former FBI special agent, spoke of left-wing political corruption across the federal government, specifically identifying the CIA and FBI.

Gilliam recalled that two FBI agents advised him to “think like a liberal” during his FBI entrance exam. “I was told by two FBI agents that did not know each other – I was told, ‘Do not go in and take that test as though you are thinking like a SEAL.’ In other words, ‘If this happened, this is the way it should be done because this is the way a team works, and this is the way an investigation should be carried out.’ They said, ‘Don’t do that, you’ll fail. Go in and think like a liberal.’ And that’s what I did, and I passed.”

The FBI’s entrance exam illustrated how leftists use ideological filtering tools preferencing ideological fellow travelers, said Gilliam.

“These tests are written to recruit a certain type of person,” said Gilliam. “So what you end up having when you do that is, you’re gonna have – the CIA has the same problem, where it’s not that they have individuals bringing a skill set to the table; it’s that they’re bringing an ideology to the table that those that wrote the test want them to have.”

Read more here.

Status battles

...Leftism is a status machine. A very, very successful status machine. Conservatives have lost status battle after status battle, often because they fought it as a policy battle. It rarely is.

That’s conservatism’s most consistent and most damaging mistake.

...The media offers people clues about what things are high status within the areas they cover. People notice, and act accordingly. Yet most conservatives still don’t understand Trump’s response:

If I lower the media’s status, I will wreck their power.

...American belief in the credibility of their news media is now at about 32 percent. That’s the lowest ever polled, and an 8 percent drop from the lowest point of the 2008-2015 period. The media has lost audience, and a lot of power. When Vogue tried to damage Melania by ripping her wardrobe, activists promptly made memes from a photo of the weird-looking critic. The attack instantly lost its power.

Facebook has tried to fight these trend lines by flagging items as “fake news.” Recently, the social media giant decided to stop. Too many people sought out flagged articles. Or, put another way: In many circles, the mainstream media’s status has become negative.

So, why hadn’t anyone ever done this before? In fairness, Newt Gingrich had some success in the 2012 primaries, and Ted Cruz has also tried. But they lacked the full array of tools. Worse, they didn’t understand how to make the media their enemy.

Once you understand conservatives’ biggest and most consistent mistake, it all becomes clear.

Now, how about a 12-step program to finally stop making the same mistake?

Read more here.

The financial power of Google and Facebook, who are run by Leftists!

What Leftism has done to California

At the Never Yet Melted blog, Fifth Generation Californian Steve Baldwin says good-bye to the Golden State, refuting in the process all the liberal boasting about California’s prosperity under Leftism.

[L]iberals like to claim California socialism is working by pointing to the much-heralded statistic that “California’s economy is the 6th largest in the world” as calculated by the state’s Department of Finance. Indeed, California’s $2.62 trillion economy is larger than that of France, Canada, Brazil, Russia, and Italy. However, that GDP stat does not factor in California’s cost of living, which is 36.2% higher than the national cost of living. As Carson Bruno writes in Real Clear Markets, “using the cost of living adjusted data from the International Monetary Fund and adjusting California’s GDP data provides a better snapshot of California’s economic standing in the world. Doing so shows that California is actually the 12th largest economy — a drop of 6 spots — and actually puts the state below Mexico.”

Moreover, as Bruno points out, Silicon Valley “accounted for 50% of California’s private industry real GDP growth.” In other words, without a few dozen mega profitable high-tech Silicon Valley firms such as Apple, Google, and Facebook, California’s GDP would be significantly smaller.

However, as economic blogger Richard Rider points out, the aggregate GDP statistic is really not a good indicator of a state’s economic health, especially since one industry appears to be propping up the “6th largest economy” myth. California has over 39 million people, more than any other state, so a far more accurate assessment of its economy, Rider writes, would be per capita GDP as compared to the rest of the country. After adjusting the GDP figures to account for the cost of living (COL), the Golden State ends up with a paltry 37th place ranking within the U.S.A., with a $45,696 per capital GDP. Even rustbelt states, such as Michigan and Ohio, have a higher adjusted per capita GDP. Despite Silicon Valley’s high-tech giants, California barely squeezes past impoverished New Mexico. Rider also reports that when one looks at per capita GDP stats for the rest of the world, California ranks 19th, but those stats don’t factor in the COL data; if they did, California would be even further down the rankings internationally.

One should not also assume that high-tech companies are a permanent feature of California’s economy. Already, the extremely high cost of living in Silicon Valley has, since 2016, caused more Silicon Valley employees to leave the state than it has attracted. With a few high-tech companies having left California for other states such as Virginia, Texas and North Carolina, it’s only a matter of time before this turns into a flood.

But it’s not just Silicon Valley employees fleeing California; it’s productive — and job-creating — citizens from all over the state. As Joel Kotkin and Wendell Cox wrote in the Mercury News last April, “the largest group of outmigrants tends to be middle-aged people making between $100,000 and $200,000 annually.”

Indeed, California has done everything possible to make it difficult for businesses and employers to produce goods and services. California now has the highest state income tax rate and the highest state sales tax rate in the country. Our gas tax rate is fourth-highest, but if you add in the 10-12 cent “cap and trade” cost per gallon, we have the highest gas tax in the country. Based on 2014 numbers, California’s single-family residence property tax is the eighth highest in the country with the median homeowner property tax bill 93% higher than the average property tax bill for the other 49 states. As for the state’s corporate income tax rate, it is also eighth in the country. And let’s not forget our small business tax, a minimum of $800, even if no profit is earned.

Overall, the Tax Foundation ranks California as fifth worse in overall tax burden, but the state is especially hostile to its high earners who start businesses and create most of the jobs. Indeed, the top 1% pays 50% of all state income taxes. Moreover, the Small Business and Entrepreneurship Council ranked California as having the worst anti-business climate in the country; the American Tort Reform Foundation ranks the state as the “worst state judicial hellhole” in the U.S. and the national Chamber of Commerce rates California as having the fourth-worst business climate.

If California is such a prosperous state as liberals claim, why does it have the highest poverty rate in the nation? According to the Census Bureau, the poverty rate is 23.4%, which is 17% higher than second place Nevada. Indeed, while California has 12% of the nation’s population, it is home to 33% of the nation’s TANF (Temporary Assistance for Needy Families) welfare recipients, more than the next seven states combined.

What’s clear is that the producers are leaving the state and the takers are coming in. Many of the takers are illegal aliens, now estimated to number over 2.6 million. The Federation for American Immigration Reform estimates that California spends $22 billion on government services for illegal aliens, including welfare, education, Medicaid, and criminal justice system costs. Liberals claim they more than make that up with taxes paid, but that’s simply not true. It’s not even close. FAIR estimates illegal aliens in California contribute only $1.21 billion in tax revenue, which means they cost California $20.6 billion, or at least $1,800 per household.

"Leftism is a collective psychological defense rooted in primitive mechanisms such as denial, splitting, projection, delusion, fantasy, acting out, and even hallucination"

At One Cosmos, Dr. Bob writes,

...As we've discussed in the past, leftism is a collective psychological defense rooted in primitive mechanisms such as denial, splitting, projection, delusion, fantasy, acting out, and even hallucination (what else to call it when someone looks at our president and sincerely "sees" a racist, or Russian spy, or anti-Semite?).

In this regard, we want to do the opposite of the left, in that they dismiss conservative arguments by simply attacking our motives -- for example, we are opposed to affirmative action because we are White Supremacists, or don't accept AGW hysteria because we Hate Science. Much progress could be made in "healing our divisions" if the left would simply deal with our arguments on the merits instead of habitually accusing us of that which they are unconsciously guilty.

People who condemn imaginary motives may or may not be correct on this or that policy, but they are certainly immature, and immaturity is never the answer (and soon becomes the problem).

For example, a group of emotionally stunted liberals may "believe in free speech" as much as you or I. But this doesn't for one moment prevent them from violently prohibiting opinions they don't like, because of the nature of splitting. Splitting is a defense mechanism that allows one to simultaneously believe two opposite theses without any cognitive dissonance, or even any real awareness that one is being illogical.

...But this is simply an extreme case of a much more common and mundane phenomenon. It's what humans do. Think, for example, of all the Hollywood feminists who, until a few days ago, loved Harvey Weinstein (HT American Digest). Now, if your mind is whole and integrated, then it is impossible to simultaneously "respect women" and "love Harvey." But with splitting, all things are possible!

...The other day it occurred to me that there are two main kinds of liberal: there are those who are susceptible to correction (as indeed was I), and those who are absolutely fixed in their beliefs -- who cannot benefit from any amount of fact, logic, information, or experience, no matter how brutal the mugging.

...In this context, the concept of splitting is a way to imagine how a person can harbor mutually contradictory ideas. How, for example, is it possible for a Catholic to be a leftist? In (mere) reality it isn't possible, but that hardly prevents it from happening. Examples abound: Nancy Pelosi. Ted Kennedy. Joe Biden. Pope Francis.

...In this inverted world, judgment and discrimination based upon objective and universal standards is evil, such that the healthy person is rendered sick. Nice trick!

There is a bill in California that will make it against the law -- punishable even by prison -- to Misgender someone. In other words (to paraphrase Ace of Spades) it will be a crime for us to properly gender someone who misgenders himself.

Read more here.

"We prefer a free society based on personal liberty and mutual respect. But if you leftists veto that option, that leaves us either a society where you rule and oppress us, or one where we hold the power."

Kurt Schlichter writes today at Town Hall,

...I took it seriously when Conservative, Inc., promised to fight the leftist blitzkrieg against normal Americans. It was all a scam, a lie, a pose for us rubes. The Tru Cons didn’t actually mean it.

There’s a lot of that not meaning it going on in the GOP right now. Exhibit A is John McCain, who ran ads touting how he was leading the way in opposing Obamacare only to give it aid and comfort when someone in the White House would actual sign its repeal. He’s the guy the establishment designated to lose to Barack Obama in 2008, and he was sure up to the task. But in retrospect, thank goodness, because McCain’s inevitable presidential betrayal of conservatives by breaking his word then and treating GOP voters like he treated his first wife would have done exponentially more damage to conservatism than Trump being prevented from keeping his word today ever could.

It’s so good to know that, despite his wonderful, close, awesome friend humiliating him while lying to Arizona’s voters, Lindsey Graham is still the blue falcon’s buddy. No hard feelings!

...Conservativism forgot about the real world conservatives we expected to line up behind us. While we were talking about free trade, we were ignoring that GOP voter who fought in Fallujah, came home, got a job building air conditioners, raised a family, and then one day watched the video of the oh-so-sorry CEO – who looked remarkably like Mitt Romney, because all these guys look remarkably like Mitt Romney – sadly informing his beloved employees that their jobs were getting shipped to Oaxaca. And our response to the 58-year old Republican voter who asked us how he was going to keep paying for his mortgage and his kid in college? Pretty much, “Well, that’s how free enterprise works. Read some Milton Freidman and go learn coding.”

...How about the guy who wanted to be a roofer in Fontana but he couldn’t because the contractors were only hiring illegals? What was our answer to him? “Oh well, the big corporate donors need their serfs, and if some pack of tatted-up MS-13 dreamers gang-rapes your daughter that’s just a price we’re willing to pay!”

They try to crush our religion and Conservative, Inc., cowers because Apple’s CEO might say mean things. “Just bake the cake,” they say – it’s not worth the fight! They demand our tax money to kill babies and Conservative, Inc., passes the spending bills – “Gosh, we can’t risk the WaPo saying we’re mean!” They diss our National Anthem, we react, and Conservative, Inc., wags its soft, spindly fingers – “So, so very unpresidential! My word!”

Conservatism has become a racket, and everything happening now is a result of its members hoping to wait out Trump and the demand for change he represents. Maybe if they do nothing, but say all the right things, we normals will get tired and go back to our jobs and keep providing those votes and renting those cruise cabins. But that’s not happening. We aren’t going away; business as usual is over. We aren’t just giving up, tossing away our country, and submitting to the ruling caste. We were nice with the Tea Party. Trump’s not as nice. What’s coming after is going to be much, much less nice.

Who are the normals? The Americans who built this country, and defended it. When you eat, it’s because a normal grew the food and another normal trucked it to you. When you aren’t murdered in the street or don’t speak German, it’s because a normal with a gun made those things not happen. We normals don’t want to rule over others. We don’t obsess about how you live your life, but also we don’t want to be compelled to signal our approval or pick up the tab. We are every color and creed – though when someone who is incidentally a member of some other group aligns with normals, he/she/xe loses that identity. The left drums normals who are black out of its definition of “black,” just as normal women get drummed out of womanhood and normal gays get drummed out gayhood. In a way, the left is making E pluribus unum a reality again – to choose to be normal is to choose to reject silly identity group identification and unite. Instead of saying “normal Americans,” you can just say “Americans.”

...Who are the normals? The Americans who built this country, and defended it. When you eat, it’s because a normal grew the food and another normal trucked it to you. When you aren’t murdered in the street or don’t speak German, it’s because a normal with a gun made those things not happen. We normals don’t want to rule over others. We don’t obsess about how you live your life, but also we don’t want to be compelled to signal our approval or pick up the tab. We are every color and creed – though when someone who is incidentally a member of some other group aligns with normals, he/she/xe loses that identity. The left drums normals who are black out of its definition of “black,” just as normal women get drummed out of womanhood and normal gays get drummed out gayhood. In a way, the left is making E pluribus unum a reality again – to choose to be normal is to choose to reject silly identity group identification and unite. Instead of saying “normal Americans,” you can just say “Americans.”

...But we’re not giving up, and we’re not going to sit back and just take it. Militant normalcy is the result of normal people roused to anger and refusing to be pushed around anymore. We prefer a free society based on personal liberty and mutual respect. But if you leftists veto that option, that leaves us either a society where you rule and oppress us, or one where we hold the power. So let me break this down, both for the left and for their fussy Fredocon enablers: You don’t get to win.

Concealing or obfuscating the difference between the way things are as opposed to the way they ought to be

At One Cosmos Bob quotes this from a book entitled Anti-Americanism,

"Why is it that while millions of people all over the world dream about living in the United States, many American intellectuals believe that this is a uniquely deformed and unjust society? How did the radical beliefs of the '60s survive and become, for many Americans, the new conventional wisdom? How is it possible that while communist systems are collapsing and seek a market economy, critics in the United States remain convinced of the evils of capitalism? Why are there more Marxists on any handful of American campuses than all over Eastern Europe or the Soviet Union? How can we explain that for important opinion makers at home and abroad, the United States has become a symbol of waste, greed, corruption, social injustice, and arrogance?"

The same author has also written a book entitled, Extravagant Expectations: New Ways to Find Romantic Love in America, which Bob recently read.

"Hollander investigates how Americans today pursue romantic relationships, with special reference to the advantages and drawbacks of Internet dating compared to connections made in school, college, and the workplace. By analyzing printed personals, dating websites, and advice offered by pop psychology books, he examines the qualities that people seek in a partner and also assesses the influence of the remaining conventional ideas of romantic love.

"Hollander suggests that notions of romantic love have changed due to conflicting values and expectations and the impact of pragmatic considerations. Individualism, high expectations, social and geographic mobility, changing sex roles, and the American national character all play a part in this fascinating and finally sobering exploration of men and women to find love and meaning in life."

Bob writes,

So, what is the connection between the two? Not to get ahead of ourselves, but both attitudes -- the personal and political -- seem to involve "extravagant expectations."

Leaving personal relationships to the side for a moment, what is leftism but an extravagant expectation of how the world should be? The leftist expects something of the world that the world can never provide -- in a word... or two, transcendent meaning. Ever since Rousseau penned his malignant flapdoodle, the left has had an inappropriately romantic vision of politics. You might say that when the left falls in love, other people's hearts -- and bodies -- are broken.

Yes, like the wrong woman, the left's ideas are beautiful and seductive, their consequences ruinous. Both Hillary and Obama are Dem fatales.

...You might say that leftism is a kind of deceptive personal ad from Ms. World, making impossible promises. Hollander speaks of "the political illusions and self-deception of many Western intellectuals who persuaded themselves of the admirable qualities of Communist systems."

And "Both political propaganda and commercial advertising misrepresent, distort, or at best stretch reality. Both attempt to conceal or obfuscate the difference between the way things are as opposed to the way they ought to be..."

...Now, what is the rationale of the so-called news, of a "free press" -- its reason for being? At the very least it should try to convey something of the reality beneath or behind appearances. Certainly it should not be a transmitter of propaganda, but that is precisely what it has become, and people know this. Except for the sorry 7% or whatever it is who actually trust the media. Everyone else knows MSM journalism comes down to cheesy personal ads that try to tart up the left and make it more appealing -- while denigrating the competition.

Read more here.

Competing core visions of America: globalism and patriotism

Bookworm writes,

The two campaigns are driven by competing core visions of America: Globalism and patriotism. It is those ideas, not the two reprehensible candidates, that voters must address in the 2016 election.

Hillary’s globalist presidency will mark the finish line of the “fundamental change” that Obama has started. After her election, we will live in a post-constitutional America that

will abandon individual rights thanks to a hard-Left Supreme Court;
will have a federal government micromanaging every aspect of our lives;
will see that same federal government, in turn, become subordinate to the dictates of the United Nations;
will redistribute wealth within America and then take what little wealth remains and redistribute it to favored Third World dictatorships;
will abandon America’s former friends and give succor to her current enemies;
will stand idly by watching the existential war between fundamentalist Islam and the rest of the world, while doing nothing to prevent that war from infiltrating America;
will have a completely open southern border, so much so that, within a short time, America will be a majority Latin American nation, although one with a strong, dynamic Islamic presence;
will have fully socialized medicine, although without the third-party (i.e, American) funding that kept Europe’s socialized medicine afloat during the Cold War;
will be racially divided, with permanent hostility between the races;
will marginalize men who are already the victims of unprecedented overt and covert animus; and
will have unlimited abortion that runs from the time a fetus is aborted until an old man is euthanized.

Trump’s patriotic presidency will, one hopes, prevent the dystopian future that follows in Hillary’s wake. Instead, his election will inaugurate a return to what looks and smells like a pre-9/11, late-20th century world, one that:

will have a somewhat balanced court with both constitutionalists and Leftists;
will still maintain traditional constitutional rights, including but not limited to religious liberty, free speech, due process, the right to bear arms, etc.
will have a federal government that is still way too big, but that operates within the normal parameters most of us are used to from life in the late 20th century;
will not take orders from the United Nations;
will have lower taxes on corporations and the middle class so that, rather than having the government spending money into oblivion, allows individuals to spend it in ways that create wealth;
will not bankrupt America chasing the extremely dubious, and definitely corrupt, “science” of climate change;
will continue to stand by America’s friends (although finally demanding that many finally step up their contributions as called for under international treaties) and will continue to stand up to America’s enemies;
will fight to win the existential war against radical Islam, both at home and abroad;
will have meaningful borders and will enforce existing immigration laws;
will have market-based medical insurance that promises to provide the best medical care to the greatest number of people (who will be able to choose their doctors and their hospitals);
will unite the American people without respect to race, religion, country of natural origin, sex, or any other dividers, provided that they buy into core American values;
will allow men to be men in all their wonderfulness;
will value life so that, while abortion will not be made illegal, it will not be unlimited and euthanasia will not be the go-to remedy for socialized medicine’s failures.

If you are a globalist, go ahead and vote for Hillary in Election 2016. Her corruption, her treasonous violation of national security lies, her compulsive dishonesty, and her incompetence are irrelevant. Once she’s carried across the finish line, the same forces that put her in the White House will ensure the culmination of her hard-Left American vision, one that she’s carried within her since her days at Wellesley.

If you are a patriot, please vote for Trump in Election 2016. His moral decay, compulsive boasting, and soft Leftism are irrelevant. Once he’s carried across the finish line, the same forces that put him in the White House (the People’s mandate and as well as the people with whom Trump surrounds himself) will, we hope, stop the bleeding that Obama started and return America to some semblance of the nation we recognize from the second half of the 20th century. It will not be a conservative paradise, but it may well be salvageable, unlike Hillary’s America.

Does anyone know of a better writer anywhere on the entire internet? Read more here.

Ritual self-abuse

Bookworm was also inspired by the Brangelina articles to write some thoughts about immigration.

When immigrants come, our officials and our dominant Leftist culture hasten to assure the new immigrants that they need not change one whit. Instead, America will not only bend and contort itself to conform to their norms and traditions, America will engage in ritual self-abnegation to apologize for all the horrible things it has done both at home and abroad. America, as Wayne and Garth would say, is not worthy. Those Americans engaged in this ritual self-abuse seem incapable of understanding that the primary reason immigrants come here is because their own culture failed them, whether economically, socially, or just in terms of keeping them safe.

Read more here.

Facts favor conservativism, which is why the mainstream media works so hard to hide them.

Bookworm writes,

My blog’s motto is “Conservatives deal with facts and reach conclusions; liberals have conclusions and sell them as facts.” The only thing wrong with the motto is that the word “liberal” is a poor substitute for a whole category of Leftists and totalitarians of all political and religious stripes. Otherwise, it’s entirely accurate — as is beautifully shown by the story of Kasim Hafeez, who was raised on a steady diet of anti-Israel and anti-Semitic conclusions. These conclusions led him to being a rabid anti-Israel activist — something that changed dramatically when he read Alan Dershowitz’s The Case for Israel. Confronted with actual facts, Hafeez did a volte face on his previous prejudice and now tours campuses as a pro-Israel activist.

Facts favor conservativism, which is why the mainstream media works so hard to hide them.

How hard does this media work to hide facts? This hard: Larry Correia minces no words when he describes how appalling the American media is when it comes to reporting the news. He sees them as engaged in a four step dance of information death:

Read more here.

disconnected left-wing talking points were lodged in your head like rocks in a machine?

Gagdad Bob writes at One Cosmos,

Is a virus alive or dead? Has that question been decided by biology? At least on the psycho-spirtual plane, it is a kind of negative facsimile of life: it resembles a living process while promoting death and disease. Likewise, a liberal indoctrination surely resembles an education. But it serves death, not life.

Speaking of which, I ran across an article by Anthony Esolen called Exercises in Unreality: The Decline in Teaching Western Civilization. It's a little turgid, but he does point out how the left wrecked education, ruined everybody's lives, and ate all our steak. He focuses on the philosophically and spiritually retarded John Dewey, who

"was classically trained but would have none of it for the ordinary democratic masses. He had no use for the useless things -- that is, the best and noblest things: no use for poetry, flights of imagination, beauty, religion, and tradition. He was a hidebound innovator."

Hidebound innovator. That is a good encrapsulation of liberalism, in that it is regression masquerading as progress, or barbarism dressed in Pajama Boy's clothing. It is tyranny disguised as liberation, mobocracy as democracy, discrimination as equality, stupidity as wisdom, and cruelty as compassion.

...Cognitive dissonance. I can't stand it, on any level. Rather, the Raccoon demands complete consistency. The other day, Dennis Prager was saying the same thing. He wondered out loud if there are liberals who have listened to him for a long time, and yet, remained liberal, asking any such specimens to call in. I only heard one before I reached my destination, and he very much reminded me of me, back in the day. A lot of disconnected left-wing talking points were lodged in his head like rocks in a machine.

Read more here.

How the Pope attacked conservatives

Ben Shapiro writes at Breitbart,

Seven Ways Pope Francis Slapped Conservatives in the United States

He goes into detail on each of these seven points:

The Staged Illegal Immigrant Child Photo-Op.

Comparing Fighting Illegal Immigration to Human Rights Abuses Against Native Americans.
This isn’t just insulting, it’s ridiculous. Americans sent Cherokees along the Trail of Tears. Today’s Americans send illegal immigrants along the trail of free education, emergency medical care, and state-sponsored welfare programs.

Allowing President Obama to Represent Himself as An Advocate of Religious Liberty.
Meanwhile, President Obama’s IRS cracks down on religious charities and his Obamacare regime targets religious institutions

Ripping Capitalism Before Congress.
The Pope has long excoriated capitalism as a brutal system of exploitation. To the celebration of leftists everywhere, the Pope has repeatedly dismissed capitalism as immoral, saying there is no evidence that capitalism brings about “greater justice and inclusiveness in the world.” This is true if you know nothing about world history or economics. The Pope’s excoriation of free markets in the United States came as no surprise, but it came as an unwelcome slap nonetheless.

Pushing Environmental Extremism.

Ignoring Abortion, Talking Death Penalty.
s I noted yesterday, 35 murderers were executed in 2014 in the United States. One million unborn children were killed.

Ignoring Same-Sex Marriage.

The Pope’s visit could have been an incredible opportunity to fight against Godless immorality in the United States. Instead, the Pope largely used the opportunity to push leftism slathered over with paper-thin theology. That’s a tragic loss for both the world and for the religious community fighting for survival against the onslaught of an increasingly aggressive secular left – a secular left that cheered the Pope but will be happy to either coopt or crush his church at the first available opportunity.

Read more here.

Turning the negative of humorlessness into the postive of moral superiority

Jon Gabriel writes at Ricochet,

Lefties also have turned the negative of humorlessness into the positive of moral superiority. Sniffing “That’s not funny!” at an inoffensive Caitlyn Jenner joke signals that you are more evolved than the average cis-het-white-oppressor. The same people who laughed at Dana Carvey’s “Church Lady” now aspire to be her.

More and more, comedians are realizing that their progressive allies are the ones trying to silence them, not those unsophisticated conservatives comics love to mock. Perhaps comics should seize this opportunity to joke about humorless liberals before it’s too late.

Read more here.

You can't even see that it's there

How to speak Leftist

Andrew Klaven gives us some helpful definitions of words Leftists like to use.