Sovereign Man: Don’t Forget to Vote for Yourself

Simon Black of Sovereign Man has few words for you in Don’t Forget to Vote for Yourself

The year 63 BC was an election year in ancient Rome, and an ambitious 37-year old was locked in a heated race for one of Rome’s most powerful offices: pontifex maximus.

The young politician, of course, was Julius Caesar. And he ran a cutthroat campaign against his opponents– two seasoned senators, both of whom Caesar publicly accused of corruption.

Caesar reputedly spent so much money on his campaign that, on election morning, he told his mother that he would either win, or he would have to leave Rome forever to flee his angry creditors.

The Romans didn’t invent elections; there’s evidence of voting that goes back nearly 1,000 years before Rome, to civilizations in ancient India and Mesopotamia.

And the Greeks, of course, developed the concept of democratic elections more than any other ancient culture.

(The Greeks even held ‘negative elections’ where they would vote on which former politicians should be banished for corruption and incompetence.)

But the Romans elevated elections to a full blown commercial enterprise. They were willing to spend big to win– a practice that continues to this day.

The Center for Responsive Politics recently estimated that the 2020 US Presidential election will cost a record $6.6 billion. That’s nearly THREE TIMES as much as the $2.3 billion spent in the 2016 campaign.

It’s not just the Presidency either. Even a ‘lowly’ Congressional seat costs big money these days, with a whopping $7.25 billion spent in the 2020 election. That’s double the amount from 10 years ago.

But the real cost of elections goes far beyond dollars and cents.

The biggest example is the emotional cost; I’m not sure many of us have ever witnessed such drama to the extent that has unfolded in this election.

The constant shouting and screaming, the media and celebrity shrieking, the Twitter rage… it never stops.

Countless people get behind their candidates as if their lives depend on it, with utter devotion and euphoria for their chosen one, and unmitigated hatred for the opposing side.

Things have become so crazy that couples even break up over politics.

A recent study by Wakefield Research found that 11% of couples in the United States have split up over political differences. And among Millennials, that number rises to 22%.

I find it remarkable that we allow extreme emotions for politicians (who we’ll most likely never meet) to cause a breakdown in relationships with some of the actual people who are in our daily lives.

These extreme emotions will be felt even more acutely today, and in the coming days (or weeks) as the results are announced.

Grown adults are going to break down and cry as if their dog just died. Others will hoot and cheer like they’ve just won the lottery.

And this happens every time. Every few years it’s the same cycle… the same drama. We’re told every single time that ‘this is the most important election of our lives.’

Naturally there’s an entire industry counting on us being emotional. The media sells more ads, the politicians get more votes. Billions of dollars at stake depend on us being in a total frenzy.

Look, I’m not being dismissive about elections. Obviously the people who come to power can and do have enormous influence on our lives.

They can wreck havoc and destruction, even when they’re well-meaning.

They can burden future generations with ever-increasing debts, debase the currency, regulate entrepreneurs out of business, embolden extremists, tax people’s prosperity away, and all sorts of other terrible things.

So, yes, to a degree, it’s always important.

But in the midst of all this drama is a central theme that’s almost always lost.

People tend to forget that WE have a much bigger impact on our own lives than any politicians or government.

Elections deceive us into pinning all the hopes and dreams for our future on some political candidate, like he or she is going to walk across the water and sprinkle prosperity everywhere.

But this is an absurd fantasy.

What we do matters far more– the plans we make, the actions we take, the things we do to improve our own lives.

This is like voting for yourself. And we have the opportunity to do this every single day.

Summit News: Biden Campaign Manager – “Under No Scenario” Will Trump Be Allowed to Declare Victory

From Summit News, Biden Campaign Manager: “Under No Scenario” Will Trump Be Allowed to Declare Victory

Joe Biden’s campaign manager Jen O’Malley Dillon has asserted that, “Under no scenario will Donald Trump be declared a victor on election night.”

The quote was tweeted by New York Times national political reporter Shane Goldmacher.

The comment was made shortly after the Trump campaign issued a mass email asserting that the Biden campaign was planning to rig the election by not accepting defeat.

“They have no say in that process,” commented Jack Posobiec. “It is not ok for a campaign to delegitimize election results like this, regardless of which party is doing it.”

Meanwhile, Twitter has also reiterated that it will place warning labels on tweets that “make claims about election results before they’re officially called.”

Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro also publicly indicated that his state won’t be releasing final election results until three days after election day.

“I could care less what Donald Trump says, we will count these ballots in a proper way to be certified,” said Shapiro.

As we previously highlighted, pro-Biden analytics firm Hawkfish previously asserted that it’s likely President Trump will appear to have won in a landslide on election night but may lose after mail in ballots are counted, which “will take days if not weeks to tally.”

Big Tech, Democrats and the mass media have all repeatedly insisted that Trump will not be allowed to declare victory on the night, regardless of the Electoral College count.

Wilder, Wealthy, and Wise: The Archbishop, Trump, And The Coming Great Reset

Here’s John Wilder of Wilder, Wealthy, and Wise discussing the “Great Reset” that has been all over the blogosphere recently – The Archbishop, Trump, And The Coming Great Reset.

I first became aware of “The Great Reset” last week.  There are quite a few YouTube® videos about it, but one of the more unusual mentions was in a letter to President Trump from a retired Catholic clergyman.  This particular clergyman is Archbishop Carlo Viganò.  I don’t know what the difference is between an Archbishop and a Bishop, but I suspect it has to do with a better quality of footwear.

Anyway, Archbishop Viganò wrote the following in the letter:

A global plan called the Great Reset is underway. Its architect is a global élite that wants to subdue all of humanity, imposing coercive measures with which to drastically limit individual freedoms and those of entire populations. In several nations this plan has already been approved and financed; in others it is still in an early stage. Behind the world leaders who are the accomplices and executors of this infernal project, there are unscrupulous characters who finance the World Economic Forum and Event 201, promoting their agenda.

The purpose of the Great Reset is the imposition of a health dictatorship aiming at the imposition of liberticidal measures, hidden behind tempting promises of ensuring a universal income and cancelling individual debt. The price of these concessions from the International Monetary Fund will be the renunciation of private property and adherence to a program of vaccination against Covid-19 and Covid-21 promoted by Bill Gates with the collaboration of the main pharmaceutical groups. Beyond the enormous economic interests that motivate the promoters of the Great Reset, the imposition of the vaccination will be accompanied by the requirement of a health passport and a digital ID, with the consequent contact tracing of the population of the entire world. Those who do not accept these measures will be confined in detention camps or placed under house arrest, and all their assets will be confiscated.

You can read the whole letter here (LINK).

Okay, the story the Archbishop was sharing seemed like an Infowars® segment, but with less tinfoil.  What was up?

Well, it is stuff that’s directly out of an Infowars™ segment:  as I dug into the Archbishop’s clues, it was exactly correct.  The World Economic Forum©, which runs that annual Davos conference in Switzerland where 3,000 of the elite of the business world, academia, Hollywood, and the press get together to discuss how awesome they are for sacrificing themselves by flying their private  jets to visit a Swiss resort.

Alex Jones regularly says they’re up to no good when they meet at Davos.  Not everything is a conspiracy:  I’m certain that Alcoa® and Planters™ will never be allowed to merge, since everyone is afraid of the AlumaNutty.

I know the Leftists complain about the 1%, but this is the 0.00004%.  The amazing thing?  The 0.00004% agree nearly entirely with Antifa’s® agenda.  Here’s what the Great Reset entails, as showcased in articles on the World Economic Forum©’s own website (LINK):

  • “We must build entirely new foundations for our economic and social systems.” The Davos folks describing freedom:  “Be free.  No!  No, not like that.”
  • “In fact, one silver lining of the pandemic is that it has shown how quickly we can make radical changes to our lifestyles.” I’d like to point out that some things didn’t change at all:  WNBA games have always been empty.
  • “. . . will require stronger and more effective governments . . . .” I’m against both of those things.  If we have strong government, I really hope it’s Three Stooges®-level incompetent.
  • “ . . . governments should implement long-overdue reforms that promote more equitable outcomes.” Remember – equality is we all have the same chance.  Equitable means we all get the same outcome.  Except, of course, for the 0.00004%.

 

There are three main points that the World Economic Forum© is currently selling as the Great Reset:

  • International coordination on almost everything is the first component. If you thought we had too much globalization already?  Get ready for armies of international bureaucrats to write legislation and regulation that no one is accountable for.
  • “The second component of a Great Reset agenda would ensure that investments advance shared goals, such as equality and sustainability.” Who shares these goals?  Well, at least the 0.00004% do, and they know best, right?  Especially when they spend your money.
  • Finally, they want to “harness the innovations of the Fourth Industrial Revolution to support the public good, especially by addressing health and social challenges.” The Fourth Industrial Revolution is Davos-speak for the post-Internet acceleration in information technology and the way that it interacts with the physical world.

But the World Economic Forum dives deeper.  One of the more chilling aspects is that they no longer want individuals to own, well, anything.  You can read the article here (LINK), right off of the World Economic Forum’s© website.  I did a little digging, and found the author was a member of Danish parliament, but prior to that?  She had spent 8 years getting a Masters in theology, became a part-time theology teacher, and then was in parliament.  Sound like a blonde version of AOC?

Everything that Archbishop Viganò suggests is an aim of the Great Reset is plainly on the World Economic Forum© website, with the exception for the Archbishop’s claim that that people would be put into camps if they didn’t comply by being vaccinated and chipped.  That, in my mind, makes sense.  It’s not normally something that a country advertises, “Hey come for the free stuff, stay for the concentration camps.”  Or, “Virginia, it’s for Lovers of Barbed Wire.”

My review of the Great Reset is simple:

It’s the same hokum that the Left has been selling since before the French Revolution.  The Left promises they will make people into new men and they will share the prosperity with everyone.  But those in control will then ask the question – how many people do we need, really?  The answer is a simple one, and it’s always the same:  fewer than we have now.

In reality, the 0.00004% never even start to share.  The 0.00004% will make life easy and free.  All you have to give up?  All of your freedom.  Hmm, I can get the Devil to grant my wish in exchange for my soul, and I don’t even have to go down to the Crossroads?

Which is why an Archbishop might write a letter in the first place . . . .

Independent Sentinel: If the 40 million Christians who don’t vote did vote

The following is a guest post by Michael Neddermann at the Independent Sentinel – If the 40 million Christians who don’t vote did vote.

Every American who doesn’t want to see our beloved nation transformed into a godless, socialist, “workers’ paradise” must vote to stop the threat of the systemic Marxism that has infected our society through the efforts of today’s Democratic Party. Sadly, about 40 million Christians don’t take this threat seriously enough to vote (15 million Christians not registered; the total of non-voting adults, registered and not registered, was 102.7 million in 2016, or 44.4% of the 231.5 million eligible voters).

Those non-voting Christians are a huge percentage (44%) of the 90 million eligible Christians (all denominations). How is it possible that so many who aspire to Christian moral responsibility are so cavalier about such a consequential civic responsibility, one that has such grave moral significance? To comprehend this threat, please read the evidence at every link and compare the differences between party platforms on these subjects: abortion, marriage, free expression of religion, limited government, and preserving America’s Christian heritage.

Who should better understand the urgency of this existential threat, with its eternal consequences, than liberty-loving Christians who see the true nature of what the Democratic Party advocates as anti-family, anti-Christian culture, increasingly anti-American and anti-God (the party’s policies, not individual Democrats), and anti-civilization (pro-abortion, and tacitly approving rioting/looting/burning, often fomenting police-hatred, advocating abolishing/defunding police, etc.)? The Democratic Party is promoting Marxism.

If the threat of the Democratic Party’s systemically Marxist policies/practices and promises doesn’t motivate those non-voting Christians by itself, perhaps they will be persuaded by understanding the dire consequences of supporting that danger within the context of both of Jesus’ pledge, first, to bless those who acknowledge him publicly (in this regard, politically) and, second, to condemn those who publicly deny him:

“… everyone who acknowledges me before men, I also will acknowledge before my Father …; but whoever denies me before men, I also will deny before my Father. …” – Matthew 10:32-33

The Democratic Party, which actually booed God at its 2012 convention, will certainly deny Jesus “before men” if its candidates control the government.

People who boo God deny that the founders actually dedicated the nation to Jesus Christ by officially, perpetually, and gratefully “acknowledg[ing] [him] before men” (“before a candid world” in the Declaration of Independence) when they referenced him four times in the document, one being an undisguised prayer (see below). That acknowledgment obligated Jesus to acknowledge our nation “before [his] Father,” thus, explaining America’s massive blessings.

The founders acknowledged Jesus as:

    1. the moral authority for independence in the Declaration’s first sentence;
    2. the beneficent source of our unalienable rights and individual political sovereignty in the Declaration’s second sentence; and
    3. when offering an undisguised prayer to Jesus (see below) for protection and guidance in that document’s concluding paragraph – yes, the Constitution (which outlaws socialism) is one answer to those prayers;
    4. all of the above is the “American Theory of Government”;
    5. therefore, we are truly “one nation under [and dedicated to that] God.”

This work is derived from my ebook, “America’s Primal Prayer: Is Jesus Christ the God of the Declaration; Did the Founders Dedicate the Nation to Him; is the Constitution Woven From Christian Fabric; and Why it Matters.” That ebook explains that we are “one nation under [and blessed by that] God” because America officially and perpetually acknowledges Jesus Christ “before men” in many ways, but specifically in the Declaration of Independence.

The reference to the “Supreme Judge of the world” in the concluding paragraph of the Declaration is a clear reference to Jesus Christ inserted into Jefferson’s draft as an undisguised prayer by the Christians in Congress, the Declaration’s actual author (because deists deny that God judges, they don’t pray). That prayer to Jesus Christ clarifies Jefferson’s less specific references to “Nature’s God” and “Creator” (in the first and second sentences) and to Congress’ prayer for “the protection of divine Providence” (in the Declaration’s last sentence), with an explicit identification that Jesus Christ is the God to whom the nation perpetually prays for righteousness using his well-known biblical title:

“appealing [praying] to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude [righteousness] of our intentions. …” [Emphasis on Jesus’ title, bracketed comments added.]

While the phrase “one nation under God” wasn’t added to the Pledge of Allegiance until 1954, it’s an explicit reference to the historical fact of the Declaration’s Christ-based “Chain of Delegated Authority” (God>man>servants in limited government), and of that Chain’s manifestation in the symbiotically-linked Constitution as the unamendable “Liberty Equation” inherent in the American form of government—that our rights are a gift from God—which has a 240-year history of not being the theocracy the secular (godless) left falsely alleges.

Such an understanding desperately needs the political support of those non-voting, and Democratic voting, Christians. Voting would be an important way for them (and you?) to “acknowledge [Jesus] before men” and, thus, revitalize the founders’ official and perpetual acknowledgment of Jesus “before men” while also claiming Jesus’ promise for themselves by politically opposing the Democratic Party’s attack on the God-acknowledging American Theory of Government.

Consider these questions:

    • Does failing to vote at all constitute tacit support for the Democratic Party’s naked attempt to transform the United States of America fundamentally, and is that failure to vote a denial of “America’s Christian acknowledgment of Jesus” “before men” in the Declaration of Independence?
    • Will an actual vote for Democrats constitute an overt denial of Jesus “before men” such that it will mean that Jesus must deny “before [his] Father” all those who vote Democratic, including denying the nation if Democrats nationalize their denial of Jesus?
    • Will Jesus’ denial “before [his] Father,” if Democrats take us down that Marxist “path,” means that the blessing of our liberty-enhancing, a limited form of government will be changed into their Orwellian “Democratic Socialism” (aka, Marxism)?
    • What are the personal consequences for each voter or non-voter of such a denial of Jesus “before men”?

Each person must decide and vote accordingly after reviewing this information.

America needs a revival of Christian Patriotism by those who vote and who know the 40 million Christians who don’t vote (or the millions of Christians who vote Democratic) to motivate them to do their civic and Christian moral duty to vote and restore America’s historical acknowledgment of Jesus “before men” (“before a candid world”) and, thus, preserve his blessings on America, and save the nation from the godless, America-hating Marxism systemically infecting “before a candid world” today’s Democratic Party.

This knowledge will be decisive in the 2020 election and beyond if those reading this pass it on to their pastors, fellow parishioners/congregants, and family/friends, as well as to as many media personalities as possible.

Gatestone Institute: The Autocratic Future of the United States?

Dr. Guy Millière, a professor at the University of Paris, at the Gatestone Institute writes about the suppression of information in the US in The Autocratic Future of the United States?

There seems to have been an attempt for the last four years to instill among the population a hatred of America and of the president, to present them both as a criminal and to try to overthrow them. In any event, it is the first time in American history that there has been an attempted coup d’état against a duly elected president.

If institutions of democracy — the state, the judiciary, opposition parties and the free press — suppress verifiable information instead of informing the public about it — as has just taken place for more than two weeks regarding alleged financial corruption and the possible resultant compromise — by China, Russia, and Ukraine among other countries — of an allegedly financially compromised family as possible a national security threat — these institutions of democracy instead become vehicles to sabotage a democracy.

A danger to American democracy in the past years — with threats to undo the Constitution by, for example, abolishing the electoral college, banning guns and, in 2014, eliminating free speech — has therefore become imminent.

In 2016, the FBI, under the leadership at the time of James Comey, used a fraudulent document bought and paid for by the 2016 Hillary Clinton presidential campaign to launch a two year “investigation” in search of a crime against the president. Special Counsel Robert Mueller, at the time of his appointment, on May 17, 2017, knew, or should have known — along with the leadership of the CIA, the FBI, and other key agencies, in extremely dubious, possibly even criminal, actions — that the document on which is investigation was based, the Steele dossier, was fraudulent.

Now we have the later round. After a political experiment in California successfully used late, fraudulent voting to turn Orange County from red to blue, the effort, with the complicity of the Supreme Court, seems to have expanded. There were worries that mail-in voting might rig the election, and if the military might be needed to remove a reluctant incumbent from office. No one, of course, asked what the opposition would do if it lost the election and refused to leave. The only recommendation so far seems to have been threatening more riots.

In a recent article, Abe Greenwald, executive editor of Commentary magazine, described what is happening as “a revolution against the United States of America and all it stands for”.

Roger Kimball has described in his book The Long March how, from the 1960s onwards, members of the radical left gradually took control of the universities, the educational system, culture, media. The takeover of their preferred party followed. The method pursued was defined by the Italian communist Antonio Gramsci, who advocated the infiltration of the existing civil society to destroy it from within and lead it to collapse. The tactics were set out in Saul Alinsky’s 1971 book, Rules for Radicals.

Former US President Barack Obama, a disciple of Saul Alinsky, said, before being elected in 2008, that his followers were “five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America”. He did not say into what. Hillary Clinton, another disciple of Alinsky, was expected to win and continue what Obama had started. To these self-appointed elites, whoever seems to have taken their lace seemed to become the enemy –the obstacle that had prevented them from taking what they appear to hope will be irreversible control of the United States.

There has been talk about killing the filibuster, to pass just about anything with a simple majority, and talk about enlarging the Senate by adding more states, presumably to enable one side to hold a permanent majority. Also on the agenda has been adding more members to the Supreme Court to turn it into a branch of legislative government, eliminating America’s historic system of checks and balances. There are also plans to raise taxes on everyone (remember, “You can keep your healthcare“?), abolish fossil fuels and fracking, and establish a Marxist-socialist economy of redistribution to replace a free economy.

These ideas appear to have the support of hundreds of professors, mainstream journalists, and members of the so called “cultural elites“, as well as the leading social networking services, such as Twitter and Facebook, that are practicing with impunity suppression of factual information and censorship of anything that might run counter to their preferred policies, especially if it threatens to reveal national security concerns about issues they would rather keep from public view.

Many if these ideas also have the support of international financiers and entrepreneurs, who are seeking above all, to keep hiring cheap labor, and to gain easy entry into China’s vast market share of 1.5 billion consumers. The long-term threat of China, outspokenly determined to unseat America and control the world, seems less of a threat than a slightly-less-spectacular quarterly report for their shareholders.

Communist China is ruled by leaders who have been stealing information for decades and using a kind of state capitalism to enrich themselves and those close to them, meanwhile ruling over millions of “serfs” who are increasingly deprived of information and freedom.

If the American people do not fight to defend their institutions and democracy, the United States could soon be ruled by an “expert” class, tech oligarchs, and other autocrats, and, although what will happen if the US government changes hands remains to be seen, many Americans could be forced to follow the usual autocratic road to serfdom.

Chairman of the Board of Directors of the Claremont Institute Thomas Klingenstein noted that “We are in a fight for our lives”.

When you see proposals to disrupt elections and plans about destroying a free economy, believe them.

American Thinker: The Democratic Party is the Dark Winter

J. Robert Smith at American Thinker has some words about where the Democratic party wants to take the country in The Democratic Party is the Dark Winter.

We are, indeed, at a crossroads in America.  Next Tuesday, we’ll learn the choice of direction.  Will voters stick with President Trump, who, in saner times, would be a slam-dunk for reelection — or do they embrace Joe Biden and his grim vision of a dark winter?  We have to believe that most Americans haven’t cast off common sense, along with their used masks and empty hand sanitizer bottles.  But for voters on the fence — as inexplicable as that is — let’s evaluate what the Democratic Party is showing us about itself.

Biden’s claim in the last debate that the U.S. is moving toward a dark winter, thanks to COVID, was revealing.  It exposed more than Biden’s cynicism in trying to manipulate people’s fear of the virus, it exposed an irony.

The dark winter tag speaks to the Democratic Party’s condition, not America’s.  Democrats are ominous.  Their worldview is antithetical to the American experience, and it’s rotted.  Worse is that they’re destructive.  We see it in their language and actions.  2020 is showcasing the Democrats accelerating descent into a mean-spirited, grudge-filled aggression toward traditional America — the America of the Revolution and the founding.  They despise that immense swath of red, white, and blue between the Northeast and West Coast.  And anywhere patriots live.

Perhaps 2020 is providential, in that the Good Lord chose an election year to lay bare the Democrats’ grim plots?  Maybe this is a chance for the broader electorate to get a strong read on the party that’s dumped Happy Days are Here Again for its rendition of Eve of Destruction?

The Democratic Party is a cancer making systemic attacks on the nation.  The attacks are political, cultural, and moral.  The left, which is ascendent in the party, has over many years, infiltrated major institutions: education, the media, arts and entertainment, corporate executive suites, government bureaucracies.  The fight to restore traditional America won’t end after the president’s hoped for reelection.  With Trump, though, our chances of winning the fight increase dramatically.

Let’s focus on two big, foreboding developments that are transpiring this year.  They’re pincers in the Democrats ambition to impose tyranny — a tyranny that leftists and globalists plan to fully unfold should the corrupted and compromised Joe Biden win.

COVID and the Shutdowns

In March, the COVID crisis struck, but for Democrats, it had little to do with public health.  It was an opportunity to impose and exercise raw political power.  15-day state closures to assess and formulate approaches to grappling with the infection turned into open-ended blue state shutdowns.  New York, California, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Oregon, Wisconsin, Washington State — blue states all – are still closed to varying degrees.  Businesses have been erased and millions are unemployed.  The rights to worship, to assemble (except for protests and riots), and to function as free citizens, have been curtailed.

Democrats are previewing their preferred model of governance — and it should chill patriots.  Theirs isn’t bigger government as an expediency to deal with a temporary crisis.  How Andrew Cuomo, Tom Wolf, Gretchen Whitmer, Gavin Newsom, et al, are governing sets precedents.  Democrats are demonstrating top-down, strongman government as their choice.  It has the stink of Xi Jinping and the PRC.

Conventional wisdom claims that the lockdowns may ease when the elections end.  After all, shuttering blue state economies was meant to hurt Trump.  Collateral damage to Democrat leaders’ own constituents?  A necessary price to defeat the president.

But will the shutdowns end?  Why, when they’re so useful to undermining rights and allowing governments’ grips to tighten?  Biden has declared for more shutdowns until the virus is beaten. Of course, viruses are never beaten.  Biden’s handlers are trying to be clever.

Biden in the White House means a national shutdown.  The U.S. economy has taken a multitrillion-dollar hit this year.  More blows in 2021 would send the nation careening into a depression that would surpass the 1930s.

But a depression would accomplish much for power-hungry Democrats and globalists.  The Great Reset initiative, advanced by the World Economic Forum, is poorly disguised fascism.  “Manmade climate change” failed to trigger a “reset.”  The COVID crisis is the globalists’ new lodestar.

Race and Mob Violence

In late May came George Floyd’s death in Minneapolis.  There, cringing leftist mayor Jacob Frey was joined by the leftist city council in withdrawing police protection, thereby handing over their city to mobs, though gaslighting that peaceful protests are a right.  Mobs acted as mobs act: with violence — ransacking, smashing, and burning Minneapolis.  Leftist BLM and Antifa provocateurs did their parts, inciting rioters to even more mayhem.

Minnesota governor Tim Waltz, in Nero fashion, decided to stand down as Minneapolis burned — though he had the cheekiness to seek federal aid to recoup millions of dollars in clean-up costs, smartly denied by the Trump administration.

Not to be outdone, Seattle and Portland followed Minneapolis’ lead.  It was all rinse and reap as mobs ran loose.  Seattle mayor Jenny Durkan’s impotence and endless rationalizations for her city being destroyed were surpassed finally by her embrace of something called the “Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone (CHAZ).”  It was a haven for lawlessness in a broader jurisdiction of lawlessness.  Washington State’s chief eunuch, Jay Inslee, jabbered about protests and rights from the comfort and safety of the governor’s mansion in Olympia.

South of Seattle, Portland ignited.  Mobs took the streets.  Mayor Ted Wheeler wasn’t to be out-soyboyed by Jacob Frey.  Whereas Frey, like a conquered potentate, groveled before a BLM mob in Minneapolis to show contrition, Wheeler went into the streets seeking dialogue with the barbarians, only to suffer a tear gassing before retreating.  Oregon’s progressive governor Kate Brown jabbered about protests and rights from the comfort and safety of the governor’s mansion in Salem.

Do you see the pattern?  Blue states and blue cities alone have sunk into dystopia.  We can attribute some of this to Democrats’ gutlessness and moral desolation, but there’s more here.

One way of interpreting what’s occurring in blue cities is that anarchy creates vacuums, and power — goes the saying — abhors vacuums.  So, it’s a twofer.  Democrats have exploited COVID to push tyranny and have opened the doors to chaos to create the conditions for yet more tyranny.  Their Brave New World is comprised of zombie apocalypses as a precondition for Orwell’s Big Brother.

George Floyd’s killing sparked yet other opportunities to spew venom and lambast decent Americans as racists.  Only blacks (except defiant Larry Elders) and “woke” affluent progressive whites are exempt from the vitriol and coming recriminations — if the haters prevail.

Robert Reich has floated the idea of a “Truth and Reconciliation Commission” should Biden win.  That would be a redo of Soviet show trials and Mao’s shaming of Chinese during his Cultural Revolution.

In race matters, America itself doesn’t get a pass.  No, America was racist from its inception, that being 1619, not 1776.  The founders were nothing more than well-heeled white overlords.  Say Democrats and leftists, Americans must pay for the sins of racism.  Critical Race Theory is indoctrination through shaming and bare-knuckled intimidation.  It was being introduced in federal agencies and the military before the president took steps to halt it.

A Biden presidency dooms this nation to tyranny — or, more likely, protracted conflict.  How could patriots ever meekly surrender their God-given rights and the noble — and ennobling — ideals of our Revolution and founding?  Ronald Reagan made the case powerfully: patriots will not surrender.  Donald Trump is the only man standing between us and tyranny and conflict.

AYWtGS: How My Christianity Affects My Prepping In Positive Ways

This morning’s article comes from A Year Without the Grocery Store – How My Christianity Affects My Prepping In Positive Ways.

I believe in preparedness.  I know.  It’s shocking coming from a preparedness author who runs a preparedness blog.  But I think that sometimes Christians fall into onto of two categories.  One group believes that being prepared is lacking faith.  The other group understands that preparedness flows out of their Christianity.  I fall into the latter category.  And today, I want to talk about how my preparedness flows out of my Christianity.

I will be using Bible verses to prove my point.  If you will be offended, please just close this post now.  I really don’t want to offend anyone.

***There are links in this post.  Some of the links may be affiliate links. My promise to you is that I will only recommend the most economical version of the best quality of items to serve you. All of these are the items that I have bought for my own family.  If you click on a link, your price will remain the same.  If you make a purchase, we may make a small commission that aids in the cost of the running of this website.***

But first a funny.

Optimistic Outlook

Now, I am Presbyterian, and in general, we do have an optimistic view of future things sometimes known as Post-millennialism.

Do things look bleak here in America right now – Oh my goodness – YES!  However, did you know that there are almost 8 billion people on the planet?  Two billion of those claim the name of Christ.  And, did you realize that the Christian population in South America, Africa, and Asia rival that of North America and Europe?  And the number of Christians is growing in South America, Africa, and Asia, while the Christian population of North America and Europa is shrinking.  Just because when we look around and see what looks like everything around us crumbling down HERE, doesn’t mean that it is everywhere.

I believe that the Lord is still working and growing his kingdom.  Part of my preparedness should be to witness to those around me.  I want people to love God and worship Him out of a heart full of praise.  Why?  Because in doing so, their joy will be full.  And because their joy is full – mine will be more so.

How my Christianity affects my preparedness?

My Christianity Affects My Prepping in Positive Ways1.)  I believe that we’re given the example in scripture to be prepare

Where do I believe the Bible gives us the command to prepare? This example comes from Christ himself in Matthew 25:1-10.

Then the kingdom of heaven shall be likened to ten virgins who took their lamps and went out to meet the bridegroom.

Now five of them were wise, and five were foolish. 

Those who were foolish took their lamps and took no oil with them, 

but the wise took oil in their vessels with their lamps. 

But while the bridegroom was delayed, they all slumbered and slept.

“And at midnight a cry was heard: ‘Behold, the bridegroom is coming; go out to meet him!’

Then all those virgins arose and trimmed their lamps. 

And the foolish said to the wise, ‘Give us some of your oil, for our lamps are going out.’ 

But the wise answered, saying, ‘No, lest there should not be enough for us and you; but go rather to those who sell, and buy for yourselves.’ 

And while they went to buy, the bridegroom came, and those who were ready went in with him to the wedding; and the door was shut.

Five wise virgins prepared.  Five foolish ones didn’t.  The first five entered the kingdom.  The second five didn’t.  And, yes, I get that the picture of the kingdom really is discussing being ready for meeting our King.  But there’s also a secondary meaning.  Be prepared.

2.) Because of my Christianity, I believe that my preparedness will be effective.

Will it be perfect?  No, but I believe that it will be effective.  Like the oil for the widow of Zarephath in I Kings 17:7-15, I believe that my efforts will be multiplied.

But that doesn’t mean that I sit on my laurels.  I can go “A Year Without the Grocery Store.”  I also have worked on preparing our house.  Right now, we’re working on preparing our house for winter.  We’re stocked on wood and propane for the cold season as well. I’ve also worked on getting our vehicle in order to take care of us if something happens while we’re on the road or out and about.

We’ve also worked a lot as we’ve learned about “Homesteading in the Burbs” on .24 acres.  We’ve planted apple trees, peach trees, grapevines, black raspberry vines.  We’re working on water barrel towers.  We’ve got a clothesline put up.

So I haven’t been lax, but because I’ve worked at this, I do believe that that Lord will bless it.  Psalm 37:25 says, “I have been young, and now am old; Yet I have not seen the righteous forsaken, Nor his descendants begging bread.”

3.)  Because of my Christianity, I prepare because I have the responsibility of some taking care of others.

Acts 2:44-45 says, “ Now all who believed were together, and had all things in common, and sold their possessions and goods, and divided them among all, as anyone had need.”  This isn’t a verse that supports socialism.  These people sold what they had of their own accord and helped people of their own accord.  

And if things go poorly, I had a responsibility to help take care of others.  I don’t just prepare for myself.  My husband and I are hoping to purchase acreage so that we can help others if things go poorly.   The hope is that we’ll have enough acreage to help people – starting with people in our family and then moving to people in our church.  Then we’ll see who else we would help.  I can’t speak to more than family and church yet.

4.)  Because of my Christianity, if things fall apart, I believe that if I survive, I have the responsibility to rebuild.

Those who survive should embrace the responsibility of rebuilding – even if it is incredibly hard.   And it’s something that we really need to start talking about now.  On what principles do we want to rebuild society?  What will be the basis for governmental structure and law?

There’s a lot to talk about and think about.  Do you have a preparedness group?  Discuss this with them.  Get their thoughts and input.

I would highly recommend this book – sometimes you’ll see it broken down into a three-book series.  It’s called God and Government by Gary Demar.  It’s a great read to understand how our government could be.  The American Vision website describes this book by saying, “Relying on clear historical and biblical research, author Gary DeMar demonstrated how America had been great and how she could be great again.”

So What About You?

Are you a Christian who is preparing?  What drives your preparedness efforts?  Where do you root them?  I’d love to hear. Share with us in the comments below so that we can all be better prepared.

Together let’s Love, Live, Practice, and Overcome!

Straight Line Logic: The Corruptocracy

Robert Gore at Straight Line Logic writes about The Corruptocracy that is our nation.

Most political philosophy is just an elaborate justification for theft and fraud.

What’s called the silent majority is really the ignored majority, who for the most part are happy being ignored. Their lives revolve their families, jobs, friends, and community, not the media, publicity, polls, or politics. They’re sick of elections well before they’ve seen their hundredth campaign ad, received their hundredth mailer, or ignored their hundredth telephone call. They know that politicians are phony and corrupt and make jokes about them, but hope that their rulers don’t screw things up too badly, cross their fingers, and vote for the perceived lesser of two evils.

There’s a shortage of blue-ribbon pedigrees, Ivy League degrees, and gold-plated resumés among the ignored majority, but a surfeit of hard-knocks wisdom and common sense. Benjamin Franklin said, “Experience keeps a dear school, but fools will learn in no other.” Everybody does foolish things, but by and large, the ignored majority learns from the dear school and puts its lessons to good use.

The gilded class denigrates those outside it: Hillary Clinton deploring the “deplorables,” Barack Obama saying working-class voters, “cling to guns or religion,” and Obama telling entrepreneurs, “you didn’t build that.” Yet, it consistently, almost invariably, demonstrates a complete lack of the common-sense street smarts found in abundance among those it disparages.

The quotes’ condescending arrogance rankles, but at a deeper level illustrate the real division in American politics—between the productive class and those it supports. At the intellectual level it’s the irreconcilable difference between those who believe that value can and should be conferred by the government, and those who know it must be created and produced. It’s believing or not believing that something can be had for nothing.

Freeloaders’ delusion stems from psychology, not ignorance. Every human faces a choice. They can produce value or they can beg, borrow, defraud, or steal it from someone else. For every advance humanity has made, there’s always been someone claiming their unfair share. Most of what we call history is merely an account of who’s stealing or defrauding from whom.

Because production is necessary for human survival, not producing anything of value creates a gaping psychological fissure, one not generally recognized or acknowledged. What’s generally accepted is that humans grasp at rationales and justifications for their actions, not just for the audience to which they’re playing, but for themselves. Most political philosophy is just an elaborate justification for theft and fraud. Political systems don’t spring from philosophies, the philosophies spring from the systems’ actual or potential beneficiaries.

Governments can take every scrap of what is produced. They can pledge every scrap of future production as repayment for their debts. The legitimization of unlimited current and future plunder leads to ever-increasing plunder and debt—and ever-diminishing production. Present governments are merely repeating a cycle that’s played out countless times throughout history.

You would think that government rapacity would be curbed when taxes, regulatory extortion, and debt disincentivize and begin reducing legitimate production. Unfortunately, that assumption flies in the face of historical fact; countless regimes have killed their golden geese. The only regimes that haven’t are those that are currently in the process of doing so.

One among many of rulers’ delusions is that the ruled are buying their lies.
Over time the victims see through the propaganda and narrative management. The lies fool the rulers more than the ruled and are essential psychological support for this predatory and parasitic class.

Commentators from the alternative media bemoan the lack of intelligence and awareness of the American people, and the supposed dominance of the mainstream media narrative. Yet, any number of alternative media commentators, YouTubers, and sites routinely receive more readers or viewers than touted mouthpiece media “powerhouses.” More people watch dissident Paul Joseph Watson’s videos than Rachel Maddow’s nightly screeds, but Maddow receives an inordinate amount of attention from the alternative and mainstream alike and Watson virtually none.

The alternative media’s thousands of sites have eclipsed the mouthpiece media, which exists in a bubble of its own creation. It’s a hugely underreported trend—without fanfare millions of people rejecting the mainstream, reading, researching, and coming to their own conclusions. There’s 330 million Americans and many of them are neither stupid nor duped. It’s just that nobody pays attention to them.

The media bubble envelopes the government-centered corruptocracy and allows those within to preserve the self-deception of personal worth. Someone who lives off the corporate-lobbyist-political food chain, shuffles paper in a government bureaucracy, enforces tax or regulatory extortion, or is otherwise supported in a something-for-nothing scheme cannot have the self-respect that comes from producing value. Instead, the predatory and parasitic classes cling to psychological crutches: conceit, arrogance, condescension, delusion, and willful ignorance.

The most intense predator and parasite condescension is directed at the producers who provide their sustenance. This may seem paradoxical but it’s not. Honest production is an obvious moral rebuke to those who live by theft and fraud. Acknowledging either the value of producers or their own dependence on them would undermine the fragile edifice of their rickety substitutes for self-worth.

Disaffected veterans were the core of a group that would grow to millions, their “faith” in government and the people who ran it obliterated by its repeated failures and lies. Revolutions dawn when an appreciable number of the ruled realize their rulers are intellectual and moral inferiors. The mainstream media is filled with vituperative, patronizing, and insulting explanations of what’s “behind” the Trump phenomenon. It all boils down to revulsion with the self-anointed, incompetent, pretentious, hypocritical, corrupt, prevaricating elite that presumes to rule this country. It is, in a word, inferior to the populace on the other side of the yawning chasm, the ones they have patronized and insulted for decades, and the other side knows it.

Much More Than Trump,” Robert Gore, SLL, March 3, 2016, reposted November 6, 2016

Nothing has changed over the last four years, except that the ranks of disaffected have swollen. Trump gave voice to them in 2016 and he’ll do it again in 2020. Once more it’s the productive businessman outsider against a government hack insider. After Russiagate, the impeachment, the coronavirus power-grab, leftist and Marxists riots, and endless media-driven tempests in teapots, the somethings in this country are far more contemptuous of the nothings who presume to rule them—and farcically, have designs on the whole world—than they were four years ago. The ultimate farce is the Harris/Biden ticket: a corrupt, doddering, old fool and a nakedly ambitious shrew who even Democrats don’t like, neither with a scintilla of detectable principle, waging the most inept campaign ever in front of face-masked, socially distanced audiences that number in the tens.

If he gets anything approaching an honest vote count Trump will win in a landslide. The “reputable” pollsters have become another arm of the entrenched powers’ narrative management. Like everything else the corruptocrats have tried, this effort will prove inept. The purported double-digit Biden leads will motivate, not discourage, Trump’s voters. By every other indicator—voter registrations, growing black and hispanic support, the crumbling entertainment and sports complex, the crumbling mainstream media, the ascendent alternative media, millions of new gun owners, backlash against the riots, slowly fading coronavirus hysteria, and off-the-charts attendance and enthusiasm at Trump rallies—Trump’s winning by a country mile.

And let’s not forget Hunter Biden’s hard drive, much as the corruptocracy, Twitter, Facebook, and most of the mainstream media would like us to. The revelations are important not because they reveal that the Bidens are a criminal enterprise—we already knew that—but because they further confirm the suspicions of millions of street-smart, disaffected Americans: our country is a corruptocracy.

If Trump wins and quells the Super Tantrum, he’ll have to do more than give voice to the disaffected. He’s forced the corruptocrats from the depths of their swamp, and he may or may not be blackmailing them for his own purposes. But not a drop of swamp has been drained, and if nothing happens the next four years, Trump’s tenure will be nothing more than a feel-good fantasy for his fans.

He’ll have to either blackmail paid up swampsters William Barr and Christopher Wray to do their jobs or get rid of them for people who will. Nothing less than indictments and prosecutions that cuts a wide swath across the corruptocracy— Clapper, Brennan, Comey, Mueller, Page, Strzok, Haspel, the Biden crime family, Obama, the Clintons, many of the listings in Jeffrey Epstein’s black book, and the rest of their insidious ilk—will do. Arresting Hunter and Joe Biden the day after the election would be a good start.

Trump must put up or shut up on draining the swamp before he can proceed to his long list of other unfinished business. The swamp is the inevitable backwash of a government that has arrogated unlimited power to itself, has first claim on everything produced within the United States, issues debt without limit, and maintains a confederated global empire. Power creates corruptocracies. There is a one in a trillion chance that Trump or any other ostensible outsider changes any of this, and a one in a quadrillion chance that the system reforms itself.

Trump or no Trump, the disaffected will get more disaffected, at least until the system collapses, which it will. The failing of all governments is that they can’t produce, only coerce. What they can force their citizens to produce is astonishingly low compared to what those citizens would produce if left to their own devices in free markets. The productive economy is straining under the tax and debt loads it’s being forced to carry. The debt orgy this year is probably the last straw. The shut-down real economy and debt-bloated financial markets will force a reckoning.

That reckoning will be global and governments will get smaller. Not because anyone within them experiences an intellectual conversion towards less government—and consequently less power—but because they are bankrupt and access to credit will be severely limited. Central banks may continue to buy their governments’ debt with their own devalued debt, but that daisy chain will come to an end as well. A bear market in debt of all stripes and a bull market in interest rates loom. The silver lining: long suffering savers (both of them) and creditors will finally be compensated for the credit risks they bear.

With the crumbling of governments will come the crumbling of current political institutions and boundaries. The breakdown of the corrupt and doomed old order presents the opportunity for the establishment of new orders. What seems inconceivable now may occur with astonishing speed. A year ago, who envisioned what’s transpired so far in 2020?

Millions of salt-of-the-earth, common sense Americans have watched in horror as their country has imploded from lockdown insanity and riots. There’s an exodus from urban hellholes to safer and saner locales. The response to those who say breakdown can’t happen is that it’s already begun.

Alasdair Macleod is writing about Europe, but what he says applies to the United States:

The fate of the euro will be shared with the majority — if not all — of other fiat currencies for reasons specific to them. The recovery from the ashes of government incompetence can be swift — a matter of a year or two, so long as successor governments quickly learn that free markets, sound money and minimal interference from government are all required for the restoration of economic progress. Additionally, all socialist policies must be discarded, and the profit motive and individual wealth creation embraced.

The destruction of the euro,” Alasdair Macleod, goldmoney.com, October 22, 2020

There will be jurisdictions, some born out of secession or insurrection, that will institute “free markets, sound money, and minimal interference from government,” along with the concomitant essentials: freedom and the protection of individual rights, because they work and have worked throughout history. They are the quickest way to recover from economic and financial devastation. Most importantly, freedom is the only moral system, the only system compatible with productive survival, and the only system that promotes human happiness.

Freedom, rather than Trump, represents the best hope for the righteously disaffected.

Continue reading “Straight Line Logic: The Corruptocracy”

Brushbeater: The Jungle Antenna Revisited

NC Scout at Brushbeater has a new article worth your time if you are into radio communications – The Jungle Antenna Revisited: Task and Purpose for the Partisan and Prepper

Going back to the early days of the Brushbeater blog, the Jungle Antenna post has been and continues to be one of the more popular posts I’ve done. And for good reason- I wrote it to be used. It’s the antenna every student in the RTO course builds and one of the designs they get hands on with, and it’s the one that they know works from the demonstrations we do with them. But often, as with everything, a context for the task and purpose has to be clarified.

Students in the RTO Course preparing an improvised Jungle Antenna for use.

Many preppers who contact me fall into a similar trap. I have an goal and recognize a need. What can I buy that does for me what I want it to do? How do I do this in the most cost-effective way? And finally (but what should be first), how do I obtain the skill to best use the gear I’ve purchased? Its a problematic point of view for a lot of reasons but one I get frequent questions about nonetheless. And that’s ok. I’ll normally answer it the same way- Use your stuff, Learn to use it even better, and never stop!

One of my objectives back then, as it remains in my classes and writing today, was emphasizing the skill of building your own equipment. With communications that’s improvised antennas, because it’s one of the better skills to have. Taking common and cheap components and using them to boost your capabilities is a great talent to have and makes you a force multiplier for your team or group. Those skills have served me very well and for the great people I’ve had in class, it’s went on to help them too. The end goal is getting the most bang-for-buck out of a piece of equipment as possible and with radios, that always means focusing on antennas.

The Jungle Antenna, 292 Antenna, Groundplane, OE-254 or whatever else you wanna call it, are vertical antennas designed to boost range from the relatively inefficient antenna on your radio while using the same power. It does this through efficiency; an antenna has to match, both the ‘hot’ element and the ‘cold’ element (positive and negative, respectively), in order to be resonant. Resonance is another term for an antenna’s electrical match to a particular frequency. And that resonance is measured through wavelengths– with each leg of the Jungle Antenna being one quarter wavelength long. It’s an incredibly simple antenna but it’s one that improves your transmitting and receiving ability- something you definitely want.

Jungle Jim operators in Vietnam getting a commo check before a patrol. Likely packed away in that ruck is a rolled up Jungle Antenna, ready to get strung up.

The Jungle Antenna gets its name from an interesting time in American military history. During the interwar period of the 1920s-30, the Army Signal Corps was experimenting with antenna designs to boost the range of their SCR (Signal Corps Radio, pre-A/N PRC designation in case you’re wondering) in jungle environments. Testing the designs in Panama, they found that if you take a vertical dipole and add two more negative elements, it boosts the radio’s signal in all directions even when the thick vegetation would otherwise absorb the signal. It found its way into use with groups fighting in the island campaigns and in Burma. Even though the crude radios would eventually fail from the humidity and harsh conditions, the antennas worked. Imperial Japan was also experimenting, with two engineers named Yagi and Uda coming up with a directional antenna that still bears their name. Both became very popular designs, with the Jungle Antenna saw extensive use in Vietnam and is still being taught to unconventional warfare RTOs today- because it’s simple, rugged and it works. This history provides us with a bit of context for the antenna and its intended use. It’s an omnidirectional antenna, creating a stronger signal in all directions, optimized for heavy woodland and jungle environments where much of your signal might be lost.

The Jungle Antenna up and running. We’re standing right under it and it disappears- think about how it’ll vanish in just a few more steps.

Why you want an Omnidirectional Antenna?

The Jungle Antenna does two things really, really well. It takes even a small amount of power and squeezes more range out of it, by getting your actual antenna higher, meaning more line of sight, while doing it much more efficiently. It also allows your radio to listen to other traffic much better. Because of it transmits and receives in all directions, this is a great antenna to have up for networking now– and when put up in the trees, the thin wire and natural materials make it virtually disappear. So even if all you’ve got is that $25 Baofeng, you can still get an impressive range out of that 4 watts that the UV-5R puts out. Not too shabby for something you can build out of a split post BNC adapter (the real name for what us Army guys call a Cobra Head), lamp cord and electric fence insulators.

Another, more tactical reason to have an omnidirectional antenna is in a retreat setting where a tactical operations center may have to communicate with multiple patrols simultaneously, and an omnidirectional antenna would increase the range of the radio at the base. I strongly suggest radio operators on a team carry one for their Contingency frequency also. People get lost, routes become compromised, plans change. When those plans change, it’s likely that a team in trouble needs their radio for personnel recovery, with the better range and reception from their Jungle Antenna helping them get found (along with a sound recovery plan).

But the most important reason that transcends all the others is the fact that you’re using something you learned to build yourself. You built it, you learned it works, and now you have that confidence in yourself and your equipment you wouldn’t have any other way. That confidence is earned through training.

Kunstler: Biden and Media – Bleeding Out

James Howard Kunstler writes Bleeding Out about the corruption of Biden and associates, and the media that protects the elites at the expense of journalistic integrity and representative government.

“The difference between you and me,” Mr. Trump said to the ever more ghostly Joe Biden, fading mentally late in the action on the debate stage, “is that I’m not a politician and you are, and you’re a crooked politician.” Millions watching this spectacle might not have noticed, due to the media’s near-complete blackout of news detailing the Biden family’s adventures in systematic global moneygrubbing, but the Democratic candidate for president has political Ebola, a hemorrhagic fever of credibility, now gushing out of every pore and orifice.

Twitter and Facebook may try to squelch the story, but the evidence is all over the Internet now, like blood on a crime scene, in verifiable emails, texts, Snapchats, memoranda, and bank records that Ol’ White Joe Biden is at the center of a decades-long influence-peddling spree, selling his personal services to China, Russia, Ukraine, and any other country seeking favors in US government policy, and that this slime-trail of grift disqualifies him from holding high office as much as the irreversible rot of his cognitive abilities.

The “Laptop from Hell” affair has twelve more days to play out before the November 3 vote and the Democratic Party is in a terrible jam. Do they ask Mr. Biden to step aside, or do they keep running with him while the barrage of allegations and hard evidence pours down on them like so many mortar rounds on a besieged bunker? It’s obvious now that one way or another, voters are actually being asked to elect Kamala Harris president — but who asked for her? Only the disgraced and disabled head of the ticket, Joe Biden, desperate for a non-white running mate. Elsewise, she was so disliked by voters that she skulked out of the Iowa caucuses, ending her own run. Is Hillary ironing her purple pantsuit up in Chappaqua, awaiting the emergency call from her DNC?

The early 2020 impeachment gambit has finally blown up in the Democrats’ faces, too, as it’s now obvious the phony furor over Mr. Trump’s phone call to Ukraine President Zelensky was ginned up to smother any inquiry into Hunter Biden’s $83,000-a-month services to the Burisma gas company and its crooked chief, Mykola Zlochevsky, with help from then US Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch and several of her staff, as well as then Secretary of State John Kerry.

Interestingly, figures associated with Mr. Kerry (the 2004 Democratic party nominee), Devon Archer and Christopher Heinz (Mr. Kerry’s stepson) also happened to be business associates of Hunter Biden’s, and therefore the Biden family syndicate. Mr. Archer is currently under conviction, awaiting sentencing, on a federal securities fraud rap. If US attorneys out of the DOJ have any interest in talking to him, they have a lever to incentivize his testimony about many of the transactions involving Burisma in Ukraine and the Chinese companies that were funneling payments to the Bidens for “introductions” to US persons of influence.

The Democrats have a whole lot of bad behavior to defend, ranging far beyond the Bidens to the decades-long activities of the Clintons in their charity frauds, the related Uranium One matter — in which $150-million in Russian money found its way into the Clinton Foundation — and the deal that set up transfers of US secret computer tech to Russia’s Skolkovo project, which eventuated in Russia’s development of hypersonic weapons. Not to mention the RussiaGate coup operation to overthrow the president using false allegations supplied by Mrs. Clinton, the Democratic National Committee, and scores of high officials in a range of executive agencies.

Ironically many of those same schemers are at it again in the recent letter by a long list of former Intel spooks trying to discredit The New York Post’s reporting on Hunter Biden’s laptop as “having all the earmarks” of a Russian disinformation op. At the top of the list of that letter’s signers, you’ll find John Brennan, CIA chief under Obama, and James Clapper, former Director of National Intelligence – both of them progenitors of the RussiaGate coup and liable to prosecution for seditious conspiracy. Can you smell their desperation?

Something else may be turning now, though, on this titanic hairball of corruption and deceit: mainstream media reporters starting to jump into lifeboats to save their reputations by actually reporting honestly on developments in this web of stories. The few early adapters to truth-telling may be the only survivors. The ones who stick with the ship of deception are going down into cold and darkness. And if President Trump wins reelection — a possibility despite polling that, in many cases, is just propaganda — the public will learn exactly how the Democratic Party became the enemy of the people.

See also:

Pat Buchanan: A Biden Family Special Prosecutor in 2021?

Jonathan Turley: Disinformation by Popular Demand – How the Authenticity of Hunter Biden’s Laptop Became Immaterial

Zero Hedge: You’re Gonna Bury All Of Us’: Whistleblower Describes Brazen Biden-China Dealings In Explosive Interview With Tucker Carlson

The National Pulse: Hunter Biden Audio Confesses Partnership With China ‘Spy Chief’… Joe Biden Named as Criminal Case Witness

Zero Hedge: Blockbuster Report Reveals How Biden Family Was Compromised By China

The National Pulse: Biden, Corruption, and Ukraine’s Election Interference AGAINST Trump

Advancing Time: Hunter Biden Is Not The Problem, The Problem Is His Dad

 

The American Mind: Honor in a World Gone Mad

In this essay at The American Mind, Spencer Klavan talks about hypocrisy, dishonesty, political theater, and the need for public honors to go those with actual merit. Honor in a World Gone Mad

How to see clearly in the kingdom of the blind.

In the year 1711, behold: Justice descended from heaven to shine the light of truth on all mankind and “to restore and appropriate to every one living what was his due.”

With “darkness and clouds about her, that tempered the light into a thousand beautiful shades and colors,” Justice proceeded to reassign wealth, honors, and status so that they accurately reflected the merits and deserts of which they were supposed to be markers. “One might see crowds of people in tattered garments come up, and change clothes with others that were dressed with lace and embroidery.”

This is the fantasy scene described by Joseph Addison in his “Allegory of Public Credit” or “Vision of Justice,” an essay he published in the Spectator. The first time I read it, I thought it was sour grapes. Addison notes that “I was very well pleased to see that all my friends either kept their present posts, or were advanced to higher.” It’s meant as a bit of a troll, but it still felt to my younger self like the erudite lamentation of an outsized ego wounded by allegedly inadequate recognition.

Now I’m not so sure. Addison was wise to put the light of truth in the hand of Justice: it is justice, after all, that gives to each what he is owed. Suum cuique, to each his due: this is the golden thread that links Plato’s Republic to Aristotle’s Politics, running on down through the history of Western political and moral thought even to the present benighted day. Addison’s is no arbitrary imposition of power or equitable redistribution of wealth: the outcome of Justice’s intervention is not a Communist utopia in which all are of equal stature. It is a society which displays all the shades and gradations of rank that there were in 18th-century England, but rearranged to reflect the truth of every man’s heart.

In other words, what changes is that the outward marks of virtue—the titles, contracts, and positions which convey status—are aligned perfectly with the actual reality of virtue itself as it exists (or fails to) inwardly. So far as public honors and social class are concerned, that is true justice: a divinely accurate and precisely calibrated meritocracy.

That is not the world we live in. It wasn’t in the 18th century, and it won’t be until we find ourselves on a new earth under a new heaven. Only the most deluded optimist could imagine that it is possible to assign praise and blame according to the exact truths of the heart using merely human standards of measurement. That is why only God could pick David, the destined king of Israel, from a lineup of his older and more obviously regal brothers: for “the LORD does not see as man sees; man looks at the outward appearance, but the LORD looks at the heart” (1 Samuel 16:7).

Still, we do our best to approximate accuracy and give credit where credit is due. That’s the point of having public honors at all: we are trying to make what Catholics, describing Church sacraments, call “an outward sign of an inward grace.” To refrain from conferring such honors would be just as dishonest and unjust as to practice Communism, and for exactly the same reasons: merit exists. You either lie about it or you try, haltingly, to tell the truth.

But—and this is why I have revised my opinion of Addison’s essay—the older I get, the more I feel that American public honors have utterly and perhaps irredeemably ceased to serve their high purpose. With mounting horror, I have come to feel that all the degrees, titles, and positions of rank we bestow on people are at best irrelevant to, and at worst actively deceitful about, the real qualities of those who hold them. Some of my friends on the very online Right call this phenomenon Clown World. It is a serious problem.

Not long ago I absent-mindedly tweeted to ask people when their “radicalization moment” was—when they became so appalled or astounded at the state of affairs that they stopped trying to be moderate about politics. I got more than I bargained for in response. One of the most unexpected answers was also one of the most frequent and the most revealing. “In college,” as one poster put it, “I got an A for a terribly written essay because I took a position I knew the professor agreed with.”

I myself have similar memories, from as far back as grade school: for certain teachers, you knew that only a certain range of views would fly. How well or poorly those views were defended mattered little or not at all: what mattered was which ones you held. The intriguing irony is that those teachers were also always the ones who stressed “critical thinking”—some of them even had a reputation for being free-thinking mavericks.

This is hypocrisy at a very deep level. When you discover as a child that what adults say they want from you is not what they will in fact reward, you remember that. Maybe the people who commented on my Twitter thread hadn’t thought about those professors in years. But the memory and its lessons had seeped into their bones. It made enough of an impression on them that when pushed, they can now look back and realize: that is when they understood what it is to live inside a lie.

The Senators and the Judge

As I write this, the hearings to confirm Judge Amy Coney Barrett as the next Supreme Court justice have just concluded. They have embodied everything that is most demoralizing about the breakdown of American public honors. It saps one’s will to watch U.S. senators engage in forms of political theater premised on deep ignorance, real or feigned, about how American law works.

From Hawaii’s Mazie Hirono, to New Jersey’s Cory Booker, to Connecticut’s Richard Blumenthal, Barrett was repeatedly forced to explain—calmly, as if to children—that no, she can’t say how she would vote on specific cases in advance, and no, her originalist philosophy doesn’t mean never amending the Constitution. In public statements after the fact, prominent Democrats from Hillary Clinton to Senator Ed Markey to Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot implied that originalism means freezing the social customs and standards of the 1770s in time—as if the text of the Constitution itself doesn’t explicitly include guidelines for making alterations to laws that no longer fit the circumstances, from congressional legislation on up to constitutional amendment.

I suspect Clinton, at least, is well aware that her posture was absurd. This, of course, makes it worse. In the cases of Hirono and Lightfoot, the ignorance on display is probably quite genuine. In every instance, though, it is less and less possible to pretend that these people are worth our admiration or even our respect. Our new digital environment, contrary to popular belief, is actually quite hostile to performative self-curation. Online, only authentic self-exposure garners any attention worth speaking about (spare me your Jeffrey Toobin jokes here, please). Under such circumstances, it has become harder and harder for our supposedly leading lights to hide that they are either studiously cynical, alarmingly stupid, or both.

Perhaps the most dispiriting moment of the hearings was an exchange between Judge Barrett and Senator Kamala Harris, who, it will be recalled, might well be president of the United States someday soon. Rooting around in her big box of feckless rhetorical gestures, Harris told the weepy story of a young woman—whose medical condition, let it be duly conceded, elicits sympathy—before strongly suggesting that Barrett will deprive such people of their health care by striking down the Affordable Care Act.

Leaving aside the supreme unlikeliness of such an eventuality (of which, again, I suspect Harris is aware), it was equal parts grimly satisfying and bleakly depressing to watch Barrett brush off the senator’s empty questions. “Do you currently consider the consequences of your ruling on people’s lives?” Harris asked. “Well, Senator Harris,” replied Barrett with deadpan ease, “that’s part of the decision of every case.” “And so you do,” Harris responded lamely. Then again with a blank stare: “Every case has consequences in people’s lives, so of course I do in every case. It’s part of the judicial decision-making process.” In less gracious terms than Barrett’s: yes, you hack—that’s literally what being a judge is.

It’s an indignity for someone of Barrett’s seriousness and qualifications to undergo evaluation by buffoons of Harris’s caliber, as if it were they and not she who carries the full weight of authority in the room. And yet it was lost on no one with eyes to see that Barrett, if confirmed, will be the only sitting Supreme Court Justice who did not graduate from either Harvard or Yale. There is a growing percentage of the population for which this is a point in her favor and part of the explanation for her plainspoken, seemingly effortless brilliance.

Confidence in higher education generally has been plummeting for some time. It gets worse the more major universities simp for manifestly witless sophists like Robin DiAngelo and Ibram X. Kendi as they maunder dribblingly on about “white fragility” and “anti-racist discrimination.” Every day, in other words, it becomes harder to keep up the pretense that academic prestige has anything to do with academic achievement. COVID-19 has turned places like Harvard into $55,000-a-year webinars; and as the breakout sessions start to look more and more like struggle sessions, we approach the point at which only the most dedicated apologists can view an Ivy-League bachelor’s degree as anything other than a sublime triumph of empty credentialism.

What to Do

It is a bit of ancient wisdom that every society will produce more of what it honors publicly. This is one of the main arguments that is worked out over the course of Livy’s monumental history of Rome: it is because virtues such as prudence and frugality were “so highly and continuously honored,” as the historian says in his preface, that Romans became the kind of citizens who could make their homeland great. As long as “the state showed its gratitude” for war heroes like Horatius Cocles, it encouraged others to emulate his achievements (Livy 2.10). A cornerstone of Rome’s success was what is called aemulatio in Latin—a healthy competition among young men and women to outdo one’s forebears and one another in public honors.

The converse follows, of course: societies which award their highest honors to conformity and dishonesty will produce generations of cowards and liars. An America in which children learn to feign agreement with their teachers’ political views in exchange for the social capital afforded by a high GPA is an America in which, sooner or later, the worst kinds of people will proliferate and rule—as indeed they now do…(continues)

Off Grid Ham: When Things Go Wrong, What Type of Ham Are You?

Chris Warren of Off Grid Ham asks When Things Go Wrong, What Type of Ham Are You?

It’s all fun & games until the electrons stop flowing.

Operating amateur radio is a load of fun. Operating amateur radio off grid is extra fun, but adds a layer of technical complexity to your station. Have you ever thought of what you would do if your off grid system itself went off line? Do you have the skills, spare parts, and tools to correct the problem and get the electrons flowing again? Troubleshooting solar power system may or may not be hard depending on what type of ham you are.

What kind of ham are you? Troubleshooting solar power

There are basically three kinds of off grid hams. “Type 1” hams do not get very involved with the technical aspect of the hobby. Maybe they just want to run contests. Perhaps they got into ham radio only because their kids are doing it, or to be part of a community service group. Type 1 hams don’t see amateur radio as a stand-alone hobby, but rather, as a tool, a means to achieve some other goal. They have some basic tech skills but want everything to be as plug-and-play as possible.

“Type 2” hams see radio as an end in itself. They love to tinker and experiment and would enjoy radio even if it had no ancillary practical purpose. Type 2’s enjoy messing around with radio/electronics and have a high skill level but don’t necessarily do a lot of on-air operating. They will pursue all kinds of projects, many of which never work and might seem a little crazy. They have a great time anyway. Troubleshooting solar power

“Type 3” hams are a combination of the first two. I place myself in this category. I love DIY and home brew projects and that’s what attracted me to ham radio back in the day. Yet, I see that ham radio has real-world applications. Type 3’s have figured out the magic combination of skills and utility. Troubleshooting solar power

Why this matters. Troubleshooting solar power

The type of ham you are will determine what happens when your off grid system goes down.

For Type 1’s it’s straightforward. Unless it’s a blown fuse or similar simple fix, they either call a pro or replace the entire suspect device.

Type 2’s know their off grid systems forward and backward because they probably built the system themselves. They can resolve even complex problems and have a large personal inventory of spare parts. Many Type 2’s will use the opportunity to reconfigure and make major changes and may spend a lot of time dabbling with different ideas beyond the initial problem.

Type 3’s, like type 2’s, can handle nearly any malfunction themselves because they have extensive technical knowledge of their off grid systems. They also have an inventory of spare parts, but only as it relates to their needs. They do not keep a lot of extra unrelated supplies around just for the heck of it like Type 2’s do. Type 3’s are practical and goal-oriented. They will quickly correct the immediate problem and save the tinkering and experimenting for another time. Troubleshooting solar power

Attention to detail.

Hopefully you occasionally take time to verify everything is in order. This means checking cables and connections, topping off electrolyte levels and density in flooded batteries, looking for damage with outdoor components, etc. By the way, when is the last time you cleaned your solar panels? Troubleshooting solar power

If you’re a Type 1 you’re probably not doing any of this. You probably don’t keep any spare parts around either. If you don’t plan on fixing anything yourself then at least plan for the time and resources for someone else to do it for you. Type 1’s are seldom preppers/survivalists (and if they are, they’re delusional) so being independent in SHTF situations is not a priority to them. I’m not trashing on Type 1’s. We all gotta do our own thing, right? It’s all good. I just want them to understand that they will have very limited options when things go wrong.

Types 2 and 3 are best set up to go it alone if needed. Still, there are always areas of improvement. For example, do you have printed technical data and manuals for your equipment? Are your tools neatly arranged and easily accessed, or are you the kind of person who spends thirty minutes tearing through a heap of junk to find a screwdriver? Do you proactively maintain your system, or do you only react when something goes wrong?

It happened to me. Troubleshooting solar power

troubleshooting solar power

PHOTO COURTESY OF PCHACADEMY

A few weeks ago I noticed that my home solar was producing hardly any watts during strong sunlight. Still, the batteries were fully charged at sundown. I didn’t think much of it until the next morning morning when the batteries were much more deeply discharged than they should be… (continues)

PrepperNet Live with JJS, Lady Liberty and Sam Culper, Oct. 29, 5 p.m. Pacific

Thursday, Oct. 29th, 2020 at 5 p.m. Pacific time, PrepperNet is streaming live on YouTube with guests Sam Culper of Forward Observer, John Jacob Schmidt of Radio Free Redoubt & AmRRON, and Lady Liberty of the Political Church Podcast and Radio Free Redoubt.

We the Governed: Did Your Ballot Count? How to Check (WA State)

Here is a brief article from We the Governed, explaining how to use the Washington State voter web site to check if your ballot was considered invalid. Did your ballot count? You can verify here

Washington State voters have been voting exclusively by mail since 2011, and mostly by mail for many years before that.  While there is substantial national attention on the problems with mail in voting (see here, here, and here for a few examples), it is still important for the many who have already filled out and delivered their ballots to verify their ballot (or if you live in King County – “ballots” plural) have been counted and received.

There are many reasons for the county auditor to reject ballots – the voter is dead, the signature doesn’t match, etc (Screen capture)
Every year, hundreds of thousands of mail in ballots are rejected in Washington State.  The reasons they are rejected vary and are legitimate, in most cases (a dead person voted, voter failed to sign, the signature does not match, maybe you voted for Trump (ok, no bureaucrat openly admits this as a legit reason) the ballot showed up late, etc)

How do you know if your vote counted?  Here is an easy place to check:

You can go to this website, see if they have received your ballot, and you can see if your ballot has been rejected (and why).  If you failed to sign the ballot or there is a problem with your signature, you have time to go in and get it resolved and fixed.  If you are a legitimate voter, a US citizen, only voted once, and are not voting in multiple states simultaneously – then you should visit your local auditor’s office (all masked up, of course) and fix the reported problem with your ballot. 

Share this link with others.  It is helpful and a useful tool.

Additionally, we have several days before the election “closes” (Tuesday, November 3, at 8pm for those who are living under a rock – and if you put it in your mailbox that late, it won’t count because the USPS carrier won’t get it until the next day – if you MUST put it in the mail – do it days earlier to be semi-safe) and the endless counting (and re-counting) begins.  Unlike most states, Washington will be accepting a flood and eventually a trickle of late mailed ballots arriving courtesy of our glorious US Postal Service and sometimes the trunk of King County auditor’s vehicles or other places (see here, here, and here).  If you want less drama related to your ballot, here are some steps you can take in the meantime. Even if you are so sure your choice will prevail regardless, get your vote in now to give them a margin bigger than the trunk of a King County election’s worker trunk space:

  1.  Get your ballot delivered early – do not wait until the last minute when it is easier to “lose” your ballot en route to the auditor’s office.
  2. Hand deliver your ballot directly to the auditor’s office, or at least to an official drop box now.  This is better than mailing it, as I have discussed before (see here, and here)
  3. Don’t be the goof (and this was me one time years ago, so I’ll never forget) who fills out your ballot, leaves it on the front seat of the car, buries it with other stuff, and then discovers it a month later – thinking you voted, but realizing you misplaced the ballot.  Get it in the system as quickly as you can

There is a lot of drama around voting this year.  Turn out in Washington State’s primary this last August was the highest it has been on a Presidential election cycle since the 1960s.  Vote now and help remind everyone you know to vote.  Don’t wait until it is too late.

The future will belong to those who show up.