Talk About Truisms - Critical Things
To Think About In 2023
Sent By Scott Teeters
5-24-23
I never dreamed that I would have to face the prospect of not living in the United States of America, at least not the one I have known all my life. I have never wished to live anywhere else. This is my home and I was privileged to be born here. But today I woke up and as I had my morning coffee, I realized that everything is changing for the worse. No matter how I vote, no matter what I say, no matter how much I pray, something evil has invaded our nation, and our lives are never going to be the same. I have been confused by the hostility of family and friends. I look at people I have known all my life–so hate-filled that they agree with opinions they would never express as their own. I think that I may well have entered the Twilight Zone. We have become a nation that has lost its collective mind!
You can't justify this insanity…
• If a guy pretends to be a woman, you are required to pretend with him.
• Somehow it's un-American for the census to count how many Americans are in America.
• Russians influencing our elections are bad, but illegals voting in our elections are good.
• It was cool for Joe Biden to "blackmail" the President of Ukraine.
• Twenty is too young to drink a beer, but eighteen is old enough to vote?
• People who have never owned slaves should pay slavery reparations to people who have never been slaves?
• People who have never been to college should pay the debts of college students who took out huge loans for their degrees.
• Immigrants with tuberculosis and polio are welcome, but you'd better be able to prove your dog is vaccinated? Irish doctors and German engineers who want to immigrate to the US must go through a rigorous vetting process, but any illiterate gang member or terrorist who jumps the southern fence is welcome?
• $5 billion for border security is too expensive, but $1.5 trillion for "free" health care is not?
• If you cheat to get into college you go to prison, but if you cheat to get into the country you go to college for free?
• If you cheat in an election nothing happens to you, but if you point out the mathematical errors of that election you are a conspiracy theorist & disdained.
• People who say there is no such thing as gender are demanding a female President?
• We see other countries going Socialist and collapsing, but it seems like a great plan for us?
• Some people are held responsible for things that happened before they were born, and other people are not held responsible for what they are doing right now?
• Criminals are caught-and-released to hurt more people, but stopping them is bad because it's a violation of their rights?
• Then there is the whole Afghanistan, vaccine, endless COVID variants, election cheating, deficient president, violence in the cities, defunding the police, confiscating my guns while arming terrorists, etc., etc.
• And pointing out all this hypocrisy somehow makes us "racists"?! Nothing makes sense anymore - no values, no morals, and no civility. People are dying of a Chinese virus, but it's racist to refer to it as Chinese even though it began in China. We are clearly living in an upside-down world where right is wrong and wrong is right, where moral is immoral and immoral is moral, where good is evil and evil is good, where killing murderers is wrong but killing unborn babies is okay !
Wake up America, the great unsinkable ship Titanic America has hit an iceberg, it's taking on water, and is sinking fast. We Americans are drowning. Speak up while you still have breath and a voice for soon you will have neither if you don't!
The Absurdities of Our Age
amgreatness.com/2023/05/21/the-absurdities-of-our-age
May 22, 2023
What cannot go on, will not go on and all the absurdities of the present will end with a bang not a whimper.
By Victor Davis Hanson
May 21, 2023
A sign of a civilization in headlong decline is its embrace of absurdities. Unfortunately for the United States, we are witnessing an epidemic of nihilist nonsense. Here are a few examples:
Reparations
How could a dysfunctional state like California even contemplate $800 billion in reparations?
The state currently faces a $31 billion annual deficit—and it’s climbing. The state’s $100 billion high-speed rail project is inert, a veritable Stonehenge of concrete monoliths without a foot of track laid down.
California’s income tax rates are already the highest in the nation. Its sales taxes, electricity rates, and gas taxes and prices are among the steepest in the country. And for what?
Crime, homelessness, and medieval decay characterize the once great downtowns of San Francisco and Los Angeles. It is now not safe to walk alone in any major California city after dark.
Shoplifting and smash-and-grab theft are no longer treated as real crimes. The result is the mass flight of brand stores from our downtowns and inner cities, with all the accustomed cries of “racism,” even as racist public prosecutors pick and choose whether to indict the arrested on the basis of race.
California infrastructure, once the best in the county, is now among the worst. Decaying and crowded freeways, inadequate water storage, and pot-holed streets are the new norm. Once robust gas, oil, mining, and timber industries are nearly inert.
The state’s public schools are dysfunctional. Once premier public universities are spiraling headlong into decline—junking scholastic tests for admissions, using illegal racial quotas to warp admissions, and institutionalizing racialized dorms and graduation ceremonies.
Even if California enjoyed a huge surplus, even if 300,000 residents were not fleeing the state each year, even if California had a history of being a Confederate slave state, even if whites were the majority of the population, even if the black population was greater than its present 5-6 percent, it would be insane for the state to even contemplate racial reparations.
Twenty-seven percent of the state’s residents were born outside of the United States, and have no American ancestors. The state is the most racially diverse in America, and one in which every group could, in theory, lodge complaints against the dead of the past. Mexican-Americans, Armenians, Asians, and the descendants of the impoverished “Okie” diaspora could all cite legacies of bias—but from whom exactly? The long dead?
For those of increasingly mixed heritage—about a quarter of the state—did their own ancestors oppress their own ancestors? Are all blacks sure that eight generations ago their individual ancestors were slaves outside of California, and therefore they have monetary grievances against those in the state whose ancestors eight generations ago might have owned slaves outside of California? And can such writs be documented?
Do we really wish to go down this path of destroying individuality and insisting that superficial appearance damns us to a collective rooted in the past?
If so, are we to tally up the half-century role of racial quotas to calibrate all the impoverished whites of the last 50 years who were discriminated against in admissions and hiring? Have there not been existing reparations from the decades-long implementations of racial preferences and exemptions—or perhaps in some $20 trillion dollars in reparatory transferences during a half-century of Great Society entitlements?
If we are collectives and not individuals anymore, are all of us to be judged by adding up our group’s historical and current pluses and minuses?
If so, do we add or subtract reparatory charges based on group data? If one race is vastly overrepresented in hate crimes or interracial crime statistics, and other groups vastly underrepresented as perpetrators, is it the role of the state now to intervene and provide reparatory and collective “equity” from one collective for the relatives of the victims of another collective?
Are we really convinced that past institutional racial bias is all-determinative of present opportunity? If so, why do Asians nationally as a collective on average earn $20,000 a year more than non-Hispanic whites—despite past exclusionary immigration laws, forced government relocations, and zoning prohibitions? Was there some unknown university study that postulated that the Japanese-internment or early 20th century Yellow Peril exclusionary immigration statutes were irrelevant to Asian-American upward mobility?
Inequality Under the Laws
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Inequality Under the Laws
Ideology now has made a mockery of the cherished traditions of blind justice and equality under the laws. Whether you are arrested, indicted, and convicted increasingly hinges on your politics.
During the 120 days of 2020 riots, looting, arson, and assault that saw $2 billion in damage, 35-40 killed, hundreds of injured police officers, and 14,000 arrests, were there mass detentions, thousands of convictions, and lengthy sentences handed out to Antifa and BLM members for the violence? After all, the insurrectionary rioters staged iconic attacks on the idea of government, whether defined as torching a police precinct or federal courthouse.
Why then were so many protestors of January 6 demonstrations at the Capitol that saw no violent deaths at the hands of another—except a Trump supporter lethally shot for the misdemeanor of entering a broken window of the Capitol—given lengthy prison sentences?
George Floyd—a 6’4”, 223 pound black career violent felon, arrested while suspected of passing counterfeit money, serially high on dangerous drugs, resisting arrest—was choked into unconsciousness while resisting arrest by a reckless white police officer.
Floyd was canonized as an American hero, often portrayed with halo and angelic wings.
The officer was convicted of second-degree murder and is serving combined state and federal prison sentence of over 40 years.
A white Ashli Babbitt, 5’2”, 113 pounds, a 14-year military veteran, and, like Floyd, unarmed, was lethally shot for the crime of entering a broken window in the Capitol by a black policeman.
Postmortem, her life was smeared and slandered, her shooter canonized. Was Babbitt some sinner, Floyd a saint? The choker officer Chauvin a Satan, the lethal shooter cop Byrd godly? The petite Babbitt a mortal danger stopped only by a bullet, the huge and uncooperative Floyd supposedly easy to arrest with no need of force?
Why were the downtowns of Washington, D.C. and Seattle simply hijacked and expropriated by violent groups with impunity, while federal troops were forbidden to assist overtaxed local law enforcement? Was that not in stark contrast to the barbed wire, 20,000 soldiers and barricades that marked Washington for weeks after the Capitol demonstrations?
Why was there not to be a 2020 riot congressional commission to investigate the deaths and destruction caused by groups who crossed state lines to plan and orchestrate the violence, often weaving their conspiracies with the aid of social media?
Nullification
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Nullification
Did we not fight a Civil War to reestablish that states and locales could not ignore federal laws?
Why did 550 local and state jurisdictions, in old Confederate South Carolina style, declare with impunity that federal immigration law did not apply in their territories? Does the Left now believe in such neo-Confederate principles? Would it applaud counties that rendered federal endangered species, or handgun-control statutes null and void in their jurisdictions?
Or do we now declare some nullifications good and others bad, depending on our own politics?
How did the Biden Administration simply suspend all immigration law to greenlight 6-7 million illegal entries across the southern border since January 2021? Did Biden not take an oath to execute our laws faithfully?
Does any president now have the right to order the executive branch not to execute entire bodies of federal law? Will the next president declare entire sections of EPA statutes inert by de facto nonenforcement to appease a particular political base?
At any time, did Joe Biden send a bill to Congress requesting that anyone can now cross U.S. borders without identification and legal sanction?
So do citizens fly into JFK or LAX from foreign countries and simply announce that they either forgot their passports or never obtained them? And as a reward for lack of an ID or legal permission, are they still allowed into the United States and given a free phone, and a free hotel room? Do we have one set of laws for citizens, and another for non-citizens? And if so, why?
Rogue Agencies
How can a former FBI director under oath claim amnesia or ignorance 245 times during congressional testimony, or leak a classified account of a private conversation with a president with complete impunity, as did James Comey?
How can an FBI director, as did Andrew McCabe, lie on four occasions with impunity to federal investigators? Is it now the case that FBI directors at times must lie and deceive as part of their job descriptions?
How can a former FBI director, as in the case of Robert Mueller, with all seriousness deny under oath any knowledge of Fusion GPS or the Steele dossier, whose controversies prompted his own special counsel appointment? Can citizens tell inquisitive IRS auditors that they have no memory of deductions in question?
Why is there still an FBI after it has been confessed that it paid a foreign national, Christopher Steele, to compile dirt against a presidential candidate—and paid his source in Washington to provide Steele with false information to impugn a presidential candidate? How did the FBI manage to play a central role in both the 2016 and 2020 elections in efforts to alter the result?
How can a legitimate FBI knowingly submit such information that it knew was false to a federal judge to spy on an American citizen to further a farcical plot to destroy a presidential campaign?
So what will the FBI not do? Forge documents? Offer in vain $1 million to a foreign national to verify just one fact in a fake, bought dossier used to obtain a FISA warrant? Disappear cell phone data under subpoena?
Have high-ranking officials promise that a presidential candidate will never be elected? Infiltrate Latin-Mass Catholic Church services and school board meetings to monitor the activities of church-goers and parents in attendance?
Use armed performance-art SWAT teams to swoop into private homes to arrest suspects accused of mostly misdemeanors? Hire out social media private companies like Twitter to suppress free expression deemed by the FBI unhelpful or problematic?
Suppress information about an FBI-confiscated Hunter Biden laptop, while keeping mum as former intelligence officers lie absurdly before a national election that the computer in FBI hands was likely the work of Russian disinformationists—to aid a presidential candidate in a debate and harm the incumbent?
Destroy the lives of any whistleblowers who expose such miscreant behavior to Congress?
Printing Money
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Printing Money
The journalist/historian Paul Johnson famously once wrote that the tripartite duty of any government leadership was “to ensure external security, internal order and maintenance of an honest currency.”
We certainly do not maintain an honest currency by borrowing 130 percent of annual GDP, with a looming debt of $33 trillion, an annual $1.5 trillion-plus budget deficit, and a 2022 annualized 6.5 percent inflation rate.
But statistics mask the real problem, which is a mentality of suicidal spending passed off as juvenile “modern monetary theory.” Unlimited borrowing as a “theory” is the academic idiocy that some socialist hare-brained professors dreamed up to excuse printing money we do not have.
Both parties have run up the debt. Yet the culpability mounts as each successive president adds to the crushing debt, in fear that on his watch the medicine of restraint will be worse than the disease of insolvency.
Note how casually the federal government burns through billions of dollars. We still have no idea how many billions of dollars in arms and equipment the military shrugged away in Kabul. Who cares anyway whether the terrorist Taliban is becoming one of the largest dispensers of U.S. taxpayers’ weaponry?
Currently, Joe Biden lies that by not spending allotted money he somehow is the greatest deficit hawk in memory, as he rams through a $1.5 trillion 2023 budget deficit.
The top federal income tax rate is 37 percent. In California, to take the example of our largest state, the top state bracket is 13.3 percent. Income subject to federal payroll taxes is 15.3 percent for the self-employed—and income subject to that crushing take is a whopping $160,200.
The above taxes are well aside from capital gains taxes, sales taxes, property taxes, and fuel taxes, which, along with income taxes, can easily take 50-60 percent of one’s middle-class income. Note that the government not only does not appreciate the crushing extractions but targets for auditing those who pay at that rate. And all this tax revenue leads to what? Multitrillion-dollar budget deficits and unsustainable national debt.
Adding insult to injury, our current White House occupant, Mr. “Ten-Percent”/ “The Big Guy” Joe Biden demagogues as “greedy” anyone who resents the wastage of federal spending after handing over half his income to the government. Yet did the Bidens report all their past foreign income and pay at that rate? Could Joe have ensured that his son first paid all he owed to the IRS before he smeared other Americans as not paying their fair shares?
A sane country would immediately reboot and update the old Simpson-Bowles reduction and simplification of taxes and spending proposals that would gradually work our way toward a balanced budget—and maybe, in a century, pay off what we have borrowed. But we know that is impossible since we would hear ad nauseam that such fiscal integrity was racist, heartless, and cruel.
So we will keep up borrowing and printing bread-and-circus money until, like the late fourth-century polis, or late imperial Rome, there is finally no money for the upkeep of infrastructure, domestic law and order, and deterrence against foreign enemies.
Then what cannot go on, will not go on and all the absurdities of the present will end with a bang, not a whimper.
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''The Left Has Pushed the Envelope''
realclearpolitics.com/articles/2023/05/25/the_left_has_pushed_the_envelope_149277.html
Victor Davis Hanson
''The Left is waging a full-fledged cultural revolution against traditional America. And the Maoist results are often as absurd as they are terrifying.''
Special counsel John Durham just issued his final report on wrongdoing within the FBI, CIA, and the Department of Justice.
The summary confirms that our premier investigatory and intelligence agencies interfered in the 2016 and 2020 presidential campaigns.
Directors and high-ranking FBI officials lied under oath. They misled Congress. They altered court documents and deceived federal judges.
The FBI hired a foreign national to gather dirt on Donald Trump's 2016 campaign - while he was being paid by the rival Hillary Clinton campaign.
The FBI contracted Twitter to suppress news stories. It kept the Hunter Biden laptop under wraps, even as former intelligence officials flat-out lied it was likely "Russian disinformation." That was a blatant effort to aid the 2020 Biden campaign.
The IRS just conceded whistleblowers were correct and the agency fired its entire multi-year audit team responsible for investigating Hunter Biden's purported tax irregularities.
The agency claimed it was ordered to do so by the Department of Justice, headed by Biden's appointee Merrick Garland.
California is facing a crushing $32 billion deficit. Yet it flirts with an $800 billion-dollar "reparations" payout to the state's Black residents.
No one has any idea where the money for that would come from. No one can define who would qualify. No one can explain why a state that never allowed slavery eight generations ago now owes selected Californians billions of dollars it does not have.
One of the reparations board leaders asserts Blacks might be willing to accept an "installment" plan of payments.
The NAACP just issued a "travel alert" advising Blacks not to visit Florida. The announcement was timed to draw negative attention to conservative Florida Governor Ron DeSantis' announcement of a presidential bid.
Chicago, Baltimore, Milwaukee, Pittsburgh, Los Angeles, and Indianapolis - all outside Florida - have the highest Black murder rates in the nation.
Florida by contrast, with a Black population of 3.3 million, has the second-largest number of Black businesses in the nation. The chairman of the NAACP's board of directors is himself a Florida resident!
Black Lives Matter has just announced it lost millions of dollars in investments and ran up huge deficits. The culprit was its former corrupt leadership.
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Its extravagant spending, plush homes, and family hangers-on have nearly bankrupted the advocacy group. It cannot account for the millions of dollars in corporate guilt and protection money it leveraged following the George Floyd riots in 2020.
In New York, a threatening subway career criminal with 42 prior arrests was subdued by a bystander and died during the confrontation. The criminal is now deified. The would-be Samaritan is charged with felony manslaughter.
The deceased's uncle is vocal about his late nephew's confrontation. But he himself was just arrested with stolen property and armed with a knife. He was mysteriously still roaming the streets despite 70 prior arrests and current active arrest warrants.
In almost every American city and town, biological males, with enormous advantages in size and musculoskeletal mass, routinely win women's sporting competitions.
They are systematically destroying decades of progress that sought to ensure parity between men's and women's sports.
Corporate America has joined this cultural revolution hysteria. Companies are apparently now hellbent on destroying their brands, profits, and net worth.
Under pressure from LGBTQ activists, the Los Angeles Dodgers reinvited the "Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence" to celebrate Pride night at Dodger Stadium.
Catholics and Christians had objected to the invitation because the group's notoriety hinges on its sexualized and often pornographic mockery of Catholic ritual, the Holy Trinity, and the Christian faith.
The supposedly courageous group would never dare extend its street-theater blasphemy to other religious groups such as Muslims or Hindus.
The Dodgers apparently do not care that Greater Los Angeles may be home to 6 million Mexican American citizens and resident Hispanic immigrants. Most are Catholic and many were avid Dodger fans.
Anheuser-Busch has nearly destroyed its best-selling Bud Light brand by hiring transgender performance-art activist Dylan Mulvaney to hawk the brand - and his own transitioning - to America's working classes.
The Disney corporation, for decades, has enjoyed multibillion-dollar concessions and a veritable 40-square-mile private fiefdom gifted from the taxpayers of Florida.
No matter. Disney has rebranded it films, amusement parks, and television offerings to reflect radical transgender, gay, and race advocacies.
The results so far are billion-dollar losses in Disney stock, subscribers, and viewers.
A woke CNN has all but destroyed its once-global audience. It now has fewer viewers than certain popular podcasts.
All these implosions are not just shocking but surreal. Why are our government, corporations, and popular culture colluding in mass suicide - to the delight of our enemies like Communist China?
(C) 2023 Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
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cc
https://twitter.com/claudiamconwayy?lang=en
>Serious quest. Who would volunteer for this?
''DeSantis 102 – Floridians are Furious – How to Have Fun with The Great Pretending Campaign of 2024''
theconservativetreehouse.com/blog/2023/05/25/desantis-102-floridians-are-furious-how-to-have-fun-with-the-great-pretending-campaign-of-2024
May 26, 2023
''I openly predicted last year, when Ron DeSantis announces his candidacy, we will have the most fun in a presidential primary in history. The last 24 hours have been absolutely hilarious. If you are not having fun at the expense of the DeSantis billionaire funders, you are doing it wrong.''
Candidate Ron DeSantis cannot even hold a public event in the state of Florida because the only people who support him are the isolated group immediately around him and the Selfie-My-Lunch crowd who are disconnected from the average life of a Floridian.
Have you ever heard of a presidential candidate launching a campaign and NOT holding a public event in his/her home state to do it?
Most people are overlooking the obvious. His handlers could not run the risk of a public event for their principal. What does that tell you about the candidate?
Everything, and I do mean everything, about Ron DeSantis is manufactured, fake, and phony; especially the claimed support that you see pushed by national media and the right-wing alt-media that are placing their bets to be paid by the massive financial mechanism behind the DeSantis management team. Floridians can see through it, and the handlers are hoping the sunlight doesn’t spread to Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina.
In the state of Florida, support for Ron DeSantis 2024 is maybe in the 15 to 20% range (I’m being generous), beyond that he is not liked at all. I travel the state and talk to blue-collar ordinary people all the time, there is no grassroots support for the fraud that DeSantis has perpetrated on the state. This announcement has left him naked to the realization of his character as a raw political opportunist.
Once you realize all of this hype is manufactured and phony, you can have buckets of fun with it. All of the DeSantis Republican supporters are predictable like the Cruz Crew was in 2016. Their arguments and policy points are as shallow, false, and fake as their candidate. Call them out.
Look at DeSantis's history, he was the lockdown beach closer during COVID-19 and he had people arrested for opening their businesses. In 2021, long after President Trump was out of office, Ron DeSantis suspended the liquor licenses of non-compliant bars and restaurants. Don’t let the Ukraine management team (Pushaw Inc.) attempt to rewrite it.
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Great meeting with President @realDonaldTrump at the @WhiteHouse discussing all things #COVID19 and FL's strong efforts to protect vulnerable populations & to expand testing in an innovative way. @POTUS & his administration have provided great support for FL each step of the way. pic.twitter.com/jNkndpVg1m
— Ron DeSantis (@GovRonDeSantis) April 28, 2020
Ron DeSantis is the easiest candidate in the history of presidential candidates to deconstruct because it’s all phony.
If you come across a Florida resident claiming to support Ron DeSantis, tell them to post “I LOVE RON DESANTIS” on their Facebook page, Instagram, or social media, and watch what happens. They won’t do it, because they don’t want to be ridiculed by their community network. Yes, it really is that obvious and that bad.
If you listen to national media or alt-right CONservative media, those being paid for their participation and support of the fraud, you would think Ron DeSantis has a lot of support and following. He doesn’t. DeSantis is running away next week to campaign outside Florida because the sunlight down here is too hot. His management team is trying to make a quick national impression because sooner or later people are going to realize the pretense.
(Bloomberg) — Ron DeSantis’s presidential campaign sought to regain its footing Thursday by announcing a robust upcoming travel schedule to early-voting states a day after a glitch-filled launch.
The Florida governor has multiple stops scheduled for next week in Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina as his campaign aims to build momentum to take on Donald Trump, currently the front-runner for the 2024 Republican nomination.
[…] DeSantis has built-in advantages as he now officially gets underway, including a sizable amount of money left over from the 2022 gubernatorial race that he can tap for his presidential bid, the backing of a well-organized super PAC, and GOP donors who are eager for an alternative to Trump.
DeSantis and his team are trying to raise millions of dollars in the first 48 hours at a two-day donor meet-up at the Four Seasons in Miami. More than 100 fundraisers have congregated at the luxury resort for a campaign briefing, an afternoon of fundraising calls, and a reception with the governor on Thursday evening. The DeSantis team hopes to raise $8 to $10 million, according to two sources briefed on the plans, with each individual contributing the maximum amount allowed of $3,300.
Next week, DeSantis travels to Iowa for two days followed by New Hampshire and South Carolina
— the first three GOP primary voting states. He and his senior staff recently told donors that they view Iowa’s GOP caucus as one of his best chances to challenge Trump since the team’s internal polling shows DeSantis with a favorability rating of two-to-one with evangelicals compared to Trump. (read more)
He’s got everything, except voters!
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Eye Swallow