PRINCIPLES

 This is going to be a long thread on the subject of the PRINCIPLES! Crowd and their insistence that DeSantis shouldn’t lead a charge against Disney, ‘Don’t call them groomers! That’s naughty!’ etc

because PRINCIPLES!

And I’m going to use Dien Bien Phu as an example.

At Dien Bien Phu, the French Foreign Legion was slowly surrounded by the Viet Min. The Communists slowly took high ground position after high ground position. 

At first the French tried occasionally to push them out and occasionally succeeded.

But eventually the Viet had all the high ground with artillery sited on the base.

At first the shelling was a nuisance. Then it got heavier. More and more guns, more anti-aircraft. 

Eventually, the French were pounded into surrender.

The Left has been ‘boiling the frog’ for a long time, and it has mostly been by weaponizing empathy around ‘cultural issues.’

And as Breitbart pointed out, 'Politics is downstream from culture.' 

READ THE WHOLE THING ...

What Makes Christianity Different?

What distinguishes Christianity from all other religions? This! pic.twitter.com/HKXv5g7G8q

— Dinesh D'Souza (@DineshDSouza) December 27, 2022

Today’s blacklisted American: Violence against churches and religious institutions skyrockets since 2018

 

The Biden administration has done nothing because it sees these attacks as politically advantageous. The attacks are being done by the militant brownshirts of the Democratic Party, and thus Biden and Harris are glad to see them occur. They want the religious — who almost always tend to be conservative — to live in fear. And these politicians also know that they have the support of a huge segment of the modern American population. Too many Americans no longer believe in free speech. Instead, they think that censorship and oppression are always justified to impose their own ideas.

Meanwhile, the majority of Americans who still say they believe in free speech and religious freedom do nothing. Within the Republican Party is a small but significant faction that actually favors the repeated betrayal of its conservative wing, allying themselves with the Democrats to further these intolerant policies. The rest of that party does nothing, because it is like the American general public, largely willing to look the other way out of fear, self-interest, or cowardice.

And thus freedom dies.

The greatest answer ever given at any press conference ever.

Merry Christmas ✝️pic.twitter.com/9jNASM9rEn

— Benny Johnson (@bennyjohnson) December 25, 2022

Wrong Again: 50 Years of Failed Eco-pocalyptic Predictions

 

Modern doomsayers have been predicting climate and environmental disaster since the 1960s. They continue to do so today.

None of the apocalyptic predictions with due dates as of today have come true.

What follows is a collection of notably wild predictions from notable people in government and science.

More than merely spotlighting the failed predictions, this collection shows that the makers of failed apocalyptic predictions often are individuals holding respected positions in government and science.

While such predictions have been and continue to be enthusiastically reported by a media eager for sensational headlines, the failures are typically not revisited.

You may be too young to know that in the 1960s and '70s the "End of the World" was coming via Famine,  Pollution, Ozone Depletion, Acid Rain, and a New Ice Age.  That was before Global Warning became The Thing.

Read the whole thing.

Harmful Language You Should Stop Using - And What To Replace It With

 

The Twitter Files are the Red Pill

 Matt Taibbi knew something strange was happening, but he could not put his finger on it.  Until he was able to read the Twitter Files.

Sometime in the last decade, many people — I was one — began to feel robbed of their sense of normalcy by something we couldn’t define. Increasingly glued to our phones, we saw that the version of the world that was spat out at us from them seemed distorted. The public’s reactions to various news events seemed off-kilter, being either way too intense, not intense enough, or simply unbelievable. You’d read that seemingly everyone in the world was in agreement that a certain thing was true, except it seemed ridiculous to you, which put you in an awkward place with friends, family, others. Should you say something? Are you the crazy one?

Matt was immersed in what was once called the "Mainstream Media," so he saw the world through the lens created by the people who made up a fantasy world by telling us the absurd, the malignant, and the bizarre were normal.  The "culture" was ripped apart and reshaped in ways that made no sense to normal people.  That has made a lot of people a little crazy.

I can’t have been the only person to have struggled psychologically during this time. This is why these Twitter files have been such a balm. This is the reality they stole from us! It’s repulsive, horrifying, and dystopian, a gruesome history of a world run by anti-people, but I’ll take it any day over the vile and insulting facsimile of truth they’ve been selling. Personally, once I saw that these lurid files could be used as a road map back to something like reality — I wasn’t sure until this week — I relaxed for the first time in probably seven or eight years.

Here's what allowed him to regain his senses.  He read the internal Twitter files that revealed a conspiracy so deep that most people are still unwilling to believe it.  He took the red pill. 

A group of us spent the last weeks reading thousands of documents. For me a lot of that time was spent learning how Twitter functioned, specifically its relationships with government. How weird is modern-day America? Not long ago, CIA veterans tell me, the information above the “tearline” of a U.S. government intelligence cable would include the station of origin and any other CIA offices copied on the report.

I spent much of today looking at exactly similar documents, seemingly written by the same people, except the “offices” copied at the top of their reports weren’t other agency stations, but Twitter’s Silicon Valley colleagues: Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, LinkedIn, even Wikipedia. It turns out these are the new principal intelligence outposts of the American empire. A subplot is these companies seem not to have had much choice in being made key parts of a global surveillance and information control apparatus, although evidence suggests their Quislingian executives were mostly all thrilled to be absorbed. Details on those “Other Government Agencies” soon, probably tomorrow.

 Something tells me the coming year is going to be a better one. Happy Holidays, everyone. Enjoy your loved ones, ignore the rest, and see you all again soon.

Fat acceptance is a death cult

.@MattWalshBlog: "Fat acceptance is a death cult. It's one of the most dangerous ideas in the world...It's probably time that we start thinking about the misinformation that tells people...that morbid, suicidal, self-destructive obesity is something to be celebrated." pic.twitter.com/NmzKO1axty

— Daily Wire (@realDailyWire) December 21, 2022

.@MattWalshBlog warns against following Stanford's list of banned words: "Yes, it's arbitrary...yet, through the force of sheer repetition, the person who abides by the language rules will eventually begin to perceive reality in a way that conforms with the rules." pic.twitter.com/g4aQcytufw

— Daily Wire (@realDailyWire) December 22, 2022

The Totalitarian dillemma - how do you change it peacefully?

 People tell me that most FBI agents are good people who bring criminals to justice. If that's true, where do you think they get people like the two dozen agents with machine guns and ballistic vests with FBI stenciled on them raiding the home of a pastor, his wife and his seven children at dawn?

 This is not an isolated instance. Recall the night-time raid on the home of the 70-year-old Roger Stone that involved not just a SWAT Team but helicopters, boats and a CNN News team conveniently primed to film the raid by the FBI. That's how totalitarians intimidate the population; you make examples, you highlight these arrests to let them know that it can happen to you.

As Tonto said to the Lone Ranger when the Indian attacked: ”what do you mean “we” white man?”  Who do you think will “clean up” the FBI?  Christopher Ray, the man who’s run the place for the past 6 years?  Or Merrick Garland who labelled men and women who criticized school boards as domestic terrorists?  Do you think Joe Biden will change his mind about MAGA Republicans after calling them fascists?  

Keep in mind that these people have the power to send dozens of heavily armed men to arrest elderly men asleep in the middle of the night, or middle-aged pastors in front of their children.  Probably thousands of college-educated men – and women - would love to be in on these raids believing they are saving the country.  

Seriously, what is Jim Jordan going to do when Ray, or Garland tells him that he’s got a plane to catch and can’t stay to chat?  That’s what we got when the Left created a “cabal of powerful people” and decided to – the Time Magazine’s words - “save” the 2020 election. Mao wasn't kidding when he said that political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.

1. Controlled Opposition : Why I Really Don’t Give A €&+# About Them

New 🧵 1/55 pic.twitter.com/YwFGIESQAK

— Threads 🧵 Irish (@ThreadsIrish) December 22, 2022

The Nihilism of the Ruling Class Curtis Yarvin

David Rothkopf is the deep state made flesh. A sort of “Yung Kissinger,” Rothkopf has done the cursus honorum of journalism, government, philanthropy, and academia. Not that he is or ever was in charge of anything. No one is in charge of anything. There is only a way things work. But if anyone knows how things work, it is Rothkopf.

That’s why it’s worth reading his new masterpiece of airport nonfiction, American Resistance: The Inside Story of How The Deep State Saved the Nation. Or in case you have better things to do in the airport—my summary of the book’s argument:

The deep state does not exist.

The deep state is stronger than the president.

The deep state is the true democracy.

There is no deep state.

It is not my business to refute this remarkable logic—only to explain it.

What is the deep state? What does it think? Why does it do what it does? Where does it come from, and where is it going? Rothkopf is here to tell us—and yet, not. Like Kissinger, he loves nothing more than to say a thing and in the next breath deny it.

One random phrase caught my eye as a beautiful sample of his style. Rothkopf writes of “the alleged ties between Joe Biden’s son Hunter and the energy company Burisma in Ukraine” (my emphasis). Alleged! The fact that Hunter Biden was on Burisma’s board is as well-documented as the Holocaust. Yet with this one beautiful word, alleged, the commissar vanishes. Orwell was a rookie.

Read the whole thing.

VIRGINIAN PILOT: "NOTHING TO SEE HERE ... MOVE ALONG"

This is how the press covers up news that's inconvenient for Democrats.

Doomed to Repeat: Gender Ideology and the Repressed Memory Movement

 

A scant 30 years ago, therapists with (mostly) the best of intentions managed to ruin many people’s lives. Using recovered memory therapy, clinicians unwittingly participated in creating false memories of horrific abuse that in some cases permanently sundered relationships between parents and adult children and sent innocent people to jail for decades. Most importantly, this treatment also harmed the patients it was meant to help.

In the late 1990s there were numerous lawsuits in which therapists or psychiatrists were successfully sued or settled on charges of having propagated false memories of childhood sexual abuse, incest, and satanic ritual abuse. Fran and Dan Keller served 21 years in prison after young children who attended their daycare began making wild allegations after having been coaxed by a therapist. According to one child witness, the Kellers “had everyone take off their clothes and had a parrot that pecked them in the pee-pee,” and “came to her house with a chainsaw and cut her dog Buffy in the vagina until it bled.” The therapist construed these childish imaginings as literally true, and concluded her small patient was a victim of ritual abuse. The Kellers were finally freed in November of 2014 after the only witness who provided any physical evidence of abuse—a doctor—recanted.

The false memory and ritual abuse scares of the ‘80s and ‘90s now seem bizarre almost beyond imagining. Therapists, psychiatrists, government agencies, congressional committees, and the media bought into the belief that worldwide satanic cults had infiltrated society and were ritually abusing children on a significant scale.

Tragically, history is in the process of repeating itself. Something strikingly similar is now happening. The current trend to diagnose children as transgender bears an eerie similarity to this previous social panic. This matters because, as with the previous panic of the ‘80s and ‘90s, the current trend is harming those it is supposed to help, and forcing them to live with the consequences for the rest of their lives.

Below, I outline the similarities—and differences..

 Transgender children fall prey to the bizarre belief that they are the opposite sex or neither sex. Taken away from the clamor and din of politics, the assertion that one is biologically one sex but of a different “gender” in some mysterious way makes no sense and is every bit as strange as asserting that daycare workers sacrificed babies and fed them to children.

Read the whole thing.

America, We Can Choose Not to Tolerate Weirdos

 

EXCERPT (read the whole thing);

Somehow we got to the point where we're expected to just nod politely when freaks, strangeos, and perverts turn up in positions of great responsibility. Well, that needs to change. Whether it's some "non-binary" bondage mutant who oversees America's nuclear waste betwixt bouts of luggage larceny or an Army colonel who – and yeah, this happened – masks up as a leather sex puppy in uniform on social media and who, along with junior officers, also dressed as carnal canines, forms what I guess would be an erotic litter. And then there's the everyday parade of creepy groomer oddities teaching our kids – actually, indoctrinating them – who are so proud of it that they go post videos of themselves bragging about the gender confusion and woke nonsense they spread. Time to stop accepting the idea that we need to pretend weirdos are not weird....

There is a solution, though. It's to reject false tolerance, the kind that is not about letting people alone to live their private lives but about forcing their intolerable strangeness upon the rest of us. We tried what they called "tolerance," and they started grooming our kids and unleashing kooks to command our troops.

It is high time we no longer tolerate nuts. No, if you are a nut, you do not get a position of responsibility. Too bad. You don't get an important job because you are crazy, and craziness does not stop when you leave your house, or doghouse, as it were. Let's reach far back to yesteryear – like 2017 – when it was understood that insanity is disqualifying.

Empowered woman - Babylon Bee

Pro-Choice Bosses - A Generous Offer To Our Pregnant Employees

Don't miss this outstanding video from our friends at @LiveAction! pic.twitter.com/5U32B2uxs8

— The Babylon Bee (@TheBabylonBee) December 13, 2022

The population implosion

 A couple featured in the NYTimes live in separate homes and do not have children.  Americans are not reproducing themselves and will eventually die out as a result.  The invasion of people crossing the Southern border could replace the children Americans are not having.  The problem is that the South American birth rate is only slightly above 2, which is not good enough.  However, the invasion is not just South Americans but also trekkers from Africa, where women have an average of 4.2 children. 

Demographics is destiny.  One of the reasons Russia is having military problems is that they are short of men.  Their fertility rate is 1.6, which means they are dying out and lack the manpower for sustained war.   They’re drafting retirees to fight.

The American fertility rate is roughly the same: 1.6.  This is not a big problem for today’s retirees.  But it is for people in their 20s or 30s who may want to retire and collect their social security benefits.  Sub-Saharan Africa has by far the highest fertility rate. If current trends continue, my grandchildren may depend on the benevolence of the grandchildren of Africans crossing the Southern border, who will continue to spend enough time together to reproduce.

Forget about global warming.  The end of Western Civilization will come from ideas born on the pages of the NY Times.

I think this band, which I discovered a few years online, is one of the very best I’ve ever heard in vocals, harmonies and musical arrangements. Check out this song, for example: https://t.co/Wa7Ase0gtM https://t.co/TIOP06rDVY

— David Limbaugh (@DavidLimbaugh) December 13, 2022

Who In the US Is Objectively Racist? The Left. As the Data Show Definitively.

 

The increase in gun homicides documented in the Emory University study is attributable almost exclusively to one factor: a nearly 60 percent increase in homicide fatalities among black men. Not over a period of many years–but in a little over one year.

And what year was that? 2020. And what happened in 2020? The death of George Floyd, and the subsequent revelation that black lives especially matter.

Yes, but not in the way intended. Not by a long shot. That death and revelation brought in its train myriad consequences. Defund the police. The war on cash bail and the release of numerous criminals. The demoralization of police, who were instructed explicitly and implicitly that arresting black male offenders was a career risk, and the subsequent surrender of the streets to the thugs. And on and on. (The release of many from jail because of COVID didn’t help either.)

This is as close to a natural experiment as can exist in social science. An exogenous shock–the death of one man–leads to a tectonic shift in law enforcement, especially with regards to a particular demographic. The result?: a hyperbolic increase in homicide rates in that demographic. (I note that the previous uptick observable in the chart in 2014 corresponds to the proto-Floyd event, the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, MO, which was the catalyst for Black Lives Matter.)

This is as close to a definitive proof of causation as is possible in observational social science.

Twitter is both a social media company and a crime scene

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 10, 2022

Dear Woke Corporation: Take a Hike!

"I'm sorry that's happening to you. Best of luck."

Senator @TomCottonAR blasts woke Kroger CEO for expecting Republicans to come to their defense. pic.twitter.com/L9j82kDraA

— Townhall.com (@townhallcom) December 6, 2022

When there's Racial Outrage, there's a Race Hoax. Depend on it.

A black woman (Zaynab Bintabdul-Hadijakien) is revealed to be the suspect behind the window-smashing attack on the Black Cultural Center at @UVA in October. The incident had been blamed on white supremacy by activists. UVA hid the suspect's identity. https://t.co/1XiAKPlnhl

— Andy Ngô 🏳️‍🌈 (@MrAndyNgo) December 5, 2022

American Stazi

Evidence of FBI spying on Trump’s allies for years before 2020 has emerged.  It’s telling that the FBI alerted Twitter and Facebook that the “Russians” were going to spread disinformation shortly before the New York Post printed the Hunter Biden laptop story.  They could only have known about the upcoming story because they were monitoring the emails of Trump attorney Giuliani and Steve Bannon.  It would be interesting to find out when they began spying on their domestic political enemies and what court order allowed them to do that.  

Re @elonmusk #TwitterFiles - FBI spying on Rudy Giuliani’s cloud in 2020 with a covert surveillance warrant. Had access to his emails from John Paul Mac Isaac and me. FBI had #LaptopFomHell and knew it was real. Looks like pre-censoring a legit story https://t.co/HZmSPiRR8d pic.twitter.com/rlnTeK2a7T

— Miranda Devine (@mirandadevine) December 3, 2022

Dr. Fauci: ‘Good Without a God’ Creates a Frankenstein

 

In Mary Shelley’s 1818 original version of Frankenstein, the brilliant but unorthodox Dr. Victor Frankenstein created his nameless humanoid by using a formula he concocted in a lab.  Obsessed with creating something beautiful, his experiment produced a hideous monster with yellow skin, watery eyes and exposed blood vessels who escaped the lab.  

He was a 19th century gain-of-function research lab leak. ...

More than 200 years later, the real-life Dr. Anthony Fauci embodies both the “scientist” and the monster.  He’s a slithering gorgon coddled by a Medusa of creatures in government, media, Big Pharma, Big Tech, the global billionaire class, China, and armies of compliant physicians enslaved to their careers.....

Fauci publicly advocated for using gain-of-function research to “juice up” bat viruses, which meant intentionally making the viruses worse, creating new strains, and making them so transmissible they could spread globally.  Real-life Frankenstein stuff.  

The goal?  To make something beautiful – a vaccine that could save the world from a deadly pandemic when and if “nature” ever unleashed it.  Oh, and money.

Read the whole thing.

Leftism

 The Left suffers from social psychophysiology – the proclivity of people to get tangled up in ideologies that are like crippled religions.  They operate on faith, disassociated from reality.  And if they run up against reality, they dismiss reality and cling to their religion.

Asking the wrong question

 

The Morning Brief from Yahoo Finance is written today by Andy Serwer, who asks the question:

Question: How many people does it take to run a tech company? His focus is on what it takes to keep the lights on and servers running. In the case of Twitter, it's noticeable that the answer is much less than Twitter had when Elon Musk bought it. But the proof isn't to Andy's liking. There's a hint that he's not a fan of Musk: I’m not a huge fan of Elon’s management style — which seems in part to be about getting in touch with his inner 13-year-old boy  To give Andy credit, he questions the value of the employment bloat in general and even the vaunted engineers that create the features found in the big Internet organizations.  Many of these layoffs have likely been in marketing and staff functions, but I would argue that in some cases redundancy lies in line operations as well. It's an open secret that a fair amount of core technology work adds little or no value to customers, companies, or the economy.... I understand engineers and product managers need to experiment. It’s just that the process — an overly empowered tech culture where engineers are encouraged to “disrupt,” “pivot,” “move fast and break things,” and “fail fast” — has been taken too far. Maybe this modus operandi makes sense for the smartest 1% of technical workers, but not for tens of thousands who have been given the keys. But here's the problem, Andy's looking at these companies as if they were factories producing the necessary goods. He refers to firing half the workers at a dairy, leading to customer shortages. But that is an apple-to-oranges comparison. Twitter is not a dairy.   And then it gets personal. To me Musk and his radical job cutting smacks of twice baked-over Randism. Every generation produces business leaders like Musk, those with incredible ideas who also cloak power plays in the guise of economic revolution. But the problem with Twitter was never about the number of employees. It was about the product they delivered.   The problem with Twitter (and Facebook and Google) is that they don't deliver milk. They provide opinions, shape the culture and affect elections. Those thousands of employees hand megaphones to their partisan allies and send mobs to silence people who disagree. They inject partisan poison into the cultural bloodstream.   If those workers at Andy's dairy deliberately soured the milk, the number who work there is not the issue. They should all be fired and replaced with those who deliver good milk.   The problem with Twitter, Facebook, and Google is not the number of people who work there.  It's the people themselves who are in charge of the Public Square. They have abused their power by stifling speech.  They have deliberately censored the truth as well as dissent.  They created a public forum and then turned it into a partisan meeting.    The question is not about the number of people it takes to run a tech company. The more important question is, what should be done when people in a company deliberately produce a toxic product?  It's telling that before Musk, Twitter censored President Trump but provided links to child porn.  Twitter produced toxic waste.  A lot of work is required to restore trust in Twitter.  But with Musk and fewer employees, it's making the right changes.

FAUCI: I’M A BUREAUCRAT, NOT A SCIENTIST

 The deposition of Anthony Fauci took place today in the lawsuit commenced by Louisiana and Missouri, alleging that numerous Biden administration officials colluded with and directed big tech and social media giants to censor dissenting scientific and medical voices with regard to Covid.

***

Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry, who attended the deposition, tweeted that Fauci had a lack of memory.

...

One of my favorite quotes from Fauci’s deposition today: “I have a very busy day job running a six billion dollar institute. I don’t have time to worry about things like the Great Barrington Declaration.”

— Jenin Younes (@Leftylockdowns1) November 23, 2022

 The Great Barrington Declaration was ultimately signed by thousands of doctors and scientists. It challenged the covid shutdown policies that were recommended by Fauci and implemented by governments at the federal and state levels

The truth will out https://t.co/LbPs0TPaep

— Jim Hanson (@JimHansonDC) November 24, 2022

Therefore, as you received Christ Jesus the Lord, so walk in him, 7 rooted and built up in him and established in the faith, just as you were taught, abounding in thanksgiving. (Col 2:6–7) https://t.co/WJqtoJY7x9

— David Limbaugh (@DavidLimbaugh) November 24, 2022

What makes the lying media mad? Hint: It's not the big lies.

BRIAN KILMEADE: Press mad at Biden for lying about granddaughter's wedding https://t.co/mdjs0DYTa3

— Fox News (@FoxNews) November 24, 2022

The Fake News Media spent the last few days smearing Tucker Carlson and @libsoftiktok, just to watch their BS narrative all come crashing down. https://t.co/SW2EmrLtAK

— The Columbia Bugle 🇺🇸 (@ColumbiaBugle) November 24, 2022

God Shave the Queen

 

 Sure enough, in the wake of the mass shooting at a Colorado nightclub that caters to the homosexual crowd, the militants who use homosexuality as victimhood cover to help in the overthrow of our nation and society have indeed come out from the woodwork to hurl the accusations and attacks at us.

But the common denominator here is Judeo-Christianity, western civilization and America as founded as the existential threat and enemy that must be utterly annihilated. As more and more of a militant anti-American attitude becomes mainstreamed into government and the public discourse across all sectors of society, wrong-think will be punished. The concept of "you will be made to care" is well on its way to either being codified as law, or failing that adopted as a standing principle for employers and businesses. Bitterly ironic that someone like Jack Phillips has his life destroyed for the principle of refusing to serve someone because it goes against his beliefs while the very same principle will be used against you if you do not accept theirs. And yet, that is exactly what is happening.

Read the whole thing. 

Rea 

The financial collapse of the crypto exchange FTX was brutal and swift. Almost overnight, its CEO Sam Bankman-Fried saw his $16 billion fortune wiped out.

SBF, as he’s popularly known, managed to fool almost the entire world—though not quite everyone.

In hindsight, it’s not hard to see the red flags at FTX. There was no board of directors. Bankman-Fried couldn’t answer simple questions about his funding. The executive leadership was shady and there was the whole “cabal of roommates” in the Bahamas.

One thing that hasn’t gotten enough attention, however, is SBF’s philosophy of “effective altruism,” a social movement that rejects self-interest and instead focuses on “how to benefit others as much as possible.”

Many people will no doubt applaud SBF for his philosophy. Putting others before oneself is considered by many to be not just a virtue but the virtue, and it could help explain Bankman-Fried’s meteoric rise and celebrity. Legacy media swooned over SBF’s apparent selflessness. Story after story after story gushed over the crypto altruist who wanted to give his wealth away—even as he lived in a $40 million penthouse.

Bankman-Fried clearly liked to talk about his altruism, which many see as a clear and obvious virtue. Or is it?

‘Do Not Confuse Altruism With Kindness’

Ayn Rand famously didn’t see altruism as a virtue; she saw it as a sinister force.

“Do not confuse altruism with kindness, good will or respect for the rights of others,” Rand wrote. “These are not primaries, but consequences, which, in fact, altruism makes impossible.”

Now, I’m not an Objectivist. I actually celebrate giving and see charity as part of my Christian calling. But I think Rand is on to something. While I don’t believe “selfishness is a virtue” or “that greed is good,” I do believe in rational self-interest, the idea that it’s both normal and prudent for humans to advance their own interests in their economic decisions.

The idea of rational self-interest is central to capitalism and was famously articulated by Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations.

"It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest,” Smith wrote. “We address ourselves, not to their humanity, but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities but of their advantages."

Smith, like myself, didn’t see charity as a sin or mere foolishness. But he clearly understood that humans are naturally self-interested creatures and that this instinct is not actually detrimental to human flourishing, but a key to it. This is the miracle of a market economy, which leverages self-interest through trade and voluntary action to improve everyone’s standard of living.

Now, contrast this sentiment with Sam Bankman-Fried, who said he was bailing out digital assets not because he saw an opportunity but because he felt it was the right thing to do.

“It’s not fair to customers,” SBF said on CNBC’s Squawk Box.

Or consider what Bankman-Fried told an Institute of International Finance audience in August.

“It's okay to do a deal that is moderately bad, in bailing out a place,” SBF said.

Purchasing failing companies to protect their customers seems like a dubious business strategy to me, and it was one of the things that caught the attention of seasoned traders, who began to raise questions about FTX. Those traders turned out to be right. FTX, which recently had a valuation of $32 billion, was massively overleveraged, and when rival crypto exchange Binance announced it was offloading hundreds of millions of dollars of FTT (FTX’s token), a run on funds ensued.

But it’s worth focusing on Bankman-Fried’s rhetoric a little more, because it occurred to me it sounds a little like a character in Atlas Shrugged.

‘Material Greed Isn’t Everything’

James Taggart, president of Taggart Transcontinental, is the most prominent villain in Ayn Rand’s magnum opus. He talks endlessly about serving mankind and sneers at those who are concerned with crass profits.

“Material greed isn’t everything. There are non-material ideals to consider,” Taggart lectures his sister Dagny, the hero of the story.

Taggart’s smug thinking is what prompts him to take on his own bad deal, a massive expansion of Taggart Transcontinental into Mexico. He confesses to “a feeling of shame” that he owns a railroad, but “the Mexican people have nothing but one or two inadequate lines.”

“The Mexicans, it seems to me, are a very diligent people, crushed by their primitive economy. How can they become industrialized if nobody lends them a hand? When considering an investment, we should, in my opinion, take a chance on human beings, rather than on purely material factors.”

Taggart gets his way and—like FTX—his San Sebastian Line is a disaster. The lesson in both cases is clear: beware business deals based on altruism.

SBF, like James Taggart, spoke often about serving humanity. His concern with climate change, global pandemics, and progressive causes earned him laurels and fawning press. Even after the collapse of FTX, newspapers are discussing his noble efforts “to prevent another pandemic.” But there is also a notable difference between Rand’s petulant railroad baron and Bankman-Fried.

While James Taggart is a mean, surly, unscrupulous man, his altruism seems somewhat genuine; either he’s too stupid to see his good intentions will bear bad fruit or he lacks the self awareness to realize his “altruistic” ideas are not as pure as he believes. (It’s important to understand that even though Taggart spurns selfishness and greed, he is clearly a selfish and greedy person.)

With Sam Bankman-Fried, this appears less true.

In an exchange with Vox reporter Kelsey Piper, SBF’s altruistic philosophy came up. Piper noted he was “really good at talking about ethics” publicly. His response is telling.

“I had to be…it’s what reputations are made of, to some extent,” SBF answered. “I feel bad for those who get [expletive] by it…by this dumb game we woke westerners play where we say the right shiboleths [sic] and everyone likes us.”

From this response, it’s clear Bankman-Fried knew he was a poser. His advocacy was just part of the new game of stakeholder capitalism. (Interestingly, SBF actually refers to ESG as a perversion.)

Sam Bankman-Fried, unlike James Taggart, is not an idiot. He knew what he was doing. I don’t know if this makes SBF more of a villain than Taggart or not.

But it certainly makes Bankman-Fried’s downfall all the more tragic.

This article was republished from the author's Substack.

Jon Miltimore

Jonathan Miltimore is the Managing Editor of FEE.org. His writing/reporting has been the subject of articles in TIME magazine, The Wall Street Journal, CNN, Forbes, Fox News, and the Star Tribune.

Bylines: Newsweek, The Washington Times, MSN.com, The Washington Examiner, The Daily Caller, The Federalist, the Epoch Times. 

This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.

YouTube censors Reality

Big Picture, 2022 Midterm Elections Highlight the Distinct Difference Between Ballots and Votes

Republicans have focused on persuading voters.  Democrats have focused on collecting ballots.  It's why stroke victims who can't speak (Fetterman) and candidates who won't debate (Katie Hobbs) win elections.  The winner is the one with more ballots, not the one bringing voters to the polls.

Why Republicans are not preparing for elections with this in mind shows - in no uncertain terms - that they have a serious problem.  They are throwing money at consultants that don't care whether their candidates win or lose.   The GOP’s Political Consultant Problem

 As the political discussion centers on the 2022 wins and losses from the midterm election, one thing that stands out in similarity to the 2020 general election is the difference between ballots and votes.  It appears in some states this is the ‘new normal.’

Where votes were the focus, the Biden administration suffered losses.  Where ballots were the focus, the Biden administration won.

Perhaps the two states most reflective of ‘ballots’ being more important than ‘votes’ are Michigan and Pennsylvania.  Despite negative polling and public opinion toward two specific candidates in those states, Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer and Pennsylvania Senate candidate John Fetterman achieved victories.

Whitmer and Fetterman were not campaigning for votes, that is old school. Instead, the machinery behind both candidates focused on the modern path. The Democrat machines in both states focused on ballot collection and ignored the irrelevant votes as cast.

Since the advent of ballot centric focus through mail-in and collection drop-off processes, votes have become increasingly less valuable amid the organizers who wish to control election outcomes.  As a direct and specific result, ballot collection has become the key to Democrat party success.

The effort to attain votes for candidates is less important than the strategy of collecting ballots.

It should be emphasized; these are two distinctly different election systems.

...

When ‘ballot organization’ becomes more important than ‘vote winning,’ you modify your electoral campaign approaches accordingly.  It might sound simplistic, but inside the distinct difference between ballots and votes you will find why refusing debates is a successful strategy.

If you are trying to win votes you could never fathom campaign success by refusing to debate an opponent.  However, if your focus is centered around ballot collection, the debate is essentially irrelevant.

Died Suddenly

A most inconvenient truth, and this time, it's real.

“DIED SUDDENLY” is premiering today at 6PM EThttps://t.co/qPIpJLAncM

pic.twitter.com/cIw0ldPLjB

— Noor Bin Ladin (@NoorBinLadin) November 21, 2022

Kurt Schlichter: The Case For Ron DeSantis 2024

 Kurt Schlichter is writing a series of essays to make the case for and the case against both DeSantis and Trump.  Here's the case for DeSantis ....(read the whole thing)

It’s going to be King Kong vs. Godzilla and, while a few pipsqueak Rodan's might be flapping around (Hi Mike Pence), this bout is the battle royale. The 2024 primary will be Donald Trump v. Ron DeSantis. Everyone else is barely relevant ....

Ron DeSantis is Trump’s number one competitor precisely because of his greatest strength – competence. Not just competence in running his dinosaur-ridden state but in turning it bright red and annihilating the competition. “Competence” is going to be the watchword in 2024, along with “normality.” People want to go back to “normal,” which some think of as American life before the drama that began when Donald Trump came down the escalator (note that these people do not necessarily see Trump as the cause of the abnormality; his rise is seen by many as a reaction to the abnormality). But many of us older folks see “normal” as the America we grew up in, before 9/11 and the 2000 election (an election that was A-OK to deny because of reasons and shut up you transphobe). We want a prosperous America and an America that is not constantly in turmoil and at war, facing alleged (and not-so-alleged) existential threats from outside and within. We want an America where weird perversions are not declared awesome and where those of us who oppose groomers waving their tu-tu-clad man-butts in the faces of kindergarteners are not declared dangerous terrorist bigots. We would prefer a country where mean tweets don’t happen because they are not necessary since the ruling caste is functioning and not in need of radical push-back.

Competence goes with normality. It is the ability to perform one’s job with a high level of skill, and Ron DeSantis has done that as governor. His state is secure and prosperous. His handling of Hurricane Ian was stellar. The storm response was planned and executed flawlessly, so flawlessly that once the wind died down you never heard about it again. And what you did not hear, if you did not live there, was how the power came back fast and how bridges got rebuilt in days. You would have heard all about it if those things didn’t happen. Now, especially if they live in a hellhole like California, people look at the construction jobs that clog the freeways for months or years and they know that it does not have to be this way.

Godzilla

 

Jeffrey Epstein

 

Katie Hobbs Projected To Win Arizona Governor’s Race With 108% Of Precincts Reporting

 

Republicans have been roundly condemned for denying an election that was 8% more democratic than the last election.

The apple doesn't fall far from the tree

🤣🤣 pic.twitter.com/teFsoF1W5a

— Kim Dotcom (@KimDotcom) November 15, 2022

The collapse of FTX - short version

The collapse of FTX

 

 

Time to face reality, realize when we're wrong.

 House Majority Whip James Clyburn, D-S.C., blamed the right's "demonization of Nancy Pelosi" for the attack on Paul Pelosi in their San Francisco home, saying that this is what happens in a country that follows "Germany in the early '30s."   

The man most responsible for putting Biden in the White House – the Democrat Kingmaker – called Republicans Nazis.  Accusing Republican critics of Nancy Pelosi of inciting the attack on her husband.  

We tend to think that attacks like this are so far out that nobody would believe them.  We are wrong.  When Biden says to a group of Black supporters: “They’re going to put you back in chains,” people on the Right use it as an example of rhetoric that’s so overheated that it is counterproductive.  It’s not.  

Normal people view this kind of rhetorical excesses through our Overton Window and don’t believe that others will not view them the same way.  We’re wrong.  

When Clyburn accuses us of being Nazis and Donald Trump of being Hitler, many people nod and agree.  They see us the same way.  They may be our neighbors and even nod as they pass us on the street, but they believe that if given power, we’ll bring back slavery, send our enemies to concentration camps and begin gassing Jews.  If you think that’s an exaggeration that no one would believe, you’re wrong.  

That’s the situation we find ourselves in.  It’s partly our fault; we ignore these accusations at our peril because we know these are lies that anyone can see through.  That’s wrong.  It’s partly because, with very few exceptions, the mass media is on the other side, and acts are the megaphone to amplify and spread these smears.  The press is an oligopoly controlled by the opposition.

It does not have to be this way.  The first order of business is to create – or buy – our own press.  Musk’s takeover of Twitter is a good start.  But the press is financially precarious, and what Musk has done with Twitter can be done with local and regional organs, including local broadcast affiliates.  

More thoughts on that anon.   

The Other Side Gets the Ball, Too

 As the GOP prepares for post-mortems and mutual recriminations -- and some of that will be necessary -- it's also important to keep in mind that in any contest, the other team has strengths as well, and they get their time with the ball too. And that they're going to score.

We got a little self-deluded about abortion having all but vanished as a factor in the race. It didn't.

Abortion was a costly victory. That doesn't mean you don't take the victory; only a GOPe Grifter would say that you perpetually run on an issue and never actually try to win that issue on a policy level.

But winning the issue of abortion, finally, did provoke a powerful backlash from the 40% of the country that considers abortion to be an unholy sacrament.

Just as Obamacare was a costly victory that, from the Democrats' perspective, they absolutely needed to seize and accept the fallout as unavoidable consequences, so too does the GOP have to take the win on abortion, but with the unavoidable consequence of a riled-up leftwing progressive base.

And on that, even though abortion faded as an issue as we got close to election day, millions and millions of votes were cast weeks and even a month before election day. I checked the Pennsylvania mail-in voting rules; the website didn't give a firm date, but it said early voting usually takes place "4-6 weeks" before election day.

So people were casting votes for Fetterneck in the last week of September. When the July-August passions over Dobbs were still hot.

Another important factor is that the Democrat Party, being now the party of smug, comfortable affluent white professionals and civil servants who imagine themselves to be of the professional class, is now less of a political party than a Lifestyle Brand. By which I mean: they are affluent enough to not care as much about minor little things like gas costing six dollars a gallon and chicken breast costing almost $8 a pound (when you can even get it!). Or even that their 401K's have lost one third to 40% of their value.

They like advertising the fact -- or advertising the pretense -- that they're so wealthy that they don't care about the trivial worries of money that so concern the Lumpenproletariat:

Does anyone think this Bearded BBW is really unconcerned about the price of carbohydrates? Because I sure don't.

The Lifestyle Brand Liberals are fine with the price of gasoline, which they understand must Necessarily Skyrocket (TM) if we're to save the world from Carbon Dioxide (The Invisible Killer). They don't love paying more for gas, but they also don't love paying more in taxes. They accept doing so, however, as tithings they pay to the Universal Church of the God-State.

One sad lesson we learned in Iraq is that any tyranny has its fervent supporters -- there is no such thing as a tyranny that is hated by everyone. Such a tyranny would not last more than a day and an hour.

The Democrats' Covid Tyranny, of course, has millions of passionate Mask Baathists who voted not for Covid Amnesty but for Covid Vengeance, vengeance against those who have dared to unmask over the past year. The Democrats still very much count upon these jihadists as party loyalists.

Finally, the Lifestyle Brand that is the Democrat Party has little to pitch its smug, affluent white Karen core of extraordinarily mediocre careerists who think they're genius world-beaters except constant validation and slurs against the proles -- narcissistic mediocrities of the sort that make up the Democrat Party need to be constantly assured that there are huge swathes of people who are inferior to them.

The Democrat Party exists nearly exclusively to invent Nazi-like dehumanization campaigns against half the country so that the intellectually insecure sub-mediocrities of the civil-service and mid-management mid-wits can feel they're Superior to someone.

And the Democrat Party is creating these dehumanization campaigns effectively enough. The last campaign convinced the midwits that the people the Democrat Party is using government power to censor, surveil, and jail are The Real Fascists, and that the midwits should therefore feel Scorn towards them, and feel a swell of Unearned Superiority towards them.

And they reward the Democrat Party with their votes for this service.

No one will ever vote against someone who makes them feel like Somebody.

This is all primal and primally ugly stuff, but the Democrat Party has always been about this very base tribalism. They've been doing it for 100 years. They're good at it.

We maybe forgot that a bit.

That doesn't let us off the hook for having failed to counter this. That doesn't let us off the hook for having failed to beat them.

But we should keep it in perspective. Patton warned against soldiers imagining the Nazis to be ten-foot-tall giants who were unbeatable in battle.

But we should likewise resist imagining the Democrats as one-foot-tall Jonah Goldbergs unable to take three steps without stepping on the dick of the better-endowed studs servicing their wives. They are the nastiest race hustlers the modern world has created, in bed with Hollywood and Madison Avenue with access to all the expertise that professionals and artists in the fields of emotional manipulation and brainwashing can grant them, and they get to run their plays, too.

And they can run race- and class-baiting plays for Suburban White Karen against lower-class white men just the same as they used to run race-baiting plays for black and Hispanic voters against rich whites. They can run whatever racial/class play they need to. They are amoral and without conscience. Their only morality is Marxism.

Google Is Influencing Elections by Flipping Votes on ‘Massive Scale’: Researcher

The Left Were the Mad Scientists, We Were Their Lab Rats

 Once the Left took the presidency, the House, and Senate, they tried a deadly experiment on the American people.

As the midterms approach, one way of looking at America’s current disaster is that we, the American people, were lab rats. And since 2021, the Left were the mad scientists, eager to try out their crackpot leftist experiments on us. 

The result is that the housing market is tottering on the verge of collapse. 

As interest rates soar, our $31 trillion national debt crowds out everything else in the budget. 

Inflation roars at a rate of 8-9 percent per annum, higher than at any time in 40 years. Yet the prices of the stuff of life—food, fuel, shelter, energy—are far steeper still than the official rate. 

No one is safe from thugs anymore—whether a commuter on a New York subway or the Pelosis in Pacific Heights.

The country reportedly has a 25-day supply of diesel fuel—the energy source that runs the nation. Meanwhile, we keep draining the Strategic Petroleum Reserve of oil—a commodity we have in abundance but refuse to produce fully.

We never fixed the supply-chain crisis of last year, and so still face shortages of key consumer goods. 

The labor participation rate is at an all-time low—given fat government COVID subsidies, the Siren-song appeal of staying home after the lockdowns, fear of COVID, and millions of workers with long COVID.

The post-Kabul Pentagon is quiet about the depletion of its critical stocks of weaponry. We have sent billions of dollars’ worth in howitzer shells, javelin missiles, and Hilmar rocket launchers to Ukraine without replenishing our own arsenals. The Army’s recruitment rate is off 50 percent this year....

Read the whole thing.

RADICAL? You have no idea how radical Democrats are.

 

The Democrats focus on abortion, defining it as the most important freedom women have – the right to kill their babies – including the right to kill it after it’s born – shows just how radical they are. 

You didn’t realize that the right to kill your newborn was part of the Democrat party’s platform?  That’s because the corporate media hid this little gem by Ralph Northam, former Governor of Virginia, in answer to a question about third-trimester abortion.  He took it a step further and discussed what should be done after the baby was delivered.

“``The infant would be kept comfortable . . . and then a discussion would ensue.''  

Translation: the right to kill your just-born child is now yours. 

Defenders of infanticide complain that Northam was referring to children born with deformities.  But what’s a “deformity?”  Democrats use euphemisms for all sorts of things that most normal people know are barbaric.  They are now busy defining removing young girls’ breasts and vaginas as “gender-affirming care.”  For boys, “gender-affirming care” is cutting off penises and testicles and sewing in a vagina as a replacement.  They recently elevated a woman to the Supreme Court who asserted under oath that she did not know what a “woman” was.   This is Orwellian in the true sense of the word.    

Stevie Wonder was born blind; Helen Keller was both blind and deaf.  Deformed?  Downs syndrome children are “deformed,” as are those born with Spina Bifida and cleft palates.   One of the most common defects is a heart defect.  Deformities worth a death sentence are whatever they say they are.

Medical science can now detect abnormalities that were once hidden until the newborn developed and the defect manifested itself.  When you can lose your job for not getting a government-mandated shot or be defamed for knowing that men and women are different - and that you can tell the difference at a glance - you can be sure that “deformity” will soon mean anything that people who want to do away with their less-than-perfect child want it to mean. 

Please note: none of Northam's defenders support a law known as the "Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act."  Why?  They don’t want to protect the baby that survives a failed abortion.

Paul Pelosi's behavior after he opened the door for police seems REALLY relevant.

WATCH 👇👇👇https://t.co/lphZRCofO8

— Larry O'Connor (@LarryOConnor) November 6, 2022

 

 

What has become of us

 I’m going to skip over the recent reports that the CDC, DHS and other federal agencies have been directing social media platforms on not just what but whom they would like to be censored. A clear first amendment violation....

Needless to say this obliterates the idea that these are simply private companies doing what they want. This is fascism, textbook.

In my view, we desperately need one major social media platform to embrace free speech and allow for open debate, this is the only pathway to make that a reality. While I don’t trust Elon Musk I am left with no choice but to pray his prior claim of being a “free speech absolutist” was sincere and he can somehow navigate this minefield to make my dream a reality. It may sound like hyperbole but I think the fate of humanity may rest on his shoulders; without open dialogue the chasm between our warring camps will widen and things will almost certainly turn violent. Let’s give peace one last shot. Words will never hurt you but civil wars most certainly can.

Read the whole thing. 

Outlaw Mutilation

 

We look back on the primitive people of the past and sneer at their bizarre and monstrous atrocities – and rightly so. Even the civilized Romans recorded horrible acts by their elite – Emperor Elagabalus allegedly wanted to castrate himself and do some more cutting in order to become a Romanette, while Nero sliced the bologna off his boyfriend, a kid who was unlucky enough to resemble Nero’s dead wife. But here’s the thing – the Romans themselves wrote about this stuff recognizing that it was an atrocity. The Romans at least has a bit of moral clarity. But our savage elite celebrates the surgical disfigurement of disordered people, including kids. Our senile president sits with a male pretending to be a girl and cheers it on. Mutilation is a disgrace and it must stop.

Yeah, the word is “mutilation.” Chopping of penises and testicles, cutting off healthy breasts, trying to sculpt obscene parodies of male and female sex organs – these are mutilations. The Aztecs, no slouch in the atrocity department, would look at this in disgust. 

“Top surgery,” “bottom surgery” – they know it is all an abomination because they try to hide double mastectomies and castration behind benign euphemisms like “gender affirming care.” It’s a lie wrapped up inside a deception. And our garbage ruling class think this is a good thing. 

Oh, somewhere in their broken brains, they do understand that this is barbarity of the cruelest kind, so they always initially deny and obfuscate when confronted. “What? We don’t do gender-affirming surgery on minors! Why, just ignore our websites and videos where we brag about doing gender-affirming surgery on minors.” 

But then, when exposed – after they call you a terrorist for letting people know about the horrors they are inflicting on sick and vulnerable people – they shift into, “It’s actually a good thing, this thing we were denying doing just a couple minutes ago.”...

Read the whole thing.