Archive for the ‘culture’ Category

Why Corona Panic? Because we’re so Insulated from Danger

Posted: March 10, 2020 by datechguy in culture, News/opinion
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Right now the panic over the Corona Virus is doing a lot more damage than the virus itself. The media for both political and rating reasons are pushing this for all it’s worth and the public seems to be buying into this hook, line and sinker.

One might wonder why this is the case. After all this isn’t the first new virus out there and it won’t be the last, moreover the death rate is rather small and there is a specific population that is most at risk (elderly and infirm) who can be targeted for protective measures.

So why is everyone acting as if the world is going to end and that we are all in danger? I suspect because we so rarely are.

Unless you are living in a gang controlled area of a Democrat run city or have a job that involves risking your life regularly odds are you rarely if ever face an actual non-accidental danger to your life. Oh there is the odd hurricane or tornado and once is a very great while some lunitic goes off on a binge, but the reality is that basic threats to one’s life that were common 200 years ago, from nearby enemies, brigands and raiders or from diseases which were common 100 year ago have generally been eliminated from ordinary life in he US.

We life in a society that rarely faces death, and while that is good thing one of the side effects culturally is that we as a people don’t cope with the reality or the possibility of death very well. We deny it, we duck and dodge but death as a reality of life just isn’t there for most people on a daily basis.

So just like college students at $50K a year universities who cry oppression without irony when ginned up by activists with an ulterior motive the public living in one of the safest societies in the history of humanity is stampeded by a media who knows better into a panic for a disease which while dangerous is when it comes down to it a severe flu and can be arrested in its spread by basic hygiene that people should be doing anyways.

This is the price of the life we currently have and given the alternative of living in much more dangerous times it’s a small price to pay, but I sometimes wonder how such people are going to cope when an actual crisis comes up..

I suspect not well.

Joe Biden Saved by the Mrs. Tessi Democrats

Posted: March 5, 2020 by datechguy in culture, elections, politics, primaries
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Back in Jr high I had a crush on a girl named Mary Beth Tessi.

She was not only beautiful girl (oh what eyes!) and as Italian as her name implied but brilliant. As far as I was concerned time stopped when she entered a room. Alas for the dreams of a 13 year old she married someone else, a very fine and devout fellow and like myself has been married over 30 years. Both are very lucky to have each other but I must confess 40+ years later I still melt a bit on the rare occasions I see her.

Oddly enough while I rarely see her the person I DO still see regularly is her mother who I never knew in my youth. She’s in her late 70’s early 80’s is very devout and I admire her greatly. While considerably younger than my mother (who would be 96 if alive today) they were friendly and despite my balding head and occasionally gray beard she invariably slips me a five dollar bill and tells me to buy myself and DaWife some ice cream when she sees me.

I constantly run into her at Church or Catholic events or in adoration but there was one time she really threw me off.

It was about five years ago during the primaries, I had run into her at Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament and the subject of the primaries and election came up in passing and she expressed her hope that Hillary would be able to win.

I was Gobsmacked. There could not be a candidate more antithetical to the values of a devout Catholic than Hillary but as I spoke to her a bit on it I suddenly realized something.

Mrs. Tessi came of age at a time when the most powerful Catholic from Massachusetts was John McCormick a devout Catholic. Her daughter Mary Beth was born during the term of John F Kennedy the 1st Catholic President of the United States and her 2nd when Bobby was still alive. During her 40’s the biggest name in the Democrat party nationally and in the state was Tip O’Neill as Catholic as you can get. Furthermore Hillary had stayed married to a cheating husband a very Catholic thing.

She wasn’t a person who followed politics and when she thinks of the Democrat party she still thought of it as the party of McCormick, O’Neill & Kennedy and I certainly wasn’t going to able to shatter that illusion, in a few minutes when my own mother didn’t figure it out Jan 2010 two years before she died.

And that brings us to SuperTuesday and Joe Biden.

If you look at the exit polls there was a huge divide when it comes to age on the Democrat side. Among the worst groups for Bernie Sanders were Democrat voters over the age of 65 (15% for Bernie). For Joe Biden this was among the best groups for him (48%). Meanwhile the best group for Bernie were people age 18-29 (58%) and 2nd were those from 30-44 (41%). Those age brackets were Biden’s worst (30-44 23%, 18-29 17%).

This is very significant, because one of the things I’ve observed in life is that what you were taught in school tends to stick with you.

The age groups who voted for Joe Biden were born at a time when Democrats and Republicans alike were cold warriors and taught in school that still extolled Capitalism and discussed the Horrors of communism. If you were born in 1975, the low end of the 45-65 you were being taught American History while Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher and St. John Paul II were bringing down the Evil Empire of the Soviets. If you were born in 1965 you were taught the evils of communism and if you were born in 1955 or before odds are you had a family member who fought against the communists in Korea. It’s worth noting btw that voters age 45-65 AND 65 or older do didn’t vote for Biden went for Mike Bloomberg the vocal pro-capitalist in the race.

For the last two weeks when it became likely that Bernie Sanders could be the Democrat nominee those voters who were taught the evils of communism and socialism were confronted by an MSM who fearful of what an unrepentant communist at the top of the Democrat ticket would do to races at the bottom for the 1st time did not sugar coat Bernie Sanders love of Communism and history of backing folks like Fidel. They finally saw Bernie Sanders for what he was not because the media and party which knew all along, finally found it in their interest to tell them.

And so remembering the lessons of their youth they turned out and voted against their cold war adversary. For those who decided that they just couldn’t vote for a human gaffe machine who couldn’t tell his sister from his wife ended up voting for Mike Bloomberg the unrepentant Capitalist in the race. It’s no coincidence that among the groups that Bloomberg did best with were the 45-65 & 65 and up age groups while voters who were in school in time to hear Socialism and Communism glorified (ages 30-44 & 18-29) loathed him.

It’s fair to say that for now Barack Obama’s efforts to push Mayor Pete and Senator Amy out of the race might have saved Joe Biden’s political life. It’s even fair to say that Joe Biden’s political life was saved by Black voters who remember him as Obama’s right hand man.

But I think that Joe Biden campaign lives another day because the Mrs. Tessi Democrats remembered the lessons of their youth and voted to save their party against an evil they still recognized.

Alas in four years there will likely not be enough of them to do so again.

One other thing About Democrats/Socialism and Bernie

Posted: February 24, 2020 by datechguy in culture, elections, politics, primaries
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There is one other point I’d like to add to yesterday’s post concerning the Democrats, Socialism and Communism. I freely confess this this conjecture but based on my observations it’s correct.

For quite a while Democrats leaders have seen the direction this party had been going, particularly in the schools. They saw the moves away from discipline, the rejection of the rule of law, the moves to re-write American History to into anti-american history, the removal of values from the system, and the whole nine yards. They saw all of these things happening at the same time that the GOP began to embrace all of these things.

Moreover the Democrats were in a position on the local, state and federal level to do something about it. To make sure that American values were still taught in American schools, to make sure that American History was not re-written to favor our enemies to make sure that “enforcing the law” was not a dirty word and to make sure that the inmates were not running the asylum.

They did not.

Why? They were afraid.

They feared that unless they embraced these socialist, communist elements would become an effective 3rd party only with numbers beyond the libertarians. Moreover with the abandoning of Americanism and religion Democrats were even more a coalition party of many different groups some with vastly different cultures and priorities united only in their rejection traditional American Judeo-Christian culture. So the loss of any one of those part might put them in the minority forever.

And the loss of power, influence and cash that such a cleansing of these elements in the party even if it was only for a few years, was more than the party could bear. Much better to pay the lip service and advance some of their agenda, after all, as long as they voted the way that secured power and influence for the leadership it didn’t matter what these fringe elements thought.

This could work as long as their numbers were small, but as schools and universities moved unchecked ever farther to the secular left those numbers continued to grow to the point where Democrats are no longer saying to socialist/communists that they much embrace them if they want any chance of power, but it’s literally becoming the other way around.

The rise of Bernie puts give the democrats three unpalatable choices

  1. Embrace the whole Socialist/Communist agenda in public
  2. Walk away & concede this cycle in the hopes that the Bernie Crowd McGoverns itself away
  3. Walk away and take the structures with them and hope that enough Judeo-Christians Americans who voted GOP because there was no place else for them to go might embrace a party that embraced traditional Democrat values without rejecting American Judeo-Christian values

None of these choices are going to be fun for the left but if they had not taken the small hit years ago they would not be in this position today.

Why Donald Trump Courts Black Americans

Posted: February 22, 2020 by julietteochieng in Always look at the bright side of Trump, American Success Stories, crime, culture, elections
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Setting the captives free

by baldilocks

A guy I follow on Twitter pointed out something that has been in the back of my mind ever since 2016 when Donald Trump asked black Americans what we had to lose by supporting him in his presidential bid.

Over 90% of black voters voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016, but so what? Black people are only 13% of the US population.

(By the way, over 92 million eligible voters did not vote in the 2016 presidential election! I bet that number will be smaller this year.)

The point is that Donald Trump did not need black voters to win in 2016 and does not need us this year. So why does he help and support black Americans? Why does he want us on the Trump Train?

There was a lot of predictable race-baiting last week when President Trump pardoned Bernard Kerik, Eddie DeBartolo, Jr. and granted clemency to Rod Blagojevich. All three are white men and as their stories on were all the talk on Twitter, Chelsea Handler said this.

When people have a caricature formed in their minds, they are unable to see solid reality right in front of their faces. Social Media exacerbates this phenomenon because people want to be part of that which seems popular. Conversely, people hate to be contradicted and hate being wrong – although both happen all the time.  I remember the first time someone tried to explicitly shame me for predicting something that didn’t pan out.

“I was wrong.”
“YOU WERE WRONG! Aren’t you ashamed?”
“Why should I be ashamed of being wrong? I’m not God; therefore, I make mistakes.”

Yes, it really happened like that.

Anyway, the reality is that President Trump pardoned and granted clemency to many others. And many of these others are black.

Here’s a sample.

Angela Stanton-King

When best-selling author and BET reality TV star Angela Stanton-King received word on Tuesday that President Trump had just granted her a full pardon, she was literally overcome.

“I just started hyperventilating right at the airport,” she told Newsmax. “I was just crying like a baby. People thought someone had died.” (…)

For Stanton-King, the pardon represented another amazing chapter in her life’s extraordinary  journey. After surviving a troubled childhood involving abuse, she got caught up in a stolen vehicle ring, and received a prison sentence. She was released in 2005.

“When I was released from prison 15 years ago,” she told Newsmax in an exclusive interview, “I was given a $25 check and a bus ticket and told to start my life over.

“I came home to four children, and I came home to two tombstones,” she said. “My mother was in one and my grandmother was in the other. (…)

Stanton-King defied the odds. She went on to write a best-selling book about her journey, Life of a Real Housewife. The book launched her career as a publishing entrepreneur, and that led to a big role in a BET reality TV show. She also founded the American King Foundation, a nonprofit focused on criminal-justice reform and reuniting families that have been separated by mass incarceration.

In the comments to Handler’s Tweet, many others point to the error in her implication, but it’s a safe bet that she will block it all out and pretend that it didn’t happen all the way up to the next time she decides to point the racism finger at the president or at conservatives in general. She is what she is. Like-minded politicos and media professionals will do the same.

President Trump knows this, but he still keeps reaching out to fellow Americans who are black. Why? I think I have an answer.

What do all of these newly-freed former prisoners – white, black, brown, etc. – have in common besides being mostly non-violent offenders? It’s this: they all hit bottom and are determined to climb back up; they are intent on becoming better people than the persons they were. More often than not, someone saw their efforts and gave them a hand up.

They are all looking to improve themselves the right way.

That’s a very American trait which President Trump appreciates. If you ask me, he doesn’t care whether or not any of these people vote for him – many of them probably won’t be able to anyway.

What he is doing: using his power and authority to make it easier for the repentant to keep walking in the right direction instead of reverting to their old selves and old lives.

He’s inviting all of them – great and small — to be a part of the American Dream, their birthright. He’s inviting them to rebuild their lives and do their small part in making America great again.

Black, white, brown, red, yellow, they already lost the most precious thing they had to lose: freedom. Now they have it back and the president is just trying to help them hold onto it.

Do I think that the percentage of black American voters who vote for Donald Trump in 2020 will be larger than in 2016? Probably, but not by much.

Then again, I could be wrong.

Juliette Akinyi Ochieng has been blogging since 2003 as baldilocks. Her older blog is here.  She published her first novel, Tale of the Tigers: Love is Not a Game in 2012.

Follow Juliette on Facebook, Twitter, MeWe, Patreon and Social Quodverum.

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