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Report from Louisiana: Get me Outta Here!

Posted: August 23, 2021 by Pat Austin in Uncategorized
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By:  Pat Austin

SHREVEPORT – So many conflicting emotions and stories on my news feed this morning. It’s enough to make one just pull the plug, put the house up for sale, and move out to the most rural, off the grid place you can find.

On the one hand, JOY! It’s the first day of school! Precious back-to-school pictures fill my social media feed of little children with big backpacks and happy smiles.

On the other hand, I also see one post after another of cancelled festivals and events due to the Covid surge. New Orleans has cancelled JazzFest, again. Everyone worries about Mardi Gras – will it happen or not?  Many other small, local festivals are announcing cancellations: the KBON Music Festival, the Delcambre Shrimp Festival, and Festival Acadiens et Créoles was rescheduled to the spring. The Natchitoches Meat Pie Festival and the Scott Boudin Festival also cancelled. The list continues to grow.

But school is fine, apparently, as is packed arenas for music concerts, and sports events.

It doesn’t add up.

In addition to all of this, on a more local level, we had at least three homicides in Shreveport yesterday several more shootings on top of that, one high-speed chase, and one elderly woman was stabbed sixteen times in the face and neck.

We may have topped 60 homicides for the year here yesterday, and we still have four more months to go. It isn’t getting any better, we had no leadership, and nobody willing to do anything to stop this violence. Shreveport Mayor Adrian Perkins has posted nothing but Covid vaccination and information on his social media feed for as far back as I can stand to scroll; not a word about the daily shootings and killings.

Silence.

It all just makes you think. You know, last week we were in a small community and nobody got shot, stabbed, or tried to kill a policeman. We could take an evening walk through town, leave our front doors unlocked, and not worry about getting robbed or mugged. People in these smaller communities know each other, they go to church together, the family unit is tight. That’s not to say they don’t have their problems, they do. Many rural communities across our country have terrible drug problems, young people bored with nothing to do, and their own unique issues.

There is no Utopia.

But after yesterday’s bloodbath here, it does make one long for a quieter community.

I don’t know what the answers are, and I know that Shreveport is far from unique in its crime problems. All I know for sure is that an answer must be found. We spend a lot of time throwing blame and not enough time working for solutions, it seems. And maybe that’s all I’m doing here; I just know I no longer wish to live in this city where human life apparently has absolutely no value and our leaders are silent about it.

Pat Austin blogs at And So it Goes in Shreveport and at Medium; she is the author of Cane River Bohemia: Cammie Henry and her Circle at Melrose Plantation. Follow her on Instagram @patbecker25 and Twitter @paustin110.

More Quick Afghanistan Thoughts Under the Fedora

Posted: August 20, 2021 by datechguy in Uncategorized
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I don’t see why anyone is so surprised at the Biden Administration not caring about Americans trapped in Afghanistan or American equipment or those who helped the US being left behind in Afghanistan. It not like people willing to steal an American election from tens of millions of Americans are going to give a damn about American interests.

There have been a lot of jokes over the last several months about the Biden Administration being “Welcome Back Carter”. That comparison is increasingly becoming unfair to Jimmy Carter who at least didn’t give our enemies 10-40,000 hostages to play with.

A couple of days ago old friend Don Surber complemented Janet Yellen on quickly freezing Afghan assets abroad. While it sounds good let’s not pretend that the Taliban will not connect the ability of Americans to leave the country with the freeing of those assets.

It’s taken a few days but we’re now seeing media start to defend the Biden Administration on all of this. There is a cold calculation here that in the long run Americans won’t care about what happens there and or will believe the media’s new spins on it. Given what we’ve seen from the left over the last seven months I’m sorry to say this political calculation is likely correct.

Oh and you’ll note that I continue to use “Biden Administration” rather than “Joe Biden” because anyone who thinks he is actually in charge is as stupid as the Generals who decided on this policy.

Finally one of my favorite lines from C.S. Lewis’ The Screwtape Letters is this paragraph from letter 13 where Screwtape excoriates Wormwood for letting his “patient” be exposed to reality:

The characteristic of Pains and Pleasures is that they are unmistakably real, and therefore, as far as they go, give the man who feels them a touchstone of reality. Thus if you had been trying to damn your man by the Romantic method…you would try to protect him at all costs from any real pain; because, of course, five minutes’ genuine toothache would reveal the romantic sorrows for the nonsense they were and unmask your whole stratagem.

Right now there are a lot of woke college students, feminists and BLM activist who have been crying “oppression” who because of what is and will continue to go on in Afghanistan are getting a glimpse of what actual oppression, actual pain, and actual suffering is and where they actually sit on the “Oppression” scale. It’s also a bit of a hit to those who regularly scream “Islamophobia” because people are seeing that such a “phobia” of radical Islam has a solid basis for reality.

Whether this is a moment of realization of reality or a moment of anger that the value of their victim status will depend on the individual, but given the rampant narcissism of such folks I suspect the latter will greatly outnumber the former.

Biden Administration channels “Yes Prime Minister”

Posted: August 19, 2021 by datechguy in Uncategorized

In the episode of Yes Prime Minister The Bishop’s Gambit: there was the following following exchange concerning a Nurse arrested in an Arab country for having of whiskey.

PM Jim Hacker: A British National is facing a barbaric punishment for a trivial offense committed in a foreign country. The Foreign Office is there to protect British nationals.

Sir Humphrey: The Foreign Office is there to protect British interests

PM Hacker: Well it’s not in her interest to be flogged

Sir Humphrey: It’s not in our interest to prevent it.

PM Hacker: Yes it is, this could hurt the government very badly.

Sir Humphrey: Well I understand that tomorrow the foreign secretary will deliver a strongly worded note of protest to the Kumranis.

PM Jim Hacker: Why can’t they do it now?

Sir Humphrey: Well we haven’t got their agreement yet! They’re seeing the Ambassador privately now, once they’ve approved the wording we’ll hand it over, then we’ll have done all we can.

This came instantly to mind when I saw this concerning our response to people being slaughtered in Afghanistan since Biden ran away.

“We are hearing from people in Afghanistan that they are getting threats from the Taliban, and we have expressed in no uncertain terms, here at the United Nations, through a very strongly-worded press statement from the Security Council, that we expect the Taliban to respect human rights including the rights of women and girls.”

Perhaps someone should explain to the Biden administration that this Yes Prime Minister segment was not a “how to” guide.

How fitting that the Yes Prime Minister segment came with a laugh track and the Biden Administration is a joke.

We are now paying a tremendous price for surrendering the culture war to the political left

Posted: August 19, 2021 by Jon Fournier in Uncategorized
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Very few of us Conservatives and Libertarians ever attempted to fight the political left in the area of cultural issues.  We abounded Hollywood and the rest of the entertainment industry to progressives and other Marxists. 

Now the vast majority of movies and television programs are a cesspool of leftist propaganda.  Hardly any at all present America or its founding principles in a positive light. 

America bashing is one of the most prevalent themes encountered today.  Conformity, the liberal orthodoxy, and doing whatever those in authority demand have been hammered into the heads of all that partake in any form of entertainment. America’s sins of slavery and racism are constant themes,  They are portrayed as being the absolute foundation and soul of this nation, which are very much far from the truth.  All of the tremendous good that America has done and stands for is ignored. 

Young children who watch cartoons, Disney movies, and Nickelodeon are subjected to gay and transgender brainwashing.  I believe this is something that should be left out of children’s programming.  Most parents are probably unaware that this going on.

The liberal brainwashing on college campuses has gone unchecked by those of us on the political right for decades.  It has now spread through high schools and grade schools.  A recent poll declared that more than half of all young people have been brainwashed into viewing socialism as positive and capitalism negative.  No wonder so many young people voted for Biden and no wonder so many blindly follow all of the liberty destroying mandates and lockdowns.  If American founding principles and civics were still taught these mandates and lockdown would have ended soon after they were attempted.

Conservatives and others on the right allowed leftists to gain almost complete control of the news industry and social media.  Without the suppression of the truth about the theft of the 2020 presidential election Donald Trump would still be in office.  Without the suppression of real scientific facts about the effectiveness of masks and lockdown those liberty destroying ineffective mandates would not have remained in effect for more than a week or two.

We need to take up the culture war on all fronts immediately and fight to win.

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