Posts Tagged ‘history’

The Hale-Bopp Comet Democrats

Posted: November 7, 2021 by John Ruberry in culture, economy, elections, media, News/opinion, politics, Uncomfortable Truths
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Heaven’s Gate logo courtesy of Wikipedia

By John Ruberry

The one great comet of my lifetime was the Hale-Bopp Comet of 1997. But its spectacular night time display was overshadowed by the mass suicide of the 39 members of the Heaven’s Gate cult. Because they believed that here was a spaceship traveling behind the comet they took some barbiturates, drank some vodka, and put hoods over their heads so they could reunite with one of the founders of the cult, who they believed was a passenger on that craft.

They had faith, or something akin to it, in their beliefs. 

On a lesser and of course non-deadly scale is the cult-like beliefs Democrats, and their media allies, have in themselves and their policies. 

There are exceptions here and there, James Carville being a notable Dem who has decried the liberals’ wokeness, but after the victory of Republican Glenn Youngkin over Democrat Terry McAuliffe in the Virginia gubernatorial race and the GOP near-miss in New Jersey, leftists are doubling down on failure, despite clear evidence that their policies are unpopular. 

Just like cult members. 

Let’s start with Critical Race Theory. I was one of many conservatives who switched the channel over to MSNBC to see how the left was responding to last week’s election coverage. Commentator after commentator said, like the sheep in George Orwell’s Animal Farm, that CRT was not being taught in Virginia schools or anywhere else for that matter. I laughed particularly hard when former Obama HUD secretary Julian Castro said so on a program that Brian Williams, no stranger to fiction, hosted. Castro is a lawyer and while probably in a lie-but-avoid-perjury mode he fixed his mind on a mental crumb–that no one anywhere in pre-college classrooms is teaching the arcane original Critical Race Theory texts from the 1970s–the Dead Sea Scrolls of leftist bigotry. What is being taught in some schools is that American society is inherently white, meaning racist, and that white people, even children, are oppressors. 

For instance, shortly before Election Day a mother said she was told by her six-year-old daughter in a Loudon County, Virginia classroom that she was “born evil” because she is white. Not surprisingly CRT is hated by most parents–and not just white parents.

I don’t want to dig too far into semantics but the meanings of words and phrases evolve. Critical Race Theory now means dividing people into those oppressor and oppressed camps and that our society is rigged and incurably racist. Well there is one antidote–leftist indoctrination in schools, or so liberals believe.

Yes there are white supremacists. There are far fewer of them than when I was a child and those remaining should be shunned.

Oh, MSNBC talking heads I have a message for you: CRT is not a “racist dog whistle.”

Now let’s move on to infrastructure. Many left-wing experts, that is, people who know a lot of things about stuff that isn’t true, made the ludicrous claim that if Joe Biden’s Build Back Better infrastructure bill had been signed into law before Election Day McAuliffe would have won. I’ll try to be brief on this whopper of a fallacy but for starters, infrastructure was not a major issue in the Virginia governor’s race. Also, as Barack Obama learned, enacting infrastructure legislation doesn’t make thousands of building projects “shovel ready.” Part of Build Back Better was signed into law on Saturday–I’m not breathing the smell of hot asphalt today. But it will be many months before BBB construction projects commence and even longer before they are completed. Okay, the food and beverage improvements on Amtrak, part of the infrastructure bill, could be available soon. 

Do you remember Obama’s not-so-shovel-ready stimulus bill from 2009? Only about $100 billion of the $800 billion bill actually was spent on infrastructure.

On the other hand, inflation is a problem in America for the first time in decades. There is a growing belief among voters that government is getting too big too fast. And the Democrats have been the party of Big Government since the presidency of Joe Biden’s idol, Franklin D. Roosevelt. As for the current president, he was elected because he passed himself off as a moderate, or perhaps as an old school liberal–but certainly not as Bernie Sanders.

There is a deeper problem for Democrats, particularly among hard-left members such as the members of The Squad. As I mentioned earlier Dems have a cultist faith in their policies. I encounter left-wingers regularly here in the inner-suburbs of Chicago. On those rare instances I engage in a political conversation with them, I am usually told, “Well, you just aren’t properly educated on the issues. You listen to too much talk radio and watch too much Fox News–you are indoctrinated.” But unlike them, I am regularly confronted by the other side. For instance, I sat for hours in a hospital waiting room last month. First I endured former Bill Clinton staffer George Stephanopoulos on Good Morning America and then the leftists on The View, although I was in for a minor treat as Joyce Behar was not on the couch that day. And overall mainstream entertainment media is drenched with covert and overt liberal bias. Take a look at late night comedy shows, excluding of course Fox News’ Gutfeld! And as I mentioned earlier, I dabble with watching MSNBC–and CNN.

So yes, I am educated and I am exposed to multiple political views.

In the post-mortems among Democrats, again with a few exceptions, there was no call from them to moderate their policies and to address what went wrong on Election Day last week. It’s still full steam ahead.

I’ve mentioned this quote many times before but too many people still haven’t seen it “The trouble with our liberal friends is not that they are ignorant,” Ronald Reagan said, “but that they know so much that isn’t so.”

You can’t reason with most leftists. 

And there was no spaceship hiding behind the Hale-Bopp Comet. 

Oh, no one is always right. Yep, not even conservatives.

The last words I’ll leave to Dr. Martin Luther King.

“I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”

John Ruberry regularly blogs at Marathon Pundit.

The Left’s Dirty Little Secret: Black America since 1865 is one of the Great Success Stories in History of Mankind

Posted: October 2, 2021 by datechguy in American Success Stories, culture
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Yesterday I commented on how both Stacy McCain and myself understand the secret of happiness by realizing that no matter how bad an individual situation we remember how far our families has come in a couple of generations from subsistence to comfort.

But our experience pales before the experience of Black America as a whole.

Think about this for a second. Newly freed black American’s in 1865 as a whole:

  • Owned little or nothing
  • Were illiterates
  • Were considered inferior
  • Had (in contrast to African immigrants post 1865) no national identify other than slavery
  • Had no political power
  • Had only whatever experience they had as slaves (primarily subsistence agriculture)

There was no real political class or professional class or middle class shopkeepers to support them, at best that were patronized by well meaning people who thought them lesser and at worst they were exploited to gain wealth and power in the conquered states (the “carpetbaggers & machine pols of reconstruction”)

Yet from this situation in 150 consider the state of black America now

Black buying power currently stands at over $1.1 trillion and is on the road to hit about $1.5 trillion by 2021. This collective buying power means that nearly $2 trillion will be flowing through black America annually very soon, making us the centerpiece for various researchers, marketers, advertisers, and other campaigns designed to influence black spending patterns.

educationally

  • Per the NSBA in a 2020 paper 2017 stats from the national school board 11% of teachers and seven percent of SCHOOL PRINCIPALS are black (out of 13% of the total population) two thirds of black students graduate with high school diplomas.

In reputation

  • Black students and applicants at the corporates level are actively sought by companies and colleges.

In politics

  • 63 members of he current congress are black (about 12% corresponding to the population) and that’s not even considering the numbers in various state legislatures and local governments.

In identity:

  • Black culture, black music, black literature, black television and the black church have provided a visible culture that is noted and powerful worldwide

Finally consider

  • Black actors,, sportsman, broadcasters and prominent scientists, members of government are fully a part of American culture as a whole as are black Americans in every part of life.

Frankly the only places where black America is regressing is in Democrat cities many run by black pols and even that that the rising tide of black America lifted all black boats including those who were corrupt in the community as well as those who were not.

As a person who is a student of history I submit and suggest that no other society has come from that point from nothing as the black community and thus I state for the record:

The success of Black America’s rise from Slavery to where it is today is one of the if not the greatest Society success stories in the History of Mankind and is a peculiarly American Success Story

Now there are those in that corrupt community who would have Black America ignore this fact and focus only on failure and there are others, particularly in the Democrat part who would keep Black American in the plantation of victimhood and suggest to black children and teen that they are oppressed and inferior and thus need to be lifted rather than encourage and challenged but to all of those who claim the state of Black America is one of oppression I ask you these two question:

  1. How many of the descended from black slaves in America would exchange their lot with a Black person in Africa and would move there permanently if given the chance?
  2. How many of those descended from the blacks slavecatchers and slave sellers in Africa would exchange their lot with a Black Person in America and would move here permanently if given the chance?

I submit and suggest that the number of the first is negligible and the number of the 2nd is almost all of them.

That’s the final victory of black America, those who descended from the people who sold their ancestors into slavery would given anything to be in the position of the descended from those they sold vs where they are now. And all of this comes from the hard work of those slaves and their children who started with nothing and built a culture and society.

Take a bow black America and remember the people trying to sell you victimhood are the folks looking to build their power on you perceiving yourselves as inferior.

Don’t fall for it, you’re descended from giants, act accordingly.

Stacy McCain Discovers the Key To Happiness

Posted: October 1, 2021 by datechguy in American Success Stories, culture
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One of the reasons why the current situation in the US makes me so unhappy is that I am a student of history and a collector of history books to some degree and when I compare the boundless optimism of historians of a century and a quarter ago to the media crowd of today it makes me shake my head.

But when I get down like that I do what Stacy McCain does here:

We must live in reality, rather than in our political fantasies of an ideal condition of “Equality” that, so far as I know, has never existed anywhere at any time in all of human history. This utopian fantasy is harmful in that it breeds irrational discontentment, no matter how objectively splendid our actual circumstances may be. Some of the most bitter people in America are rich liberals whose affluent lifestyles would have been unimaginable to their grandparents or more remote ancestors. My own grandfather plowed the red clay hills of east Alabama behind a mule team. He had no indoor plumbing or electricity or central heat. Rather than make myself miserable by comparing my situation to that of Mark Zuckerberg or Bill Gates, I prefer to make myself happy by thinking how much easier my life is than that of my grandfather. Right now, I’m drinking a fruit smoothie and eating a meal I warmed up in the microwave, while preparing to hit the “publish” button and communicate with a readership of thousands. What have I got to complain about, if I pause to compare my situation to my grandfather’s life in rural Alabama?

My father was born in 1921 and would have been 100 years old this Halloween, his father was born in the late 1800’s, My mother was born in 1924 and her mother, the youngest of my four grandparents was born in 1896. All were born before the airplane, before the radio in the shadow of the Volcano Mt. Etna.

They came to a country where they were considered of a different race, did not speak the language and worked hard all their lives. My parents born here did the same, people simply don’t understand how lucky they are to have what they have particularly when it was built on the hard work of folks like this who took risks.

A great example of this blindness came up a few months ago. My son was experimenting with a sauce and decided to call my older sister to get some tips on how our grandparents made the meat. Was it in a sauce raw or did they cook it in the sauce etc. She pointed out that the reason why they cooked things in the sauce wasn’t flavor, but that it was a lot of work to clean pans, to cook etc, particular in an era before washing machines and the harnessing of electricity became the norm. . A lot of the styles we romantic about the past was all about necessity

I will likely never have to work as hard as my father who left school in at 11 in the sixth grade to work, who fought a world war in the pacific and then came home to build a family. I will likely never have to pick dandelions to have something to eat as my mother did occasionally as a kid (she never lost a taste for them) Nor will I have to work remotely as hard as my grandparents did to get by and that is due to both their hard work and American progress.

To know history is to be grateful for the lot you have as an American, which is why so many are willing to come here and work for money many Americans would not, because they know what they’ve got.

Cognitive decline: the mainstream media is still protecting Biden

Posted: September 12, 2021 by John Ruberry in culture, entertainment, media, News/opinion, politics
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By John Ruberry

After the collapse of the government of Afghanistan last month mainstream media reporters remembered for a little while that they were supposed to be journalists instead of propagandists and protectors of the Democratic Party.

They criticized President Joe Biden for the Afghan debacle, which was easily the worst foreign policy disaster since the fall of Saigon in 1975. It may have been the worse than that, as no one expected the Viet Cong to attack America. 

But those catcalls from the media only went so far. No one, outside of conservatives, has addressed the metaphorical crazy grandpa in the basement–Joe Biden’s clear cognitive decline. 

Okay, let’s get something out of the way. I am not a doctor and I have never met Joe Biden. But even two years ago, as he announced his run for the presidency, it was clear, to phrase it as Mark Levin did, that “the spin was off of his fastball.” Of course Biden, always a mediocrity, never had much of a fastball. 

And of course to prevent a Bernie Sanders Democratic nomination and a likely Donald Trump victory, US Rep. James Clyburn led the rush to annoint Biden as their only hope to defeat Trump. And Biden campaigned, sort of, for the presidency from what Sean Hannity called “his basement bunker.” 

Greg Ganske, an MD and former Republican member of Congress, knows Biden, In an op-ed for the Des Moines Register, he decried Biden’s mental decline.

It’s gotten worse since the election. In a CNN interview, he opined, “Um, you know there’s a, uh, during World War II, uh you know, where Roosevelt came up with a thing, that uh, you know, was totally different, than a, than the, he called it, you know, the WWII, he had the War Production Board.” In March he forgot the name of his Defense Secretary, Lloyd Austin, at a White House event, calling the Pentagon chief “the guy who runs that outfit over there.”

I am not alone in seeing a difference in President Biden. Mike McCormick, who worked 15 years as a White House stenographer and with Biden from 2011 to 2017, has said, “He’s lost a step and he doesn’t seem to have the mental acuity he had four years ago. He doesn’t have the energy, he doesn’t have the pace of his speaking. He’s a different guy. He read that Democratic National Committee speech verbatim — it’s not Joe Biden anymore.”

John Kass, the former Chicago Tribune lead columnist, calls Biden “President Meat Puppet.” 

During the 2020 presidential campaign while watching Biden, well, sort of campaign on television, I was reminded of a Star Trek episode centered on the doomed and flawed John Gill, Captain Kirk’s former history professor, who creates a Nazi government because that fascist nation was, in Gill’s opinion, “the most effecient state Earth ever knew.” Not true, I need to add, although oddly enough Spock agreed. 

The Enterprise’s power trio watch in horror and pity as Gill, a puppet of the evil Melakon, addresses his planet in a televised address by announcing an attack on the scapegoat planet Zeon. “Captain, the speech follows no logical pattern,” says Spock. “Random sentences strung together,” Kirk adds. “He looks drugged, Jim,” observes Dr. McCoy, “Almost in a cataleptic state.”

“They’ve kept what’s left of him as a figurehead,” Kirk says. 

Last year Lou Aguilar of the American Spectator noticed the similarities between Biden and Gill in 2020. So did Victor Davis Hanson for American Greatness last month. But these men are conservatives.

Now I am not claiming Biden is a fascist. Calm down, leftists. He is not. Biden is a confused and tired old man–but only conservative pundits are noticing that. Are we smarter than liberals? Well yes, of course we are, but it seems at the very list our “betters,” the liberal elite that is, are looking the other way in regards to the president’s mental status. Or perhaps the liberal media is purposely hiding Biden’s cognitive decline, as seems to be the case with George Stephanopoulos, who allowed a portion of his most recent interview with the president to end up on the cutting room floor as he confused key details of his late son Beau’s military service. I suspect the latter scenario is the case.

Dr. Ronny Jackson is now a Republican congressman. He was the White House physician during the Trump presidency. Two months ago he called on Biden to take a cognitive test and for the results of it to be made public. Three years ago Jackson said he administered one to Trump and he reported that “45” answered every question correctly.

Here’s the problem the mainstream media faces. Biden will continue to have good days and bad days–but as I’ve observed with relatives of mine suffering from cognitive decline, the good days always become fewer. 

Oh, how many more times will Biden be hours late for a press conference? Why always so late?

Eventually Biden’s slipping mental state will be too obvious for even the liberal media to ignore. And when they finally do notice–it’s up to us to remind them that conservatives blew the whistle on Biden first. 

Perhaps at that time, in an act for redemption, the lefty talking heads and writers can reveal who the power is behind the Biden the Figurehead.

Kass has an idea, “Ron Klain, the White House chief of staff, is now openly referred to as President Klain.”

John Ruberry regularly blogs at Marathon Pundit.

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