The More Things Change, the More They Stay the Same

The following video discusses the last totally controlled election in communist East Germany, which took place in 1989. Nash Montana, who translated the clip for subtitles, includes this introduction:

This video is an excerpt from a ten-part German documentary television series entitled “Damals in der DDR”. It was produced by MDR, WDR, and LOOKSfilm, and was released in 2004. The series uses contemporary accounts to report on life in the German Democratic Republic (East Germany, Deutsche Demokratische Republik, DDR) from 1945 to 1990. The short (three-minute) clip from the documentary that I translated shows how elections were held in the DDR.

It was simple: ballots were pre-printed with one candidate per position. No pen was needed to mark a candidate since there was no choice. Voting was mandatory. Repeated refusal to vote ended in prison sentences of up to ten years.

West German television showed instructions on how the ballot had to be folded and dropped in the box. It explains that write-in candidates or crossed-out candidates, were still counted as a yes vote for the original candidate listed on the ballot. There were no clear rules on when, or how, a ballot was counted or discarded as invalid. That is how the DDR accomplished a 99% voter turnout for the SED (Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands, Socialist Unity Party of Germany) candidates.

Many thanks to Vlad Tepes and RAIR Foundation for the subtitling:

An afterword from the translator:

The SED was the Socialist Unity Party of Germany. The DDR was a one-party regime. A few other institutional popular-front parties were permitted to exist in alliance with the SED, for example the Christian Democratic Union, the Liberal Democratic Party, the Democratic Farmers’ Party, and the National Democratic Party.

(You know, kind of like the DNC here, which reigns supreme over the other front party in alliance with it, the GOP.)

It is often said that in order to imagine what the future might bring, one should look to the past. Certainly this is now more true than ever. That’s why we have to hurry and burn every book, censor every opposing opinion, alter every Wikipedia entry, and keep children from learning history, so that they may immediately repeat it. Because it was so good the first few times around.

After all, “A generation that is not taught to recognize the irreconcilable differences represented by the Declaration of Independence and the Communist Manifesto, between Madison and Marx, the Federalist Papers and Rules for Radicals is doomed to be ruled, not to rule. Individual liberty will not survive in a republic of civic dunces.” (SFExaminer, 2011)

There is one looming question in my mind that I haven’t quite yet been able to wrap my head around: Just how did the USA become the most highly prized, biggest buck with the greatest number of points on his rack, to be slain? How did the old make the connection to the new? When and how did the Comrades of the Old World decide to infiltrate our country, and who were all the figures in the shadows? …all that stuff.

But here we are.

All I know is that if the USA falls into Communism, then Brave New World meets 1984 meets Fahrenheit 451 meets Minority Report meets Sci-fi futuristic technology and surveillance pre-cog totalitarianism. Then the rest of the globe will fall, too, and Global Totalitarianism will become our future.

Because those books were warnings, not instruction manuals. But even the authors of these books didn’t quite comprehend the entire, gigantic beast that will rear its ugly head in the coming years (no predictions! Otherwise I’ll have to back it up with facts). How could they?

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The American Future: A Simulacrum of Normality

I hate to jump the gun on events, so I prefer not to write about the definitive Death of the Republic until January 20, after Joe Biden has put his hand on The Communist Manifesto, or The Autobiography of Malcolm X, or whatever he plans to use in lieu of the Bible, and been sworn in by Chief Justice John Roberts as the 46th President of the United States. That’s when we’ll be able to say that the Republic is morally, ethically, spiritually, physically, positively, absolutely, undeniably and reliably dead.

In the meantime I’m keeping up with the flow of events in this American Twilight. As is Roger Kimball, who has written a lucid, restrained essay for American Greatness that is worth reading while you’re waiting for the Biden/Harris administration and the Great Reset.

I found the link at Western Rifle Shooters, which also has many other links to much less restrained discussions on the same topic. If you want to get a feeling for what the community of, ahem, friskier and well-armed deplorables — who by now number in the millions, if not tens of millions — are talking about, I recommend following those links at WRSA.

Mr. Kimball opens his essay with these paragraphs:

A Betrayal of American Freedom

At the moment, the world seems to be divided into two camps.

One camp belongs to those who believe that Joe Biden, notwithstanding some possible election “irregularities,” won the 2020 presidential election fair and square. A corollary of this belief is the conviction that Donald Trump, by refusing to concede and go graciously into the good night of political defeat, is behaving badly (one venue even describes his behavior as a “disgrace”).

The second camp, which is where I reside, holds that the 2020 election was inherently fraudulent, that the fraud was perpetrated in ways large and small over many months, and that it appears to have cost Donald Trump the election. I say “appears” because the reality, I believe, is that Donald Trump won by a significant margin but that voter fraud obscures that reality.

The first camp seems to be the larger of the two and its membership is growing quickly as more and more erstwhile supporters of the president fold their tents and make their peace with “President-elect Biden.” Mitch McConnell, the Senate Majority Leader, was a recent high-profile defector from President Trump’s side.

Or maybe he is only a realist who sees the writing on the wall, not to mention the headlines in the papers and on CNN.

This is being too generous to Mitch McConnell. The majority leader has never been in the Trump camp. He may have pretended to be from time to time, when he found it expedient. But he has always been a member of what Sundance at Conservative Tree House calls the “Uniparty”, which includes all Democrats and most Republicans, especially in the Senate.

The Republicans pretend to be an opposition party, but the snouts of their leadership are as thoroughly dipped in the trough of graft and corruption as are those of Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, and the rest of the Democrat Party.

But that’s a minor point. And Mr. Kimball seems to allude to that reality a couple of paragraphs further along:

President Trump has not fared well with his legal battles, but that has not dimmed his determination to fight on, much to the dismay, indeed, the fury, of his critics in both parties (actually, I think it is basically one big party, but that is an issue for another day).

And where do we go from here?

It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that Something Ugly This Way Comes.

It’s likely, I suppose, that Congress is just too sclerotic for anything really dramatic to happen. It seems pretty clear that the courts — above all the Supreme Court — remain terrified of being called mean names by reporters at the New York Times.

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Cracks Are Beginning to Appear

I don’t know how much of a bellwether a rural Virginia Walmart is, but that happens to be my area of research, so it’s where I’ve been gathering my data.

I mounted an expedition to the store this afternoon to stock up on the usual staples, but without wearing the mandatory face mask. The last time I had been to the same store there were just three other people without masks, but this time I counted no fewer than fifteen. In addition to those brazen deplorables who don’t care if they kill Grandma, there were numerous others who were wearing their masks haphazardly, at best — pulled down below their noses, or even under their chins. There was one fellow with a ZZ Top beard who wore a mask plastered on the front of it like a postage stamp on a Brillo pad — he looked completely absurd. And maybe he intended it that way.

So what might this thaw in the COVID regimen portend? My intuition tells me that it must have something to do with last month’s election and the fact that we’re about to inaugurate Beijing Joe as our next General Secretary… I mean, President.

There are an awful lot of Trump voters out here in the Virginia backwoods, especially among white people. Unless I misunderstand the current zeitgeist, they are well aware of how fraudulent the election was, and they’re righteously angry about it.

Are they beginning to react against perceived authority by eschewing the masks they’ve been ordered to wear by Governor Coonman?

I don’t know, but I consider it a distinct possibility…

There is Only One Militia, and it is the People

An apocryphal story about Benjamin Franklin relates his response when, at the end of the Constitutional Convention in 1787, he was asked what form of government the new country would have. He said: “A republic, if you can keep it.”

The amazing thing is that we have kept it for as long as we have. Mind you, 233 years after the Convention the Republic is in tatters — just barely hanging on by a thread. It has been deteriorating steadily since at least 1913. If events in the United States of America continue on their present path, the official death date of the Republic will be January 20, 2021. When the act of voting becomes meaningless, a republic no longer exists.

T.L. Davis has posted an important essay about this revolutionary moment we all find ourselves facing. Some excerpts are below.

NB: The mention of Catch-22 by Joseph Heller refers to this passage from the novel:

“Catch-22,” the old woman repeated, rocking her head up and down. “Catch-22. Catch-22 says they have a right to do anything we can’t stop them from doing.”

[…]

“Didn’t they show it to you?” Yossarian demanded, stamping about in anger and distress. “Didn’t you even make them read it?”

“They don’t have to show us Catch-22,” the old woman answered. “The law says they don’t have to.”

“What law says they don’t have to?”

“Catch-22.”

Excerpts from the essay:

Fight for It

by TL Davis
December 4, 2020

Despite the fact that the Constitution of the United States of America has largely been ignored, defamed and dismissed, it continues as a legal document and as a formal message from the founding fathers to future generations. They could not be here to fight every war for us or even every battle, but the purpose of the Constitution was to give us the weapons with which to fight for ourselves, for our nation, our land that we live on. The weapons are there for us to use, if we want freedom. But, no one is going to give it to us, or live up to their obligations to follow it. It is the moment Mike Vanderboegh identified in the book Catch 22 which really is: “We can do anything you can’t stop us from doing.” Someone has to stop the madness and that someone is you.

Breaking down the Second Amendment is important right now, this minute, for people to understand their roles in the upcoming fight for this nation. “A well-regulated militia…” Let’s start with that. A well-regulated militia is a formation of the people, the farmers, the store clerks, the truck drivers, the factory workers, etc., who are trained to some degree, if only how to hold, aim and fire their weapons at the instruction of commanders or if unstructured when they are endangered in their position. It is NOT what the media and politicians have said in that it is the National Guard. No force, paid by the government, can be the “militia” that is reserved solely for the people themselves, i.e. land owners and equity holders in the republic, reliant upon a free society to support their lives. The Second Amendment does not apply to government forces who can be manipulated by the very enemies of the people who command them.

“…being necessary to the security of a free state…” The founders who had just fought a vicious and largely unsupported war to be free of a distant and unresponsive government who viewed them as nothing more than wealth miners of the new world, subject to the military authority of the crown for obedience, fully understood that the only way to secure a “free state” was to arm the average person whose life and liberty would be at threat from a similar government, perhaps the very one they were devising in Philadelphia. They did not know the future and probably would have been surprised that their document guided America through more than two centuries before it also became so corrupt and meaningless as to threaten the lives and liberty of its citizens.

I’m sure that most people have read the Second Amendment so often that they might have become blind to what it really means, or have accepted other’s definitions without much thought. Read that phrase one more time. “being necessary to the security of a free state…” I hold that “…a free state…” can have a couple of different meanings. It can mean that we are all armed so that we can secure our state the political subdivision of the whole, from the union, should the union of states become corrupt and damaging to the one state, or it could mean the union as a whole, or it could mean an individual’s state of being free. At this point in time, any definition one wants to accept for “…a free state…” works as any and all are under prescient threat.

“…the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.” Here again, the “people” as Antonin Scalia points out in his opinion of the court in District of Columbia v Heller:

[…]

So, the meaning of the Second Amendment is clear that the people, those familiar folks in the mirror, have the right to keep and bear arms to secure a free state, forming militias among the people to achieve this goal.

But, is there sufficient threat to qualify the mobilization of the militia to secure a “free state?” I ask this question only to the internal conscience of the reader. It is not a bar that is set by law or regulation. It is a determination one must make for themselves, but thoughtful consideration of the issues is still warranted. So…

The entirety of the republic is based upon the consent of the governed. That consent is transferred from the people to the individual representatives every two years, four years and six years, but is always subject to a democratic vote, the winner of the several races for representatives and senators become official with the outcome of the vote with each vote representing a person of legal age, proper residency and mental capacity to transfer that consent. When it comes to the president, the democratic outcome of the vote is further qualified by electors to the electoral college, ensuring that should the greater population choose a tree, or a clearly incompetent, as a president, the electors can choose otherwise to secure that the single most powerful person in the nation is capable of fulfilling the duties as a matter of national security.

The people, however, maintain their consent and through popular action might revoke it legally through recall, impeachment or physical removal. Where their votes have not been faithfully tabulated and their consent properly conferred to the elected representative, there is no transfer of consent. Where there is no transfer of consent, there is no legal authority to pass laws or convene congress. The consent has not been transferred and the republic ends immediately.

[…]

It is clear, after the weeks have passed since the election, that there is no means of arriving at the appropriate transfer of the consent of the governed through legal means. Judges, Secretaries of State, Governors and representatives of the people are incapable of dispensing the true and faithful duties of their offices for various reasons, all of which stem from some sort of corruption, be it bribery, violation of oath, treasonous intent or some other corrupting influence.

Over these weeks, the people have seen their votes discarded, changed and invalidated. Their objections to illegalities in the processes of tabulating and verifying votes has been met with complicit silence, refusing a redress of grievances.

Still, at the end of the day, that is fast approaching, the people of the United States seek a peaceful means of resolution. They look to the Supreme Court for favorable rulings. They assemble at state houses to demand that their votes be counted and verified. They wait for some official to declare their voices heard and the egregious fraud exposed and reversed. They wait for the possibility that the republic can continue, that rule of law has been restored and respected.

In absence of that, WHAT?

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The Great Divide

Back in August I reported on a dissident Episcopal congregation — of which I am a member — that has been meeting for unofficial Eucharist services at a private home. Even after Governor Ralph “Coonman” Northam partially relaxed his rules on religious gatherings, the bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Southern Virginia, in her infinite wisdom, issued a diocesan bull from her offices (which Dymphna used to refer to as the “Winter Palace”) that forbade churches under her purview to take normal communion, sing, use prayer books, drink coffee, or shake hands, for fear that congregants might succumb to the Wuhan Coronavirus and meet an untimely end.

These conditions were unacceptable to more than half the congregation. Our priest resigned, and we dissidents reconvened in the living room of one of our parishioners who has a baby grand piano, which our organist fortunately knows how to play.

We have been meeting there for more than four months, celebrating a full Eucharist, passing the Peace with handshakes and hugs, singing, and gathering afterwards in the adjacent dining room for lunch. Nobody wears a mask, and nobody is afraid. Those precious Sundays are a refreshing change from the COVID madness that seems to have taken over everywhere else.

What struck me during the conflict over these issues is the dichotomy that has developed between those who are afraid, and those who are not. The group that ratted us out to the bishop and forced the closure of the church — a minority — is afraid. They are deeply afraid. They are so afraid that staying home from church and avoiding any possibility of contamination was not enough for them; they had to make sure that the entire congregation endured the same regimen.

The group that meets for Eucharist in a private home is not afraid. We recognize that COVID-19 exists, and that some of us are at risk if we catch it. But we’re still not afraid. For whatever reason, the Coronamadness has not infected us.

Those people who live in fear seem to have forgotten these lines from the Suffrages that we recite during Morning and Evening Prayer:

V. Give peace, O Lord, in all the world;
R. For only in you can we live in safety.

They apparently believe that safety lies in masks, hand sanitizers, vaccines, Dr. Fauci, etc., rather than the Lord.

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As a matter of interest, the great divide between those who are afraid and those who are not coincides exactly with the political faultlines within our little church. Those who are afraid are all liberals, and voted for Joe Biden. Those who are not afraid voted for Donald Trump, with the possible exception of one person who is basically apolitical.

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Muslim Brotherhood Would Use a Biden Presidency to Advance “Congressional Jihad”

A Biden presidency, however brief it turns out to be, will be a real gift for Islamic zealots. (It’s not yet clear what President Harris’ policies will be vis-à-vis Islam, but one presumes they will be no less accommodating than those of her predecessor.) In the following guest-essay, Ashraf Ramelah discusses the prospects for the Muslim Brotherhood under a Biden administration.

Muslim Brotherhood would use a Biden presidency to advance “Congressional Jihad”

by Dr. Ashraf Ramelah

The 2020 American presidential election will be historically remembered as a unique election. A contested, undecided race is not new, but the media’s hype, backing and declaration for one candidate is unprecedented. Ultimately, the delay caused by the election investigation will be to expose the use of comprehensive fraud within the voting procedures of American elections, past and present. Statements by individuals witnessing voting poll crimes in the form of affidavits are appearing every day.

Once the final verdict is reached and Americans and the world are informed of who will lead the country for the next four years, Americans can do nothing less than demand a permanent fix of the election process. This seems to be a goal of the current administration. This truly is unique.

If anyone thinks a presidential outcome for Biden could occur without empowerment of Islamic radicals, then think again. Take a look at the current fervor in the Middle East over Biden’s premature presidential declaration. The Muslim Brotherhood’s (MB) overwhelming enthusiasm for the media’s Democrat “President-elect” is revealed all across the Arabic-speaking media. Certainly they stand to gain by a Biden win and also the reverse; they have much to lose with a Trump win.

Muslim Americans and the Muslim Brotherhood will thrive under Biden

Some world leaders, including the Muslim Brotherhood Deputy Morshed, have already congratulated Joe Biden, the media’s unverified choice for president. The Arabic media reported that the MB issued a “victory” statement while the Deputy Morshed gave the following official statement, “Biden victory proves that the American people can still impose their will.”

Deputy Morshed no doubt refers to media reports of more than one million Muslim-Americans (highest number ever) voting for the Democrat presidential candidate, and gives credit to them for Biden’s success. According to the Al Jazeera and Anadolu agencies, the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) promised to deliver Joe Biden these votes. Since the Sharia sheep always follow the wolf, these votes could actually prove to be legal. Brotherhood members form the majority of CAIR’s board of directors. The pro-MB Arabic media are now highlighting how gratified Muslim-Americans are for the Biden “win.”

The Arabic media go on to express satisfaction felt by Muslim-Americans with Biden’s pre-election promise to lift the ban imposed by Trump on citizens of seven Muslim countries, which now prevents them from entering the United States. According to further reports, Muslim-Americans expect Biden to denounce Islamophobia and racism against Muslims in America and around the world.

Meanwhile, Arabic reports show that the enthusiasm of the Muslim Brotherhood, a designated terrorist organization in Egypt, is an all-time high with Biden — perhaps hopeful for another Obama/Biden experience like the one that elevated the MB to power not so long ago with the striking role played by the former American President and his Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, during the wave of the infamous Arab Spring.

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The Reset to End All Resets

To paraphrase Hermann Göring*: When I hear the word “sustainable”, I reach for my Luger.

The term “Great Reset” is causing such a buzz in the deplorable fever swamps of the intertubes that even the august New York Times has been compelled to mention it. Just in order to dismiss it as a “conspiracy theory”, mind you; but still, they had to pay attention to it.

Yet how can it be a conspiracy theory when it is featured on the website of the World Economic Forum?

The originator of the phrase is Dr. Klaus Schwab, the founder and executive chairman of the WEF, which is a sort of country club for absurdly wealthy globalists. Dr. Schwab’s treatise on the topic —posted last June on the WEF website — is entitled “Now is the time for a ‘great reset’”. Its subtitle riffs on Rahm Emanuel: “In every crisis, there is an opportunity”.

Two current crises provide the subtext for the opportunity to impose the Great Reset. One is the Wuhan Coronavirus, and I’ll get to the other one in a minute.

First: Dr. Schwab lays out the rationale for taking advantage of the unprecedented opportunity provided by COVID-19, saying that “the world must act jointly and swiftly to revamp all aspects of our societies and economies, from education to social contracts and working conditions. Every country, from the United States to China, must participate, and every industry, from oil and gas to tech, must be transformed. In short, we need a ‘Great Reset’ of capitalism.”

There are many reasons to pursue a Great Reset, but the most urgent is COVID-19. Having already led to hundreds of thousands of deaths, the pandemic represents one of the worst public-health crises in recent history. And, with casualties still mounting in many parts of the world, it is far from over.

[…]

Left unaddressed, these crises, together with COVID-19, will deepen and leave the world even less sustainable [this is where my Luger left its holster —BB], less equal, and more fragile. Incremental measures and ad hoc fixes will not suffice to prevent this scenario. We must build entirely new foundations for our economic and social systems.

Dr. Schwab intends a thorough overhaul that will fix the global system once and for all. He tells us that “populations have overwhelmingly shown a willingness to make sacrifices for the sake of health-care”, out of which arises the golden opportunity that will allow the bumpkins and hayseeds to be gulled into global governance — for their own good, of course.

The Great Reset agenda would have three main components. The first would steer the market toward fairer outcomes.

[…]

The second component of a Great Reset agenda would ensure that investments advance shared goals, such as equality and sustainability.

[…]

The third and final priority of a Great Reset agenda is to harness the innovations of the Fourth Industrial Revolution to support the public good, especially by addressing health and social challenges.

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All Quiet on the Western Front

At least it was quiet one hundred and two years ago today, when the armistice was signed and the guns fell silent.

The Western Front seems far from quiet today, especially here in the USA, where the frenzy of political vitriol has reached an unprecedented pitch. I’ve never experienced anything like the verbal artillery barrage that is currently underway in the wake of the Election to End All Elections. What with enemies lists, calls for the arrest of politicians, and the expressed desire to render one’s political opponents unemployable, it seems that the doughboys have stepped up from the duckboards onto the parapet and are awaiting the order to march out through the wire into No Man’s Land.

I don’t know where all of this is heading, but it won’t end well. The rhetoric being employed, especially by the Left and the Democrat Party, has all but burnt the bridges leading back to some form of “bipartisanship”. This appears to be total war, with no taking of prisoners, and no option but unconditional surrender on the part of one side or the other.

And it’s not just here in America. While we’ve been preoccupied with mail-in votes and pallets of ballots, Britain has plunged headlong into full-blown totalitarianism led by the wild-haired Führer Boris Johnson. Under pandemic rules — and this is true of any country caught up in the Coronamadness, not just the U.K. — there can be no liberty, no civil liberties, no constitutional rights. The citizen has no choice but to obey the ukases of the all-powerful State, which has empowered itself to do anything it deems necessary to keep everyone “safe”.

What a strange time to be alive in!

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I continue to be a mask-resister. Whenever I can possibly get away with it, I enter business establishments without wearing a mask, regardless of any sign they might post on the door. Yesterday I shopped maskless at a Food Lion. I noticed just four other people without muzzles — two teenaged girls, one man of about forty, and another man somewhat older.

Sometimes I have an urge to go up to other dissidents and ask them why they aren’t wearing the mandatory face covering. Is it for medical reasons? Or just on a whim? Or principled resistance?

But I’m a severe introvert, so I never ask.

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A small wave from the larger political storm broke into my own personal space a couple of days ago. As most of you know, I was shut down by PayPal (clearly for political reasons) right after I started my summer fundraiser back in August. I started looking at alternative payments services, but haven’t settled on a particular one yet.

Two months ago I signed up for one called Stripe. After going through the trouble of setting everything up, I decided that it wasn’t what I needed. I don’t remember exactly why, but it was probably because it offered no way of creating a “donate” button with a single link to a payment form.

I hadn’t thought any further about Stripe since then, but on Monday I got an email from them out of the blue:

Hi Edward,,

I’m writing to let you know that we are no longer able to accept payments for GOV after 2020-11-12. After a recent review of your website and account information, we’ve found that your business presents a higher level of risk than we’re able to work with. Specifically, your business is in violation of our Stripe Services Agreement, section A.7.b (“Restricted Businesses and Activities”) [0].

Additionally, we request that you remove any references to Stripe on your site, including any code, such as API keys and any plugins [1]. We can provide you with two days to switch to a new provider. After that, you won’t be able to accept additional charges on your account, but we will continue making transfers to your bank account until you receive all of your funds [2].

If you believe we have made an error in this determination, or have since removed violating content, please let us know.

Regards,
Stripe

Since I wasn’t planning on using Stripe, none of this mattered to me. However, just to get an idea of how the rules are enforced against political dissidents, I drilled down into the legal bumf on the Stripe website.

As a matter of interest, the referenced Section A.7.b of the Stripe Services Agreement says:

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Eyeing the Results

I’m about to head out to the retinologist’s office to get a periodic injection in my left eye to treat my condition (wet macular degeneration).

I have a lot of good stuff in the pipeline, but I didn’t have time to put together a post before leaving. So I’ll let this be a placeholder till I get back.

I know y’all are anxious to discuss the election, which seems to be morphing into the Big Cheat, as expected. The post-election ructions have already commenced, and I assume the Antifas will be out in force to make sure everyone is OK with the ordained official result — OR ELSE.

You can use this post as an open thread to leave comments about all that, or anything else in the news. When I get back I’ll moderate what has come in, before I lie down and cover my eyes to escape the dancing bubble.

See you later.

From Fahrenheit 451 to Cancel Culture: Bradbury Predicted People Would Demand Tyranny

Over the years Nash Montana has done yeoman’s work for us translating Swiss dialects and German. In the following essay she expands her repertoire with a look at the dark heart of the Culture Wars.

From Fahrenheit 451 to Cancel Culture: Bradbury Predicted People Would Demand Tyranny

by Nash Montana

Even if it has been a while since you read Fahrenheit 451, you might remember Ray Bradbury’s classic for its portrayal of a dystopian future in which an authoritarian government flies drones to control the people, and burns books.

Read Fahrenheit 451 again to discover why people wanted their tyrannical government to burn books. Bradbury wrote the book in 1953, yet the parallels to today’s social climate for censorship are haunting.

Bradbury’s protagonist is Guy Montag, who, like all firemen in Bradbury’s future, burns books.

In Bradbury’s dystopia, firemen became “custodians of our peace of mind, the focus of our understandable and rightful dread of being inferior; official censors, judges, and executors.”

Today’s mainstream and social media are “custodians of our peace of mind” as they filter out “conflicting theory and thought.”

Captain Beatty is Montag’s boss. Beatty explains, “If you don’t want a man unhappy politically, don’t give him two sides to a question to worry him; give him one.”

If you don’t want people debating questions such as COVID-19 policy, Beatty has the ticket: “Cram them full of noncombustible data, chock them so damned full of ‘facts’ they feel stuffed, but absolutely ‘brilliant’ with information. Then they’ll feel they’re thinking, they’ll get a sense of motion without moving.”

Today, millions listen daily to reports of case counts of COVID-19. Like Bradbury predicted, listeners can recite the numbers but have no context to make sense of the numbers.

Many have little idea that important scientists and doctors have advocated alternatives to lockdowns that could save lives and abate catastrophic impacts on economies.

As in Bradbury’s world, many are working tirelessly to disparage and censor alternative views.

In Bradbury’s dystopia, thinking was not welcome. Even front porches were eliminated. One of Montag’s young neighbors explained why:

“People sat there sometimes at night, talking when they wanted to talk, rocking, and not talking when they didn’t want to talk. Sometimes they just sat there and thought about things, turned things over… they didn’t want people sitting like that, doing nothing, rocking, talking; that was the wrong kind of social life. People talked too much. And they had time to think.”

Social distancing is today embraced as a way to keep us safe from COVID-19. Social distancing also keeps us safe from “conflicting theories and thoughts.” Chairs have been removed from social gathering places. Hallways are quiet. Nobody stands around the water cooler. People have few places to talk with each other. The parallel to porches is haunting.

Perhaps you are sensing a shift in social norms undermining parental rights and the sanctity of the family. Bradbury foresaw a push for government-funded pre-school. Captain Beatty explains, “The home environment can undo a lot you try to do at school. That’s why we’ve lowered the kindergarten age year after year until now we’re almost snatching them from the cradle.”

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Dueling Lawn Signs

Sundance at Conservative Tree House asked for readers to supply what he calls “ground reports” on the upcoming election. Since the current political atmosphere is so toxic, and most polls are so obviously bogus, collective anecdotal accounts of what’s happening are all we have to go on.

Rather than clog up his comments section with my remarks, I’ll post them here instead. But first I want to recycle a joke from four years ago. It was relevant in October of 2016, and it’s even more relevant today:

“When this dreadful election is finally over, I hope we can still be friends, even if we are in different internment camps.”

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During the last two or three weeks, the number of campaign signs in people’s yards in this part of Central Virginia has really exploded. In the region I’m personally familiar with — which comprises a rough triangle having Charlottesville, Lynchburg, and Farmville as its vertices — Trump signs outnumber Biden signs. In my immediate neighborhood, however, the Biden signs are ahead. My neighbors are mostly black, which I assume is one of the main reasons for the difference.

In fact, putting a Trump sign in the front yard is the same as saying, “A white family lives here.” I have yet to see a single Trump sign in the yard of a house whose inhabitants are definitely black.

The converse is not true, however. There are enough white Gutmenschen in the area — especially retired transplants from Yankeeland — to give Biden a strong showing among the palefaces. Among the white population, the Biden signs are usually found in front of middle class or upper middle class houses. A trailer or double-wide inhabited by white people is almost certain to have a Trump sign, if it has any sign at all.

A couple of other correlations are worth noting. The first is the display of American flags. I haven’t seen any yards with Biden signs that also fly an American flag. The Trump supporters, on the other hand, are very likely to have a flag on a pole, or hanging over the front porch.

For the last year or so I’ve noticed a sign that some people post in their front yards: “Love thy Neighbor / NO Exceptions”. I wondered what particular import the message had, but now that election season has kicked in, the correlation is clear: If a “Love thy Neighbor” yard has a campaign sign, it’s inevitably a Biden sign.

This leads me to conclude that the “Love thy Neighbor” initiative is about race. I take it to mean: “You lousy racist! You need to be high-minded like me.” It’s virtue-signaling, in other words. It can be found in the front yards of both black people and white people.

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There’s no way the entire Commonwealth of Virginia will go for Trump. The demographics of the state are now dominated by dense concentrations of snowflakes, federal employees, and culture-enrichers in the Wretched Hive of Scum and Villainy, a.k.a. Northern Virginia, plus the more progressive zip codes of the Richmond area and Tidewater. And Charlottesville, of course, which habitually votes just to the left of Ann Arbor.

Taken county by county, Trump would win, but the majority of the population in the Old Dominion is loyal to the Communist Democrat Party.

Lysenkoisms

“Stick with the science” is the mantra of politicians and public health officials during the COVID-19 era. Our Israeli correspondent MC takes a peek behind the curtain of politicized “science”.

Lysenkoisms

by MC

The problem with propaganda — the idea of lying to the populace — is what happens when the lies are exposed.

This is highly relevant in the current scenario of lockdowns and face masks. See this article. The science raises questions as to the motivation of lockdown authorities, and those authorities have to respond with Lysenkoised ‘science’ in order to defend their actions.

At the behest of Joseph Stalin, Trofim Lysenko used politicised junk ‘science’ to validate lies.

Lysenko forced farmers to plant seeds very close together since, according to his “law of the life of species”, plants from the same “class” never compete with one another. Lysenko played an active role in the famines that killed millions of Soviet people and his practices prolonged and exacerbated the food shortages. The People’s Republic of China under Mao Tse-Tung adopted his methods starting in 1958, with calamitous results, culminating in the Great Chinese Famine of 1959 to 1962, in which some 15 million people died. At least 30 million died of starvation.

Outside the Soviet Union, scientists spoke critically: British biologist S. C. Harland lamented that Lysenko was “completely ignorant of the elementary principles of genetics and plant physiology” (Bertram Wolfe, 2017). Criticism from foreigners did not sit well with Lysenko, who loathed Western “bourgeois” scientists and denounced them as tools of imperialist oppressors. He especially detested the American-born practice of studying fruit flies, the workhorse of modern genetics. He called such geneticists “fly lovers and people haters”.

Unable to silence Western critics, Lysenko tried to eliminate all dissent within the Soviet Union. Scientists who refused to renounce genetics found themselves at the mercy of the secret police. The lucky ones simply got dismissed from their posts and were left destitute. Hundreds if not thousands of others were rounded up and dumped into prisons or psychiatric hospitals. Several were sentenced to death as enemies of the state or starved in their jail cells (most notably the botanist Nikolai Vavilov). Before the 1930s, the Soviet Union had a strong genetics community. Lysenko gutted it, and by some accounts set Russian biology and agronomy back a half-century.

One can immediately see the model here: the mal-educated Lysenko develops an opinion that catches the attention of technically illiterate, but powerful politicians. Lysenko’s opinions are in accord with political (religious) dogma and ambitions, so they MUST be correct.

Rather than validate the opinion using such tools as observation, peer review and the repeatability of experimentation, the ‘science’ becomes ‘settled’ by consensus and opinion rather than open, reviewable research.

Millions starved to death because Lysenko’s erroneous opinions became official state ‘science’.

In Lysenko’s case, the subject matter was the growing problem of falling crop yields due to the inherent problems of collectivisation, which was a mandated (but unproven) ritual belief of religious communism. The communist ‘New Man’ would become a super-farmer if he would just do as the regime demanded.

Lysenkoism is not just limited to agriculture. We can see it working in medicine (face masks, lockdowns and vaccines) and climate change (the great carbon dioxide hoax).

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Joe’s a Shoo-in Now!

The Swedish matinee idol Greta Thunberg has thrown her sustainable solar-powered weight behind Joe Biden’s presidential campaign. With that endorsement, his election on November 3 becomes a sure thing.

Many thanks to FouseSquawk for translating this article from Aftonbladet:

Greta Thunberg takes a stand in American politics

Climate activist Greta Thunberg is making an exception to her line of not interfering in politics. In a tweet on Saturday, she urges Americans to vote for Democrat Joe Biden in the presidential election on November 3.

She justifies the exception on the grounds that the election in the USA goes beyond normal politics, especially from a climate perspective, and writes, “Organize yourselves and get everyone to vote for #Biden.”

The 17-year-old has something to say to Biden’s opponent, President Donald Trump. When Time Magazine named Thunberg as Person of the Year 2019, Trump mocked her in a tweet:

“So ridiculous. Greta needs to take care of her aggression problem and go see a good old movie with a friend. Relax, Greta, relax!” wrote the Republican president (TT)

Planned Bankruptcy

Below is a wry take on the US presidential election from a German vantage point by the popular columnist Hans Heckel.

Many thanks to JLH for translating this essay from Preußische Allgemeine Zeitung:

Week in Review

by Hans Heckel
September 12, 2020

Planned Bankruptcy

Why Joe Biden reminds us of Heinrich Lübke, and what Wolfgang Schäuble has up his sleeve.

Let us imagine for a moment that Joe Biden, who wants to be President of the USA, was not a member of the Democratic party, but in the wrong party — that of President Donald Trump. How then would the media handle the challenger? Americans can only wonder what that would be like. Not we Germans though, for we had Heinrich Lübke, whose dementia overshadowed the last years of his presidency and was an inexhaustible source of schadenfreude. Leftist media laughed themselves sick over the poor soul’s real and invented slips.

What does that have to do with Biden? Two quotes with which he delighted the coalition of Asians and Latinos: the anti-racist comment: “Poor children are just as clever and talented as white children.” That was a real “Lübke”, right? Another time, he was defending himself against the charge that he was a total opponent of private ownership of weapons: “I have three guns for hunting, my son has three hunting guns, altogether we have five guns.”

He doesn’t get numbers. His appearances in Internet videos are astounding in many ways. Names, too. He once confused Angela Merkel with Margaret Thatcher, and the states of New Hampshire and Vermont.

So, fortunately, our media protect us from knowing of these bizarre reports — they don’t fit the image of the “great hope” and would only confuse us. After all, what were the Democrats to do? The friendly wink to “Black Lives Matter” and Antifa tells us clearly that the party elite has moved so far to the left that it could shake the majority of voters. So somebody who is redolent of the “Middle” is needed. And old man Biden is the right one. People know him. They will vote for him. Later, the party grandees can slide the old man across the stage like a cardboard backdrop, while completely different persons are pulling the strings and making the policy, whether for Vermont or New Hampshire or the whole country. And if President Biden should later address our Chancellor as “dear Maggie”, Tagesschau will cautiously miss this. After all, what is the cutting room floor for?

It is in Germany’s best interests that Biden be elected. For we hear that Trump’s ambassador in Berlin will be no friend of ours. The opposition is seriously concerned that the appointment of Douglas Macgregor would gravely damage German-American relations. PAZ has already published the quotes that are the source of these concerns.

Among them is Macgregor’s attribution of a “sick mentality” to us, because we are fixated on the twelve years of Nazi rule, and pay almost no attention to the other 1500 years of our history. And yet Germany has “played a decisive role in Central Europe in the defense of Western Civilization”. He also reproaches Berlin over its offer of free state aid for “millions of unwanted Muslim intruders”, instead of raising military spending.

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