The Oath Keepers and the Pompton Mutiny

Is the Constitution truly protecting us from a centralized government?

In a field about a five-minute drive from here, a regiment of Colonial soldiers during the Revolutionary War, the New Jersey Line, mutinied on January 20, 1781.  Freezing, poorly clad, poorly armed, and not having been paid in months, the troops decided to follow other soldiers who marched on Philadelphia (where Congress held forth at the time), to demand food, clothing and pay.

General George Washington, not insensitive to the condition of his troops, pleaded with Congress to allocate the money.  His “requests” fell on deaf ears.  At the time, while the Colonies were united under the Articles of Confederation, it was a loose union and the states were locked in petty quarrels about which states should pay the armed forces.

Some states had actually disagreed with making war on Great Britain, especially the Southern states.  The New Jersey Line was actually on its way to its own state capital, Trenton, to make their demands.

Acting under the auspices of Sergeants David Gilmore, John Tuttle, George Grant and the influence of alcohol, about 300 soldiers from the New Jersey Line of the Continental Army mutinied. These soldiers began to make their way to Trenton to issue demands for a redress of grievances to the Continental Congress, in echo of the actions of their brethren in the Pennsylvania Line who had successfully sought similar redress.

Alerted to this rogue faction by Pompton Camp Commander, Colonel Israel Shreve, who had in turn been informed by a woman whose name has been lost to history, Commander-in-Chief of the Continental Army George Washington “immediately ordered a Detachment […] from West Point, under the Command of Major General [Robert] Howe, who surrounded the Mutineers by surprize in their Quarters, reduced them to unconditional submission & executed two of their Instigators on the spot—This has totally quelled the spirit of Mutiny, and every thing is now quiet.”

Sergeants David Gilmore and John Tuttle were executed on the spot by a firing squad of 12 mutineers; Sergeant George Grant was issued a pardon based upon testimony by the troop body that he had advocated peaceable return to duty throughout the events of the rebellion. But not, according to a local doctor, before he begged for his life.  The firing squad was reported to have discharged their duty and their weapons tearfully in slaying their former officers. The entire body of troops was said to have been penitent and genuinely contrite in the time following the unsuccessful mutiny.

Locals have been searching for the site of this mutiny for two centuries.  Supposedly two rocky mounds on top of Federal Hill mark the gravesites of Gilmore and Tuttle.  “Tuttle” is an old and well-known name in these parts.  A marker on Union Avenue in Bloomingdale marks the supposed site of the mutiny.

In addition to the controversy over the site of the execution, at least one of those potential sites is privately held and in danger of development. The Federal Hill site in Bloomingdale was once held by DR Horton, who sought to build 256 homes there, without great consideration to historical or environmental preservation on the site and won a court order to force the development.  Since then, the Meer Tract, which comprises a large portion of Federal Hill, has been purchased by Tilcon Industries, part of multinational mining conglomerate Anglo American plc, which plans to demolish and mine the land, against the outcry of environmental organizations and the Borough of Bloomingdale‘s historical opposition to development there.

The residents of Bloomingdale are opposed to the development; its town council is not.  They signed onto the United Nation’s Agenda 21 Sustainable Development treaty.  But the blasting has been going on since 2011, long after Tilcon’s contract was supposed to run out.  There is nothing left of the mountain and if there were graves up there (the hill was also the site of a Nazi Bundt camp) they’ve long since blasted away.

The government displayed a strange reluctance to nominate Federal Hill as a national historic site.  The site has some status, now.  But the town allowed sustainable development housing to be built in the marsh just below the hill, the only place an encampment could have been built during the Revolutionary War.  The town was quick to deem it an “urban blight zone” and devote the land to sustainable development.

Today, we have another questionable act of our Federal government:  the arrest of Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes.  Rhodes, a Yale-education attorney and U.S. Army veteran was arrested by the F.B.I. on January 13, 2022, on federal charges of “seditious conspiracy” related to the January 6, 2020 protests at the U.S. Capitol.

U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland calling the January 6th riot an “insurrection” while failing to charge anyone with treason or sedition, even though there was no evidence of any kind of plan to overthrow the government.  In fact, those who allegedly plotted the violent overthrow of the government left their guns behind, at their hotels or at home, that day.

Now Garland has offered up Rhodes and ten others as sacrificial lambs to the leftists who tirelessly promote their narrative that the January 6th protest and riot were some sort of unarmed effort to overthrow American system of government.

According to the Associated Press account:

Rhodes did not enter the Capitol building on Jan. 6 but is accused of helping put into motion the violence that disrupted the certification of the vote. The Oath Keepers case is the largest conspiracy case federal authorities have brought so far over Jan. 6, when rioters stormed past police barriers and smashed windows, injuring dozens of officers and sending lawmakers running.

Furthermore, the AP charges:

The indictment against Rhodes alleges Oath Keepers formed two teams, or “stacks,” that entered the Capitol. The first “stack” split up inside the building to separately go after the House and Senate. The second “stack” confronted officers inside the Capitol Rotunda, the indictment said. Outside Washington, the indictment alleges, the Oath Keepers had stationed two “quick reaction forces” that had guns “in support of their plot to stop the lawful transfer of power.”

Jonathan Moseley, an attorney representing Rhodes, said his client was arrested Thursday in Texas.

“He has been subject to a lot of suspicion to why he wasn’t indicted,” so far in the Jan. 6 riot, Moseley said. “I don’t know if this is in response to those discussions, but we do think it’s unfortunate. It’s an unusual situation.”

Moseley said Rhodes was supposed to testify before the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection in a deposition but it got called off. He was talking to Rhodes on the phone about the committee when Rhodes was contacted by the FBI.

Rhodes has said in interviews with right-wing hosts that there was no plan to storm the Capitol and that the members who did so went rogue. But he has continued to push the “lie” that the 2020 election was stolen, while posts on the Oath Keepers website have depicted the group as a victim of political persecution.

Mutiny during war is considered a crime punishable by almost immediate execution.  That’s what Dad said.  He was in the U.S. Army during World War II.  Washington justified ordering the execution in order to keep his rag-tag army from falling apart, even as crooked politicians dithered about who, if anyone, was going to pick up the bill to pay to feed and clothe the Continental Army.

Corrupt politicians steal from us and get away with it, while starving soldiers are executed in the field (in the case of the Revolutionary War) and others are arrested and held without bail, even as real rioters who burn, loot and pillage are set free.

One reason they get away with this is the power the executive has to issue executive orders.  The power applies specifically to “war.”  That’s why we’ve had “wars” that aren’t actually armed conflicts (“The War on Poverty”) while other wars are declared unofficial conflicts.  The “War on Terror” allowed Pres. George W. Bush to pass The Patriot Act, which many libertarians said we would live to regret.

Crooked politicians and even attorney generals and district attorneys can be charged through the Grand Jury system.  If only people were aware of that fact.  You can actually volunteer for Grand Jury and bring charges against corrupt prosecutors.

Despite what you see on television, prosecutors don’t actually run the show.  But they have more power than they should.  A defendant is not allowed to have his attorney present during questioning.  But the grand jury can ask its own questions of the defendant and witnesses.  They can investigate evidence and even crime scenes.

The question is what to do with these corrupt officials once a grand jury hands down an indictment.  The petit jury doesn’t have the same powers as the grand jury.  Since the 1960s, here in Passaic County, a petit juror cannot ask questions.  They can look at evidence in the jury room, but only such evidence as the judge allows.  They cannot visit crime scenes and while they can ignore a judge’s instructions, the judge wields tremendous power to cite a juror with contempt of court if they disagree with the rest of the jury (I was).

The Sheriff’s Office is the county law enforcement.  Whether they’ll abide by the jury’s decision is uncertain.  There’s much that many of us still don’t know, such as whether a judge can turn aside a jury’s verdict in a political case.

Jurors do have the option of “jury nullification,” although it would be a miracle if most Americans even know about this concept.

Joel McDurmon, author of Restoring America One County at a Time (McDurmon, Joel.  Restoring America One County At a Time; Devoted Books, Dallas, Georgia.  2^nd Ed., 2019), describes “jury nullification” this way:

The principle itself is quite simple:  juries have the perfectly legal right to determine the facts and the law in cases over which they sit in judgment.  This concept sounds radical to most modern ears.  But it’s absolutely true.  In cases where the application of a current law would actually cause an unjust outcome, or where the applicable law itself is unpopular or simply a bad law, the jury can remedy the situation – even if the defendant is technically guilty of breaking the law – by refusing to find the defendant guilty, by declaring the person innocent.  Juries have this right even if the judge instructs them otherwise in any way. 

Several of the founding fathers understood the fundamental importance of jury   nullification.  Even a Fox News report on the subject quoted John Adams to this effect:  “It is not only [the juror’s] right, but his duty…to find the verdict according to his own best understanding, judgment, and conscience, though in direct opposition to the court.  Likewise, the first Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, John Jay, [wrote]:  “…you have nevertheless a right to take upon y ourselves to judge of both, and to determine the law as well as the fact in controversy…Both objects are lawfully, within your power of decision.”  Unsurprisingly, Jefferson joined these Federalists in this view.  He explained why we should support jury nullification:  because “ton consider judges as the ultimate arbiters of all constitutional questions,” he wrote, is “a very dangerous doctrine indeed, and one which would place us under the despotism of oligarchy.”

In the case of the Oath Keepers, they are being held by the Federal government without bail.  Under the Patriot Act, they’ve been deemed “domestic terrorists.”  Whether they’ll be tried by a military tribunal or by Congress itself – if they’re tried at all – has not been announced.

The witnesses against them have not been vetted and were possibly federal infiltrators.  We already know the F.B.I.’s penchant for lying and changing witness statements to favor the government’s case.  The Associated Press “reported” that there were ‘associates’ waiting on the outskirts of Washington, D.C.  But then again, the government media also told us that the Steele Dossier was the real deal and that President Trump had been consorting with Russian prostitutes.

The whole thing was a fabrication.  But because the fabricators themselves hold the reigns of government, they will never see the inside of a prison cell for this fraud which they perpetrated upon the American public.

And the truth has yet to emerge about the coronavirus.

Their greatest weapon is ignorance – our ignorance.  Our general ignorance about our history, our laws, even our language is incredibly appalling.  I’ve had several job interviews in which the interviewers complained about the lack of communications abilities in today’s workers.  They can’t spell, they can’t write, they can’t construct a proper sentence.

Worse still, thanks to our Marxist educational system, they know absolutely nothing about our history or our Constitution.  Even those who willingly support the U.S. Constitution don’t realize what it actually says.  Even my Army veteran friend had to admit he hadn’t read the Federalist and Anti-Federalist Papers – and he has a much higher IQ than I do (you should have listened to my mother, pal, when we were kids.  Didn’t she tell you to stop reading the Sam Spade novels and read Shakespeare instead?  That if you wouldn’t eat garbage, why would you read it?).

That goes for all of you out there.  Everything you need to know about the U.S. Constitution and the Founding Fathers is in those two collections of essays – debates, really, about the Constitution.

Politics is all local.  McDurmon says that politics actually starts on the municipal level.  The first item he starts out with is education.  If you don’t even know who signed the Declaration of Independence first, you’re going to be easy fodder for any prosecutor if you’re selected for jury duty.

Reading the Federalist and Anti-Federalist papers may tax your brains.  The language is that of educated men, many of them lawyers.  This is not just about dusty old history; it’s about the laws that govern our nation, our states, counties and municipalities – laws that are being used against us without our knowledge or permission.

My Army friend accused me of spreading “fear porn.”  Well, I beg your pardon.  I’m not the one who joined the Army straight out of high school and started parachuting out of airplanes.  I was sent to secretarial school out of high school and finally I earned my bachelor’s degree in English and Communications.  I couldn’t pass the GRE to go on to graduate school the way my brother did.

But I did get involved in politics, sort of sub-municipally in the form of the local community band, which is an awful like serving in the Army except we carried musical instruments instead of weapons.  We had to march in step, keep our lines straight, and obey the band director, especially out on the street.  The politics were left in the rehearsal hall.  We did have a Constitution and like the U.S. Constitution, it was nightmare.

But we’ll leave the subtleties of the Constitution’s wording for another day.

We should be afraid and I’m going to keep on telling you you should be afraid because the politicians are using the words of our own Constitution against us.  The Supreme Court is using its loose wording to the government’s advantage, much as the band officers did years ago.

We’re going to be hung or executed by our own Constitution and just as mercilessly as Washington ordered the execution of those starving officers on Federal Hill.  Instead of holding Congress accountable – then and now – men (and women) brave enough to confront that government are paying the price.

Nobody – NOBODY – tells me what to write.  Not even someone with an IQ of 185. 

Got that?!

Breyer Announcement Cloaks New DOJ Funding of Anti-Cop Groups

Breyer Retires as DOJ grants billions to groups he supported from bench

Yesterday, Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer announced his retirement.  He was appointed to the Supreme Court by Pres. Bill Clinton in 1994.  During his tenure, he registered the opinion that he considered citizenship naturalization unconstitutional

In 2015, Breyer broke a federal law which bans judges from hearing cases when they or their spouses or minor children have a financial interest in a company involved. His wife sold about $33,000 worth of stock in Johnson Controls a day after her husband had already participated in the oral argument. This brought him back into compliance and he joined the majority in ruling in favor of the interests of a Johnson Controls subsidiary which was party to FERC v. Electric Power Supply Association.  Breyer has appeared as a guest on Stephen Colbert’s TV show. On the Late Show in September 2021, he discussed the Texas Heartbeat Act and his reluctance to retire.

Yet here we are, late January of 2022, a mere four months later and he announces his retirement.  “Resident” Biden immediately announced that he would appoint a Black woman to the SCOTUS  bench, as he said he’s always promised to do.  Republicans have reacted with a big yawn.  At least Breyer is a liberal, not a “conservative” or “constitutional” justice.  One Liberal activist judge for another.

A few more interesting notes about Breyer’s career.

While teaching at Harvard, Breyer took several leaves of absence to serve in the U.S. government. He served as an assistant special prosecutor on the Watergate Special Prosecution Force in 1973. Breyer was a special counsel to the U.S. Senate Committee on the Judiciary from 1974 to 1975 and served as chief counsel of the committee from 1979 to 1980.

Breyer served as a member of the Judicial Conference of the United States between 1990 and 1994 and the United States Sentencing Commission between 1985 and 1989.  On the sentencing commission, he played a key role in reforming federal criminal sentencing procedures, producing the Federal Sentencing Guidelines, which were formulated to increase “uniformity” in sentencing.

So why announce his retirement now?  No one really cares.  One theory is that the Democrats are going to lose big-time in November.  If the Republicans take back the Senate in enough numbers, the Democrats won’t get their Liberal activist nominee through.

The exact timing is stranger when you consider this article from John Solomon’s Just the News.com:

The Department of Justice has awarded crime-reduction grants to some groups that back the same anti-police, soft-on-crime policies implemented by George Soros-funded district attorneys that critics argue have unleashed a surge in urban crime.

Those policies — including the defunding or restructuring of police departments, bail reform, less incarceration, decriminalizing and deprioritizing a broad range of criminal offenses — have been linked to skyrocketing criminal violence in many Democrat-led cities, including Los Angeles, San Francisco, Philadelphia, Chicago and New York City.

The DOJ’s Bureau of Justice Assistance has awarded the grants to organizations and municipalities to “reduce serious and violent crime” and “make neighborhoods safer” under its 2021 Byrne Criminal Justice Innovation Program. Some of those grantees, Just the News found, have ties to district attorneys and groups funded by progressive megadonor Soros.

In Los Angeles, for instance, the Urban Peace Institute (UPI) received $1 million for its South Los Angeles Peacemakers program to make the city safer. The UPI has called for the “radical restructuring” of American policing, including shifting power from police to community “peacemakers.”

The nonprofit was instrumental in progressive Los Angeles DA George Gascon’s criminal justice changes in the city, according to a report.

“In December 2020, newly-elected Los Angeles District Attorney George Gascon unveiled sweeping changes to the criminal justice system in Los Angeles County,” the California Wellness Foundation reported.

“These groundbreaking changes were a direct result of decades of tireless advocacy, education, were a direct result of decades of tireless advocacy, education, awareness-raising and research by activists, grassroots organizations and community members in Los Angeles County. Among these grassroots groups were the Urban Peace Institute (UPI), a grantee in our Community Well-Being portfolio, which has championed community-led solutions to public safety, justice and public health for over 17 years.”

Amid the anti-police protests and rioting roiling Democrat-led cities following the May 2020 death of George Floyd, UPI urged radical overhaul of law enforcement and the criminal justice system.

“Change is only going to come from a seismic shift in power away from police, police unions, and the justice system towards a transformative investment in community-led safety and health solutions” UPI proclaimed on its website.

“American policing needs radical restructuring. Public safety should be redefined by communities that experience over-policing and violence.”

In Reimagining Public Safety, a list of recommendations posted on its site, UPI outlines five broad objectives:  1) end over-policing of communities of color; 2) end police violence and brutality, 3) reimagine policing for public trust; 4) invest in community-based alternatives to public safety, and; 5) ensure community-led police accountability. Focused far more on restricting law enforcement than on curbing crime, the nonprofit’s specific proposals

 include the following [it’s a lengthy list]:

• End and divest funding from law enforcement practices that support systemic racism, use of force, and warrior style policing (recommending guardian-style protection, instead);
• End stop and frisk practices;
• End racial and gang profiling;
• End use of gang databases and injunctions;
• End police in schools;
• End police collaboration with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE);
• Decriminalize and deprioritize enforcement of minor crimes;
• End use of adversarial policing and aggressive suppression tactics;
• Transform use-of-force policies;
• Require police departments to bear the cost of misconduct; settlements should be paid out of police budgets;
• Divest funding from law enforcement practices that support systemic racism, use of force, and warrior-style policing to fund alternative community-based public safety strategies;
• Build a comprehensive community-based public safety infrastructure focused on non-law enforcement approaches to neighborhood health and safety;
• Review public safety budgets at the state, county, and city level to reprioritize funding to improve community health and safety; redistribute public safety funding responsibilities between city, county, and state;
• End the use of police in schools and divest funding to support school mental health counselors, gang intervention and outreach workers, nurses, psychologists, social workers, and public health workers;
• Create police commission and civilian complaints offices including community oversight with subpoena power;
• Invest in community leadership training to ensure police accountability is driven by communities of color most impacted by over policing;
• Ensure expedient officer discipline and prosecution without pay when under investigation of an alleged crime or improper use of force;
• Assign independent prosecutors for use-of-force cases;
• Establish policies that allow individuals to review police video and audio footage of their interaction with police without a court order;
• End the application of qualified immunity doctrine to police accused of use of excessive and/or deadly force;
• Require policing data publication for arrests, diversion, officer-involved shootings with disaggregation by race, age, and zip code;
• End police union interference in the oversight and crafting of police accountability;
• State legislatures must separate negotiation of contracts on police wages and benefits from law enforcement disciplinary procedures;
• Revise state “Officer Bill of Rights” to ensure it does not interfere with officer accountability.

UPI’s cofounder, Connie Rice, also co-founded the Advancement Project, a left-wing activist organization opposing voter ID that has received millions from Soros. 

UPI’s Executive Director Fernando Rejon said the organization believes in a community-driven force to address violence. “It’s not necessarily as much shifting power from police” rather to a “community-based infrastructure” that focuses on gang-related violence,” he said. The shift from police, he said, is not “directed toward reducing crime but bringing down the violence.” 

According to Rejon, the root causes of violence must be addressed.  UPI lists 10 root causes on its website, where it cited an evaluation on the success of its peacekeepers program. 

Bail reform and other criminal justice reforms including decriminalizing and deprioritizing prosecution of low-level crimes are a major factor in the surge in criminal activity, according to many in law enforcement. Los Angeles has seen a rash of smash-and-go robberies, and fourteen suspects in December were promptly released on zero bail, sparking controversy and calls for an end to no-bail policy by LAPD Chief Michael Moore and even progressive Mayor Eric Garcetti.

In a shocking recent case, UCLA graduate student Brianna Kupfer was allegedly murdered by Shawn Laval Smith, who had a lengthy criminal history. Smith was released on a misdemeanor charge in October, 2020, Fox News reported. A law enforcement source told the news outlet Smith was recently jailed in San Mateo after assaulting an officer and had an active warrant in that case.

Los Angeles’ homicide rate rose 12 percent in 2021 over 2020.

The DOJ also awarded $1 million to the city of Oakland, Calif., to reduce crime in that city, and the award documents show the Urban Institute as one of its partners in that program.

Another taxpayer-funded award of  $1 million was given to the Center for Court Innovation (CCI), previously the Fund for the City of New York, to increase safety in the Bronx by empowering “public safety, violence prevention, youth services, community organizing, urban planning and public health strategies …”  

CCI stated in the award documents it will also use the funds to address the “deep-rooted and generational issues of community violence …” 

“We design and implement bail reform strategies to reduce the use of jail and increase the fairness of the justice system,” CCI declares in its Rethinking Incarceration policy.

New York, like Los Angeles, has seen a significant rise in violent crime. In one recent case, Michelle Go, 40, was pushed onto the train tracks in Times Square by a deranged man. 

Another case involved 19-year-old Kristal Bayron-Nieves, who was gunned down while working at a Burger King. The suspected murderer, Winston Glynn, has an extensive rap sheet and was released on his own recognizance after a November arrest, as the misdemeanor charge was “bail eligible,” the New York Post reported.

CCI’s Manhattan Justice program wants a more fair criminal justice system and believes that transformation is needed in response to criminal activity. The program “helps build a more effective and restorative justice system by providing comprehensive services as alternatives to traditional responses to crime,” according to the organization.

Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg’s office is a partner in the Manhattan Justice program. Bragg appointed Sherene Crawford as his executive assistant DA. Crawford was a leader at the Center for Court Innovation. CCI has also been funded by Soros.

The DOJ did not respond to a request for comment.

So hold on a moment.  We thought high-crime communities had reversed their stance on policing the policy.  Crime rates, particularly murder, soared so high that communities began fighting back on the grass-roots level.

Now we learn, on the same day that Justice Breyers, noted for his activity in criminal sentencing reform, announces his retirement from the Supreme Court, that thanks to billionaire Soros, it’s business-as-usual.  The window-bashing thugs in Los Angeles and San Francisco were immediately released without bail.

Our guess is that Breyer’s coincidental announcement was meant to serve as cover for this outrageous action by Biden’s Department of Justice.

Spread the word, readers.  The attack on our law enforcement and our civilization is going to continue.

Doocy Versus the Doofus-in-Chief

A $50,000 Reward for Biden’s Missing Brain

Former Vice President Biden called Fox News White House correspondent Peter Doocy a “stupid son of a bitch” Monday after he asked Biden about soaring inflation.

“Do you think inflation is a political liability?” Doocy asked Biden as the press was ushered out of an event in the White House East Room.

“No, it’s a great asset — more inflation. What a stupid son of a bitch,” Biden sneered into a hot mic.

The president’s vulgar insult was cut from the White House video feed but was audible on video streamed by C-SPAN.

Apparently not recognizing the sarcasm and criticism inherent in the Fox News reporter’s question, former Vice President Biden responded to the question seriously.  Among the other things, Biden (who flunked the Third Grade) failed to learn about was rhetorical questions.

He wasn’t supposed to answer the question and certainly not with a vulgarity unbecoming a supposed President of the United States.  But then, he really isn’t the President, anyway.  Do he and his party e ver wonder why Conservatives continue to assert that the 2020 election was stolen?

It’s certainly not out of bitter envy, although we are bitter.  Even putting the irrefutable evidence aside– the e-mail chains from districts to state attorney generals’ offices;  the electronic evidence; the refusal by Democrats to allow Republican poll workers to oversee the counting of the votes; the fraudulent electronic ballots; the theft of mail-in ballots; the number of ballots that came from non-existent addresses; the number of illegal aliens, felons and dead people on the rolls – there’s an obvious reason we know the election was stolen.

Look at the candidate himself.  Who would elect a man for President whose son had shady dealings with the Ukraine, China and a number of other countries that could be tied to his father’s Vice Presidency?  Voters were polled long after the election.  They said that if they had known about Hunter’s laptop, they’d never have voted for Biden.

Friends who were Democrats said they couldn’t bring themselves to vote for him.  Biden flunked the Third Grade.  Although he attended law school, he never actually practiced the law but went into politics at the age of 26.  His ancestors, the Robinettes, were slave-owners.  He used ear-marks to subsidize a failing, federalized railroad (Amtrak).

Then there are his questionable social skills (photographed sniffing women’s hair and other eyebrow-raising actions).

Who is going to vote for someone like that?  So of course we firmly believe that the election was stolen.  The only way he could “win” was if the Democrats bought the votes of illegal aliens, paid poll workers to falsify the voter rolls and stuff the ballot boxes.  Multi-billionaires had to buy state attorney generals to validate the illegal votes.

The hoary Biden’s greatest power, it seems, was in raising the dead on Election Day.

Peter Doocy, the son of Fox News host Steven Doocy, graduated from Villanova University with a bachelor’s degree in political science.  This wasn’t the first time Doocy had his intelligence questioned.

In October 2017, Doocy asked Sen, John McCain (R-AZ), “Has your relationship with the president frayed to the point that you’re not going to support anything that he comes to you and asks for?”  McCain responded, “Why would you say something that stupid? Why would you ask something that dumb, heh? … That”s a dumb question.”

The question was certainly salient.  But it was a fair question which McCain didn’t want to answer.  Instead, he upbraided Doocy for asking it.  McCain’s response wasn’t even grammatically correct.

Later in the day, after calling Doocy a “stupid SOB,” Biden reportedly called Doocy to ‘clear the air.’

I once had to take photos of an employee who was angry.  When I suggested to her that she needed to smile, she became even more enraged.

“Look,” I told her, “you can scowl at me if you want.  But no one is going to see me or whoever it is you’re mad at.  They’re not here and I’m behind the camera.  The only person people who look at this photo are going to see is you, so might want to consider revising your expression.”

Former Vice President Biden’s optics were none-too-pleasant on Monday.  He came across as sneering, arrogant, and stupid.  The White House Press Room cut out that portion of the press conference.  But the video still made it out to the light of day.  He looked and sounded like an idiot.  A foul-mouthed idiot at that.  You want the proof that the election was stolen?   Just turn on the television and take a good look at the guy who supposedly “won.”

Stupid is as stupid does, Forrest Biden.

The Thunder of War and the Beep of Tyranny

Hiding under our smartphones as the clouds of war gather

“Is that the sound of cannon,” Ilsa asked Rick in the 1942 film, Casablanca, “or is it the sound of my heart pounding?”

He assures it’s the German artillery and only about three days’ from Paris.  My sister-in-law asked a similar question of my older brother.  What was rattling the windows of their house.  He told her it was the artillery from a nearby military installation.  Either they were testing closer to their house, or the bombs were getting bigger.

She wanted to know what it meant since the installation had never been this close.  I could have told her that this wasn’t the first time artillery shook the windows of that house, although not with the same ferocity.

Only late last week came the news that the State Department had ordered all families of embassy personnel to leave the Ukraine.  The Russian Army had been progressively building up on the border all this past year.  Russia has been testing hypersonic missiles.  Their warships have been stalking the coasts of Ireland and Scotland and their submarines have been ghosting the coast of the United States.

China, meanwhile, has been performing wargames over Taiwan and testing similar hypersonic missiles.

War isn’t just coming; it’s here.  Today, the U.S. military announced the call-up 8,500 troops.  That’s not many troops to help defend Ukraine’s borders.  We’re bound by treaty to NATO to defend the Ukraine.  By August of last year, we’d completely abandoned Afghanistan to the Taliban and China.

The United States must put on a show of force; but that’s all it is – a show.  Biden the Feeble has no more intention of showing strength in defending the Ukraine and Taiwan than Obama the Marxist had as China marshalled islands in the South Pacific to create the “Belt” section of its “Belt and Road Initiative,” creating military installations in the South China Sea.  Nor did Obama blink an eye when Putin took over the Crimea on the Black Sea.

All these territories are rich in oil.  China and Russia take over the oil fields as Biden shuts our oil fields and oil production down.

The United States’ economy has been sufficiently weakened by the coronavirus shut-down, a completely unnecessary gutting of our economy from a health stand-point.  The lockdown was of course entirely necessary to Obama’s agenda of shutting down the United States of America, which Biden is continuing.  Biden displays precisely the doddering, ineffectual non-leadership necessary for a final surrender of the United States to a global dictatorship.

He’s also the poster boy from corruption.  The Gateway Pundit reported on Jan. 23, 2021 that the Biden Regime has granted EcoHealth Alliance, which assisted the Chinese military with research into creating the coronavirus, $4.7 million.

Gain-of-function research entails increasing the lethality, virulence, and transmissibility of a pathogen, which deleted webpages from the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s website reveal the lab was engaged in alongside EcoHealth Alliance…

…The Biden grant will furnish Daszak with a new $4.7m of U.S. taxpayer cash until 2026.

“USAID CWA is to conserve threatened and endangered species by strengthening protected areas and helping communities be less reliant on protected resources for their livelihoods,” notes the grant’s description.

The cash represents the largest sum EcoHealth Alliance has ever received from USAID, with the next largest totaling less than $2 million. The Biden-backed $4.7 million grant is also the third-largest grant the group has ever received from a federal agency.

What has Biden done to protect America from “enemies both foreign and domestic”?

Nothing.  In fact, he and Obama are America’s enemies, along with their propagandist Media and an increasingly Marxist Congress.  China and Russia may confidently invade Taiwan and Ukraine, respectively, knowing that they can depend upon a compromised, feckless anti-American puppet in the White House to offer a deliberately unsuccessful parry to their invasions.

Meanwhile, the domestic destruction of our country continues apace.  Americans are staging a credible resistance to this tyranny.  But thunder still comes from Federal Hill and the iron rains down upon our vehicles here, across the highway, making ready for the Sustainable Development Obama promised.  By 2030, we will not own anything, certainly not our homes or property.

The current generation does not understand what it’s losing and will not realize the trap they’ve fallen into until it’s too late to escape from it.  They’ve been lured into a trap, as every critter is ever lured, by the convenience of electronics.

An article in the January 2022 issue of Newsmax warned that if you own a metal, mechanical  key to your front door, you’re “out of touch.” 

Don’t these people realize that by over-reliance on electronics, they can not only be locked out of their homes (and cars), but that they can also be locked in?  One sign of the beginning of our loss of freedom came with the introduction of electronic car windows.  Everyone sighed at the convenience and never gave a thought as to what would happen if the electronic windows failed.

My brother and his first wife found out the hard way:  they spent at least a week with one of the back windows of their van stuck open, with the rain coming in.  They waited for two weeks for the electronic component to be replaced.  Having open windows is bad enough.  Imagine having closed windows and a lack of air conditioning?  My air conditioning stopped working in my 16 year-old car.  If for some reason the windows refuse to work, I basically won’t be able to drive the car until it’s fixed.  If my present car had the manual, roll-down windows that my former cars had, it wouldn’t be a problem.  The power windows are a great convenience.  But they can’t replace the safety of the roll-down windows and roll-down windows haven’t been an option in many years.

The government and various manufacturers don’t want us to do it ourselves.  They don’t want us to have do-it-yourself cars, meals, or homes – and we’re increasingly shunning them in favor of the lure of convenience.

Let someone else take care of the house, drive the car, and make the dinner.  Let someone else decide what’s best for your children.

Let someone else decide what’s best for the country.  Politically, America was never supposed to be a do-it-yourself country.  That’s why we have a representative republic.  So we can live our lives, do our jobs and raise our families. 

But now we consider even voting such a chore, that we willingly surrender to the siren song of electronic voting.  Democrats are touting “participatory democracy.”

What a joke.  That’s the last thing in the world that they want.  They’re seeking the further diminishment of individual rights, not a broadening of them.  In short, they don’t give a “beep.”

Why the U.S. Economy is Sinking Like the Titanic

Too many (illegal) immigrants and billionaires, not enough seamen

The story of the R.M.S. Titanic is one of the most famous disaster/mysteries in history.  Everyone knows the story: The Titanic strikes an iceberg on her maiden voyage from England, with 1,500 lives lost.

Yes, we know all the legendary mistakes, or at least we think we do:  Captain Smith ignoring numerous iceberg warnings and keeping his ship at nearly full speed (21 knots); the lookouts failing to see the iceberg in time; the ship not having enough lifeboats for everyone (approximately 2,200 passengers and crew); Third Class passengers being kept from getting to the life boats in time; boats pulling away from the Titanic half-empty; nearby ships ignoring the Titanic’s calls for help.

But let’s take a look at the lifeboat issue again.  The British Board of Trade required passenger ships to carry a certain number of lifeboats; the Titanic had more than required number.

What she – and all the rest of the liners – did not have was enough crew to manage the lifeboats.  At the very least, each lifeboat needed the seaman to uncover the boats and make sure they were supplied.  Two were needed to lower the lifeboat while a third directed them.  One seaman was needed to direct the lifeboat’s rudder and another to row it.

That’s at the least five seaman.  We’re not talking about pursers, cabin stewards or bakers.  The boats needed skilled seamen who knew how to navigate and steer the boat.  In spite of what you think, their job wasn’t to row the boat to shore (Newfoundland was closest) but to keep the boat near the last position of the ship so rescue ships could find them.

We’re talking numbers.  Five seamen for 20 lifeboats. That’s a minimum of 100 seamen.  But according to statements by surviving crew members, the Titanic was still decidedly short-handed and barely got all the boats away in time.  The last boats, the collapsibles, had to be floated off and not all of them made it off the Titanic.  One overturned and the survivors – all men – had to stand on the boats keel, shifting port and starboard as they navigated.

There was the problem in a nutshell.  More passengers (and crew) could have gotten off the ship.  But the passengers refused to get into the boats in the beginning.  They preferred to remain on the ship, in the hopes that a rescue ship would arrive.  In fact, they could see one, clearly unaided, off the Titanic’s port bow.  But instead, it sailed away.

Being short-handed, the crew had to get the boats away whether they were filled or not, and go on to the next lifeboat.  Secondly, there were orders to put women and children on board first – not only.  This was a tremendous error on the part of the crew, which was used to the adage that first-class passengers were always first.  To their credit, not a single first-class male passenger boarded a lifeboat.

This was unfortunate because the boats were heavy and difficult to steer, as the crew attested.  They struggled just to keep the boats from being carried away by the strong current.  More men would have enabled the crew to better manage the boats and save more lives in the bargain.  (Men are also warmer).

Take that, feminists who think the world doesn’t need men.\

So why didn’t the White Star Line install more lifeboats and hire more seaman?  Because the White Star Line was already struggling financially.  They couldn’t compete with the German liners and the Cunard Line which were faster, ferrying more passengers with a faster turnaround time.

Although the Titanic was carrying about 2,200 passengers, she actually had capacity for 3,500 – some put her maximum at 4,000).   Given a minimum of five seamen per lifeboat, with each boat capable of carrying 60 (or perhaps 70, given the smaller size of women and children), White Star would have had to hire 400-450 seaman with no other job aboard the ship except to manage the lifeboats in case of an emergency.

Not only would they have had to fed, but housed as well, with all the usual overhead.  They would have also been entitled to White Star Line’s benefits, such as they were (including life insurance).  The White Star Line’s band was actually a pick-up band composed of contractor musicians working through an agency.  The musicians’ survivors received no life insurance benefits.

In short, the struggling White Star Line would have gone out of business and the Titanic would never have set sail.  Nor would any other ship under those sort of requirements.

We blame various actors in this drama for the tragedy:  Captain Edward Smith, Thomas Andrews (the Titanic’s architect), J. Bruce Ismay (Chairman of the White Star Line), the helmsman at the wheel who inadvertently turned the ship the wrong way. 

The Titanic was on fire since three weeks before she left Belfast.  That’s when she should have departed and was the reason the bunkers were filled with coal.  But her sister ship, the Olympic, was damaged in an accident.  The Olympic’s first major mishap occurred on her fifth voyage on September 20, 1911, when she collided with the British cruiser HMS Hawke

It took two weeks for the damage to the Olympic to be patched up sufficiently to allow her to return to Belfast for permanent repairs, which took just over six weeks to complete.  To expedite repairs, Harland and Wolff was obliged to replace Olympic’s damaged propeller shaft with one from Titanic, delaying the latter’s completion.  By November 20, the Olympic was back in service, but, on February 24, 1912, suffered another setback when she lost a propeller blade on an eastbound voyage from New York, and once again returned to her builder for repairs.

To return her to service as soon as possible, Harland & Wolff again had to pull resources from Titanic, delaying her maiden voyage by three weeks, from March 20 to 10 April 10, 1912, the same three-week period in which the dormant coal in the Titanic’s bunker combusted into a fire, a fire which would not be contained until April 14, the same day Titanic later struck an iceberg at full-speed.

The collision took 37 seconds.

Passengers boarding in Belfast reported seeing the fire, that is, the actual flames.  Some of them disembarked.  When the ship reached Southampton, some 120 or so engineers abandoned the ship.  Not only did White Star have to find more engineers (which they took from the Olympic), they also had to find more coal, which was in short supply due to a coal miners’ strike.

The ship had burned through more of its supply than they had anticipated.  Passengers boarded the ship unaware of the fire, since the Captain berthed the ship so that the passengers boarded from the pier on the port (left-hand) side, not the starboard (the right), where the fire was raging.

One passenger who cancelled his trip was J.P. Morgan.  Morgan was the CEO of White Star Line’s parent company, International Mercantile Marine Co. (IMM).  Morgan was kind of the Donald Trump of his day.  He had plans to build a special train line and a hotel for White Star’s passengers, particularly the first-class passengers.

Not to disparage Trump in any way, but Morgan quietly cancelled his trip on the ship’s maiden voyage – a ship he owned.  The cancellation was hushed up.  Bruce Ismay took his cabin, instead. 

But Morgan never saw America again.  He died in his sleep at the Grand Hotel Plaza in Rome, Italy, on March 31, 1913. His body was brought back to America aboard the S.S. France, a French Line passenger ship.  Why he didn’t sail on one of his own company’s ships is unclear.  Ironically, the France set sail on her maiden voyage just one week after the Titanic sank.

Now here’s where the parallels get interesting.

After the death of his father in 1890, Morgan gained control of J.S. Morgan & Co. (renamed Morgan, Grenfell & Company in 1910). Morgan began negotiations with Charles M. Schwab, president of Carnegie Co. and businessman Andrew Carnegie in 1900 with the intention of buying Carnegie’s business and several other steel and iron businesses to consolidate them to create the United States Steel Corporation.  Carnegie agreed to sell the business to Morgan for $480 million.  The deal was closed without lawyers and without a written contract.  News of the industrial consolidation arrived to newspapers in mid-January 1901. U.S. Steel was founded later that year with an authorized capitalization of $1.4 billion, the first billion-dollar company in the world.

The Panic of 1907 was a financial crisis that almost crippled the American economy. Major New York banks were on the verge of bankruptcy and there was no mechanism to rescue them, until Morgan stepped in to help resolve the crisis.  Treasury Secretary George B. Cortelyou earmarked $35 million of federal money to deposit in New York banks.  Morgan then met with the nation’s leading financiers in his New York mansion, where he forced them to devise a plan to meet the crisis.  James Stilman, president of the National City Bank, also played a central role. Morgan organized a team of bank and trust executives which redirected money between banks, secured further international lines of credit, and bought up the plummeting stocks of healthy corporations.

One hundred and one years later, the United States experienced a similar banking crisis, with much the same remedies of federal hand-outs and securing of loans, of bailing out banks that were considered ‘too big to fail’ by the federal government.

This banking crisis was long in the making, beginning.  It goes as far back as the creation of the Federal Reserve.  Though not personally knowledgeable about banking and financial issues, Pres. Woodrow Wilson solicited expert advice from Virginia Representative Carter Glass, soon to become the chairman of the House Committee on Banking and Finance, and from the Committee’s expert advisor, H. Parker Willis, formerly a professor of economics at Washington and Lee University. Throughout most of 1912 (the year the RMS Titanic sank), Glass and Willis labored over a central bank proposal, and by December 1912, they presented Wilson with what would become, with some modifications, the Federal Reserve Act.

From December 1912 to December 1913, the Glass-Willis proposal was hotly debated, molded and reshaped. By December 23, 1913, when President Woodrow Wilson signed the Federal Reserve Act into law, it stood as a classic example of compromise—a decentralized central bank that balanced the competing interests of private banks and populist sentiment.

Before the new central bank could begin operations, the Reserve Bank Operating Committee, comprised of Treasury Secretary William McAdoo, Secretary of Agriculture David Houston, and Comptroller of the Currency John Skelton Williams, had the arduous task of building a working institution around the bare bones of the new law.  In other words, they needed to create a bureaucracy.

By November 16, 1914, the 12 cities chosen as sites for regional Reserve Banks were open for business, just as hostilities in Europe erupted into World War I.

When World War I broke out in mid-1914, U.S. banks continued to operate normally, thanks to the emergency currency issued under the Aldrich-Vreeland Act of 1908.  But the greater impact in the United States came from the Reserve Banks’ ability to discount bankers’ acceptances.

A Banker’s Acceptance (BA) is a negotiable piece of paper that functions like a post-dated check.  A bank, rather than an account holder, guarantees the payment.  Banker’s acceptances (also known as bills of exchange) are used by companies as a relatively safe form of payment for large transactions.  BAs can also be short-term debt instruments, similar to U.S. Treasury bills, that trade at a discount to face value in the money markets.

A bill of exchange is a written order used primarily in international trade that binds one party to pay a fixed sum of money to another party on demand or at a predetermined date.  Bills of exchange are similar to checks and promissory notes (paper money); they can be drawn by individuals or banks and are generally transferable by endorsements.

Through this mechanism, the United States aided the flow of trade goods to Europe, indirectly helping to finance the war until 1917, when the United States officially declared war on Germany and financing our own war effort became paramount.

Following World War I, Benjamin Strong, head of the New York Fed from 1914 to his death in 1928, recognized that gold no longer served as the central factor in controlling credit. Strong’s aggressive action to stem a recession in 1923 through a large purchase of government securities gave clear evidence of the power of open market operations to influence the availability of credit in the banking system. During the 1920s, the Fed began using open market operations as a monetary policy tool. During his tenure, Strong also elevated the stature of the Fed by promoting relations with other central banks, especially the Bank of England.

During the 1920s, Virginia Representative Carter Glass warned that stock market speculation would lead to dire consequences. In October 1929, his predictions seemed to be realized when the stock market crashed, and the nation fell into the worst depression in its history.

Investors borrowed money for their investments on what are called short-calls.  They gambled on stocks going down rather than up.  If the stocks went down, they’d sell the stock and make a profit and could pay off their loans.  If not….

From 1930 to 1933, nearly 10,000 banks failed, and by March 1933, newly-inaugurated President Franklin Delano Roosevelt declared a bank holiday, closing the banks, while government officials grappled with ways to remedy the nation’s economic woes. Many people blamed the Fed for failing to stem speculative lending that led to the crash, and some also argued that inadequate understanding of monetary economics kept the Fed from pursuing policies that could have lessened the depth of the Depression.

In reaction to the Great Depression, Congress passed the Banking Act of 1933, better known as the Glass-Steagall Act, calling for the separation of commercial and investment banking and requiring use of government securities as collateral for Federal Reserve notes. The Act also established the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), placed open market operations (the Fed buys and sells bond to control the interest rate) under the Fed and required bank holding companies to be examined by the Fed, a practice that was to have profound future implications, as holding companies became a prevalent structure for banks over time.  Also, as part of the massive reforms taking place, Roosevelt recalled all gold and silver certificates, effectively ending the gold and any other metallic standard.

Remember that, students:  FDR took the United States off the gold and silver standards.  In other words, a private citizen could not own gold or silver.  Only the government could legally hold these commodities.  You could – and still can – buy gold.  But you cannot actually have it in your possession.  A federal bank holds it in reserve for you and you can only buy U.S. currency with it.

The Banking Act of 1935 called for further changes in the Fed’s structure, including the creation of the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) as a separate legal entity, removal of the Treasury Secretary and the Comptroller of the Currency from the Fed’s governing board and establishment of the members’ terms at 14 years.  Following World War II, the Employment Act added the goal of promising maximum employment to the list of the Fed’s responsibilities.  In 1956 the Bank Holding Company Act named the Fed as the regulator of bank holding companies owning more than one bank, and in 1978 the Humphrey-Hawkins Act required the Fed chairman to report to Congress twice annually on monetary policy goals and objectives.

The creation of this separate entity absolved it from political influence – and accountability.

The Federal Reserve System formally committed to maintaining a low interest rate peg on government bonds in 1942 after the United States entered World War II.  It did so at the request of the Treasury to allow the federal government to engage in cheaper debt financing of the war. To maintain the pegged rate, the Fed was forced to give up control of the size of its portfolio as well as the money stock. Conflict between the Treasury and the Fed came to the fore when the Treasury directed the central bank to maintain the peg after the start of the Korean War in 1950.

President Harry Truman and Secretary of the Treasury John Snyder were both strong supporters of the low interest rate peg. The President felt that it was his duty to protect patriotic citizens by not lowering the value of the bonds that they had purchased during the war.  Unlike Truman and Snyder, the Federal Reserve was focused on the need to contain inflationary pressures in the economy caused by the intensification of the Korean War.  Many on the Board of Governors, including Marriner Eccles, understood that the forced obligation to maintain the low peg on interest rates produced an excessive monetary expansion that caused inflation.

After a fierce debate between the Fed and the Treasury for control over interest rates and U.S. monetary policy, their dispute was settled resulting in an agreement known as the Treasury-Fed Accord.  This eliminated the obligation of the Fed to monetize the debt of the Treasury at a fixed rate and became essential to the independence of central banking and how monetary policy is pursued by the Federal Reserve today.

In 1971, Pres. Richard Nixon passed an act making it illegal to convert dollars into gold.  Period.  With inflation on the rise and a gold run looming, President Richard Nixon’s team enacted a plan that ended this dollar convertibility to gold and implemented wage and price controls, which soon brought an end to the Bretton Woods System.

The dollar was no longer tied to the price of gold.   But it was also no longer illegal to buy gold. 

The Bretton Woods Agreement was negotiated in July 1944 by delegates from 44 countries at the United Nations Monetary and Financial Conference held in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire. Thus, the name “Bretton Woods Agreement.”

Under the Bretton Woods System, gold was the basis for the U.S. dollar and other currencies were pegged to the U.S. dollar’s value.  The Bretton Woods System effectively came to an end in the early 1970s when President Richard M. Nixon announced that the U.S. would no longer exchange gold for U.S. currency.

However, by the mid-1970s inflation was rampant, aggravated by the OPEC-fueled gas shortage, which sent gasoline prices soaring and created severe gasoline shortages. 

Meanwhile, the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) – a Carter-era policy that requires federal financial supervisory agencies to encourage banks to grant loans to people with low income and little credit – played a major role in sparking the sub-prime mortgage crisis the nation now faces, according to economist Russell Roberts, who spoke at a forum on the issue Thursday at the Hudson Institute.

By the 1990s, the interest rates on savings accounts were in the basement.  Where savers 20 years earlier could depend on a nice 7.5 percent interest on their savings, now they were barely earning any interest at all.  Worse still, banks would soon be allowed to incur “service fees” for administrating these accounts, which soon drained all savings accounts.

In 1995, Pres. Bill Clinton rewrote the Community Reinvestment Act.  Among his biggest strokes of free-wheeling executive tinkering was the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, which repealed the Glass-Steagall Act, a cornerstone of Depression-era regulation.  He also signed the Commodity Futures Modernization Act, which exempted credit-default swaps from regulation. In 1995 Clinton loosened housing rules by rewriting the Community Reinvestment Act, which put even more pressure on banks to lend in low-income neighborhoods.

The 1980s saw the greatest number of bank failures in U.S. history- 1,462 – the largest number in U.S. history, following Jimmy Carter’s signing of the CRA.  That number, provided by the Federal Reserve, is a modest number.  Other sources put the number of failed backs in the 1980s and early 1990s at over 1,600.  The second-largest was in the 1990s, following Clinton’s revision of the Community Reinvestment Act. 

There were fewer banks by the turn of the century.  The banks that did exist were much bigger, rather like the Titanic or a World War II troop carrier carrying a huge number of troops.  When the ships sank – and they were frequently sunk in the early years of World War II by Hitler’s wolf-packs – thousands of men were lost with them.  Winston Churchill frequently railed against this strategy of “too big to sink” ships, promoting medium-sized carriers instead.

Between 1980 and 1994, Texas led the way with 599 bank failures, followed by Oklahoma at 122.  This was the result of the federal government closing down oil refineries in 1998, under Pres. Clinton.  1998 was when the last refinery was built – and quickly shut down.

Does any of this history sound familiar?  Are you experiencing a feeling of déjà vu, even if you aren’t old enough to have “been there before”?

J.P. Morgan Chase was one of the banks to be bailed out after issuing loans to risky borrowers, following a decrease in the interest rate and a glut of homes on the market.  Property owners thought they could take advantage of ARMS (Adjustable Rate Mortgages), just as the investors of 1929 thought they could profit by short sales in the stock market.  It didn’t work out the way they planned.\

Progressive Socialism – remember, Socialism is an economic –ism, not a political –ism (necessarily).  Or at least, it’s not supposed to be.  It’s all about politicizing the economy, which is the aim of the Great Reset by global banks and institutions.\

How ironic is it that the head of the new Great Reset is named Klaus Schwab (the head of the World Economic Forum).  The two are not related.  Nor is Charles Schwab Investments involved with the WEF as far as we can tell.

But Prince Charles of England is.  He’s one of their biggest spokesfigures.

We’ve undergone the same bank failures, the same creation of government bureaucracies, and the same unemployment.

Here (finally) is why the government bailouts are like the sinking of the RMS Titanic.  Because of government regulations, both federal and state, companies could no longer afford to hire American workers.  Like the British Board of Trade, the federal and state government put regulations on companies they simply could afford to pay and so the companies laid off massive numbers of employees.

The employees were forced to take government assistance in the form of state unemployment – the states receiving federal grants during the 2020 pandemic.  But just as the White Star Line couldn’t afford to take on hundreds of seaman who would perform no useful work aboard the Titanic, and presumably for years, notwithstanding the fact that the ship sank on her maiden voyage – neither could the taxpayers (who were footing the bill to pay for non-workers to not work) pay the wages of non-workers indefinitely. 

Eventually, the non-workers were forced to go back into the labor market, but only after a lengthy absence, which companies don’t like to see.  Prospective workers are now another year or two behind in their skills, not to mention their bills.  And their property taxes, if they have property taxes, and mortgages.  Renters were plumb out of luck, as the saying goes, their savings long since spent.

But the ultra-wealthy are wealthier than ever and they’re investing in what Glenn Beck tells us they call the “Fourth Industrial Revolution” which will complete our society’s transition from manual to electronic labor.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) will soon replace those hamburger flippers at McDonald’s and Burger King.  Stores already feature Self-Check-Out lanes.  Those shortages you notice in some, but not all supermarkets?  They haven’t been created by the pandemic; they’re the creatures of longshoreman’s and truckers’ unions that refuse to deal with independent truck drivers.

Independent truck drivers aren’t allowed to leave their trucks at their ports, much less load their trucks with cargo.  Union truck drivers are given first preference while independent drivers must wait hours for their deliveries.  The shortages drive up the price of goods, along with the government’s printing of cash for its own purposes, driving inflation sky-high.

Our labor is worthless.  Our money is worthless.  Our votes will be worthless if bodies like the World Economic Forum have their way.  Our homes are worth plenty right now, but just like 15 years ago, that bubble is going to burst and worse than the last time, because, according to Glenn Beck, investment firms like Black Rock are waiting in the wings to gobble up all those soon-to-be worthless properties and rent them back to us, via more government grants.

I don’t doubt that Beck is right.  We have only to look back at the lessons the sinking of the Titanic taught us about wealthy elitists, failing to consider scales of economy (how many passengers – and crew – can you afford to put on your ship and still be able to save in the event of a crisis?).  How many skilled employees do you have compared to employees engaged in secondary (administrative) roles in your company (the Titanic did not have enough skilled to seaman to manage her lifeboats)?  Is your company overleveraged (the White Star Line was)?  That is to say, have you borrowed more money than you can afford to pay back (that goes for prospective homeowners as well – will your income allow you to pay back your mortgage).

If you can’t afford to put enough lifeboats on your ship, you’ve got problems.  Too many passengers and crew, and not enough lifeboats (savings) and seaman to steer the boats (workers) is a recipe for a Titanic-sized economic disaster.

In other words – to reverse the analogy –  too many citizens and institutions on the dole (various entitlements) and too many government employees, and not enough taxpayers, now and in the future, to support them, means the U.S. is going to go down just like the Titanic, with wealthy “stakeholders” bailing out before the doomed voyage, wealthy elitists climbing into the half-empty lifeboats, and everyone else left to go down with the ship.

Actually, most of the victims of the Titanic didn’t drown.

They froze to death, and thanks to the elimination of economical energy companies in favor of unreliable energy sources like wind turbines and solar panels (which have made their investors quite wealthy), we could very well freeze to death in summer.

It’s 1912 all over again, complete with a progressive, Woodrow Wilson president (Wilson suffered a stroke On October 2, 1919, leaving him paralyzed on his left side, and with only partial vision in the right eye).  Wilson traveled with the American delegation to the Paris Peace Conference in 1919.  Resident Biden led the American delegation to the Paris Climate Accords in February 2021, a month after being illegally sworn in.

Really, the parallels are just amazing.  And just as frightening.

Bureaucrats Cautiously Give the All-Clear COVID Signal

It’s Safe to Vote Again – For Now

Like victims in a Hollywood disaster movie (asteroid, volcano, earthquake, tsunami), people are slowly coming out of their hiding places at the urging of scientific bureaucrats and politicians who are claiming that the Omicron variant of the coronavirus has passed its peak.

Mandatory isolation has been reduced from 14 days to 5 days.  Great Britain is leading the way in the Great Normalization.  Prime Minister Boris Johnson, under fire for months for partying with his Number Ten Downing Street staff while Londoner were under lockdown, on the eve of Prince Philip’s funeral.

Johnson had to issue a groveling apology to Queen Elizabeth for this faux pas, which did seem to be rather tactless.  The English had a righteous grievance since they could have been arrested for holding parties in their homes while Boris and Company celebrated whatever it was they were celebrating while photographed maskless.

Since the apology, Fleet Street (the nickname for the British media) has backed off.  We should hope so, since Johnson’s six-week old infant daughter is critically ill with COVID.  We pray for Johnson and his family. 

In fact, quite a few children are reportedly coming down with this Omicron variant.  Weren’t we told children couldn’t catch it?  Stores are selling out of the in-home, do-it-yourself tests.  Still, doctors are forbidden from prescribing hydroxychloroquine (for inflammation) or ivermectin, a horse medicine that treats parasites, which the virus can hide inside of.

Are the Democrats giving the all-clear because the danger has passed?  Or are they sounding defeat because the word has spread too far and wide that the vaccines are essentially useless in protecting patients from getting or spreading the virus?

Speaking of defeat, The Washington Times reports:

President Biden’s push to rewrite the nation’s voting laws went down to defeat on Wednesday at the hands of a GOP filibuster, leaving Democrats pledging to hold a doomed vote to change the 60-vote threshold.

In a 51-49 vote, the Freedom to Vote Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights failed to garner the GOP votes necessary to pass. Vice President Kamala Harris was on hand to preside over the vote.

“I’m here tonight because this is a historic night,” said Mrs. Harris. “This is about the fundamental freedom to vote and what should be unfettered access to the ballot … whatever happens tonight because of the outcome of this vote, the President and I are not going to give up on this issue.”

The Democrats named the “Voting Rights Act” portion of the bill after John Lewis to ensure that the bill had the right racial tinge to it, to sustain the bill with the false narrative that this is a “racial” issue, that Blacks and others are being denied the right to vote.

John Lewis was a leading civil rights activist in the Fifties who led the original civil rights march on Birmingham.   He was the chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) from 1963 to 1966. Lewis was one of the “Big Six” leaders of groups who organized the 1963 March on Washington. In 1965, Lewis led the first of three Selma to Montgomery marches across the Edmund Pettus Bridge. In an incident which became known as Bloody Sunday, state troopers and police attacked the marchers, including Lewis.

Built in 1940, the bridge, which crosses the Alabama River, is named after Edmund Winston Pettus, a former Confederate brigadier general, U.S. senator, and state-level leader (“Grand Dragon”) of the Alabama Ku Klux Klan.

Crikeys!

Lewis was elected to Congress, representing Alabama’s 5th district from 1987 until his death in 2020.

 Because of Pettus’ role in supporting slavery and racism in the United States, there have been efforts to rename the bridge, including one coinciding with the 50th anniversary of the Selma to Montgomery marches in 2015. Changing the name would require approval from the Alabama state legislature. One proposed alternative namesake is John Lewis himself.  Support in honor of Lewis’ name increased dramatically following his death in 2020, two months after the shooting of George Floyd, which led to protest and calls for changing the names of some public infrastructure and buildings across the country. Lewis had voiced opposition to changing the name of the bridge before his death.  Since then, Congresswoman Terri Sewell, who is U.S. representative of the area encompassing Selma and coauthored the press release in 2015 with John Lewis opposing the renaming of the bridge, has come out supporting the renaming of the bridge, saying “We must confront and reject Alabama’s racist history and come together to implement the bold changes needed to ensure our nation finally lives up to its promise of equality and justice for all.”

Of course, without the name, no one would know why the civil rights activists chose to cross that particular bridge (and why they were violently prevented from doing so; Martin Luther King Jr. had to finally produce a judicial ruling allowing the group to cross it).

On the other hand, who – in this day and age – would want to have a bridge named after a Grand Dragon of the KKK?  The KKK is still active.  They’re an incredibly dangerous group.  You can yuck it up about red necks who don’t know that they lost the Civil War (or as they call it, “The War Between the States).  But they’re still out there, flying their Confederate flags and burning crosses.  There’s a reason why normal people may criticize that flag but never attempt to take the flag away from them.

But we have as little use for Liberal Marxists who have made a bloc constituency out of Blacks and other minorities.

The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) which Lewis helped found, was the principal channel of student commitment in the United States to the civil rights movement during the 1960s. Emerging in 1960 from the student-led sit-ins at segregated lunch counters in Greensboro, N.C., and Nashville, Tenn., the Committee sought to coordinate and assist direct-action challenges to the civic segregation (the Jim Crow laws) and political suppression of African-Americans.  From 1962, with the support of the Voter Education Project, SNCC committed to the registration and mobilization of Black voters in the Deep South. Affiliates such as the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party and the Lowndes County Freedom Organization in Alabama also worked to increase the pressure on federal and state government to enforce constitutional protections.

Oddly enough, it was the Democrats who banned Blacks from participating in their party.  In Mississippi, they were restricted from participation in the political system since 1890 by passage that year of a new state constitution, and by the practices of the ruling White Democrats in the decades since, with participation in the state Democratic Party limited to Whites.  Starting in 1961, SNCC and COFO (the Council of Federated Organizations) had waged campaigns to register Black voters.

The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) was formed in April 1960 at a conference at Shaw University in Raleigh, N.C., attended by 126 student delegates from 58 sit-in centers in 12 states, from 19 northern colleges, and from the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR), the National Student Association (NSA), and Students for a Democratic Society (SDS).

The last two, student associations, had decidedly Marxist ideologies and foundings.

Today, the Democrats are trying to use the history of racism, of which they were the predominant practitioners, to eliminate our constitutionally, federated republic and replace it with a socialist democracy.  That’s what Nazi Germany.  That’s the road Russia started out on after eliminating the czar.  But within six months, the Bolsheviks overthrew the elected socialist government and instituted communism.

What the Marxists will never tell you, what they cover up, is that when the Russian peasants learned that they wouldn’t be allowed to privately sell the crops they had grown themselves, and they were even forbidden to keep enough of their own crops to feed their own families, they rioted.

Many peasants fled Russia.  But during World War II, Stalin made a craven deal with Churchill:  return the Cossacks or deal with Adolf Hitler yourself.  Churchill reluctantly turned ex-patriated Russians over to the Soviet Union.  They were returned to the Soviet Union where they were tried as traitors to the collective and either executed or given 25-year minimum sentences in the gulags, a system of political prisons.  Prisoners in the gulag were crammed into cages, sometimes 25 prisoners to a nine-foot cage, starved, and tortured.

We’ll discuss Marxism (yet again) in detail another day and discuss Mark Levin’s book, American Marxism.

For now, we can breathe a sigh of relief.  But we mustn’t let our guard down.  This was a close victory and only because two Democrats refused to vote for the bill: Krysten Sinema (D-Ariz.) and Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.).  Keep in mind that the vote the rejected was to change the filibuster so that the Voting Rights Bill could be passed on a simple majority rather than the current 60-vote requirement.

Without the filibuster, Democrats fear they will not be able to pass this bill. They tout this bill as the key to protecting democracy from “racist” policies.  In fact, there is no greater danger to democracy than this bill, which would federalize elections, preventing states from enacting their own measures to protect legal votes, prevent states and counties from clearing their voting rolls of multiple, dead and otherwise ineligible voters, extending the voting period even further, permitting mail-in ballots, prohibiting voter ID, permitting foreign donations, and allowing illegal aliens and felons to vote.

We’re out of immediate danger from COVID (supposedly) and Marxist anti-election campaigns.  For now.

But don’t go back to sleep.  Ever.

U.S. Senate to Begin Debating Tomorrow on Mega Election Federalization Bill

“Power to the People?” The fight’s on to rob us of our power.

“The New American magazine is reporting that the U.S. Senate, led by Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) will begin debating tomorrow, Jan. 19, 2022, the major federal election-takeover bill that combines previous pro election-fraud legislation advocated by the far Left Democrats and Moderate Republicans.

“H.R. 5746, entitled the “Freedom to Vote:  John R. Lewis Act,” is now pending in the U.S. Senate.  Originally introduced as an unrelated NASA bill, it was amended by the House of Representatives into its current version, with the House voting 220-203 on Thursday (Jan. 13, 2022) in favor of the amended bill.

“On Thursday, Schumer announced that the Senate will begin debate on H.R. 5746 on Tuesday, Jan. 18, leading to a possible final vote within days.  The Senate had originally scheduled a recess this week, but it will now be delayed until after the full vote.

“As the bill title of H.R. 5746 implies, it combines two separate anti-integrity election bills that congressional Democrats have tried, but failed, to pass thus far. These are the Freedom to Vote Act Freedom to Vote Act (S. 2747) and the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act (H.R. 4/S. 4).

“H.R. 5746 would decimate election integrity and inhibit Americans from achieving free elections. Being a combination of two bills that are destructive simply by themselves, it would be especially harmful to the United States and its republican form of government.

“Among H.R. 5746’s provisions copied from the “Freedom to Vote Act,” it would:

• force each state to provide automatic voter registration for everyone with a driver’s license;
• mandate that states provide online voter registration;
• require states to provide same-day voter registration;
• force states to provide at least 15 consecutive days of early voting, including two weekends;
• make vote-by-mail and ballot drop boxes nationwide policies;
• weakens states’ ability to clean up voter rolls (despite Senator Klobuchar’s press release claiming otherwise);
• expands “voting access” to “underserved communities,” which likely vote primarily for the Democrat Party; and
• unconstitutionally limits state legislatures from redrawing congressional districts as they see fit.

“Among H.R. 5746’s provisions copied from the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, it would:

• reestablish a “preclearance” process that forces the states to gain permission from the U.S. Department of Justice before implementing any changes in their election laws. This “preclearance” process would be even broader and more draconian than what existed under the 1965 Voting Rights Act before the Supreme Court struck it down in 2013.
• change Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, making it easier for Left-Wing activists and the federal government to take legal action against state election laws on the basis of “racism.”
• require states to fully pay for polling places on Indian reservations, despite the federal government’s use of these reservations to assault freedom and subvert state sovereignty.

“All of these provisions are unconstitutional, violating Article I, Section 4, of the U.S. Constitution, along with the 10th Amendment. Furthermore, these provisions would give the federal government — particularly executive-branch bureaucrats — unprecedented control over state and local elections.

“Thankfully for election-integrity reformers, Senators Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) and Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.) both reiterated their opposition to changing or abolishing the filibuster on Thursday, making the likelihood of H.R. 5746 passing slim.  Nonetheless, the fact that such a blatantly unconstitutional and anti-integrity bill is being seriously considered in the first place illustrates the low regard many American political leaders have for the Constitution.

“The U.S. Senate would be wise to reject H.R. 5746 and any other bill that undermines election integrity. Rather than enacting legislation such as this, it should only support legislation that adheres to the U.S. Constitution while also strengthening the integrity of American elections.”

We would also add to this extremely informative article by the New American that Republicans are consistently onboard because Corporate America loves its illegal alien employees.  They mean may lower costs for businesses and lower prices for consumers, but legalizing their vote comes at a terrible price for American freedom.

Republicans are also onboard because they want to undermine any possible candidacy by President Donald J. Trump.  They cannot see beyond their own political agendas.  They know that he’d handily defeat any candidate in the 2024 election if Trump chooses to run.  Neither Party has been particularly loyal to their voters. 

Hard as it is to imagine, in 2008, many Democrat voters wanted Hillary Clinton as their candidate.  Nevertheless, the Democrat Party went through political gymnastics to defeat her, even though the nomination was hers to lose, and nominated Barack Obama instead.  That’s what Democrats think of the “democratic” process.

As for the Republican Party, we Conservatives have long known what the GOP thinks of us.  Their minions threatened the organizers of one of the New Jersey Tea Parties with a lawsuit for refusing to commit to compromises.

What did one of Glenn Beck’s guests say?  That our candidates have been “pre-selected” for us?  That’s darned right.

Now the centralized, federal government wants to take over the entire election process.  Under Obama, the federal government wanted reorganize states in regions centered around cities.  Counties would be obliterated and towns consolidated.  As towns grew into cities with enormous populations, individual voices would be silenced.  Power would be reducted into fewer, but ever more potent hands.

Under our 31st president Herbert Hoover the Permanent Apportionment Act capped House Membership at the level established w on June 18, 1929 (after the 1920 Census) creating a procedure for automatically reapportioning House seats after every decennial census.

In 1919, the 16^th Amendment allowed Congress to tax Americans’ income.  That same year, under Progressive Pres. Woodrow Wilson, the 17^th Amendment was passed, taking the election of U.S. Senators away from the states and giving it directly to the people, thereby eliminating the states from any involvement in the running of the federal government.

The Progressives have used the Civil War as a tool for combating states’ rights and created a bureaucratic, centralized government.  After all, the Civil War hinged on Southern states claiming the right to an abominable practice – slavery – and therefore any right claimed by the states was not on selfish but immoral and counter to the good of the collective United States.

Civil rights became conflated with human rights.  They are not the same.  The human need for shelter became confused with the “right” to own property.  Since not every human being in American could not financially afford to own property (in spite of Jimmy Carter’s attempts to socialize the banking industry, eliminating community banks), then no one should be able to own property, much less rent that property out to those who lacked the “capital” to invest in property.

The banking crisis of 2008 was the result of banks being required by the government to offer loans to people who didn’t have the means to repay the mortgages.  While it’s true many prospective homeowners fell for the ARM (adjustable rate mortgage) scam, gambling that the interest rates would fall not rise and that the homes would always sell at a higher rate than the homes they sought to buy), who but the Federal Reserve itself was responsible for the setting of the interest rate.

Let the home-buyer beware.  (We didn’t fall for it; we took out a fixed-rate mortgage at a reasonable rate).

Let the voter beware of this Trojan Horse bill that will forever “transform” our election process and thereby change the type of government under which we live.  The Democrats like to pretend that they champion “democracy” knowing that most citizens don’t understand the term.

We currently enjoy a representative, federated republic, in which the departments of government begin small at the bottom but are federated – gathered – into a greater whole whose representatives are supposed to be limited in their powers.  Municipalities, counties and states enjoy most of the rights.  Only those matters of national importance – money, foreign policy, the military, and immigration and naturalization (among others) – are granted to the federal government.

That is what the Founders meant by a limited government – and the politicians don’t like it.  Ultimately, they mean for the government to hold the right to own property – via corporations and banks.  Which is just what the Colonists left behind in England.

Why is Queen Elizabeth II – although we admire her greatly – the wealthiest woman in the world?  Because only the Queen, her extensive family and her appointees can own property in Great Britain.  Everyone else must pay rent, for smaller and smaller homes (with almost no property at all) and apartments.  And of course, her subjects must also pay taxes.

You can’t own property in China, either.  Unless you’re a favored member of the Chinese Communist Party.

We are on our way to becoming something like Venezuela, with Chinese overlords, drug cartels, and “Sustainable Environment” corporations and banks that can deny you loans if you don’t meet specified social criteria.

The Democrats got away with stealing the 2020 Elections.  They know they can’t dip into that well a second time without drawing suspicion in this year’s elections.  Meanwhile, some states are busy enacting new rules and reinforcing existing laws that  protect legal citizens’ right to vote.  Therefore, the Democrats are taking out all the stops to railroad this bill through the Senate, no matter what it takes.

Conservative organizations are urging citizens to take this bill seriously and urgently.  Citizens with Republican representatives – and even Democrats who truly care about their country – and urge their senators not to pass this bill under any circumstances.

We concur.  Get on the phone tomorrow and the next day and let your representatives hear from you.

Voting isn’t a “right;” it’s a privilege reserved for legal citizens of the United States in good stead.

If you don’t do this and send Congress the message, you won’t have a second chance.  Your vote – and your individual voice – will be history.

MLK Jr. Day 2022 – The Promised Land

Who is this “We”?  This is the only “We” that matters.

Martin Luther King Jr. gave his famous “Promised Land” speech on April 3, 1968 at the Church of God in Christ Headquarters, Memphis, Tennessee.  The next day, he was assassinated at his motel in Memphis.

Towards the end of his “Promised Land” speech, King told an anecdote about how he’d been stabbed by a demented black woman in New York, while signing copies of his first book.  The knife barely missed his aorta.  He was rushed to the hospital.  The doctors told him that if he had sneezed, he would have ruptured his aorta and died instantly.

The story made The New York Times.  Among the letters he received was a letter from a white high school girl at White Plains High School in Westchester County, New York. 

“While it should not matter,” she wrote, “I would like to mention that I’m a white girl. I read in the paper of your misfortune, and of your suffering.  And I read that if you had sneezed, you would have died. And I’m simply writing you to say that I’m so happy that you didn’t sneeze.”

“Like anybody,” King concluded in his speech in Memphis, “I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I’m not concerned about that now.  I just want to do God’s will.  And He’s allowed me to go up to the mountain.  And I’ve looked over. And I’ve seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land!”

Certainly, that was an inspirational, even noble sentiment.

But completely wrong.  “We” – none of us – will get to the Promised Land collectively.  God will judge us on our individual merits.  Even that’s not correct.  None of us has enough merit to pass the Pearl Gates.  If we do pass through, it’s only through the salvation gained for us by the sacrifice of Jesus Christ.

As a Christian minister, King should have known that.  Not even the most devout Christian can hope to see the Promised Land unless Jesus gives us the thumbs-up.  If we do, it’s only through His mercy that we do so.

This is why Christianity is attacked.  Both King’s advocates and his critics claim that he was taking a turn towards Collectivism.  The next last clause in his very last public statement – “as a people” – indicates that maybe his head had been turned by the supposed “salvation” of Collectivism rather than Christianity.

I heard the speech repeated on Glenn Beck’s radio broadcast.  I looked up from my morning coffee and thought, ‘Hey.  Wait a minute.  That’s wrong.”

God sees all of us and will judge all of us as individuals.  He counts the very hairs on our heads and a sparrow doesn’t fall but that He knows about.  Whereas bureaucrats, politicians and bean counters only count the big numbers.  They think in terms of demographics:  yes, race; age; income; occupation.  They place people into all sorts of groups and can’t be bothered with the “petty” details of individuality.

But God (I don’t believe) sees things that way.  He sees people in terms of male and female.  But that’s pretty much it.  Skin color?  Not a factor, if we judge by His reaction to Miriam’s distaste for her brother Moses’ black wife.  When she objected, God punished her with leprosy.  Leprosy – you know, the disease where your skin turns paper white and falls off and if you’re not treated, you die of an infection pretty darned quick?

That’s evidently what God thinks of racism.  What the people in the Bible thought and what God thought are two different matters altogether.

Still, individual sinning didn’t stop God from flooding the Earth and killing off all the poor animals along with all those obnoxious people.  The Flood didn’t even stop some sinners from climbing aboard Noah’s Ark and carrying on.

God sent an asteroid down to rain fire and brimstone down on Sodom and Gomorrah.  He sent an angel to warn the righteous Lot to get his family out of town.  Still, Lot’s wife was said to have looked back on the devastation and was turned to stone.  Presumably, she was “looking back” with regret upon the licentious lifestyle of Sodom and Gomorrah.

Noah and Lot were the only righteous people God felt worthy of salvation.  He kicked the Jews out of Jerusalem when they defiled His temples with pagan worship.  A generation had to pass before He allowed them to return from exile in Babylon.

Even today, some Jews are Jewish-in-Name-Only, who consider Jahweh an “oppressive” god.  They celebrate the High Holy Days of celebration, like Hanukah, but not Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, considered the holiest day in the Hebrew calendar.

God is selective in His favor but collective in His punishments. 

“Do not be unequally yoked with unbelievers. For what partnership has righteousness with lawlessness? Or what fellowship has light with darkness?  15What accord has Christ with Belial?^b  Or what portion does a believer share with an unbeliever?  16What agreement has the temple of God with idols?  For we are the temple of the living God; as God said,

“I will make my dwelling among them and walk among them, and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. 17Therefore go out from among them and be ye separate from them,” says the Lord, “and touch no unclean thing; then I will welcome you, 18and I will be a father to you, and you shall be sons and daughters to me, says the Lord Almighty.”

2 Corinthians 14-18

God charged us, through Jesus Christ, to love one another, even as we love ourselves.  But the love of God comes first, of course.  He urged us to gather together in congregations to worship God.  On the other hand, Jesus told us not to go to the temple or church merely to be seen among other men as worshipping the Almighty. 

“Wherefore two or more gather in My name so shall I be also.”  Matthew 18:20.

For praying, Jesus recommended a closet.

“And when you pray, you must not be like the hypocrites. For they love to stand and pray in the synagogues and at the street corners, that they may be seen by others. Truly, I say to you, they have received their reward. 6But when you pray, go into your room and shut the door and pray to your Father who is in secret. And your Father who sees in secret will reward you.

7“And when you pray, do not heap up empty phrases as the Gentiles do, for they think that they will be heard for their many words. 8Do not be like them, for your Father knows what you need before you ask him.

Yet the prayer he recommended that followed those words was in the plural:

Our Father in heaven,
hallowed be your name.
10Thy kingdom come,

Thy will be done,
on earth as it is in heaven.
11Give us this day our daily bread,
12and forgive us our debts,
as we also have forgiven our debtors.
13And lead us not into temptation,
but deliver us from evil.

Matthew 6:5-13

Some denominations add:  “For thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever and ever.”

But that’s actually from Revelations 5:13:  3And I heard every creature in heaven and on earth and under the earth and in the sea, and all that is in them, saying:  “To Him who sits on the throne and to the Lamb be praise and honor and glory and power forever and ever!”

Somehow, I doubt that God minds the slight amendment to The Lord’s Prayer.

Humanists complain that our God punishes the innocent along with the guilty.  What they fail to understand is that no one is “innocent.”  Some people are better than others.  But no one is without sin except Jesus.

Events of late have probably tested God sorely.  We may have gotten Him into the mood to use the asteroid the size of Mount Everest on us.  Or maybe not.  The Bible says no one knows what the limit to God’s patience with us is.  Not even Jesus knows when He’ll put an end to our corruption.  This may only be the beginning of the end.  The Apocalypse could still be centuries off.

Or it could come tomorrow.

Legend suggests that there will be an event called “The Rapture” in which Jesus will sweep up his true followers before leaving the rest of us to our “collective” fate.

The origin of the term derives from Paul the Apostle’s First Epistle to the Thessalonians in the Bible.  in the Bible, in which he uses the Greek word harpazo (Ancient Greek:ἁρπάζω), meaning “to snatch away” or “to seize,” and explains that believers in Jesus Christ would be snatched away from earth into the air.

But we don’t want you to be ignorant, brothers, concerning those who have fallen asleep, so that you don’t grieve like the rest, who have no hope.  14For if we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so God will bring with Him those who have fallen asleep in Jesus.  15For this we tell you by the word of the Lord, that we who are alive, who are left to the coming of the Lord, will in no way precede those who have fallen asleep.  16For the Lord Himself will descend from Heaven with a shout, with the voice of the archangel, and with God’s trumpet.  The dead in Christ will rise first,17then we who are alive, who are left, will be caught up together with them in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air.  So we will be with the Lord forever. 18Therefore comfort one another with these words.

1 Thessalonians 4:13-18

That is the only “collective” there is:  those who have been faithful to God and Jesus.  Those are the only people God regards as a “We,” a group, a demographic, if you like.

There are people with a great faith in God who will be brought up to Heaven with Him.  Their faith gives them the insight to know who they are.  The Shepherd knows his own, Jesus said.  But they are not a demographic, a race, a gang, or a political party.

“They” are God’s faithful.

Dear Diary: The FBI Raided the Homes of Project Veritas Reporters

Hillary Clinton’s Red Reset Button.

Joe Biden’s children seem to have a problem keeping their secrets.  Hunter Biden sold his used laptop to a dealer, with all his secrets still contained in its hard drive.  Now, Hunter’s sister Ashley’s diary has turned up. The diary was offered by tipsters to Project Veritas and to one other Conservative outlet.  Project Veritas turned the diary over to the F.B.I., although the theft of a diary would come under the auspices of local and state law enforcement.  Project Veritas, dubious of its provenance, refused to publish and then turned it in.  The other Conservative outlet did publish the contents of the diary.

But the black helicopters landed on the roofs of current and former Project Veritas reporters, including the roof of founder James O’Keefe.

According to Fox News, which reported the story on November 6, 2021:

The FBI raided the home of Project Veritas founder James O’Keefe as part of a federal investigation into the “stolen” diary of President Biden’s daughter, Ashley Biden.

The New York Times reported the raid took place early Saturday morning just days after the homes of two Project Veritas associates were also the subject of search warrants.

A spokesman for the FBI told the Times its agents had “performed law enforcement activity” at his apartment building in Mamaroneck, New York, but did not comment on the investigation.

The investigation is being conducted by the FBI and federal prosecutors in Manhattan.

Project Veritas responded to a Fox News inquiry by pointing to video remarks O’Keefe released Friday reacting to the previous FBI raids of his journalists

The investigation surrounds a “stolen” diary belonging to Ashley Biden that went missing just days before the 2020 presidential election.

O’Keefe confirmed the Times’ previous reporting about two other FBI raids that took place this week, releasing a video message addressing his group’s apparent ties to the diary and declaring “Project Veritas came under attack.”

“I woke to the news that apartments and homes of Project Veritas journalists, or former journalists, had been raided by FBI agents,” O’Keefe began. “It appears the Southern District of New York now has journalists in their sights for the supposed crime of doing their jobs lawfully and honestly, or at least this journalist.”

“We do not know how the New York Times was aware of the execution of a search warrant at our reporter’s home or the subject matter of the search warrant as a grand jury investigation is secret,” O’Keefe said. “The FBI took materials of current, former Project Veritas journalists despite the fact that our legal team previously contacted the Department of Justice and voluntarily conveyed unassailable facts that demonstrate Project Veritas’ lack of involvement in criminal activity, and or criminal intent.”

“Our efforts were the stuff of responsible ethical journalism, and we are in no doubt that Project Veritas acted properly at each and every step,” O’Keefe asserted. 

The Project Veritas founder then explained that “tipsters” approached his group late last year alleging to have Ashley Biden’s diary containing “explosive allegations” about her father, then the Democratic nominee, and that the diary was allegedly abandoned in a room that she had stayed at and that they stayed after. 

The “tipsters,” who O’Keefe said he had never met prior, were apparently negotiating with media outlets to sell Biden’s diary and that ultimately, Project Veritas did not publish the book’s contents because his group was not able to independently verify its authenticity. 

“Project Veritas gave the diary to law enforcement to ensure it could be returned to its rightful owner. We never published it,” O’Keefe said. “Now, Ms. Biden’s father’s Department of Justice, specifically the United States Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York, appears to be investigating the situation, claiming the diary was stolen. We don’t know if it was but it begs the question: In what world is the alleged theft of a diary investigated by the President’s FBI and his Department of Justice? A diary?”

Fox News legal analyst Gregg Jarrett appeared on “Hannity” Friday and stressed there’s a “huge difference” between what Ashley Biden’s attorney has alleged that her diary was stolen versus what O’Keefe alleged about it being left behind in a room, saying “one’s a crime and the other one isn’t.”

“Project Veritas did the right thing,” Jarrett told Fox News’ Sean Hannity. “They didn’t publish this because they couldn’t verify the authenticity of the documents, but the other conservative website did publish it but they claimed they did verify it. What is so bewildering about this is why in the world would the feds even involved in it.”

Jarrett insisted that even if the diary was the subject of a theft, it would be a “state “than a federal crime and that the investigation, which allegedly began under Attorney General William Barr, has become an “enormous conflict of interest” with President Biden now in office. 

“A journalist cannot be criminally prosecuted for publishing stolen material [i.e., The Pentagon Papers] unless the journalist himself or herself is involved in the theft. There’s no indication of that,” Jarrett said. “And the same is true of leaked classified information. Journalists have never been prosecuted for that, although the leakers have when they’re identified. So, we don’t know a whole lot about this story, but it’s deeply troubling. They would barge into the homes of two journalists armed with a search warrant signed off by a federal judge and the Department of Justice, presided over by Joe Biden, this smacks of a political investigation and potential prosecution.”

On Wednesday (Jan. 12), Project Veritas leaked top secret memos by U.S. Marine Corps Major Joseph Murphy, as reported by Uncoveredc.com,  wrote a letter in August of 2021 with important evidentiary attachments that have now been obtained by Project Veritas. The documents further verify previously released information, according to Project Veritas founder James O’Keefe.

Murphy, formerly a fellow with DARPA, has exposed additional “incriminating documents…hidden in a top-secret shared drive” concerning the gain-of-function research on bat-borne coronaviruses and the link between NIH and EcoHealth Alliance to the Wuhan Institute of Virology. According to Murphy, the documents were placed in the folder in July 2021. To this day, Fauci denies involvement in gain-of-function research and/or contracts.

Major Murphy claims that in March of 2018, the EcoHealth Alliance approached DARPA approached DARPA for gain-of-function research on bat-borne coronaviruses.  DARPA rejected their request as too dangerous.  However, Dr. Fauci and the NIAID granted EcoHealth Alliance the grant money anyway.

So, in the last few days, alternative or “Conservative” investigative journalists and websites have come under fire for publishing “misinformation” and “lies.”  The Marxist’s media partners have been attacking anyway who attacks the vaccines as ineffective, something the CDC itself admitted.  They’ve even gone so far as to lie to the public, stating that the vaccine can prevent you from getting or spreading COVID.

That is a blatant lie.  The only thing the vaccine can do is lessen the symptoms and keep you out of the hospital.  Maybe.

Have we come so far down the path of tyranny that the government, in the form of the CDC (or any other government agency), can declare what is true and what is false, and censor anyone, even other scientists, who produce evidence contrary to the government’s assertions?

We are depending for our information on government-controlled publications and websites.  Government bureaucrats often sit in on the editorial meetings of such stalwart newspapers as the New York Times and the Washington Post.  These two newspapers lead the broadcasts of the top television and cable news networks.  They scruple not to discredit their competitors such as the Washington Times, Fox News, and of course, Conservative news websites like Project Veritas.,

Project Veritas was smart enough to lawyer-up, knowing that it was confronting a corrupt, bureaucratic government.

One of my favorite, top-of-the shelf books is Leonard W. Levy’s Freedom of the Press:  From Zenger to Jefferson (Levy, Leonard W.  Carolina Academic Press, Durham, N.C./The Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1996/1966).  I picked it up on a trip with my Mom to see Monticello, Thomas Jefferson’s home.

Levy lists an impressive – and enviable – five-page bibliography on the subject of freedom of speech and freedom of the press.  For 20 or so years it was out of print until the Carolina Academic Press reprinted it

Peter Zenger was the publisher of a weekly newspaper, the New-York Weekly Journal.  In 1733, Zenger began printing journal, which published opinions critical of the colonial governor, William Cosby. On November 17, 1734, on Cosby’s orders, the sheriff arrested Zenger. After a grand jury refused to indict him, the Attorney General Richard Bradley charged him with libel in August 1735.  Zenger’s lawyers, Andrew Hamilton and William Smith, Sr., and, successfully argued that truth is a against charges of libel.

Levy writes that John Milton, Roger Williams, and John Locke were at the forefront of 18th Century philosophy regarding freedom of speech and freedom of the press.  Hamilton and Smith used their writings in defending Zenger.

Milton wrote, “Give me liberty to know, to utter and to argue freely conscience, above all [other] liberties.”

Williams championed against civil magistrates judging in matters of conscience, even “scandalous” doctrines against the establishment [the government], although he did not remonstrate against the punishment of civil crimes against the civil state [the public], such as murder and theft.

John Locke opined that “no opinions contrary to human society, or to those moral rules which are necessary to the preservation of civil society, are to be tolerated by the magistrate” and that the intolerant should not be tolerated.  Those “who will not own and death the duty of tolerating all men in matters of mere religion” should be punished.

He did not approve of sedition or irreverence in criticizing government officials or the state (the monarchy).  Still, he published 18 reasons why the licensing of the printing trade was unnecessary and “administratively cumbersome.”  But Locke’s was not a defense of freedom of speech but an argument in favor of expediency.

“Cato,” Levy writes, “was the joint pseudonym of the Whig journalists, John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon.  Their essays, first published in London newspapers beginning in 1720, were collected in four volumes that went through six editions between 1733  and 1755.

“’No one,’ writes an historian familiar with the sources, ‘can spend any time in the newspapers, library inventories, and pamphlets of colonial America without realizing that Cato’s Letters, rather than Locke’s Civil Governmentwas the most popular, quotable, esteemed source of political ideas in the colonial period.’

Quoted in every colonial newspaper from Boston to Savannah, “Cato bought to his wide audience a bold, systematic theory of intellectual and political liberty.  Free speech, Cato insisted, was the “Right of every Man, as far as by it he does not hurt and control the Right of another; and this is the only Check which it ought to suffer, the only Bounds which it ought to know.”

How little 21^st Century students know of this 300-year-old battle for freedom of speech, controlled as they are by corporate media and misled by Marxist teachers.  Today, the issue is not the individual, who is being deleted, “memory-holed” from history; it’s the politicized group, class, segment, demographic to which you belong that matters.

That was why Saul Alinsky advised his followers, in his 1971 book, Rules for Radicals:   

“Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.”

“…in a complex, interrelated, urban society, it becomes increasingly difficult to single out who is to blame for any particular evil.” 

The bureaucracy that Woodrow Wilson began building turned out to be a problem for the radicals of the Sixties.  Now that we’ve been put into our “boxes” by 21^st Century radicals, we’re advanced to wholesale blame of groups.  But the individual is still dangerous and must be made an example of so as not to become a hero his followers.

The Constitution and, in particular, the Bill of Rights, stands in the way of the government tyrannizing over individuals.  So, it must tyrannize by proxy, through corporate entities whose own rules are independent of the U.S. Constitution.

The Great Reset.  How is it no one but myself remembers Hillary Clinton pressing the red “Reset” button during her campaign.  I recall it distinctly.  It wasn’t that long ago.  It should have been a red-hot, five-star alarm to anyone who fears for freedom and individuality.

Finally!  I found the picture.  It was in 2009 when she was Secretary of State.  According to roughdiplomacy.com:

On 6 March 2009 in Geneva, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton presented Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov with a red button with the English word “reset” and the Roman alphabet transliteration of the Russian Cyrillic alphabet word перегрузка (“peregruzka”.)

The Russian word “perezagruzka,” written offensively in Roman alphabet, instead of Cyrillic, was intended to mean “reset” but actually meant “overload.” Turned out to be truer than intended.

Clinton is a Saul Alinsky-ite.  She wrote her college senior thesis in 1969 about Alinsky.  Evidently, this “Great Reset” or “Fourth Industrial Revolution” dates farther back than its official introduction by the World Economic Forum (which makes no bones about its intention).

Their theme may be “Build Back Better” but what they clearly mean is to “Build Back Bigger.”

Journalists like James O’Keefe are a threat to that goal and must be squashed like the anti-Big Government “insects” they are seen as.

The Filibuster Follies – Fighting to “Protect” the “Voting Rights” of Illegal Aliens

Voting is a privilege, not a “right”

Charles Schumer, the U.S. Senator from New York, has taken his Filibuster Fraud Show on the road to gain support for – temporarily – abolishing the filibuster.

Democrats have used this tool for years to thwart Republican and Conservative legislation.  But the Republicans have made use of it and probably plan to use it if the Senate attempts to pass Schumer’s misnamed “Voting Rights Bill.”

A filibuster is a political procedure where one or more members of a Congress debate over a proposed piece of legislation so as to delay a decision being made on the proposal or entirely prevent such a decision from occurring. It is sometimes referred to as “talking a bill to death” or “talking out a bill,” or “stonewalling.”  The opposing party usually characterizes the filibuster as a form of obstruction in a legislature. This form of political obstruction reaches as far back as Ancient Roman times.  When you think of a filibuster, think of Jimmy Stewart in the film, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. 

One of the first known practitioners of the filibuster was the Roman senator Cato the Younger.  In debates over legislation he especially opposed, Cato would often obstruct the measure by speaking continuously until nightfall.  As the Roman Senate had a rule requiring all business to conclude by dusk, Cato’s purposefully long-winded speeches were an effective device to forestall a vote.

In the United States House of Representatives, the filibuster (the right to unlimited debate) was used until 1842, when a permanent rule limiting the duration of debate was created. The “disappearing quorom” was a tactic used by the minority until Speaker Thomas Brackett Reed (R-Maine) eliminated it in 1890. As the membership of the House grew much larger than the Senate, the House had acted earlier to control floor debate and the delay and blocking of floor votes.

The “magic minute” allows party leaders to speak for as long as they wish, which House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (Calif. Distr. 23) used in 2021 to set a record for the longest speech on the House floor (8 hours and 33 minutes) in opposition to the Build Back Better Act, which is part of the World Economic Forum’s Great Reset, attempt to enforce Socialism through private companies rather than only through the government.

The filibuster is a powerful legislative device in the U.S. Senate as well.  Senate rules permit a senator or senators to speak for as long as they wish and on any topic they choose, unless “three-fifths of the Senators duly chosen and sworn (usually 60 out of 100 senators) bring debate to a close by invoking cloture under Senate Rule XXII.”

Even if a filibuster attempt is unsuccessful, the process takes floor time.  Defenders call the filibuster “The “Soul of the Senate.

It is not part of the US Constitution, becoming theoretically possible with a change of Senate rules only in 1806 and not used until 1837.  Rarely used for much of the Senate’s first two centuries, it was strengthened in the 1970s and in recent years, the majority has preferred to avoid filibusters by moving to other business when a filibuster is threatened and attempts to achieve cloture have failed.  As a result, in recent decades this has come to mean that all major legislation (apart from budgets) now requires a 60% majority to pass.

Under current Senate rules, any modification or limitation of the filibuster would be a rule change that itself could be filibustered, with two-thirds of those senators present and voting (as opposed to the normal three-fifths of those sworn) needing to vote to break the filibuster.  However, under Senate precedents, a simple majority can (and has) acted to limit the practice by overruling decisions of the chair. The removal or substantial limitation of the filibuster by a simple majority, rather than a rule change, is called the “constitutional option” by proponents, and the “nuclear option” by opponents.

On November 21, 2013, the Democrat-controlled Senate voted 52 to 48 to require only a majority vote to end a filibuster of all executive and judicial nominees, excluding Supreme Court nominees, rather than the 3/5 of votes require only a majority vote to end a filibuster of Supreme Court nominees.  A 3/5 supermajority is still required to end filibusters on legislation.

In 2020 alone, according to a March 26, 2021 Washington Examiner report, Democrats used the filibuster 327 times; the Republicans, only once.  Now they want to abolish it.  At least until a few days ago, Schumer wanted to abolish the filibuster permanent.  He now wants to abolish only long enough to pass the Voter Rights Bill.

The Democrats complain that states are attempting to void the right of “residents” to vote by cleaning up the voter rolls, requiring voter ID and proof of U.S. citizenship and reducing Election Day to its Constitutional one-day only.  States will eliminate all paper ballots except in cases of inability to physically access the polling places.  In those instances, only family member or authorized health care providers may handle the citizen’s ballot.

The states also will require more secure supervision of ballot counting.  We’re not certain what each state has in mind.  But we hope they mean for each municipality to count its own votes, which should return to mechanical ballot machines, then send those votes to their county seat and finally to the state capital.  Fewer administrators will be allowed access to the votes.

We can’t stress enough how unsecure computer voting and counting is.  The practice should be abandoned.  The Democrats took advantage of the 2020 lockdown to force voters to use mail-in ballots which were then scanned electronically and transferred to computers for tallying.

Conservatives have an issue with the Democrat’s definition of “resident” and “voter” and their “rights.”  Illegal aliens have no rights at all.  They shouldn’t be here and they shouldn’t be permitted to vote in our elections, on any level.  A polling place is not a hospital.  There is no humanitarian right involved in voting illegally.

The Democrats know these people come from Marxist countries.  Some are drug dealers, gang members involved in drugs and theft, prostitutes and other criminals.  They know they can “count on their vote” because the Democrats are great at handing out money in order to buy votes.

Their Democrat votes will ensure a one-party system in the United States.  Already, social media companies are cracking down on opposition voices, deplatforming them (i.e., Parler) so they can’t reach their audiences.  The COVID lockdown has Americans at one another’s throats, with residents willing to “rat out” those who don’t comply with lockdown rules and measures, like getting the vaccine or wearing the mask.  I believe in wearing the mask; at least, short-term.  I don’t believe in forcing my neighbors or my friend s to do so.  Biden’s Mask Mandate, if he’s able to invoke it, will encourage and even reward neighbor for reporting neighbor for infractions.

My parents warned me about this when I was just a child myself.  They lived through the Great Depression and World War II and were old enough to have heard about the Bolshevik Revolution from their elders.  Teachers were already extolling the “glories of Communism” in their high school.

The Illegal Aliens are the Democrats Voting Army.

There seems to be some news afoot that Arizona Sen. Krysten Sinema (D) has announced that she doesn’t support the move to abolish the filibuster in order to pass the Voting Rights Bill.  Let’s hope that that is true and further, that some RINO Trump opponent like Mitt Romney switches sides to support it.

The one thing in favor of legal citizens is that Democrats are way down in the polls and may lose seats comes November.  Resident Biden’s poll numbers are in the Thirties.  Wait until Americans realize what is meant by Biden’s “Build Back Better,” that it’s the motto of the World Economic Forum’s Great Reset to transform not just the United States but the world into a totalitarian state, complete with gulags for those who oppose this death threat to liberty and freedom.