fox files

Very interesting theory on Trump’s success.

The mayor of Livermore California explains Trump’s popularity and success. This is perhaps the best explanation for Trump’s popularity.

Marshall Kamena is a registered Democrat and was elected mayor of Livermore, CA.. He ran on the democratic ticket as he knew a Bay Area city would never vote for a Republican. He is as conservative as they come. He wrote the following:

Trump’s ‘Lack of Decorum, Dignity, and Statesmanship’ By Marshall Kamena, Mayor of Livermore, CA.

My Leftist friends (as well as many ardent #nevertrumpers) constantly ask me if I’m not bothered by Donald Trump’s lack of decorum. They ask if I don’t think his tweets are “beneath the dignity of the office.”

Here’s my answer: We Right-thinking people have tried dignity. There could not have been a man of more quiet dignity than George W. Bush as he suffered the outrageous lies and politically motivated hatreds that undermined his presidency.

We tried statesmanship.

Could there be another human being on this earth who so desperately prized “collegiality” as John McCain?

We tried propriety – has there been a nicer human being ever than Mitt Romney?

And the results were always the same. This is because, while we were playing by the rules of dignity, collegiality and propriety, the Left has been, for the past 60 years, engaged in a knife fight where the only rules are those of Saul Alinsky and the Chicago mob.

I don’t find anything “dignified,” “collegial” or “proper” about Barack Obama’s lying about what went down on the streets of Ferguson in order to ramp up racial hatreds because racial hatreds serve the Democratic Party.

I don’t see anything “dignified” in lying about the deaths of four Americans in Benghazi and imprisoning an innocent filmmaker to cover your tracks.

I don’t see anything “statesman-like” in weaponizing the IRS to be used to destroy your political opponents and any dissent.

Yes, Obama was “articulate” and “polished” but in no way was he in the least bit “dignified,” “collegial” or “proper.”

The Left has been engaged in a war against America since the rise of the Children of the ’60s. To them, it has been an all-out war where nothing is held sacred and nothing is seen as beyond the pale.. It has been a war they’ve fought with violence, the threat of violence, demagoguery and lies from day one – the violent take-over of the

universities – ’till today.

The problem is that, through these years, the Left has been the only side fighting this war. While the Left has been taking a knife to anyone who stands in their way, the Right has continued to act with dignity, collegiality and propriety.

With Donald Trump, this all has come to an end. Donald Trump is America ‘s first wartime president in the Culture War.

During wartime, things like “dignity” and “collegiality” simply aren’t the most essential qualities one looks for in their warriors. Ulysses Grant was a drunk whose behavior in peacetime might well have seen him drummed out of the Army for conduct unbecoming.

Had Abraham Lincoln applied the peacetime rules of propriety and booted Grant, the Democrats might well still be holding their slaves today. Lincoln rightly recognized that, “I cannot spare this man. He fights.”

General George Patton was vulgar-talking.. In peacetime, this might have seen him stripped of rank. But, had Franklin Roosevelt applied the normal rules of decorum then, Hitler and the Socialists would barely be five decades into their thousand-year Reich.

Trump is fighting. And what’s particularly delicious is that, like Patton standing over the battlefield as his tanks obliterated Rommel’s, he’s shouting, “You magnificent bastards, I read your book!”

That is just the icing on the cake, but it’s wonderful to see that not only is Trump fighting, he’s defeating the Left using their own tactics. That book is Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals – a book so essential to the Liberals’ war against America that it is and was the playbook for the entire Obama administration and the subject of Hillary Clinton’s senior thesis.

It is a book of such pure evil, that, just as the rest of us would dedicate our book to those we most love or those to whom we are most indebted, Alinsky dedicated his book to Lucifer.

With Donald Trump, this all has come to an end. Donald Trump is America ‘s first wartime president in the Culture War.

During wartime, things like “dignity” and “collegiality” simply aren’t the most essential qualities one looks for in their warriors. Ulysses Grant was a drunk whose behavior in peacetime might well have seen him drummed out of the Army for conduct unbecoming.

Had Abraham Lincoln applied the peacetime rules of propriety and booted Grant, the Democrats might well still be holding their slaves today. Lincoln rightly recognized that, “I cannot spare this man. He fights.”

General George Patton was a vulgar-talking.. In peacetime, this might have seen him stripped of rank. But, had Franklin Roosevelt applied the normal rules of decorum then, Hitler and the Socialists would barely be five decades into their thousand-year Reich.

Trump is fighting. And what’s particularly delicious is that, like Patton standing over the battlefield as his tanks obliterated Rommel’s, he’s shouting, “You magnificent bastards, I read your book!”

That is just the icing on the cake, but it’s wonderful to see that not only is Trump fighting, he’s defeating the Left using their own tactics. That book is Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals – a book so essential to the Liberals’ war against America that it is and was the playbook for the entire Obama administration and the subject of Hillary Clinton’s senior thesis.

It is a book of such pure evil, that, just as the rest of us would dedicate our book to those we most love or those to whom we are most indebted, Alinsky dedicated his book to Lucifer.

Trump’s tweets may seem rash and unconsidered but, in reality, he is doing exactly what Alinsky suggested his followers do. First, instead of going after “the fake media” — and they are so fake that they have literally gotten every single significant story of the past 60 years not just wrong, but diametrically opposed to the truth, from the Tet

Offensive to Benghazi, to what really happened on the streets of Ferguson, Missouri — Trump isolated CNN.. He made it personal.

Then, just as Alinsky suggests, he employs ridicule which Alinsky described as “the most powerful weapon of all.”… Most importantly, Trump’s tweets have put CNN in an untenable and unwinnable position. They need to respond.

This leaves them with only two choices. They can either “go high” (as Hillary would disingenuously declare of herself and the fake news would disingenuously report as the truth) and begin to honestly and accurately report the news or they can double-down on their usual tactics and hope to defeat Trump with twice their usual hysteria and demagoguery.

The problem for CNN (et al.) with the former is that, if they were to start honestly reporting the news, that would be the end of the Democratic Party they serve. It is nothing but the incessant use of fake news (read: propaganda) that keeps the Left alive.

Imagine, for example, if CNN had honestly and accurately reported then-candidate Barack Obama’s close ties to foreign terrorists (Rashid Khalidi), domestic terrorists (William Ayers & Bernardine Dohrn), the mafia (Tony Rezko) or the true evils of his spiritual mentor, Jeremiah Wright’s church.

Imagine if they had honestly and accurately conveyed the evils of the Obama administration’s weaponizing of the IRS to be used against their political opponents or his running of guns to the Mexican cartels or the truth about the murder of Ambassador Christopher Stevens and the Obama administration’s cover-up.

So, to my friends on the Left — and the #nevertrumpers as well — do I wish we lived in a time when our president could be “collegial” and “dignified” and “proper”? Of course I do.

These aren’t those times. This is war. And it’s a war that the Left has been fighting without opposition for the past 50 years.

So, say anything you want about this president – I get it – he can be vulgar, he can be crude, he can be undignified at times. I don’t care. I can’t spare this man. He fights for America!

Her name is Haley Leach.

She’s an attractive 29-year-old from Colorado who has a legal pistol permit to carry concealed. But as far as the state of New York is concerned, she’s a felon.

That’s because this law-abiding citizen, who has a license to carry a gun legally in Colorado, intended to fly out of New York State. When she tried to declare her gun at the Southwest Airlines counter in an Albany, NY airport, she was arrested for violating New York’s handgun laws.

And it’s all because she tried to do the right thing.

That’s because Haley, who is definitely NOT one of the criminals gun laws are meant to STOP, didn’t know.

Legal gun owners are NOT the problem when it comes to violence in this country. But too many lawyers, prosecutors, and District Attorneys in this country go after legal gun owners, and then pat themselves on the back, believing they’ve done something to stop crime.

That upsets me to no end, but getting mad doesn’t keep anybody out of jail. If you want to stay out of jail and KEEP your CCW rights, you’ve got to be smarter than the sneaky anti-gunners trying to trick you into becoming a “criminal.”

Here are three tricks anti-gun states and their prosecutors use to target legal concealed carry.

1. Beware Of Airports

The TSA has very specific rules for transporting firearms. You have to keep the gun locked up.  It has to have one of those “steal me” tags on it declaring that it’s a firearm. You have to put your hand over your heart and recite, “I’m not a bad person because I’m a gun owner” the whole time you’re in the airport.

(Okay, I made that last one up.)

But did you know that you can follow all these rules to the letter and STILL get arrested?

That’s what happened to Georgia resident Patricia Jordan, who flew legally with her handgun (obeying all the TSA’s rules) into New York.

When she tried to check her gun for the flight back home, she was told to “wait”, and then they arrested her for having the gun in New York State.

When it comes to your gun rights, AIRPORTS ARE A TRAP.

They’re like a mini police-state where you are searched, interrogated, and treated like you’re guilty until you prove yourself innocent.

If you try to take a gun through an airport, make sure you understand the letter of the law both in the state you’re leaving and in the state you’re traveling to.

2. Catching You “Transporting”

If you own guns, sooner or later you’re going to have to transport them (like when you move). There are laws affecting that sort of thing, too believe it or not. Unfortunately, Dustin Reininger didn’t know that when, a few years ago, he was arrested in New Jersey.

Reininger was moving from Maine to Texas. His guns were legal in Maine. They were legal in Texas. But they were supposedly, suddenly, magically ILLEGAL in the state he was simply PASSING THROUGH to get where he was going. When he made the mistake of spending the night to rest in the state, he was arrested.

Even though the state’s gun laws are meant to prevent crime, not merely punish legal, good, law-abiding citizens and gun owners passing through the state, New Jersey’s prosecutors didn’t care. That means you not only have to know the gun laws in the state you leave and the state you’re going to when you transport firearms, but you also have to know the laws all along your travel route.

(Are you getting the picture yet?)

3. Looking For Dead CCW Holders

Another story out of gun-hating New York involves a man who successfully fought off a home invasion. Ronald Stolarczyk, who is 64 years old, used a pistol in self-defense when he fatally shot a pair of home invaders who were going through his stuff.  Unfortunately for him, the gun he used belonged to his father legally. In New York, you’re not allowed to inherit your dad’s handgun if you don’t have a permit specifically registered to that gun by serial number.

In other words, Stolarczyk is staring down the barrel of felony possession of an illegal handgun all because he shot two home invaders.

The authorities in New York regularly comb through the CCW rolls, looking for CCW holders who have passed away. Then, they target the dead gun owner’s family members to make sure the handguns involved are accounted for. As nuts as all these dirty tricks sound, they’re perfectly legal in states that have these gun-hating laws.

If you want to stay ahead of sneaky tactics like this, while preserving your right to carry and move freely around this nation, you’ve got to know the laws. More importantly, you’ve got to understand what those laws mean to YOU.

This isn’t easy to do, but there IS information out there that will help,

and if you are responsible enough to carry, then you need to be just as responsible and more by staying ahead of these government RATS and

educating yourself. There are PLENTY of GOOD organizations out there availing to help you.

Get yourself educated and equipped so that sneaky gun-grabbing prosecutors can’t target YOU for legal destruction.

It’s a shame that law-abiding gun owners are treated in this country’s state legal systems as potential threats. Guilt before innocence.

Unfortunately, that’s the sad reality of the so-called justice system and carrying concealed today.

Prepare. Train. Survive.

A national convention of the Democratic Socialists of America took place in Atlanta last weekend. If you listen to the audio alone, you would be forgiven for thinking it’s an episode of South Park. (It was hilariously terrifying.)

The beauty of free speech is that we all have the opportunity to listen in and see how people relate with one another in their natural habitats. 

How to Love Socialism 

As someone who values individual sovereignty, there’s a part of me that sympathizes with socialism, but in a way that most socialists hate.

I don’t have a problem with socialism per se. Or even democratic socialism.  The main grievance I have with any political structure is bigness. 

Some form of “democratic socialism,” after all, MIGHT be a great fit for a small community of 300 people who share the same values… goals… and lifestyles.

The nitty-gritty. So here’s what it comes down to:

If it is voluntary, it is A-OK. 

If you want to live in an “ecosexual” community that battles climate change by humping moss… you do you. Why would I stop you?

If it is mandated by law… by force… at the point of a gun… 

That’s where I start to quiver in paranoid fear at the potential implications.  As we all should.

When Socialism Works  (ugh)

As for the former, the voluntary form of socialism, there is, indeed, precedent.  Take, for example, the Bruderhof community of Christians in the UK.  While the UK’s Mirror, in typical mainstream media fashion, paints the small community as “bizarre” and “radical”, The truth is it’s the exact opposite of bizarre and radical.  It’s safe, predictable, disciplined, and… well… boring.

“Imagine,” says Sara Wallis, “a place where there is no debt, crime or homelessness. No one worries about money, mortgages or unemployment.”

In a normal day, the families get up at 6am, eat breakfast together at 6:15, then it’s school and work for everyone from 7:30am to 5pm, with a 2-hour communal lunch break.  At school, the kids study in the morning, but then “it’s like summer camp” in the afternoon.  There are obvious trade-offs however. To be a part of the community, the individual is forced to sacrifice quite a bit of his or her own autonomy.

“It’s a community,” says Wallis, “where you are not always allowed to make decisions about your life, where families can be asked to move house if it’s deemed better for the greater good and where a traditional uniform from a bygone era is worn.”

Their work is not centered just around maintaining the community, however, says Wallis: “The community collectively raises tens of thousands of pounds for charity.” A socialist’s wet dream, right? Wrong.

There’s a problem with this type of socialism.  It requires three things absent in our modern day’s idea of the socialist utopia…

1] Personal responsibility and self-ownership

2] Abdication of autonomy.and free choice (rather than “restrictions for thee and none for me”)

3] Adherence to a clearly defined set of values (i.e., a loss of ambiguity and moral relativity)

As a voluntary option, however, where one can leave at any time, there’s no reason why someone couldn’t live a perfectly happy life in that particular case and form of “socialism.”

The Problem With “Big Socialism”

The problem with “Big Socialism,” apart from the aforementioned necessary use of force, coercion, violence, and all that stuff that makes society suck, the advocate for “Big Socialism” wants a fantasyland wherein we can all be (but especially he) shielded from our own weak spots and negligence.  Rather than strengthening ourselves in the necessary fire of maturation, civilization is seen as a feather bed, a given, a constant.  And the only problem with civilization is not a matter of contribution, but that it has been doled out unfairly.  It’s not “open opportunity” for growth that economists mistakenly worry themselves with. It’s the lack of an open reward system. It’s worse than a fairytale. (At least a fairytale has a moral.) And it leads to insanity, such as that which can be experienced if viewing the national convention of the Democratic Socialists of America video as I’ve done, which is but a microcosm of Big Socialism…

Wherein, you’ll notice, every individual believes the most important thing isn’t to live in harmony with others based on clearly-defined principles and values, (something social justice and socialist crowds in general severely lack, yet act as if they don’t) but to demand that others conform to an ever-shifting and highly ambiguous landscape of “sensitivities”. Nobody is willing to sacrifice their discomfort for the “greater good,” and yet everyone expects everyone else to.

If that’s all Big Socialism has to offer, then NO THANK YOU dear Democratic Socialists of America.

We’ll be fine without you.

I’ve Never Seen James Altucher Like THIS Before.

What James said on camera would absolutely shock you.

While Miley Cyrus says she’s not having a kid until “climate change is stopped,” David Benatar says you would be better off if you were never born at all.

Don’t take it personally. It’s not just you. Benatar means every human who exists and everyone who has ever existed. Ever.

A self-proclaimed “anti-natalist” philosopher and author of Better Never to Have Been, Benatar believes life is so unbelievably horrific that the only compassionate thing humans could do would be to stop having kids…Until no human exists ever again.

Damn the climate, says Benatar, it’s life itself that’s the problem.

And Benatar isn’t alone.

In fact, he’s the voice of a dying paradigm.

The Nihilistic Roots of Modernity

Without getting too deep in the weeds, at the root of Benetar’s argument is that life is *clearly* cosmically meaningless.

We exist, he says, in an indifferent universe, and are subject to indifferent, and blind, forces.

In the absence of cosmic meaning, he writes, there’s “something circular about arguing that the purpose of humanity’s existence is that individual humans should help one another.” Bleak, indeed. Alas, we must admit.

Despite the obvious inherent weakness, futility, dismality, ugliness, and distastefulness of Benatar’s take on life, living, and the nature of reality,

there’s something so completely right-on about it.

Not because he’s correct, because he’s not. But because he has bravely and fully embodied the absolute spirit of our age.

Benatar deserves respect mostly because he refuses to, unlike the many other anti-natalists, hide his nihilism behind a thin veneer of virtue.

Despite the gloominess, his honesty is a breath of fresh air.

He makes no claim his anti-natalist position is about anything except his dismal outlook on life. He’s simply taken our materialist paradigm, with even more religious fervor than a Westboro Baptist, to its logical conclusion: Something far worse than fire and brimstone… an abysmal void of eternal nothingness for all.

More than the climate, it’s this same dark wet blanket of modernity that, I suspect, has led Miley Cyrus to announce her refusal to have children “until climate change has stopped”. After all, hate to break it to you, Miley: Climate change will never stop. That’s what the climate does. It changes.

Furthermore, if it were truly about climate, that is, if it were truly about not contributing to human-created climate degradation, it appears that years of flying all over the world to massive venues with massive burning lights and blaring sound systems to dance half-naked in front of massive throngs of people who burn massive amounts of gas to get there and drink massive amounts of alcohol out of massive amounts of plastic [Catching breath] might be more harmful to the environment than if, say, Miley retired and lived a quiet life at home with a kid.

Indeed.

This anti-natalist sentiment runs deeper than just worrying about the climate. And it’s something I’ve noticed while aging through my own Boomer years as I’ve witnessed Millenial ‘peers’ if you will, during that time.

One example from a decade ago:

When asked what he was most surprised about in his two years (yes, two) of college biology classes, a friend told me, simply: “It’s taken all of the magic out of life.” Imagine! That’s all it takes. Two years of professors droning on about intestines, neurons, and microbiomes.

Two years of college and, boom, a 22 year-old knows enough about the world and the nature of reality to cast it off as ultimately meaningless.

Such is the all-pervasive arrogance of the Old Guard. If you want to be in the club, you have to have it all figured out: “The universe is lifeless, cold, and meaningless. Only a fool would argue otherwise.” And, as biologist Rupert Sheldrake has learned the hard way, suggests in academic circles, that the nature of reality might have some bits of mystery left in it and you’ll find yourself kicked out of said club.

At the same time, however, a new paradigm is peeking through.

Several of the greatest minds in the 20th century, after all, believed what quantum physics (the most successful and advanced theory ever) is suggesting would blow the materialist, nihilistic, anti-life, mechanistic worldview out of the water.

Einstein included. Consciousness, they said, is not what we think it is, and the nature of reality is far more mysterious than we’ve been led to believe. (more on that another time, possibly.)

Until then, however, there’s a much easier way to argue against the anti-natalist hordes who look down on those who wish to raise a family.

For that, I bring up Kevin Baldeosingh to rap about why baby strikes won’t save the planet, and why we should keep celebrating life.

Why Baby Strikes Won’t Save the Planet

If you’re worried about climate change, you shouldn’t have children. Ever. That’s the new argument that many young Americans are buying into.

The issue gained prominence in February when Congresswoman Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez raised it on Instagram, and it was back in the news earlier this month when pop singer Miley Cyrus suggested she wouldn’t be having children until climate change was stopped.

Birth Strikes Over Climate Change

“We’ve been doing the same thing to the earth that we do to women. We just take and take and expect it to keep producing. And it’s exhausted. It can’t produce,” Cyrus told ELLE. “We’re getting handed a piece-of-shit planet, and I refuse to hand that down to my child.”

Even some members of the British royal family got into the act, with Prince Harry revealing this week that he and wife Meghan won’t be having more than two children in order to reduce climate change.

For many birth strikers, the claim is that each new human being adds to the carbon load of the planet. In fact, nearly one-third of Americans say climate change should be a consideration when planning a family.

Economist Tyler Cowen, however, has presented a contrary argument that having more children is the best way to ensure that the human species will be able to deal with a climate crisis if and when one occurs because more people means more innovators who will develop new technologies to mitigate such challenges.

Although the no-children-less-carbon argument may seem novel, the lobby is in line with a decades-old demographic trend. Long before this new justification for reducing family size, fertility levels had already been falling in all developed nations while remaining relatively high in poor countries.

In the 1950s, American women had an average of four children; this has gone down to two. In other developed nations, the rate has also similarly declined over the past half-century—in France from 2.7 to 1.9, in Japan from 2.2 to 1.3, and most notably in China from 5.5 to 1.8.

On the face of it, the population control position seems perfectly logical: Since households have limited resources, the more children you have, the less is available for each child. Therefore, if poor people want to ensure that their children grow up to be better off than them, they should have smaller families. This is the key premise on which the family planning movement has been based since the early 20th century. People who do not want to have children view them as an expenditure item and hence often feel virtuous about the resources they save by not having any. That virtue signaling is a key component of the BirthStrike lobby, but, of course, this position is based on the false premise of a fixed economic pie.

Are Children Liabilities?

In any case, this view of children as a liability is very much a modern one. Before the Industrial Revolution, and even nowadays in agriculture-based societies, a large family was considered a benefit. The reason was quite simple: Children provided labor and hence more resources for the household. The early years during which the children were not productive were more than compensated for as they grew up.

This attitude persisted even after the Industrial Revolution began since a large family meant that some children could be spared from the farm to go work in the factories, where wages were higher and the work less back-breaking. Notably, by the end of the 19th century, many families started opting to send their children to school instead of work, with child labor laws belatedly catching up with this new social trend. This was because parents saw how, in a society where manufacturing and services were paying better, education was a benefit for their children.

In large part because of this change from agriculture to manufacturing, the very concept of a large family started to change. In pre-modern times, a family of eight children was considered normal, with anything above 10 being considered large (but in a good way). By the mid-20th century in developed countries, having more than five children was thought to be a large family, hence the Brady Bunch. Nowadays, four is considered plenty.

So while economic factors do have a strong effect on birth rates, the effects are expressed in a counter-intuitive way since people who can afford to have more children tend to have fewer offspring than people who cannot provide as much. Economists have explained this by viewing children as a consumption good. A consumption good is anything that provides satisfaction to the user (what the late Gary Becker, who pioneered the application of economic tools to social interactions, called “psychic income”). To maximize this satisfaction, wealthy parents have to invest more in their children to ensure their equivalent or greater success as adults, therefore, they have fewer children in order to trade off quality in favor of quantity.

The economist Bryan Caplan, however, disagrees (reluctantly) with Becker’s argument. In his book Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids, Caplan instead attributes the decline in family size to changes in values, self-imposed rules, and foresight. Caplan argues that marriage and religion are key factors affecting family size, and both are less influential institutions than they used to be. With respect to rules, he notes that parenting has become more onerous because parents feel they must devote more time and resources to their children, which makes a large family undesirable. And I think I MAY, SOMEWHAT agree with that too.

Lastly, Caplan argues that people today apply narrow foresight in making child-bearing decisions, weighing short-run pleasure against a few years of negative consequences, whereas true foresight means optimizing positive and negatives over our expected lifespan. “Infancy is a passing phase, but children last a lifetime,” he notes. “Costs fall: the older kids get, the easier they are to care for. Once your kids become teenagers, you’ll rarely feel like you need a moment to yourself. You’ll have to pressure them to spend time with you.” (as do currently I)

Doomsday Logic

However, the birth strikers believe they have true foresight. If their premise is correct, then both they and their children will be worse off over their lifetimes. But had people in the past adhered to this doomsday logic, nearly everyone in every part of the world would have remained childless. In ancient times, most parents correctly expected four of their 10 children to die before the age of five, and they did not expect the surviving ones to be materially better off than them. Such experiences naturally created a pessimistic view of life and, as policy analyst Marian L. Tupy noted in a recent article, “Most civilizations have separately conjured up some form of eschatology or that part of theology which is concerned with ‘death, judgment, and the final destiny of the soul and of humankind.’”

In the 20th century, every generation in the western hemisphere feared the prospect of world war, global food shortages, health-sapping pollution, and nuclear Armageddon. Not only did none of these disasters occur, but every new generation also had more wealth, health, and security than the previous one. History thus suggests that doomsayers should have a bit more humility about their dire prophecies.

Most significantly, to the extent that any such doomsdays were ever likely, they were prevented by human ingenuity in tandem with the universal desire for freedom. History thus suggests that doomsayers should have a bit more humility about their dire prophecies.

Perhaps more importantly, young pessimists should also be cautious about predicting their own future state of mind. Since human beings are notably poor at this, it is more useful to observe other people’s experiences and assume that you are more likely to be like them than a noble exception.

And Caplan observes, “Regret is abnormal for people who have kids, and normal for people who missed their chance.” This selfish reason also gels with the climate activists’ altruistic goals since, if Cowen is correct, every well-off person in a developed nation who chooses to not have a child may well be lowering humanity’s chances of dealing effectively with climate change.

Before you choose to birth strike for the uncertain good of the planet therefore, it might be wise to consider these almost-certain truths.

Ciao

One of the latest mass shooting took place only 20 minutes from where I’ve traveled many times.

A friend was on his way to meet a date at a bar on the Oregon District (where the shooting happened), but, in a blank moment of “highway hypnosis,” he missed his exit and showed up 5 minutes “late”… just after the shooting.  And this was, of course, less than 24 hours from another shooting on the other side of the country.

Awful. Disgraceful. Disgusting. Sickening.

Yes. All of the above.

But quick jumps to scapegoating and knee-jerk reactions for the government to “do something,” of which are already emerging from all corners of the political and pundit class, are, and always have been, wrongheaded.

A Tale of Two Shooters 

The Dayton shooter, as reported by Heavy.com, “was a self-described ‘leftist,’ who wrote that he would happily vote for Democrat Elizabeth Warren, praised Satan, was upset about the 2016 presidential election results, and added, ‘I want socialism, and I’ll not wait for the idiots to finally come round to understanding.’”

On the other end of the spectrum, the El Paso shooter was a Trump supporter who praised veterans, the wall, Christianity, and made fun of vegetarians for being “hipsters”.

Now, what’s important about the tweets and descriptions above is not that they are of any substance by themselves, nor are they very helpful predictors of potential mass shooters. (Even self-proclaimed satanists rarely ever shoot up public places.)

What’s important is how they’re being used now, predictably (though awkwardly), on both sides, as political vehicles; examples that the “other” is evil, and “we” are the innocent angels.  (Yet, by nature of playing that game, they’re both wrong.)

As Paul Rosenberg of Freeman’s Perspective has written in the past:

Politics, as it exists today, never wastes a chance to make the beautiful ugly, and, even moreso, the ugly even uglier. 

He said:

“Let’s be honest about something we see nonstop but seldom appreciate: Politics makes life ugly. Politics turns people you disagree with into twisted, cartoon images of what they really are, and it pushes you into degrading and hating them. In short, it’s vile, corrosive, and hate-filled.” At no time has this been more apparent than in the past 48 hours.  And the endgame for both sides is always the same: the long arm of the law grows another finger.

Politics is Poison

You wouldn’t think it by the current hysteria, but violent crime in America today is sitting near an all-time low.  Although we saw a minor uptick in 2015, over the past quarter-century, crime has been on the downslope. 

Furthermore, for perspective, the eternal Neil deGrasse Tyson, who, perhaps, recently fired his publicist, wrote:

And yet, if you spend 5 minutes on Twitter, Facebook, or listening to the pundits, you’ll emerge convinced a new civil war is on the horizon. 

Already, mainstream pundits are demanding “domestic terrorism laws” in America. Meanwhile, we’re having flashbacks of the Patriot Act.

You know, that thing that passed in the name of “security,” which ultimately made us less safe… eroded our civil liberties… expanded domestic spying programs… and militarized the police beyond anything we’ve ever seen, or would ever be appropriate.

We all MUST refuse to let the legacy media, once again, bully us with fear.

Americans Should be Very Skeptical Of Calls For New Terrorism Laws

Although Two mass shootings have rocked the United States in less than 24 hours, leaving dozens dead and many more wounded, MUCH THOUGHT needs to be given to these situations still.

The first in El Paso, Texas was allegedly perpetrated by a white supremacist whose racist motives are outlined in a rambling “manifesto”, the second allegedly by a self-described “leftist” whose motives, like the 2017 Las Vegas shooter, are presently unknown. These incidents occurred a week after another mass shooting in Gilroy, California.

All the usual US gun control debates have of course reignited, which is understandable ONLY to those NOT in the know. Alongside this debate, however, we are seeing another, far more pernicious agenda being raised that I would like to address here.

In an interview with MSNBC’s Joy Reid, notorious liar and propagandist Malcolm Nance claimed that existing laws aren’t sufficient for prosecuting the El Paso shooter, because there are no laws designating his act of mass murder as “domestic terrorism”.

“I think that Congress needs to take up right away a series of domestic terrorism laws,” Nance said. “It’d be very simple: just match them to the words ‘international terrorism’, so that a member of al-Qaeda and a member of a white nationalist terrorist cell or a militia that thinks they’re going to carry out international acts of terrorism are equal all the way around. Right now there are no laws called ‘domestic terrorism law’. They can get you for firearms, they get you for hate crimes, but you are not treated as a terrorist. This act in El Paso was clearly by all definitions a terrorist attack in the United States, but of course by the nature of the person being white and American he can’t be treated like a member of ISIS or al-Qaeda. He can’t even be detained, he can only be treated as a murderer.”

(The accused, for the record, is in fact under arrest currently, and prosecutors say that they are treating it as a domestic terrorism case for which they are seeking the death penalty. This is in Texas; he’ll be dead before the next Fast & Furious movie. Nance’s notion that prosecutors’ hands are somehow tied here is silly.)

“But he’s a murderer with a political intent who is spreading an ideology,” Nance continued. “So Congress should take that up immediately. And let’s see if the White House won’t sign that legislation. That would be very revealing.”

In other words, shove the legislation through and call anyone who opposes it a Nazi lover.

Political commentary is flooded with the word “terrorism” today. People are demanding that the El Paso shooter in particular and white supremacists in general be labeled terrorists by the narrative-making commentariat, and you know what? I totally get it. The push since 9/11 to tar Muslims as “terrorists” has been extremely obnoxious and fueled by hate and bigotry, so it makes sense for progressive-minded people to push for the egalitarian usage of that term. But before doing so, please reflect on what lessons we learned from the post-9/11 “Islamic terrorism” scare, although Islamic global ‘spread’ IS in fact, VERY REAL!

“Years of misguided alarmism over ‘Islamic terrorism’ resulted in the erosion of civil liberties, militarization of police, and a host of other bad outcomes. Applying the same alarmist logic to ‘white nationalist terrorism’ is likely to produce a host of similarly bad outcomes, tweeted independent journalist Michael Tracey in response to the chatter.

“I am telling you now that the government will use the violence that Trump himself has rallied as an excuse for more militarization, more surveillance, more violations of civil liberties — and a lot of people are going to welcome these things because they are afraid, tweeted Truthout‘s Kelly Hayes. “I’m not guessing or being creative here.

This is about having a sense of history and a sense of how these systems function in the present. I would love to be wrong. I would celebrate being wrong. But I’m not.”

Indeed, it is an established fact that the US government will use the narrative about the need to fight terrorism to advance pre-existing agendas. The first draft of the massive USA Patriot Act was introduced a week after the 9/11 attacks, far too fast for anyone to have gathered the necessary information from all the relevant government bodies about what changes were necessary and typed out the hundreds of pages of the bill. Legislators later admitted that they didn’t even have time to read through the densely worded bill before passing it the next month, so to believe that it could have been written in a week would be childish.

In 2011 then-Congressman Ron Paul told Politico that “the Patriot Act was written many, many years before 9/11,” adding that the attacks simply provided “an opportunity for some people to do what they wanted to do.” Paul was serving in Congress when the Patriot Act was passed. The Act has since been used to erode human rights at home and abroad by destroying Fourth Amendment protections and legalizing Orwellian surveillance, and it’s safe to assume that the opaque and unaccountable government agencies who were greatly empowered by it had already wanted this to happen.

I have no easy answers for America’s mass shooting epidemic, and as an Australian I see the gun control debate as outside my sovereign territory. I will simply suggest, as I so often do, that if Americans really want to address the problem, then the best place to start is to do the first ever honest and in-depth study on the effects of domestic propaganda on the American mind; particularly war propaganda.

There are only so many times a certain type of mind can be told violence-glorifying lies before it snaps; if anyone researches mass shootings in the light of the constant psychological abuse that Americans suffer at the hands of their mass media, I guarantee they’ll find a connection. Americans are the most propagandized people on earth because of their proximity to the most strategically crucial part of the empire; it’s not a coincidence that they’re also by far the most prone to mass shootings.

One thing I can tell you won’t fix your problems, America, and that’s listening to the propagandists who want you to hand over even more control to a government that has already begun floating high-altitude surveillance balloons over your country without your permission.

Don’t let them bully you with fear and DON’T allow them to manipulate you like a puppeteer either.