Let’s start with the headlines for this Halloween weekend.
“In our top story, Anthony Fauci has announced that the CDC, in a joint project with DHS, CIA, NSA, LSD, PCP, and other three-letter agencies, will be sending ghouls, goblins, witches, zombies, orcs, and other unpleasant creatures door-to-door to vax people…
“The CDC has also announced that it will be providing apples with vaccine needles in them to pro-vaccine activists who wish to trick neighborhood children into accidentally injecting themselves with experimental gene therapy. It’s the night of the living vaxxed, folks! Legions of brainwashed undead are roaming around shrieking ‘must eat unvaxxed brains!’ So stock up on silver bullets and wooden stakes or whatever it is that works best against these monsters according to the latest peer-reviewed double-blind studies financed by Pfizer, Moderna, and the Anthony and Melinda Fauci Bat Coronavirus Gain of Function Foundation. As the saying goes, trust the Psy-ops! I mean, the Science!”
Fast forward to the YouTube-friendly portion of the show:
HEY VACCINE SKEPTICS! BETTER LOCK YOURSELVES IN YOUR HOMES AND BAR THE DOORS! THE VACCINE ZOMBIES ARE COMING TO EAT YOUR BRAINS! AND ONE OF THE SCARIEST VACCINE ZOMBIES IS THIS MONSTER HERE WHO VAGUELY RESEMBLES THE DECOMPOSING CORPSE OF…NOAM CHOMSKy? WAIT A MINUTE, THAT IS NOAM CHOMSKY! I USED TO FRIGHTEN PEOPLE WITH MY DICK CHENEY MASK…WHO WOULD HAVE GUESSED THAT NOAM CHOMSKY WOULD BECOME ALMOST EQUALLY MONSTROUS?
In this first episode of the new show, The Remnant Underground, Michael Matt discusses the ramifications of Pope Francis promoting population control guru, Jeffrey Sachs, as a permanent member of the Vatican’s Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences.
Aside from being militantly pro-contraception, Sachs is also co-author of the UN Sustainable Development Goals, which promote abortion worldwide.
So, here’s the question: How pro-life can Francis possibly be, when he has no problem partnering with pro-abort population controllers?
Next up, Francis says the whole world must get vaccinated and the “peaceful protesters” who burned down Minneapolis are today’s “Good Samaritans”.
And guess what? Francis also called on Big Tech to crack down on your freedom of speech…and this was AFTER he’d rolled out the red carpet for Nancy Pelosi inside the Vatican.
We’re getting to the point now where one cannot be a sincere Catholic and a defender of Francis at the same time, the two being mutually exclusive.
Michael analyses a recent speech by Pope Francis that proves beyond any shadow of a doubt that this man has betrayed the Church of Christ and turned her over to radical globalists who are hellbent on building a New World Order out of the ashes of Christendom.
Plus, Michael provides an update on his family’s COVID recovery.
Dilbert creator Scott Adams tweeted this week: ”The country’s energy is strange. Everything is amped up in every direction. Something big is coming.” He’s rarely wrong about such things.
Adams said he doesn’t know what that something big is, but I’m hoping it is a major shift in America’s political tectonic plates. I may be looking too hard for it, but I, too, feel it in my bones.
Infrastructure Faceplant
For one thing, the wacky spending program the Democrats were proposing and fiddling with seems to have hit the shoals, trapped between the far left and the more moderate senators Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin. Even the leftward Politico cannot spackle over the dilemma, a dilemma that is the only thing preventing Democrats from turning our constitutional republic into a totalitarian socialist economic mess in which only the most authoritarian and corrupt rule over a greatly impoverished citizenry.
For the second time in less than a month, Speaker Nancy Pelosi and her leadership team had to delay a vote on Senate-passed infrastructure bill amid progressive opposition, denying President Joe Biden a much-needed win as Democrats’ bigger, $1.75 trillion social spending plan also remains in limbo.
“I think it’s wholly apparent that today was not a success,” said Virginia Rep. Abigail Spanberger, whose state has a high-stakes gubernatorial showdown Tuesday that Democrats were hoping to boost with the infrastructure vote.
“Because people choose to be obstructionists, we’re not delivering these things to my state or to the rest of the country,” the swing-district Democrat added. “I guess we’ll just wait because apparently failing roads and bridges can just wait in the minds of some people.”
Democrats slunk out of the House chamber embarrassed — furious at the liberals who dug in and a White House that refused to pressure them to relent — and openly fretting about the long-term repercussions, given the tough climb they face in the midterms.
Virginia Gubernatorial Race
Terry McAuliffe, who was supposed to be a shoo-in for a second term as governor of Virginia, seems to be in a lot of trouble. Good polls can only measure general sentiment in my view, but all that I’ve seen show that sentiment has rapidly shifted in favor of his opponent Glenn Youngkin. To my mind, McAuliffe’s fatal miscalculation was to stand with the teachers’ unions, the obstructive, dictatorial Loudon County school board against the parents. Northern Virginia is heavily populated by tech and professional federal employees who in recent years have tended to vote Democrat, but these are people who can be expected to be concerned with the public school education of their children, and McAuliffe, reflexively tone-deaf to such concerns, placed himself perilously on the third rail.
How bad is his campaign going? It could hardly be worse. So few people have turned out in places like Arlington, Virginia, that he’s skipped showing up at the final rallies — rallies designed to snowball voter support. At one of those rallies. Pharrell Williams, a noted hip-hop singer and music producer, told the crowd it’s okay if they vote for Glenn Youngkin — not something I’d think the rally organizers wanted to hear.
The odious and discredited Lincoln Project tried to help McAuliffe by staging a pretend white nationalist display for Youngkin. I suppose, because they were torn between trying to pay honor to diversity while smearing Youngkin, they included a young black man in the mix of demonstrators, immediately undercutting the message of the scam that this was a white nationalist demonstration. In fact, one of the “white nationalists” was the financial director for Young VA Dems. About the same time this ploy flopped, others reminded voters that McAuliffe had defended the present Democrat governor of Virginia Ralph Northam’s appearance in blackface costume, and it turned out that McAuliffe’s spokesperson (who also worked for the Harris and Biden campaigns) had posted racist tweets in 2012. Just as #MeToo backfired — this week against New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, now charged with a misdemeanor sexual offense against a staffer — the cancel culture mining of ancient racist comments is now backfiring against the Democrats who had made this something of a cottage industry.
The National Legal and Policy Center is asking the FEC to “promptly investigate” whether the contribution to the Virginia gubernatorial candidate violated federal laws prohibiting campaigns from accepting political donations from foreign nationals.
“Terry McAuliffe has a history of accepting foreign contributions. The FEC must fully investigate these serious charges that he accepted $350,000 in illegal foreign contributions for his current campaign,” said Washington, D.C. attorney, Paul Kamenar, counsel to NLPC, who drafted and filed the complaint with the FEC.
LycaTel LLC, owned by Sri Lankan-British national Allirajah Subaskaran, gave McAuliffe $350,000 in July, the Free Beacon first reported in early October. The company is a New Jersey subsidiary of Subaskaran’s U.K.-based telecom conglomerate, which boasts a complicated web of offshore businesses and has been the subject of tax-fraud and money-laundering charges in France.
(Of course, as you imagine, Northern Virginia voters, whose main source of news is the Washington Post, will know little of such things, as the paper actively supports McAuliffe and buries these stories, so if you know any please send them the link to this.)
If, as I hope, McAuliffe loses, it will mean a gut check for those Democrats heading into a 2022 reelection fight. It tells them that people are sick of this craziness and their own careers are in danger. I expect that since their personal political careers are the first of their interests, self-seeking congressional Democrats will cut their strings to the loonies in the Squad and the Sandernistas.
Changing the Climate
Ostensibly to chat with the Pope about such theological issues as climate change — apparently the latest religious belief superseding what most people consider Catholicism — President Biden (who reportedly took 800 staffers with him to the Climate Conference in Glasgow, Scotland) cruised through Rome in an 85-vehicle motorcade.
What more could you ask to show how seriously Biden takes the issue of greenhouse gases and fossil fuels?
Speaking of “serious,” how can you not laugh at a president so stupid that he said, “When you buy an electric vehicle, you can go across America on a single tank of gas figuratively speaking. It’s not gas. You plug it in.” Sure, you do, and you have to plug it in every few hundred miles and wait for hours for it to charge unless somewhere someone has invented some very very long and sturdy extension cords. And, of course, plugging it in requires electric power from somewhere, and there’s a substantial shortage of it because of the same loony energy policies that are now forcing up gas and electric power prices around the country and the world.
Immigration Follies
Thousands of aliens are heading toward the border to join the more than one million who already illegally crossed under this administration, and, almost entirely unvetted, have been transported around the country. Citizens, many of whom jumped through years-long hoops to satisfy what is still immigration law totally ignored by this administration, are incredulous at the latest report, as Roger L. Simon explains:
WASHINGTON — The Biden administration is in talks to offer immigrant families that were separated during the Trump administration around $450,000 a person in compensation, according to people familiar with the matter, as several agencies work to resolve lawsuits filed on behalf of parents and children who say the government subjected them to lasting psychological trauma.
“The U.S. Departments of Justice, Homeland Security, and Health and Human Services are considering payments that could amount to close to $1 million a family, though the final numbers could shift, the people familiar with the matter said.”
$450,000 a person? This when millions of actual taxpaying American citizens are suffering, barely able to make ends meet during the pandemic, and inflation is on a record pace. Not even Anthony Fauci, allegedly the highest paid government official, makes that much, at least in salary.
Psychological trauma? How about causing psychological trauma to a whole country at once? Never in my life have I heard anything so insane.
No matter how hard the mainstream press tries to bury such things, ordinary voters cannot miss the fact that the administration’s idiotic policies and tinkering already have resulted in supply shortages, higher prices, higher energy costs, and terrible schools that are miseducating their children and undermining parental authority. Just as bad, all this would lead to even higher taxes. They’re waking up and that means to me that the ground is shifting under the Democrats’ feet. That is “something big.”
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In 1976, a professor of economic history at the University of California, Berkeley published an essay outlining the fundamental laws of a force he perceived as humanity’s greatest existential threat: Stupidity.
Stupid people, Carlo M. Cipolla explained, share several identifying traits: they are abundant, they are irrational, and they cause problems for others without apparent benefit to themselves, thereby lowering society’s total well-being. There are no defenses against stupidity, argued the Italian-born professor, who died in 2000. The only way a society can avoid being crushed by the burden of its idiots is if the non-stupid work even harder to offset the losses of their stupid brethren.
Law 1: Always and inevitably everyone underestimates the number of stupid individuals in circulation.
No matter how many idiots you suspect yourself surrounded by, Cipolla wrote, you are invariably lowballing the total. This problem is compounded by biased assumptions that certain people are intelligent based on superficial factors like their job, education level, or other traits we believe to be exclusive of stupidity. They aren’t. Which takes us to:
Law 2: The probability that a certain person be stupid is independent of any other characteristic of that person.
Cipolla posits stupidity is a variable that remains constant across all populations. Every category one can imagine—gender, race, nationality, education level, income—possesses a fixed percentage of stupid people. There are stupid college professors. There are stupid people at Davos and at the UN General Assembly. There are stupid people in every nation on earth. How numerous are the stupid amongst us? It’s impossible to say. And any guess would almost certainly violate the first law, anyway.
Law 3. A stupid person is a person who causes losses to another person or to a group of persons while himself deriving no gain and even possibly incurring losses.
Cipolla called this one the Golden Law of stupidity. A stupid person, according to the economist, is one who causes problems for others without any clear benefit to himself.
The uncle unable to stop himself from posting fake news articles to Facebook? Stupid. The customer service representative who keeps you on the phone for an hour, hangs up on you twice, and somehow still manages to screw up your account? Stupid.
This law also introduces three other phenotypes that Cipolla says co-exist alongside stupidity. First there is the intelligent person, whose actions benefit both himself and others. Then there is the bandit, who benefits himself at others’ expense. And lastly there is the helpless person, whose actions enrich others at his own expense. Cipolla imagined the four types along a graph, like this:
The non-stupid are a flawed and inconsistent bunch. Sometimes we act intelligently, sometimes we are selfish bandits, sometimes we act helplessly and are taken advantage of by others, and sometimes we’re a bit of both. The stupid, in comparison, are paragons of consistency, acting at all times with unyielding idiocy.
However, consistent stupidity is the only consistent thing about the stupid. This is what makes stupid people so dangerous. Cipolla explains:
Essentially stupid people are dangerous and damaging because reasonable people find it difficult to imagine and understand unreasonable behavior. An intelligent person may understand the logic of a bandit. The bandit’s actions follow a pattern of rationality: nasty rationality, if you like, but still rationality. The bandit wants a plus on his account. Since he is not intelligent enough to devise ways of obtaining the plus as well as providing you with a plus, he will produce his plus by causing a minus to appear on your account. All this is bad, but it is rational and if you are rational you can predict it. You can foresee a bandit’s actions, his nasty maneuvres and ugly aspirations and often can build up your defenses.
With a stupid person all this is absolutely impossible as explained by the Third Basic Law. A stupid creature will harass you for no reason, for no advantage, without any plan or scheme and at the most improbable times and places. You have no rational way of telling if and when and how and why the stupid creature attacks. When confronted with a stupid individual you are completely at his mercy.
All of which leads us to:
Law 4: Non-stupid people always underestimate the damaging power of stupid individuals. In particular non-stupid people constantly forget that at all times and places and under any circumstances to deal and/or associate with stupid people always turns out to be a costly mistake.
We underestimate the stupid, and we do so at our own peril. This brings us to the fifth and final law:
Law 5: A stupid person is the most dangerous type of person.
And its corollary:
A stupid person is more dangerous than a bandit.
We can do nothing about the stupid. The difference between societies that collapse under the weight of their stupid citizens and those who transcend them are the makeup of the non-stupid. Those progressing in spite of their stupid possess a high proportion of people acting intelligently, those who counterbalance the stupid’s losses by bringing about gains for themselves and their fellows.
Declining societies have the same percentage of stupid people as successful ones. But they also have high percentages of helpless people and, Cipolla writes, “an alarming proliferation of the bandits with overtones of stupidity.”
“Such change in the composition of the non-stupid population inevitably strengthens the destructive power of the [stupid] fraction and makes decline a certainty,” Cipolla concludes. “And the country goes to Hell.”
Corinne Purtill writes about culture, behavioral science, and management. Based at various times in Washington, D.C., Phnom Penh, New York, and London, she has written about everything from terrorism to the search for the Loch Ness Monster. She has a BA in English from Stanford University and reports now from southern California.
I don’t understand why so many black people support Communists. Why shed the chains of slavery and the humiliation of Jim Crow only to replace them with the slavery of supply chain breakdowns, hyperinflation, bare minimum government incomes and the humiliation of vaccine segregation?
I don’t understand why so many gay and lesbian persons support Communism in America. Why celebrate your ability to be married and love whom you please while condemning yourself and your beloved to a stagnation and decline in your standard of living and the obliteration of all your INDIVIDUAL rights? What good is the sex partner of your choice if you may not own (or cannot afford) the bed you sleep in, or the house you live in?
The world is upside down. It’s morally and intellectually inverted. Metaphysically, it’s a benevolent universe where reality and nature DO make sense. But today, at least, most of the people make no sense at all…
I don’t understand why so many Latino or Hispanic immigrants from Communist countries support Communism once in America. What in the hell is wrong with them…do they not even realize what they risked life and limb to flee?
I had thought we were over the whole “stay safe” thing, finally, now that we are over 15 months past the whole “15 Days to Flatten the Curve” thing.
But apparently not.
It appears to have made a resurgence. Perhaps this is because the vaxxed are worried their vaxxes are wearing off and it hasn’t been their turn yet at the boosters.
Today I was asked by a client if I was “staying safe” and told by another at the end of our call to “stay safe.”
I can’t tell you how much this phrase grates me, but I can’t say much to clients, so I just coughed when I mumbled “Yes” and “Will do.”
What I really want to say in reply is something like, “Get skeptical,” or at least ask them what “staying safe” entails and then critique the illogic of their answers.
I don’t remember being told anything like “stay safe” before March 2020.
(Well, I take that back. People would say “safe travels” or “Be safe” if they knew I was traveling some place iffy to see clients.)
People asked me, “How have you been?” as a general greeting or said “Hope you stay well this winter” if there was a flu going around.
I know this whole “stay safe” thing started with the whole safer at home movement that was part of the flatten thing and I know it is the cabal’s attempt to condition us that we need to be afraid and look to them for safety, but it needs to end.
Any ideas on good comebacks to use in different situations?
There are some folks out there who don’t believe that Critical Race Theory exists. (This despite the fact that many organizations have unapologetically come forward admitting that it does.) Others believe it’s just “teaching our history.” (This despite the fact that we’ve been “teaching our history,” more or less, warts and all, at least since I was in first grade, 36 years ago.) But I get it. It’s a subjective term and hard to define. So let’s get rid of the hard-to-define terms and go with some hard, factual examples.
This particular example doesn’t come from the education sphere, but it does show how race (which, as a reminder, is a made-up construct — we all belong to only one race: the human race) has been “weaponized.” And when everything is racist, nothing is racist.
It involves two “minorities” (again, I don’t even know what that particular term really means, but it’s what the left would like us to focus on, so I’ll play the left’s game for the purposes of this example and point it out), Lorena Gonzales, a Hispanic woman, and Bruce Harrell, a half-black, half-Japanese man.
The two are running for mayor of Seattle. Harrell said something a number of years ago when the gay white mayor at the time was accused by numerous men of child sexual molestation. (I don’t care how much pigment is in your skin or whom you’re attracted to, but since this is all about identity politics and that man was elected largely because he was the “gay candidate,” I figure I’ll include it in the narrative.)
Before all the facts had come to light and that mayor had resigned in disgrace after it was clear the allegations weren’t just “a homophobic attack trying to paint all gay men as child sex abusers,” Harrell came to his defense by speaking the unspeakable — namely, pointing out that we should, gasp, follow due process and not jump to any conclusions.Top Articles By American ThinkerRead More
People Notice When the Elites Lienull
Because of Harrell’s unspeakable comment, Gonzalez has launched a campaign ad using those and other things he’s said out of context as well as having some other people insinuate that he is a “rape apologist.”
Dirty politics is nothing new. What is fairly new is immediately defaulting to “YOU’RE A RACIST!!!” In this case, according to those deemed worthy to judge these things, Gonzalez is a racist because, apparently, there’s some racist trope about black men being rapists, and Harrell is apparently black. (Not that I’ve ever given it any thought, but when I saw this article and was forced to think about his race, because I’ve known of Harrell for a number of years, my immediate thought was, “Isn’t he Japanese?”) It can’t be that Gonzalez is just playing dirty politics that has nothing to do with Harrell’s skin color — although it is good to know where black/Japanese men rank compared to Hispanic women the next time I’m playing “intersectionality bingo.”
To bring this back to the beginning, CRT views all of history and socio-political relations through the lens of race. As I heard one proponent of CRT quip, “racism in America is like a pie; it’s baked right in.”
If someone cuts you off in traffic and you happen to be black, he’s a racist. If you don’t get a job, it’s because the company is racist. The disproportionate number of black people in prison can only be attributed to racism. There can’t possibly be another explanation. It can’t be that the person who cut you off is a bad driver or rushing home because his wife just went into labor. It can’t be that the other person was just more qualified, did a better job at interviewing, or provided better references. It can’t be that over 90% of prison inmates grew up without a father.
If your opponent attacks you in an admittedly dirty way, it can’t be that she’s just doing what politicians have been doing since the dawn of time and just trying to get a shot in any way she can. It has to be that she’s racist.
It’s gotten so bad that it’s almost comical. The L.A. Times ran a column calling Larry Elder “the black face of white supremacy.” “#UncleTim” trended on Twitter after Senator Tim Scott gave the response to the State of the Union address. Joe Biden told voters “you ain’t black” if you won’t vote for him.
Examples like this make it clear that this has zero to do with race and everything to do with pushing a statist agenda. Those who get in line are everything that is good and holy in the world. Those who don’t are racist.
We get what we focus on. If we want to be divided by race and all the other fun little boxes those who seek to control us are trying to put us in, we’ll get those boxes and that division. Or we could follow the words of Morgan Freeman and just stop talking about it. There used to be rampant discrimination against Italians, Irish, and Catholics. Joe Biden’s Catholicism was barely mentioned during the 2020 election.
If we don’t seek to stop division, it will never be stopped. Let’s say we “solve racism.” People will just find another reason to divide themselves. (Read “The Butter Battle Book” by Dr. Seuss, which was an allegory for the then-raging Cold War but involved two groups at war over something as silly as whether they ate their toast butter side up or butter side down. Considering some of the silly things we see fights break out over, I’m not sure that would qualify as satire anymore.)
So the next time someone says something you perceive as mean or unfair, or cuts you off in traffic, or you lose out on a job or a table at a restaurant to someone else who happens to be of a different ethnicity, religion, sex, etc., you can throw yourself a pity party; call up the ACLU, NAACP, and whatever other acronym you can think of; and sue everyone in sight over the great tragedy — or you can think, “Hmm, that person must be having a bad day, or maybe he just has different opinions from mine, and it doesn’t have a thing to do with the color of his skin or any other superficial difference that exists, and maybe I should see what I can do to bless him or what common ground we can find.”
When I question the overreaction to COVID or the vaccination mandate, people (even the few who aren’t hostile) say things like, “So you believe in the conspiracy theory, then?”
No, that’s not it. There’s no conspiracy. It’s all done out in the open. I’m sure there are possibly secrets, but one thing is not a secret: Medical fascism is POWER FOR THE SAKE OF POWER.
Power for the sake of power is always wrong, and it’s always irrational. The fact that people who pursue power call themselves “social justice warriors” or “progressives” will not alter a thing. They are still evil.
When you replace reason with something else, you necessarily replace reason with (1) emotion, (2) coercion, or both.
We saw it first with mask mandates. Mask mandates were destructive socially and psychologically; the vax mandates are worse, because you’re being forced to take part in a medical experiment where the law of unintended consequences comes into play.
When you attempt to prevent “A” (COVID) you also can trigger all kinds of other side-effects or symptoms, possibly with far worse consequences than “A” (COVID) itself.
We’re not even permitted to investigate or consider these possibilities.
We’re told, basically, “Take the vaccine — or be shunned, and starve.” How much longer until we get to: “Take the vaccine — or be imprisoned, or executed.” What’s to stop it? John Roberts and the Supreme Court? Seriously?
The Constitution, while sacred and important on one level, is no longer practiced. In fact, people routinely invoke the Constitution to obliterate its whole original purpose, which was to LIMIT the power and scope of government. Government in the United States is far more powerful than it ever has been. Today’s regime has nothing whatsoever to do with the original founding government, and it’s hard even to recognize the America of 20 or 30 years ago in today’s dystopian insanity.
Limited government is gone, and it’s not coming back … at least, not without a big fight.
Unfortunately, limited government has no friend anywhere on earth, at present. When it went in America, the stage was set for it to perish everywhere else. Have you read about Australia lately? Or Great Britain? They’re glorified prison camps. America was always the last, best hope of mankind for economic freedom, individual liberty, innovation and prosperity.
If you want your freedom back, you’ll have to get out of your comfort zone. Because, believe me: They are NOT giving any of it up. And they’re expanding it by the hour.
THE ARTFUL DILETTANTE 