|
|
I'm not black, but my Step-Dad is black, I did live and work in black communities. What I saw as an outsider was the black community is disenfranchised (duh!), and that leads to distrust of the system, often Whites, and they prefer their gossip circles and communities opinions to News and fact... to the point that there are many more conspiracies. Events that go through that lens, don't often resemble what I saw, or the objective facts of the case. And the DNC either starts, fosters or panders to many of these wacky views of America or the world, feeding the hate/unrest for votes.
|
|
|
|
|
This covers many of the fallacies and bad arguments about the Iraq War. Disagreeing over the cost/benefits of a war is fine, ignoring truths because they get in the way of your agenda is not.
|
|
|
|
|
Old truckers never die, they just re-tire. Anyways, the point is those screaming automation will destroy us all, are missing that they've been saying the same thing since Ug first tied a spear tip to a spear, and Zug predicted that would end all animal life. This is nothing new.
|
|
|
|
The three things (Russia, Trump and Wiretapping) are intricately tied together, in ways that reflect poorly on the mainstream media, and those who believe that media. Remember this sequence:
- Trump: I was "wire tapped"
- NYT/CNN/WaPo: Haha. That idiot @realDonaldTrump thinks he was wiretapped.
..Six months later...
-
NYT/CNN/WaPo: Trump was wiretapped.
We know that: Paul Manafort and Carter Page were both illegally wiretapped: those wiretaps were illegally gotten based on the Obama Administration cronies lying to the FISA Courts by claiming the FBI/CIA had vetted the material, and not revealing that it was all based on the Hillary paid-for Dossier. Those warrants were then used to spy on the Trump Campaign, and the information they gathered was then used to charge Paul Manafort with crimes unrelated to Russia Collusion/Obstruction, and also used to illegally unmask American Citizens, and illegally leak that information to the public'. Right before this happened, Obama had changed the rules for seeing this top secret information (unmasking) information, which made it easier to leak these secrets and harder to track who did it. Top candidates with access were Obama appointees John Brennan, Susan Rice, or Samantha Power. We do not know how much criminal sharing was going on (back and forth), but we do know Obama lied in saying that he wasn't following the investigation, and some clandestine communication was happening (from private texts from Peter Strzok and Lisa Page). We also know that Bill Clinton got caught lying about an "impromptu" clandestine tarmac meeting (that was later shown to be pre-planned) with the Obama's DOJ (Attorney General Loretta Lynch), where they said they just "talked about grandkids" during the hight of Hillary's email investigation. Uh huh. CNN or the NYT have either avoided as much of that context as possible, or actively attacked anyone that questioned the motives or actions of these impeccable sources.
|
|
|
|
|
The answer for every program is "compared to what?".... you could do all these other thing: desalinated clean water, more sewage treatment, much more clean energy, and 3,000 miles of more lanes and 9,000 miles of resurfacing.... or a high speed rail that few will use. Which sounds better? So it's not that I don't like the idea of High Speed Rail, it's just my brain won't let me stop comparing how much good I could do with the money, if we didn't waste it on this boondoggle.
|
|
|
|
|
California doesn't have a highway shortfall -- from 1984-2012, the capital spending for roads and bridges rose nearly three times the inflation rate. What happens is that to little of the money spent is spent on the right thing or in the right way. About 20% of all monies from the highway trust fund were diverted to finance pet projects that have nothing to do with road maintenance (mass transit, bike paths, high speed rail, and so on), which are used by less than 5% of the population. So they raise gas taxes to make up for the fact that they can't manage their money well, and gullible voters buy in. Things like that are why California is such an expensive state to live in.
|
|
|
|
|
Why shouldn't we create Campaign Contribution Limits? Because it won't work, and will make things worse.
|
|
|
|
|
Some context on military suicides compared to other groups: something to keep in mind when Hollywood is giving folks their fake trope about how crazy those military folks are.
|
|
|
|
|
OK. Here's what I call "the lie of averages". It's a math trick often used by politicians (most of the left ones) to delude their followers, into thinking something is the opposite of what it is. For example they claim California taxes are lower than other places in rate, when in dollars it is far more. Or they'll claim administration costs on Medicare is lower than private healthcare, because as a percentage it is - but only because the payouts per case are so much greater: in dollars per case handled, they're far worse.
|
|
|
|
|
Basics of Propaganda: understanding differences between white, black and grey propaganda.
I use the meaning:
- white = you were just telling your sides story (your spin),
- grey = telling your sides story with lies of omissions (to make your side look better)
- black = are you adding in direct and known falsehoods and misrepresentation to sell your sides agenda (actively misrepresenting things).
|
|
|
|
|
Fascism is categorized by some as "right wing", because in Europe (historically), left and right isn't liberalism vs. conservatism, it often means individualism (left) vs. authoritarianism or collectivism (right). So by that definition, British and American Liberalism (Libertarianism) was considered left wing, and Fascism was right wing because it was authoritarian and collectivist (not individualist) - but that means Socialism and Communism are right wing well. While in America, our terms reversed: individualists (libertarians, classical liberals, conservatives) tend to pool on the right, not the left, so the terms/meanings/roles are directly reversed. If Fascism is right wing in Europe, it's left wing in America (or they were using a different dimension to compare it on. The same way in America, Conservatism means go backwards: back when we had less government control, but in many European countries, conservatism can mean going back to when they had Monarchs and more authoritarian control. These terms don't translate as well as some people think. There's a lot of other ways to look at right versus left wing: none of them show fascism to be a purely right wing belief system, while all show it to be a strongly left wing one (by American definitions).
|
|
|
|
|
You often hear advocates claiming, "if it wasn't for progressives, you wouldn't have X...", then they explain without progressives, we wouldn't have roads, schools, police, fireman, military, or some other thing we had for decades or centuries before progressives. But I wanted to compile the other side of the equation (the balances). Here's a reminder of what they gave us that wasn't so great, or started off fine but entropied into something bad, so people can decide if jumping on every new big-government bandwagon is a good idea… or if a little prudence, caution and research is warranted before gobbling up the bandwagon fallacy and putting on that Che Guevara T-Shirt.
The short list of losers would include the following:
- Financial servitude: centralized banking/money (the Fed), fiat currency backed by debt (and the inflation that results in), they gave us the 16th amendment, the IRS, the worst tax code in the free world (73,954 pages), they fought for every tax increase and against all relief or simplification (to fund themselves), and then they piled on 174,545 pages of regulations (over 1,040,940 restrictions spread among them) in our regulatory code, and that’s not touching the 23,000 pages in our federal legal code (and over 300,000 criminal punishments burried within the discretion of administrative agencies).
- Bigotry: centralized education with the admitted intent of reprogramming the youth (against their immigrant/catholic parents), they were champions of racism (and still are in affirmative action), supported eugenics, created our anti-immigration quotas and policies as a favor to unions (then call anyone that wants to enforce those laws a xenophobe), FDR blocked all immigration for a while, interned even 2nd generation Japanese, Germans and Italians,
- General Statism: they replaced the constitution with federalism (jurisprudence and precedence over original intent), invented supreme court stacking and judicial activism, they gave us the 17th amendment (popular vote senate which broke the constitution and states rights completely), they gave government the power to take our property (eminent domain, national parks/federal lands), and to control what we can do on our land (via the EPA and other agencies)
- Too big to fail: they have always been in bed with big business (like organized labor) and created the biggest cartels and trusts in the nation (utilities, unions, federal reserve, banking, Fanny/Freddy, tort lawyers, AMA, and so on),
- Enemies of liberty: they gave us Prohibition and the post-prohibition drug war, they granted the Fed it's own unconstitutional police forces (FBI, NSA, DEA, OSS/CIA, IRS), centralized transportation (like Amtrak), used centralized road as a way to force things on the states that were unconstitutional (like the 55MPH speed limit, forced raised the drinking age, and so on), then they complain that our federally mandated highways and bridges are crumbling (the agencies they created, failing to do their charter), they invented the anti-liberty regulatory state: the FDA was created so they could control what we put in our own bodies, the FCC and fairness doctrine were created to control our free speech (so FDR could bully any TV/Radio stations that did unfavorable pieces on the administration or it’s policies), they gave us FISA warrants and invented domestic spying (look at Espionage and Sedition Acts of the 1917-1918 and how they empowered government to read our mail, listen on phone calls, and how they undermined free speech), they created American imperialism (and got us into the Civil War, Spanish American War, WWI, WWII, Kosovo, Bosnia, Vietnam, and Central/South America), they gave us conscription/draft, they took away our guns for our own good, invented the poverty industrial complex (which is over 2/3rds of our budget and 9/10ths of our future liabilities), they made it harder to save for our retirement and replaced it with a youth-tax ponzi scam calls Social Security, then they raided the Social Security Trust fund and left IOU’s in their place (for our kids to pay for our debts/sins), they invented congressional appointed agencies to give congress plausible deniability and more opacity in government, and most of all, they won’t accept responsibility for any of it. It’s all the Republicans fault.
|
|
|
|
|
