God Laughing Too Hard To Save Us. Good For The Heart. Why I hate and Do Not Own One. Interesting Posts.More.

Hugs are good for the heart!

Why I do not own one of those damn nuisances:

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Inflation: A Modern Fiscal And Monetary 'Mess' by Kevin Hassett via National Review The inflation pot is boiling, and Secretary Yellen has poured gasoline on the fire.

Infrastructure Does Not Mean Roads And Bridges, Apparently by John H. Cochrane via The Grumpy Economist Congress passed a much-ballyhooed "infrastructure" bill. "Roads and bridges." Well, not much of it went to roads and bridges in the first place, only $110 billion out of $1.2 Trillion went to roads, bridges "and investments in other major transportation programs."

A World Without Trust by Jacquelyn Schneider via Foreign Affairs [Subscription Required] When sounding the alarm over cyberthreats, policymakers and analysts have typically employed a vocabulary of conflict and catastrophe. As early as 2001, James Adams, a co-founder of the cybersecurity firm iDefense, warned in these pages that cyberspace was “a new international battlefield,” where future military campaigns would be won or lost.  ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++  This is America under Democrats. If you made a movie of our three leaders you would win an Academy Award as the year's best comedy. It is sheer insanity that has been loosed upon Americans or they electively did it to themselves. God can't save us because he is laughing too hard. Maybe he can save the Queen but we are too far gone. ++++++++++++++++++ Do you see a difference? Don’t confuse book banning with opposition to woke indoctrination A Tennessee school board’s banning of “Maus” from classrooms made it the target of national scorn. But attempts to link their foolish decision to opposition to critical race theory is misleading. By JONATHAN S. TOBIN (January 31, 2022 / JNS) It hasn’t been a good year for school boards. In the last 12 months, many of the local bodies that govern public schools have been taking a beating over policies dealing with the COVID pandemic that many parents believe are hurting their children. Many boards have also faced furious pushback from the public about their willingness to go along with teachings on critical race theory that seek to divide Americans against each other. In those instances, much of the mainstream media rallied to the defense of the education bureaucrats against grassroots protests that many on the left wrongly labeled as racist or a reflection of a conservative spirit of “insurrection.” But the school board of McMinn County in Tennessee wasn’t so lucky. When its members decided to remove Maus, the Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel about the Holocaust, from classrooms in the Eastern Tennessee district, they became the new face of censorship in America. While they deserve every bit of the scorn they’re currently receiving from a broad cross-section of Americans in the press, popular culture and social media, it would be a mistake, as some are doing, to try to conflate the banning of Maus with other controversies, including the ones concerning efforts to keep woke indoctrination about race out of the schools. Indeed, Art Spiegelman, the artist/author of Maus, is seeking to gin up that argument by speciously claiming that the debate over critical race theory was a “dog whistle” for anti-Semitism, and that Holocaust education or anything about Jews will be the next to be booted out of the schools if right-wing book banners get their way. Spiegelman should be deeply grateful to the idiots on the McMinn County school board. Maus remains a classic of the genre as the first graphic novel to be taken seriously as a work of literature. It’s also a groundbreaking effort that successfully brought the story of the Holocaust to a mass audience, especially among the younger set, who may be resistant or intimidated by conventional books on the topic, but might read a volume presented like a comic book even if at full length. But while Maus remained in print and has been incorporated into many school curricula, it had been a very long time since it or Spiegelman was a topic of popular conversation, let alone a subject that was trending on Twitter. Within days of the news of the school-board’s decision breaking, the book—first published in two volumes more than 30 years ago—jumped to No. 2 (for the complete version) and No. 3 for volume one on the Amazon bestseller list at the time of this writing, a feat that far exceeded its reach when it first hit the bookshelves. It’s an iron rule of history that when you ban a book, you only make it more popular. By doing so on one about the Holocaust—even on the dubious grounds that the presence of some vulgar or profane language or panels involving nudity, and its depiction of violence and suicide—the board made themselves appear as if they were out-of-touch Puritan spoilsports, as well as people who didn’t care about the destruction of European Jewry. Their explanation in which they acknowledged Maus as “a meaningful piece of literature” and “the importance of teaching our children the historical and moral lessons and realities of the Holocaust” fell flat when they also added that it was “too adult-oriented for use in our schools.” The notion that the children of their community needed to be insulated even from a cartoon depiction of the Holocaust is risible. So, too, was their insistence that local educators would be tasked with finding a suitable substitute to teach about an unspeakable atrocity that wouldn’t offend local community values. And it spawned mass giveaways of the books from stores and others who purchased it for potential readers in order to send a statement about how wrong it is to ban books. The story was irresistible for much of the media, if only because it seemed to be a rerun of the 1925 Scopes trial in which a high school science teacher was prosecuted for teaching evolution in nearby Dayton, Tenn. That so-called “monkey trial” in which celebrated defense attorney Clarence Darrow debated former presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan about the relative merits of the Bible and the works of Charles Darwin made the state into an international laughing stock, something that was immortalized in the fictionalized version of the incident in the play and movie “Inherit the Wind.” Now, thanks to this school board, the people of Eastern Tennessee are once again being portrayed as moronic hayseeds whose primitive ideas about education aren’t so much material for satire as they are a reason for the rest of us to feel morally superior to them. Still, once we’re done alternately mocking and denouncing the McMinn County book-banners, we should be wary of embracing the narrative that Spiegelman and other like-minded figures on the left are eager to impose on this controversy. After all, there is a world of difference between book censorship and the nationwide backlash against critical race theory. The leftist talking point that such indoctrination in the schools is non-existent is gaslighting. Elementary-school kids are not being drilled in the higher academic version of this leftist worldview in which race consciousness is regarded as the only relevant way to think about an individual or society. But a watered-down version of it, whereby children are inculcated in ideas about collective identity in which the world is divided between those who are deemed victims solely because of their skin color and others are pronounced guilty of white privilege because of their background, is spreading in the schools. It is being incorporated into lesson plans, activities and books that have become required reading. The fact that critical race theory and its corollary, intersectionality, enable and spread anti-Semitism is alarming even many traditional Jewish liberals who are outraged about what is being taught. Their anger is a function of what is actually happening throughout the country and not because they were misled, as leftist outlets would have us believe, by reports on Fox News. Indeed, it was hardly surprising that the Maus controversy sparked a bizarre and ignorant discussion about the Holocaust on ABC’s “The View” talk show in which Whoopi Goldberg (someone who has claimed that she “identifies” as a Jew even though she is not Jewish and is unsupportive of actual Jewish causes or beliefs) moved from mocking the Tennesseans and implying that they were actual anti-Semites to claiming that the Holocaust was merely “white people doing it to white people.” The discussion, which was supposedly an effort to promote Holocaust education, illustrated the problem with universalizing this unique event into one merely about “man’s inhumanity to man.” The censors we should be most worried about are not isolated rural school boards that make bad decisions about books based on their concerns about the way popular culture is immersing their kids in a deluge of vulgarity and explicit sexual images. Rather, it is the woke commissars infiltrating the education bureaucracy and the arts that are imposing fallacious versions of American history, like The New York Times’ error-ridden “1619 Project,” and other efforts seeking to divide Americans on the basis of race and redefining Jews as beneficiaries of “white privilege.” It is they who are seeking to rid the libraries and the classrooms of content that is seeped in traditional patriotism. They are the ones who want to ban belief in the ideals of a colorblind society based on equal opportunity and to replace it with a racialist catechism rooted in the false god of “equity.” No one should be banning Maus from school, but this kerfuffle should not be used as a false cover behind which the woke purge of American education and culture should be able to hide. And: THE SILENT BRAINWASH  Brainwashing is best accomplished when you have no idea that it is being done but simply occurs as part of the fabric of your life. While you may "feel" that something is wrong, you are being programmed nonetheless. Think about TV Commercials and shows with these facts in mind.  Facts: US population 334 million consisting of 57.8% white, 18.7% Latino, 12.1% Black and 11.4% Asian or other.Then break that down to about 10% of all existing marriages that are interracial including those of all races, and only 5.6% of the population that identifies as LGBT. You would expect the same ratio's in TV commercials if they represented America but here's what you see instead, taken from a log of TV commercials over a 4 month period, which is quite different.  For TV, white men as the majority of Americans have all but disappeared.  When they are in commercials they are either old, ugly and sick or they are the partner of a black woman and have no speaking part.  In 3 of the commercials  the white men are doing laundry and always paired with a little girl to whom they are delivering the clean clothes. In other words, less than 10% of the population is driving 90% of the narrative.  There were zero commercials of White fathers and sons. None! So while 75% of white children live with both their parents, including their fathers, we choose instead not to model that that in favor of the 62% of black children that do not live in a two parent household? This is our new normal in their eyes? As acceptable? Is this the healthy "normal" image we want to model to our population?  Equally disturbing, young white boys and teens have also disappeared, unless they were flagrantly new age gay, as though that represents the "majority" instead of the pitifully small minority. What distorted perception of reality does that serve? The study found a majority of the children were white girls with a black "brother" even though this represents the smallest percentage of any reality discussed thus far!  The MAJORITY of TV commercial couples consist of a white woman with a black man, when in reality these make up about 6% of the 30% of blacks that are married or about 2% of our population. Are you starting to see how ridiculous, yet pervasive this extraordinary brainwashing is? Exactly what are they trying to program into us with this relentless deluge of non-reality?  Surprisingly, in the month of December there was an uptick (but not a majority) in good looking white male models, but research determined that in each and every case it was a cologne commercial and every one of those commercials were made in Europe where they still use white men in their commercials. Here, on the other hand, they prefer to portray young white males as so mind-numbingly stupid as being incapable of delivering their lines and couldn't even say "Liberty Mutual", the insurance company featured in the commercial.  Over a period of 4 months it concluded that while the African American population in America is only 12% they were in 94.3% of the commercials.  Black males are only 5% of our population yet were in 89.7% of the ads. Then you have to ask, where are the Asians and Latino's that make up nearly THREE TIMES the black population? Are they in THREE TIMES the number of ads or is something severely skewed here in the minds of Hollywood and Madison Avenue?  The fact is that while white males make up the largest segment of our population, they were in only in 4% of the TV commercials!  In most of those cases they are in their 60's to 80's and were pushing medication for debilitating diseases, reverse mortgages (Tom Selleck) or Medicare plans. While the study had many, many more alarming facts, one that really stands out is that virtually every ad campaign for new cars featured a woman driver except for Lincoln. In the commercials for automobiles there were more black women drivers than white women. Again, Europe was the exception here where Mercedes and BMW had NO VISIBLE DRIVERS!!  They showed the cars cruising highways but never allowed a view where the driver was visible. I found that very interesting. Are they more interested in selling the product while we appear to be more interested in selling the political/racial message? And it is not just our commercials that offer this skewed media driven unreality. It is also nearly impossible to turn on a show that doesn't have a gay couple or LGBT component, yet in reality only one in eighteen should, if they want to accurately represent the less than 5.6% of the population that fall in this group. The results of this brainwashing are dramatic and very successful. Despite the low percentage in real life, when polled, Americans have been brainwashed to believe that 24% of all Americans are LGBT! Based on commercials, they must also believe that the "average" American family is biracial, that white men barely exist and Latinos/Asians do not exist at all.  That is the magic and the tragedy of the fake, dishonest and unrealistic "woke" TV that we watch and are affected by 24/7, even though it is far afield from our reality. Ditto for the "woke" minority that follow mindlessly in its wake, thinking that this bizarre narrative is in fact real or justified, when it is merely an illusion and fabrication. They truly do control our entire thought process and will distort our perception of reality, if we allow them to.  While it is one thing to erase the stigma of single parenthood, bi-racialism , or unusual sexual preferences, it is another thing completely to portray them as the "Role Model" or "Norm", as representative of our entire society, especially at the expense of true normality or realism. In this case, it looks like White, Latino, Asian and straight lives don’t matter according to them, and Black privilege with a side of LGBT has taken us over!  +++++++++++++++++ Mike Rowe comes to the Middle of Somewhere to interview me for his podcast and its everything you’d imagine it would be  By Salena Zito PITTSBURGH-What do you get when Mike Rowe interviews me for his The Way I Heard It Podcast about my approach to reporting? A lot of things including some shared experiences with people living and working in the middle of somewheres across our country, why rootedness, place and pride in work ethic is not just dismissed as a value by elites but remains a mystery they cannot solve and most importantly a ridiculous amount of hilarity:  Click here to listen to the interview. ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++  What took you so long? https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/02/whoopi_goldberg_reveals_herself_as_an_antisemitic_ignoramus.html ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++  Did anyone ever expect them to be successful? https://www.newsweek.com/iran-nuclear-talks-vienna-wont-result-better-deal-opinion-1673695 ++++++++++++++++++