libertybelle diaries

Well, this is going to be a politics blog post. The Democrats and liberal media are busy at work gaslighting the right again. Back in 2015, Trump received billions of dollar in free media, mostly from liberal (mainstream) media, to become the “GOP Insurgent” and turn the 2016 GOP presidential primary into total chaos. Unfortunately, for Democrats Hillary was such an awful candidate and a lot of the right-wing base was so disgusted with the regular GOP choices, that Trump, with his showbiz pizzazz and rally sideshow, coupled with the media effort to promote Trump, gained more traction than Democrats bargained for. From late 2015 onward, Democrats and the liberal media unleashed a massive smear campaign, dumping every imaginable bit of dirt they could against Trump. Due to the Hillary corruption dramas and Trump’s unorthodox campaign style, Trump pulled out a surprising win.

In 2020 and 2022, Democrats and liberal media ran with this same strategy of trying to hijack GOP primaries again, by pouring money and free media into promoting the most extreme right-wing candidates. That’s how PA ended up with a showbiz doctor, who was part of the Oprah TV crowd, as the GOP senatorial candidate, a kooky lady in AZ (Kari Lake), who became the fire-breathing Trump candidate, despite her having been a John Kerry supporter and an Obama supporter and other oddball candidates that lost. Trump had a knack for promoting almost all of these oddball candidates that Democrats were pouring money into promoting.

Democrats poured money into promoting these extreme candidates in those GOP primaries, because they thought they would be easier to defeat in the general election – and they were.

Well, Democrats are up to the same thing and Trump, ever the opportunist and a liberal at heart, is back to chumming it up with CNN and CNN is happily giving Trump, the man they tried to silence for years and claimed was the biggest threat to democracy, sit-down interviews and working to sell him as the GOP’s best choice.

Hence, we come to the recent ABC poll that shows Trump beating Biden in a 2024 match-up and DeSantis, also beating Biden, but not by as much as Trump’s margin. This seems to me like more Democrat poll spin games. The liberal media is going to give Trump more oxygen and con right-wing Americans into believing that Trump is their best choice, even though all the other polling indicates Trump has lost support among the right and that Trump stands no chance of gaining independent voters, which he needs to win.

While it’s easy to be conned into thinking this ABC poll is about Biden’s unpopularity, it’s really more of the Democrat/liberal media spin games, I believe. Democrats don’t want Biden (or if there ends up being some other Democrat candidate, because after-all Biden is 80 years old) running against a younger GOP candidate, like Ron DeSantis. There’s also likely some Democrat spin game with this polling to try to float the idea to Democrat voters that perhaps Biden isn’t their best choice. Perhaps, within the highest Dem circles, there’s more damaging information on Hunter Biden corruption that involves President Biden and within Democrat power circles, they’re trying to prepare a Plan B option. Getting people to consider an idea gradually rather than cramming it down your own voters’ throats usually works better.

Whenever the liberal media runs something that might appear to reflect negatively on their elite, it’s usually mostly a con game of some sort to manipulate the right. Biden is running as the “MAGA Slayer” and that is the Democrat’s narrative, even if something happens that Biden doesn’t end up the Democrat candidate. Fanning the “MAGA Extremism” media narrative is a top priority in the Democrat’s 2024 playbook, even if Biden ends up being replaced.

Of course, there are plenty of Trump supporters who are probably cheering this ABC poll and citing it as proof that Trump is the GOP’s best choice, but they’re relying on a liberal news organization’s poll and narrative.

Then we come to the horrific shooting at an outlet mall in Allen, TX over the weekend and it felt like it hit closer to home for me, because my daughter shops at that outlet mall sometimes and she took me there last spring when I visited her. The pictures of some of the victims hit the media yesterday and seeing children slain is devastating.

However, here again, I believe powerful Democrats and the liberal media are playing spin games with information about the killer. First there was the hesitating to release the name of the killer, then both sides took their usual 2A positions and ran with their respective narratives – Democrats calling for gun control and Republicans saying there’s a mental health crisis.

So, some of the information on the killer makes no sense to me – first, I read the information that the killer, Mauricio Garcia, held white nationalist/neo-Nazi beliefs based on information from an unnamed government official. On Twitter a spin narrative battle raged with some of the right-wing pundit crowd poking holes in the emerging liberal media white nationalist narrative. Then right-wing Twitter was hyping that the killer was Hispanic and now liberal media has come back with a narrative that bridges his Hispanic ethnicity with white supremacy and even tosses in a Russian angle too. Very bizarre, that’s all I can say. The Pentagon verified the killer had served briefly in the US Army and was discharged for mental health issues. Then a narrative emerged, replete with supposedly social media postings by the killer on a Russian social media site… Interestingly, the liberal news media reporting I’ve seen couches everything is “appears to” and “might,” while the liberal news media punditry asserts these very same things as absolutes. By the way, right-wing media is off on mental health crisis narratives and trying to link this shooting to the illegal immigration crisis, even though numerous news reports state Garcia is American and graduated from high school in North Dallas.:

“So far, the official said, the evidence suggests the shooter subscribed to a “mish-mash” of ideologies that have led investigators to treat this as a case of homegrown violent extremism, that may have been ethnically or racially motivated.

Posts on that Russian social media page viewed by NBC 5 include Nazi propaganda and rants against racial minorities and women posted in recent months.

But, officials have cautioned it may take weeks or months to gather a more complete picture of the suspect’s thinking.”

https://www.nbcdfw.com/news/local/social-media-posts-suggest-gunman-may-have-scouted-allen-outlet-mall-before-attack/3253692/

We are being manipulated here too, I fear. It seems to me that with crime reporting for cases that garner national attention, there’s a great deal of partisan political motivations that often interfere with the facts being accurately reported. Whenever both sides of partisans latch onto news stories, the American people suffer from a deluge of spin that feeds the most extreme views on both sides.

We have some very serious cultural problems and neither political party nor some new legislation can fix that. Unfortunately, it seems to me the 24/7 news media and social media drama only exacerbates these cultural problems. With America entering another presidential election crazy period, I expect more mayhem and divides of all sorts to increase. And the news media will assuredly work hard to keep people foaming and frothing constantly. We’re headed toward more rocky roads ahead.

After my last blog post, I’ve been thinking about how I’ve changed my thinking in the past few years. Changes in mind-set and views can happen at any point in life and mine have shifted a great deal, not just since 2020 with the pandemic craziness, but really since 2016 and watching that entire spin information war effort – both the Clinton campaign and liberal media side, but also Trump and the right-wing media side too. Now, just about everyone who pays attention to political news is aware that we’re constantly manipulated and fed false narratives and that long ago complaint among the right about “liberal media bias” has been exposed, not just as some unintentional bias, but as an orchestrated, deliberate information war being waged by politicians and the media against the American people 24/7. Unfortunately, the right-wing media is fully-invested in the information war effort too, because it’s profitable.

The thing is whether you look at the media hysteria since 2016 or from 2020 and compare it to the level of media-generated hysteria before that, well, we sure seem to be in a different era now. What 2020 taught me was I was too trusting in the government in many ways. What the aftermath has taught me is a whole lot of Americans buy into mob thinking and mob rule and all it takes is some online or social media hype and people are “fighting mad” about one thing or another – without ever calmly doing more research or thinking about situations. I used to have more faith that the American people wouldn’t tolerate corruption and now I think many just make excuses for wrongdoing by their side, while wanting the book thrown at people who are on the other side of the political aisle. Mob rule wasn’t on my radar years ago.

Just because the media decides to drop a narrative, in favor of sensationalizing another hot take topic, well, sometimes those previous narratives don’t really go away, just because the media and political class moved on to ranting about some other topic. For instance, in 2020, federal and state governments pushed to shut down a sizable portion of the US economy, shut down schools, imposed draconian “social mitigation” policies, made monumental changes to health care. Most people prefer to just go about their daily life and forget about all of that, which is understandable. However, is it wise to forget government overreach and massive power grabs, undertaken under the guise of media-generated mass panic and fear? The economic fall-out from those 2020 shutdowns is still hitting us daily.

While I want to remain hopeful and optimistic. When I write about undertakings that I don’t think are practical or within my abilities, like in my last post I mentioned I’m not embarking on trying to replace all my big systems, like power and water, producing all my own food, in my own life, that doesn’t mean I think such undertakings are misguided or crazy. What I think is everyone needs to assess where they’re at in life, their physical ability, their technical and mechanical abilities, their finances and then think about what is doable in their own life to become more self-sufficient and better prepared for both today and the future. I’ll use the example of needlework and what often happens is someone becomes interested in learning, say counted cross-stitch, and that person has never hand-sewn anything. Then the person picks out a big project that they absolutely love. Inevitably, most people who do this quickly realize they’ve bitten off more than they can chew. Then frustrations and disappointments build. Most people don’t continue on if what they imagined would be smooth sailing to creating some lovely finished project hits one iceberg after another.

Other people often start one needlework project after another, because they see so many projects they love and want to jump right in. Both approaches from the starting a big, complicated project or too many projects, without having built any foundation of basic needlework skills leads to failure – and unfinished projects. I see a lot of this behavior online too and while people can stage videos and show what they want people to see, often what I see are people who flit from one thing to the next – whatever is the hot new project on YouTube – I’m skeptical that I’m seeing the real life situation.

The magnitude and multitude of preparedness projects you can encounter online is mind-boggling and for me, I use the same lessons learned from starting needlework projects to other areas of my life – I like to start with learning basic skills first and tackling smaller projects. I also try to prioritize. Then by trying to do an honest “lessons learned” assessment, I look at how successful a project or effort was, how much money, time or resources it required, and how does it fit into my lifestyle and my preparedness goals. With home gardening, there are challenges and this year my seedlings struggled and I debated just buying plants at the store. I got my seeds started though and I’m glad I didn’t give up, but I’m also not adverse to buying plants or even buying fresh produce and canning it, freezing it or dehydrating it. The same goes for buying canned goods or already frozen products. Whatever options matter to you – organic, no-salt or additives, lowest price, etc. – being open to looking at those store-bought options too, instead of trying to produce everything yourself can widen your horizons actually. Sure, it’s important to think about what you’d do if there’s an emergency and the big systems aren’t available, but I want to utilize as many options as I can until then.

Last year I received an Aerogarden for Mother’s Day and if you don’t want to attempt an outside garden, this little indoor hydroponic garden has been pretty nifty. Mine came with herb pods and those did well. After the herbs, I bought cheap replacement pods on amazon and planted leaf lettuce. which produced fresh lettuce throughout the winter. I just replanted new pods with green and red leaf lettuce, so I’ll have leaf lettuce indoors for the next few months. The grow lights are on a timer, so all you have to do is add water to the container and a light comes on to remind you to do that and also when to pour in a small amount of the liquid plant food. That’s all the care that’s required. It’s been effortless really and mine has 6 pods, which produces more than enough lettuce for salads for a few people. There are also all sorts of do-it-yourself hydroponic gardening set-up ideas online, if you want to try something less expensive.

I actually use the cheap, little solar-powered emergency weather radio all the time in my sunroom now and it recharges in the sunshine out there. And that’s where I’m at with emergency preparedness in other areas of my life too – I’m trying to become better at skills in my everyday life that will hopefully help me in emergency situations too.

Everyone has their own take on personal finances, but I am a firm-believer in working to become debt-free and I like living debt-free and having money in savings. It took some time to become debt-free and it takes commitment to continue on this path, but the level of personal freedom and calm it has provided is worth it. It’s not easy making the mind-set shift to living debt-free, when you’ve been immersed in our consumer culture your entire life and most people you know are stuck in the consumer culture belief system. A lot of people I know don’t believe living debt-free is possible and they also don’t believe their mountain of consumer debt is really an avalanche that’s going to bury them when the financial system wobbles. It’s easy to feel like an oddball when most people you know have different priorities, but I feel this is a better path and I think it would be a better path for most people, who are stressing about personal debt constantly. With all the dire financial crisis news that’s even in the mainstream media daily now, building yourself a small financial lifeboat and stocking it with some supplies just seems like common sense. I don’t want to be drowned by the first financial waves, when I could have easily prepared for that. Well, I mixed up my metaphors, from avalanches to crashing waves, but either way, planning to be able to survive tough financial times seems sensible.

During the 2020 craziness I decided to increase my food and basic supplies storage. I’m still doing that on a regular basis. When I started I probably had enough food to last a few months. My goal was a 6 month to one year stockpile. Here again, I incorporated that into my meal-planning and I pay more attention to food rotation and keeping inventory of what I have than I used to. It’s become part of my everyday lifestyle. It feels reassuring that if some emergency happened, I wouldn’t need to rush to the grocery store and deal with a panic-buying crowd. Here again, having multiple ways to heat food and cook has taken time to work out. This summer I’m going to purchase a solar oven – mid price range, to work on learning solar cooking skills. I also want to improve my grilling skills. I just bought two more grilling cookbooks, to add to my pile, at my local Goodwill store a few weeks ago, so I have more recipe ideas. I’ve made numerous changes to what I stock up, how I organize my pantry, and how I utilize the food I store since 2020 and continue working on becoming more flexible. Being willing to honestly assess my food storage efforts took time, as I readjusted my thinking and it will likely change more over time.

A while back, an online prepper mentioned a book, Roughing It Easy: A Unique Ideabook for Camping and Cooking. I bought it on amazon for under $6, in very good condition. Finding books that are in very good condition or like new isn’t hard, if you’re patient and look around. My Goodwill sells hardback books for $1.99 and paperbacks for 99 cents, which although higher than it used to be, is still a bargain.

I guess the question we should ask ourselves is, “Where am I at?” Then honestly assess if you’re more prepared for daily life or some future difficult times than yesterday, last month, last year or are you in worse shape. A whole lot of people, who didn’t make any changes to their financial habits or think about preparedness at all, are probably in worse shape. The thing is it’s still not too late to make some efforts to start building that small financial lifeboat and stocking up on some basics, however, with inflation, it’s going to cost more. It might be prudent to start looking beyond where you usually shop and look at other alternatives. You can find all sorts of used items and things that aren’t from large stores, often at bargain prices. You might even find things you have in your own home that can be repurposed. It’s never too late to make some changes.

I’ve been trying to tune out most of the news and social media drama. One of my adult kids told me about Tucker Carlson and Don Lemon being fired yesterday, because I was working on my little container garden. I don’t really care about either situation – like not at all. I heard the same hoopla when Bill O’Reilly was fired too. Before giving a little bit of an update on my small gardening effort, first I want to recommend this video I saw today that I think is worthwhile:

In the information box below this video, Prepper Potpourri included a video she made 8 years ago, titled, Digitizing Fear, that explained the sensationalism that drives both news media and social media. There really is a lot of fearmongering in the news media and on social media. I realized that I was letting too much of the right-wing online echo-chamber influence me. I avoid the left-wing echo-chamber, because that’s been too crazy for me to deal with for a long, long time. Distancing myself from a lot of that has improved my outlook. Some of the worst fearmongers online insist they are telling the truth, trying to inform people and that they see all these connections between all sorts of happenings – like every news event that gets hyped is part of some grand conspiracy. So far, I’ve been able to manage my daily life without any big drama caused by the economic collapse, the dire climate change, or having to build a bunker in my backyard. Anyway, realistically where I live the water table is high and they don’t even build basements, because they’ll fill up with water, so a bunker is a no-go.

All kidding aside, I see the big crises stuff brewing. I do take it seriously and work on being better prepared, but I’m trying to incorporate my “prepping” efforts into my daily life preparedness. Back in the 1980s there was a TV show, MacGyver, and the main character was the most resourceful person at preventing crises all over the world. He was even more impressive than Superman, because while Superman had special powers, MacGyver had only a vast arsenal of scientific knowledge and could figure out ingenious solutions to save America (and the world) from catastrophe in every episode. I am not very good at mechanical or technical stuff and in fact, my late husband took care of all that sort of stuff. Now I’m in my 60s and trying to learn how to handle some of those things myself. I feel incompetent frequently and I do have to ask my sons for help more often than I care to admit. The chances of me being some great survivalist are slim to non-existent, but I am trying to learn to be more self-reliant, while going about everyday life. We all need to live in the now, not in some imaginary future crises.

Now onto the gardening – I debated even planting a container garden. When I started some seeds indoors, a lot weren’t doing well. Then it was the weird weather – hot to cold, back to hot and cold. It’s been unusual weather here. As my excuses piled up, I finally decided to just get busy and get planting. I bought two bags of onion sets for green onions and two bags of starter potatoes at Walmart, but everything else I planted from seed. I also bought 6 bags of compost and mixed compost with the potting soil from last year. I had spent a lot of money on gardening supplies last spring, to get started, and decided that since I have so much stuff from last year, plus I’ve been buying seeds continually over the past year, that I was going to make an effort to use what I have. We’ll see how things go.

Those 5 pieces of succulent that were given to me last year made it through the winter just fine and it’s growing. I have two planters with green onions – one from a few weeks back and another one I just planted a few days ago. I also have grow bags in the background with some stevia plants I started from seed and two rosemary plants I started from cuttings off my rosemary plant I bought last year. I started some dill from seed too,

Here are 10 containers with better boy tomatoes from seed. I have 10 containers of cherry tomatoes, also started from seed, 10 containers of green bell peppers, 10 containers of Marconi peppers, 10 containers of green beans, 10 containers of fava beans, and 10 containers of cabbage. I have a few containers of squash planted, a planter box of lettuce and one of radishes, some cucumbers, the potatoes, plus I have things still growing from last year. I planted more basil and cilantro, but other herbs grew through the winter, like the two kinds of mint, lemon balm, oregano, rosemary, thyme, parsley and catnip. I planted garlic late in the fall and that’s still doing fine.

Last spring I bought 6 blackberry bushes, a grapevine, an orange tree and a lime tree, plus strawberry plants from Stark Bros. Those are all alive, except some of the strawberry plants didn’t make it, but the ones that did survive are producing strawberries already. I also purchased 4 blueberry bushes at Lowe’s last year and in the fall I planted them in the ground. Those are growing and have some berries on them.

Violas are still blooming and some lettuce seeds from last year sprouted in the container too. I have cosmos and zinnias growing that are from seeds that dropped last year, which feels like a gift.

This is mint I started with a couple cuttings from mint growing in my backyard. That original mint is from over 20 years ago, when I made the mistake of planting some mint cuttings a friend gave me in a flower bed I used to have in the backyard. That mint spread around the backyard and some even migrated into the front yard. I thought it was all dead, but last spring I saw a little bit in my backyard. These grow bags look pretty rough after a year, but they’re still holding up and the mint is thriving in it.

That’s the garden update. I’m glad I didn’t give up on planting a garden this year. Once I got started, it has been fun and it feels good.

I decided to continue on with the William R. Forstchen, One Second After, saga and I’ve now completed, One Year After and The Final Day. This series is also referred to as the John Matherson novels, named after the main character. While this post is another sort of book report, the bigger theme of vast corruption, cultural, political, and even personal, comes across as more important than the actual doomsday scenario, because there’s no glossing over that crises seem to bring forth the best and the worst in human nature.

I then found Forstchen’s novel, 48 Hours, which deals with an even more horrific Doomsday scenario than the Matherson series. Yes, I thought a total grid-down was the worst, but, nope, not even close. This novel is is about a Carrington-type solar (coronal mass ejection or CME) event that could could wipe out, not only the world’s electrical systems, but also an additional solar flare that is dubbed an “ELE,” an extinction level event with high-level radiation that could end most life on earth. The difference between the Matherson series and 48 Hours novel is there’s no human hand in creating the catastrophe (an EMP strike against the US) and a lot less partisan political themes in 48 Hours. The Matherson series includes a lot of partisan political drama, with a federal government still in secure shelters and a female president, a power-hungry Hillary Clinton type villain.

A disturbing takeaway for me is this fictional saga was published in 2017, before the 2020 pandemic power grabs and before the recent Democrat effort to marginalize and target conservative Americans as “MAGA Republicans” and potential “domestic terrorists.” Every time President Biden sneeringly rails against, “those MAGA Republicans,” I cringe. That doesn’t mean I’m a Trump-supporter either. I just don’t support the constant broad-brush demonizing Americans, trying to cast them as a “threat to democracy.”

The other big theme that emerges in Forstchen’s novels is how vast the corruption is in Washington and that part rang true too. In the second novel, One Year Later, as many communities around the country are still struggling to survive, maintain some semblance of civil order and painstakingly rebuild tiny parts of pre-SHTF infrastructure, the federal government begins pushing to employ US military power and order a “by any means necessary” level of force to reunite a country, which the federal government completely failed to protect or aid after the EMP strike took down the US power grid. I don’t want to ruin the story by revealing the level of corruption and betrayal in this series, but it seemed totally believable to me.

In the second Matherson novel, One Year Later, there’s an exchange between John Matherson and his wife, Makala that sums up the big picture with the corruption:

“His gaze returned to Jennifer’s grave. “Damn this world. Damn what we allowed it to become.”

“We had nothing to do with what happened,” Makala began, but he cut her off with a glare.

“We did have a lot to do with it. We had all grown so fat, so complacent, and we always let someone else worry about such things, even though we knew that those we allowed to be in charge were far too often incompetent–or worse, self-serving and blind in their arrogance.”

– One Year Later, page 85

It’s very easy to play these partisan finger-pointing games and to pretend the “other side” is evil and “your side” is noble and good, but the truth is our endless partisan rancor and ruthless scorched earth politics flourish because “we the people” buy into it and allow it to flourish. These novels highlight how it’s not just one side is good and the other is bad; it’s that most people seem morally adrift, especially when faced with an existential crisis and it’s the few who behave nobly, not the majority. The other common area of moral blindness is how easily many people make excuses for bad behavior, corruption, and especially politically-motivated lying coming from their partisan side, while screaming at the top of their lungs about how evil the “other side” is.

I’m done with apocalyptic fiction for a while, because these novels, while providing me with an understanding of threats I knew little to nothing about, they left me feeling a bit drained. Part of that is that we live with non-stop media drama fueling one crisis after another, all blazing across the news media and social media 24/7, and I prefer to try to keep a positive outlook and somehow “apocalyptic” novels aren’t the happy endings I prefer in fiction. There’s also a lot of things I need to work on in my own life besides partisan political drama, celebrity drama or social media drama.

Forstchen takes a less partisan lens in 48 Hours and it becomes more an exploration of how different types of people facing an almost unimaginable existential crisis respond. Many in his novel behave badly, but some look out, not for themselves, but for humanity. In the Afterword, he explains:

“I wrote it in part out of frustration as well. I believe in America, I believe that as Abraham Lincoln once said we are indeed “the last best hope of earth.” But of late how we all seem to have turned on each other is heartbreaking. Being left or right, liberal or conservative, believer in God or not (at least as you believe in God) is tearing us apart as a nation. So thus a question: If 48 Hours ever did become a reality, what would we do; what would you do? Maybe at such a moment we would see that which separates us has become all but meaningless and that all of humanity has far more in common than what divides us.

I wrote 48 Hours with a belief, a hope that this is something “I know,” that at least some of us, would indeed reveal, as Lincoln once said, “the better angels of our nature.”

I’d like to believe that those “better angels of our nature” still flourish in America, but with hearing so many convoluted partisan beliefs disguised as strong moral takes that I’ve heard coming from both the left and even many of those on the right, well, unlike Forstchen, I have serious reservations about that.

I still hope he is right and that I am wrong. A whole lot of “better angels” are desperately needed, if our nation is to have any hope of moving both our culture and our politics to less extreme terrain and build on some common ground.