Category Archives: General Interest

“Well,” said Maude, “there is nothing anyone can do to change human nature.  That is the one immutable, in spite of the idealists, and Rousseau.  For better or for worse, we are what we are.”

Charles thought for a while and when he spoke Maude did not consider his remark to be irrelevant: “In the old Roman religion — or was it Greek?–Justice was the last goddess to leave the world and left it to its own destruction.  She never returned.”

– Ceremony of the Innocent, written by Taylor Caldwell (p. 346)

Words matter.

A few posts back I wrote Part I of the “War about Words”, which those aligned with the political left will dismiss without any consideration, because it’s critical of President Obama and Hillary Clinton.  The same instant dismissal or obfuscations occur among the political right too, when the left attacks one of their political figures and then we have the Trump contingent too, who reject all criticisms of Trump, out of a belief that he is the last best hope for America.

Often my views draw fire from all sides, because I’m one of those annoying people who says what I think, regardless whether it agrees with a particular partisan or political agenda or whether it goes against all the “expert” opinion.  I prefer to think not only for myself, but of myself as an American, first, last, always.  I am free to think whatever the heck I want.  That’s the wonder of America!

As a child, my mother sent us off to vacation Bible school at our village church (yes, PA still has villages) and in fact, one of my direct ancestors donated the land for that church during the early settlement of that area of northeast PA in the late 1700s.  That church was a Lutheran church, but a Calvary Baptist church from another town ran a vacation Bible school in the summer too and they had a bus that picked up kids.  My mother let us go to that church’s vacation Bible school several summers.   They had all sorts of really interesting crafts and activities, but one summer, two women from that church took me aside and told me that girls are supposed to wear dresses and not cut their hair, which made me feel a deep sense of rebellion, as I sat there in shorts and with short hair.  These ladies also told me that I needed to say I wanted “to be saved” or I was going to hell.

Ordinarily, I am a crybaby, coward, but the more these two women lectured me, the more resentful and rebellious I became, because quite frankly, my church never used the words “being saved”, so I did not even understand the phrase.  I politely told these two ladies that I didn’t want “to be saved” .  They kept pushing and finally I rebelled and told them that no matter what they said, I wasn’t going to say that.  They told me I was going to hell.  When I got home, I sat at the kitchen table and bawled, because confrontations always upset me.  When I poured out my story, my mother told me I wasn’t going back there.

From where I stand, it sure looks like the partisan political factions’ endless fighting has America on the precipice that President George Washington warned about in his Farewell Address.  Yesterday, FBI Director, James Comey, laid out the entire list of crimes Hillary Clinton committed by grossly negligent handling of classified information, through the setting up of a home-brew email server in her home.  Director Comey decided not to recommend an indictment, citing that a “reasonable” prosecutor would not bring charges in this case.  Of course, once again this announcement threw the pundits into an exploding heads frenzy, because Director Comey  said Hillary Clinton’s actions were “extremely careless” rather than “grossly negligent”, but is there really a difference between the two?

Then Director Comey  added the excuse that he found no malicious intent or intent to harm America in her actions.  Of course, proving intent isn’t even required to indict under the statute, but here again, the words he carefully chose were meant to bury the email server scandal and smacked of being obviously for partisan political purposes.  Those church women meant well, but the words they wanted me to say, were words I didn’t understand or believe.  I believe Director James Comey decided to use words he fully understands, but didn’t really believe – I believe he caved to partisan political pressure from the White House.  I believe he wanted to avoid a “constitutional crisis”, because the corruption goes all the way to the White House.

Today, many liberal news outlets were already burying Hillary’s email server scandal and focusing on Trump’s antics.  To be fair, Trump hands them endless fodder with his imprudent, bizarre comments, like his latest praise of the late, brutal dictator, Saddam Hussein’s “no questions asked” internal policing policies against terrorists.   Saddam killed a lot of terrorists inside Iraq, heck, he murdered ethnic minorities too.  Trump likes strong-man leadership, but Saddam also gave safe haven to many terrorists leaders and funded terrorism abroad.

As, I’ve repeated, ad nauseum, since last Fall, Trump’s “GOP Insurgency”, waged with BILLIONS of dollars of free media, is a gift that continues giving to the Democrats, leaving the GOP in shambles, heading into a presidential election in November.  The Democrats though are uniting around Hillary, despite the Bernie Sanders insurgency campaign, paid for by private campaign donations and with far-less media attention.  The obvious, unfair and overt, media collusion by big media elites to facilitate the “GOP Insurgency”, found the media on the defensive with excuses for the obvious disparate media coverage… phrases like “earned media”, other candidates turn down interviews, etc., but make no mistake about the SPIN cycle form of INFORMATION WARFARE being waged by the political Left in America.

This SPIN is a totalitarian effort to control the ostensibly free mass media, through an orchestrated mass media saturation strategy,  using relentless repetition of messages (the mindless talking points messaging), media collusion to disseminate those messages and a constant reinforcement of the “will of people” expressed through manufactured opinion cascades, that keep stating what the majority of Americans believe…….based on a relentless repetition of polling data (an unscientific sampling of a few  people’s opinions extrapolated as reflecting the opinions of all Americans).  The combination of messaging control and manufactured opinion cascades speaks to overt mass brainwashing by political and mass media elites and an overt long-term effort to quell free speech, but this form of INFORMATION WARFARE also grossly tips the balance to one political party’s agenda.  This INFORMATION WARFARE strategy assures the Left’s political agenda dominates and becomes the “mainstream opinion”.  Just watch how the relentless repetition turned a terrorist attack into an attack on Christians who oppose gay marriage and more gun control.  The Left also mobilizes celebrity and big name “experts” to aid  their SPIN operations.

Oh, but look how they covered Trump?  Doesn’t that prove the media does give Republicans” ample coverage, well, that depends on how you define “Republican”…..  and the media told us Trump is the “GOP Insurgent intent on burning down the GOP establishment”.  Alas, here again, we come up against definitions.  What is the GOP establishment, if not the GOP?

With Hillary Clinton’s email server scandal, the liberal media will do damage control for Hillary, just like they aided leftist partisans to rewrite that Orlando “narrative” within two weeks.   In that Orlando case, a short-lived brouhaha ensued when the Justice Department tried to censor  the shooter’s 911 call and remove the shooter’s references to Islamic terrorism (the shooter pledged allegiance to ISIS and declared he was committing jihad).   Under a public backlash, Lynch released the 911 tape, but the shooter’s words even then were altered.

Words matter a great deal to those who use them to control public perception and manipulate the truth.  The Orlando shooting was usurped and turned into blaming Christian anti-gay people for the hate and promoting more gun control legislation.  Attorney General, Loretta Lynch, came out and declared we need more “love” to combat “hate”, thus advancing the left’s narrative to make it about right-wing haters and gun control rather than about radical Islamic terrorism.

In this email server scandal there’s a discernible series of actions by key players in the past week, that made it obvious that the Obama administration wanted this scandal to go away very quickly.

President Obama arranged last week to hit the campaign trail with Hillary Clinton yesterday.  Loretta Lynch had a clandestine 3o minute meeting with former president, Bill Clinton, at the airport in Phoenix last week.  Lynch described that meeting as just a chat about grandchildren, golf and BREXIT.  She played that meeting off with a news conference, proclaiming she would accept the recommendation of the FBI on the email server case.  Just like that the news broke that the FBI would interview Hillary Clinton on Saturday (a holiday weekend no less).  And on Tuesday, July 5, 2016 Director Comey came out and announced no reasonable prosecutor would indict.  Today, Loretta Lynch came out and said she accepted Director Comey’s recommendation.  Case closed.  Hillary Clinton’s minions are out in full force, saying  “it’s time to move on”.

Like rats stuck on a wheel, the Republicans in Congress, came out and announced they are going to have Director Comey testify before Congress tomorrow, to answer their questions about his decision not to recommend an indictment of Hillary Clinton.  The hearings that go nowhere again……. it’s like being trapped in a strategy that is doomed to fail and you’d think the Republicans would learn that they never win.  The Dems, with their liberal friends, control almost all the big media in America and their talking points messaging always controls who wins.

This is like constantly repeating a script that always ends the same way or that Einstein quote about people who do the same thing over and over and expect a different outcome.  The media and the Clinton team will opine, using their perennially tired, but always successful talking point….  “this is another right-wing witch hunt”.  The Republicans will pontificate, the media will declare Hillary won, and she will continue her march to the White House, because here’s the truth – she really is ABOVE THE LAW.

Today, I clicked on some news sites that are liberal-leaning and Hillary’s email server wasn’t a top news story, but Donald Trump’s Saddam Hussein comment was.  The liberal media was “moving on”.  Within a few more days, the email server scandal will be old news and besides FOX News talking to Trump supporters and right-wing online sites, the Clinton propaganda squad can add another media messaging coup feather to their cap.

Having personally experienced what happens if you get in the way of the Clinton propaganda efforts, during the impeachment scandal, I feel compelled to keep speaking out and to keep trying to find a way to expose their criminal abuse of power.  The details of my experience are under the Messages of mhere tab on my home page, but what I want to talk about here is what made me so determined to fight them then and what makes me determined to fight to expose their corruption now.  America can’t survive if political machines can control the media and blatantly subvert the law.  A common thread, that the pollsters and pundits keep telling us drove the Trump and Sanders “insurgent” campaigns, is American discontent with powerful elites playing by a different set of rules and that the system is rigged.

America is a unique experiment in the history of world government.  Americans believe in individual liberty:

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, –That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.”

http://www.archives.gov/exhibits/charters/declaration_transcript.html

In the post right before this one, I linked to a piece at the Legal Insurrection blog, where  William A Jacobson relates a Twitter exchange with Karol Marcowicz that precisely captures the perilous point America is at.  Jacobson writes:

The best truly big picture view I saw was from Karol Markowicz, a columnist for the NY Post and an ex-Soviet who moved the the United States as a child.

In response to the Comey verdict, Markowicz tweeted out a statement as to how others who came from the USSR expected no other result:

.“Guys, the ex-president’s wife was never going to get indicted.”-all my USSR-born friends”

Jacobson goes on to say:

“She linked in the tweet to a post of hers on her personal website from 2013, which has this sentence in it referring to Americans who complained about their government:

“They weren’t born in a country where hundreds of years of backward government had led to this kind of cynicism that gets passed on from parents to children.”

I understood what she meant. While I wasn’t born in and didn’t grow up in the USSR, I studied there and vicariously came to know the cynicism of the system, particularly through refusenikfriends.

It wasn’t just that the powerful were above the law or there was no rule of law. It was in another dimension.

I tweeted back:

“Those who lived under communism understand exactly what just happened.”

http://legalinsurrection.com/2016/07/those-who-lived-under-communism-understand-exactly-what-just-happened/

I have been thinking a great deal about what I consider cultural DNA, with how peoples the world over develop patterns of behavior ( culture) that endure, despite the changes in government.  In fact, the people’s behavior determines how long and how much control they will tolerate from their government, to maintain the status quo and social order.

Above: My copy of “Letters from Russia.  To the right is a folk-art wooden container my son brought back from Russia, painted in a Russian folk art style called Khohkloma.

Thinking about what to write in this Part 2 post, I ordered a book, which I had read about a long while back, that explains the Russian cultural DNA, a few years after Alexis de Tocqueville traveled to America.  That cultural DNA still persists in Russia today.  The book is “Letters from Russia” and like de Tocqueville’s, “Democracy in America”, the book on Russia was written by another French nobleman, Astolphe de Custine.  Although his trip to Russia in 1839 was only three months long,  he captured life in Russia under the despot, Czar Nicholas I, in such prescient, stark detail, that historians still study his letters.  His book was banned by both, Czar Nicholas I and the Bolsheviks, who didn’t much like Custine’s letters.  I can relate, heck, my posts on the Excite message boards in 1998 evoked quite a response too and there I was fighting hordes of new posters who showed up to take over the boards with the Clinton talking points……… hummm, I likened them to being like Genghis Khan.

In their own words these two French noblemen present their opinions on the cultural DNA differences between a people who accept rulers and a people who don’t.  In 1996, renowned journalist, Steven Erlanger, wrote a NY Times piece on Custine’s book, that gives you Custine in his own words.  Here’s a short excerpt:

“In Russia, everything you notice, and everything that happens around you, has a terrifying uniformity; and the first thought that comes into the traveler’s mind, as he contemplates this symmetry, is that such entire consistency and regularity, so contrary to the natural inclination of mankind, cannot have been achieved and could not survive without violence. . . . Officially, such brutal tyranny is called respect for unity and love of order; and this bitter fruit of despotism appears so precious to the methodical mind that you are told it cannot be purchased at too high a price.

Faced with the pervasiveness of the secret police and the immensity of the bureaucracy, Custine at first is shocked. He sees the dead weight that these hordes of state employees place on Russia, and their own dehumanization.

Among Russian officials, attention to detail is quite compatible with disorganization. They go to a great deal of trouble to achieve some petty end, never satisfed that they have done enough to demonstrate their zeal. Consequently, in this rivalry between employees, one formality does not guarantee the foreigner against another. It is like a pillaging army: because the traveler has passed through the hands of one regiment, this does not prevent him from meeting another, or a third, and each of these bands spaced out along his route vies with the last in harassing him.”

http://www.nytimes.com/1996/06/16/weekinreview/word-for-word-marquis-de-custine-long-ago-look-russia-so-what-else-new.html?pagewanted=all

Interestingly, in the introduction to “Letters from Russia”, editor, Anka Muhlstein,  presents the bulls-eye de Tocqueville quote on the difference between America and Russia:

“There are on earth today two great peoples who, having started from different points, seem to be advancing towards the same end: they are the Russians and the Anglo-Americans.  They both grew up in darkness and whilst Europeans were busy elsewhere, they suddenly placed themselves in the forefront of nations, and the world learned at almost the same time of their births and their greatness

All other nations seem, more or less, to have reached the limits nature has assigned to them and within which they now need only to remain, but those two are still growing…. America is struggling against obstacles of nature,; Russia against men…. The principal means of action for the one is liberty, for the other servitude.”

Letters from Russia, by Astolphe de Custine, edited and with an introduction by Anka Muhlstein, page ix of the introduction.

America is the only place on earth that broke that mold completely and set up a government meant for the people to have control over the government and for the individual’s rights to be paramount.

We are a nation built by free-thinking and free-acting citizens.

Central to our culture is the belief that all men are equal before the law and that the rule of law applies to EVERYONE.  This week’s disgraceful display of open corruption and obvious undue political influence from the White House, all for partisan purposes, made me wonder if we are now a banana republic.

For a long while, years in fact, I have been studying the Clinton SPIN and then the Obama NARRATIVE and now we have Trump borrowing the Clinton SPIN too and here’s truth – SPIN is the American people allowing their elected leaders to bold-faced LIE to them.

Every politician who engages in the talking points messaging is using a totalitarian messaging tactic to CONTROL the NEWS the American people receive. That relentless repetition is a form of mass media brainwashing of the people.

Allowing this attack on American FREE speech principles to advance without even a recognition of how pernicious and corrupting it is, will lead to not only a surrender of our free speech, but will allow those with power to dictate the “facts” and which words we MUST use.  They will have the power to impose what “truths” we must believe and which “truths” we can speak.

I refuse to ever submit to tyranny and instead of accepting that it’s the “old news, let’s move on”, Americans need to think long and hard if they want to be passive sheep fed what to believe or if they want to be FREE.  Being FREE isn’t just about “rights”, it requires people willing to do their duty as good citizens too.

Despite Director Comey’s attempt to kick the can down the road, a constitutional crisis is already upon us, because it’s now out in the open that Hillary Clinton did egregiously and knowingly break the law. Both the Director of the FBI and the Attorney General of the United States did nothing to hold her accountable.  This isn’t just about Hillary’s corruption though, it’s the Clinton political machine, a vast, network at work.  I  got burned by that machine during impeachment, where a retired general was fed false information about me and sent to silence me.  That general became a FOB and continues to be a hack to sell the Clinton and Democrat agenda.  Lacking any way to prove  what happened to me has kept me from naming names.  I already tried contacting several journalists a long time ago and offered them the real names of everyone in my Messages of mhere story.  None of them even responded and despite the escalating exposure of the Clinton corruption, her own private email server to conduct all of her official State Department business, her off-the-books private team of intelligence operatives, Sidney Blumenthal and Tyler Drumheller, does it sound so far-fetched that she would hunt down an annoying poster on a popular message boards, whose comments were being borrowed and used by GOP pundits to break through their SPIN?  I believe in their investigation into who I am, they came across this retired general who hates my guts and who jumped at the chance to get even with me.   I believe the Clinton machine set the attack on me in motion as a part of their vast network of operations,  to make sure Bill Clinton survived impeachment.  I believe they sank to corrupting the military chain of command in the attack on me.  Would anyone even care, even if I could prove it?

Do Americans still have the true grit necessary to save our republic?  I have my doubts.   Everyone is looking for either corrupt Hillary and con man Trump to save our republic, but really this is going to take all of us to put in our oars and help row.