Category Archives: Uncategorized

Another radical, far-left protest effort kicked into high-gear this past week and it’s spreading (internationally). There’s been news reporting about authorities looking into orchestration and funding in these protests. Let’s hope they look beyond our shores, because there’s international orchestration.

Past is prologue, the saying goes, so looking back, there was an international protest effort following an American presidential election in 2016, with that Women’s March hoopla. Here’s a bit from History.com:

“On the first full day of Donald Trump’s presidency, hundreds of thousands of people crowd into the U.S. capital for the Women’s March on Washington, a massive protest in the nation’s capital aimed largely at the Trump administration and the threat it represented to reproductive, civil and human rights.”

“At the same time, more than 3 million people in cities across the country and around the world held their own simultaneous protests in a global show of support for the resistance movement. It was the largest single-day protest in U.S. history.”

https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/womens-march

COVID, of course, led to global orchestration too, selling us Italy’s lockdown response initially and all the viral videos of Italians singing on their balconies. Here’s a March 14, 2020 CNBC story: Italians are singing songs from their windows to boost morale during coronavirus lockdown. We were being massively manipulated and conditioned to accept government infringements on our personal liberties. Of course, any who dared to protest in public were evil MAGA goons, recklessly jeopardizing public safety… until BLM launched their global protest movement. Then suddenly large protest crowds weren’t dangerous… That’s how it went. Many states still had strict funeral COVID rules, but of course none of those rules applied to the George Floyd memorial services. 2020 was the year of the pandemic and BLM protests/riots… and a US presidential election.

Here we are in another American presidential election year and lo’ and behold another far-left protest effort, the pro-Hamas protests, are igniting across American college campuses and in numerous cities. In 2020 the far-left’s protesting shifted from Covid-related themes to George Floyd/BLM and this pro-Hamas protesting will likely shift to other leftist themes, but I expect the left’s taking to the streets chaos to escalate through the rest of this year. Big money fuels the fire and fans of the flames of progressive taking to the streets political action.

After the Hamas massacre of Israelis on October 7th, very quickly pro-Hamas protests began (internationally again) and although the Biden administration consistently blabs about their ironclad commitment to Israel, they also started hyping Islamophobia, despite escalating threats against Jewish citizens here in America. Very quickly there was a case of a Muslim boy murdered in Illinois that splashed across the media. I wrote a blog post, BLM morphs into “Free Palestine” movement, back in November 2023. News media reported that boy’s family was being represented by Ben Crump (BLM fame) and CAIR was speaking for the family…

There was also more attacking statues back in November 2023, just like during the George Floyd protests/riots. The same playbook is being used now.

It seems that how government officials and law enforcement respond will differ dramatically based on whether it’s a Democrat-run vs. Republican-run state. Some states with Republican governors aren’t buying into any of this far-left/news media spin garbage anymore.

Other chaos this year seems more likely than not in America, but I’m still optimistic for America.   And yes, there are still America’s foreign enemies waiting to strike, but I prefer to be a believer in our American grit, tenacity and spirit to see us through.

The economic woes continue and that’s hitting everyone, no matter whether you live in a red or blue state. There’s plenty of bad news every day.

Everyone sees the world differently. A couple days ago I was chatting with a dear friend and mostly we were talking about gardening and flower stuff. I had dropped off some more plants for her that I started from seed, because I had extras. I’ve enjoyed planting seeds since I was a kid, when my mother taught me how to save flower seeds. I’ll post some pictures soon of my container garden effort and this is working better for me right now than an in-ground garden, due to my knees and back not being up to that.

At some point I’ll likely put in raised beds, but I’m not sure how I want to arrange raised beds in my backyard, so until then, I’m doing a container garden again. This year I ordered a better quality ground cover fabric and put that down. Although I had covered the ground cover fabric with wood chips for a couple years and that looked nice, this year I’m skipping the wood chips, because a lot of weeds grew in the wood chips. I use mostly 5 gallon grow bags and plastic pots, so I can move them around easily and arrange them how I want. A raised bed can’t be moved around easily.

That’s the thing, we all arrive at how we make decisions and commitments differently. I hadn’t had a garden in many years, but after my husband died in 2021, I thought about planting a garden. In 2022, I finally made up my mind to attempt a garden without him. When we used to have a garden, he did the heavy-lifting jobs and was better at planning infrastructure. At first I intended to plant some containers of tomatoes and a few other things on my patio. Then I had too many plants started and my container garden idea took shape. Since 2022, I keep making changes to my garden and this year, I decided that along with vegetables, planting more flowers is a goal. I’ll post some photos soon.

So, with my friend, she’s excited about planting the tomatoes, peppers, squash, herbs and even a couple flower plants I gave her, but along with the gardening effort, since 2020 I changed my preparedness efforts too and have been working to be prepared for longer term emergencies. I had mentioned stocking up extra water and food to my friend several times since 2020. I stopped mentioning it, because I didn’t think she was listening and this has happened with some family members too. Yesterday she brought up stocking up more food and I told her that’s a good idea. She told me her pastor keeps telling them to stock up food and be prepared. She started discussing what she’s doing and I’m very glad she’s making the effort.

If more Americans get on board the offering a helping hand rather than get riled about the 24/7 media outrage theater, we’ll all be better off.

Image from https://thegraphicsfairy.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/Easter-Flowers-Eggs-Picture-GraphicsFairy.jpg

It took only 19 people to kill approximately 3000 Americans on September 11, 2001. Only a question of when, not if, the #BidenBorderCrisis results in even more dead Americans. https://t.co/RdvwSnH9y6

— Senator John Cornyn (@JohnCornyn) October 28, 2023

I don’t know if Senator Cornyn will leave this post on Twitter/X up, but “Over 18,000 ‘gotaways’ slipped into the US in 16 days,” is only part of our border crisis that has concerned me and millions of Americans for a long time. Yet, until the October 7th Hamas attack, penetrating the Israeli border, brutally massacring over 1,400 civilians and taking hundreds hostage, our liberal media and Democrats, paid lip service to the Democrats open borders policies. President Biden named Vice President, Kamala Harris to head up policy efforts to stem migration in March of 2021 and she downplayed the problem.

This post isn’t going to be just bashing the liberal media and Democrats or promoting Trump over Biden, because frankly I wish both of them would retire from politics. Where many people, myself included, are struggling is deciding what media sources are reliable or is blanketly trusting or not trusting everything certain media or journalists report a better approach? Or should we look at a variety of sources from various parts of the political spectrum, since the term “mainstream media” no longer seems to mean moderate or centrist? It’s really hard to decide what media to trust, because even the traditional standards most news media relied on with editing have disappeared in the internet age, where “stealth-editing” happens constantly and brings to mind the oft-repeated Orwell quote:

“Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.”
― George Orwell, 1984

The liberal media played along with the Dem effort to criticize the Trump border policies and efforts to secure our border, but also worked to discredit FOX News reporting on our border crisis. This politicized media reporting actively downplays a real threat to the safety of all of us.

I am certainly not a Trump fan, but for all the liberal media and Dem hysteria about Trump, his foreign policies were better for America and the bigger issue is all of us are at risk of increasing crime from the waves of Mexican drug cartel activities our porous border facilitates and there’s a very real risk of terrorists entering our country unnoticed.

Here’s another example of the liberal media carrying water to prop up a failed Biden administration foreign policy effort – Biden reversing the Trump ban on aid to Gaza, which is controlled by Hamas (a group the US has designated a terrorist group since 1997). Well, that reversal actually helped fund Hamas, who then launched a horrific terrorist attack on Israel on October 7th.

And they ask: Why don't conservatives trust the media? https://t.co/ChSoH4URYM

— Stephen Hayes (@stephenfhayes) October 25, 2023

There’s a lot of face-saving efforts (and revisionist history) going on in America by what I’ll loosely call the liberal elite. This crowd floods liberal media with commentary (and edicts), but most of all labels and disparages people who don’t’ agree or dare question the accepted wisdom that comes from on high from the “expert class” on anything from COVID, to the BLM movement, to the open border, to just about any policy pushed by the political Left in America.

I do believe in listening to subject matter experts, but I also believe in being able to question them. And when some subject matter experts, who challenge the prevailing view, are silenced, like what happened during COVID, where those dissenting experts in the field had their social media accounts removed and any posts online where their views were advanced censored, well, it’s natural to wonder why no one can ask questions.

The above post on Twitter/X a few days ago shows Foreign Affairs magazine doing stealth editing on their online version to allow Jake Sullivan, the National Security Advisor, in the Biden administration, to edit his essay in their November/December issue, which went to print before Oct. 7th. The National Security Advisor is the senior advisor to the President of the United States on national security issues. In his essay, Sullivan was doing victory laps about the Biden administration ditching the Trump policies in the Middle East and bragging about how the Biden approach had deescalated crises in Gaza and restored direct diplomacy. Then Hamas invaded Israel and massacred over 1,400 civilians. The Trump administration had cut off aid, because aid is routinely funneled to supporting terrorism. Biden pledged $290 million in aid to the Palestinians.

That the very programs Sullivan helped craft actually aided Hamas’ Oct. 7th attack is bad enough, but then for Foreign Affairs magazine to stealth edit to allow Sullivan to save face in their online version, after the Biden policy spectacularly failed, speaks not only to how closely the cabal of the liberal elite in media and politics work together to prop each other up, but also speaks to the moral rot.

JK, a frequent commenter on my blog, a few days ago recommended a Foreign Affairs essay, The Dysfunctional Superpower, by Robert Gates, former Secretary of Defense and former CIA director, which is in the current Foreign Affairs magazine too. This Gates article is highlighted in this RealClearPolitics article, Bolstering U.S. Foreign Policy by Repairing U.S. Dysfunction, by Peter Berkowitz.

I didn’t subscribe to Foreign Affairs magazine and I have done away with almost all subscriptions over the years, because I’d rather put more money toward other things, especially working on my emergency preparedness efforts. With everything going on in the world, I debated whether I wanted to subscribe to Foreign Affairs just to read Gates essay and the answer was no, but then as I was looking at the subscription information, it also includes access to Foreign Affairs archives and that made me rethink the issue. I did subscribe and their archives go back to their first volume in September 1922. I’ve done a tiny bit of browsing in their archives and plan to do more. The Gates essay is definitely worth reading too.

We’re all going to be dealing with this how to decide what information to trust issue for a long time due to the corruption of the the vast liberal media and the right-wing media, the corruption within the pundit class and most of all the corruption of our political class . Often I find some worthwhile information in a news article, where most of the rest of the article is useless drivel or information I don’t think is reliable. The truth is we’re going to have to become crows, as JK, explained in a comment years ago:

“There’s a somewhat useful methodology label analysts occasionally admit to using. The Crow Method. Don’t know you ever spent much time in barnyards/feedlots. … Next time you find yourself where bovines and crows are gathered, pick one crow and keep eyes on that one crow. If you’ve chosen a smart crow, the crow’ll be following a big bull and everytime the bull drops a load, the crow’ll swoop down and swirl around the bovine waste looking for the few nuggets of undigested golden corn kernels. The crow will take the corn leaving the remainder of the bullshit for the worms.”

“Better to be a Crow. Dirty work but not so dirty as being a worm. Worms’ll swallow anything.”

There’s a lot of hoopla in the news about Gaza civilians living in an “open-air prison,” with nowhere to flee. So, looking at a map, it’s important to realize that assuredly Israel, who just suffered a murderous attack by Hamas, isn’t going to welcome in Palestinians from along its 36 mile long border with Gaza. Gaza has 24 miles of coastline, which the Israeli navy has blockaded since 2009, due to Palestinian terrorism. Egypt shares an 8 mile long border with Gaza and Egypt maintains a tightly sealed border, due to Hamas, another Muslim Brotherhood off-shoot organization. Egypt isn’t going to allow Gazan refugees in and risk importing more terrorists. Likewise, no other Arab countries want to take in refugees from Gaza, because their countries don’t want to deal with more Muslim Brotherhood terrorism within their own borders. Some will finance terrorism abroad, but they don’t want it at home.

Ed Morrissey at Hot Air, wrote this piece, Egypt: No way we let Gazans into our country, yesterday, which gives a good historical background:

“In fact, it was ridiculous to expect Egypt to open corridors for a Gazan retreat in the first place. Perhaps Western diplomats forget the circumstances in which Egypt’s leader, Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, came to power in 2014. A popular uprising from the Muslim Brotherhood in the so-called Arab spring forced Hosni Mubarak from power and eventually led to the election of Muslim Brotherhood figure Mohammed Morsi as president in 2011. The new Muslim Brotherhood government rapidly began to radicalize Egypt, and the military conducted a coup led in part by al-Sisi in 2013, after which followed a period of violence between the interim regime and forces led by the Muslim Brotherhood attempting to restore Morsi. In 2014, al-Sisi won the elections run by the military government at the time, and he’s been a target of the Muslim Brotherhood ever since.”

“Why does this matter? Hamas is a spin-off and ally of the Muslim Brotherhood. To admit two million Gazan supporters of Hamas into Egypt, even if one could filter out the actual Hamas terrorists, would be a form of suicide for al-Sisi. To even ask for this from al-Sisi is an expression of historical ignorance. Mubarak and al-Sisi both kept the containment policy firmly in place for their own survival, and one of the reasons the Egyptian military took action to depose Morsi was because he was about to lift that strategy:”

https://hotair.com/ed-morrissey/2023/10/12/egypt-no-way-we-let-gazans-into-our-country-n584227

The Biden administration, being Team Obama folks, will likely have a muddled policy in dealing with this latest crisis, because President Obama sucked up to the Muslim Brotherhood and while the Obama administration kept mouthing US support for Israel, in deed Obama backed Morsi (an Islamist with ties to the Muslim Brotherhood) in Egypt. Here’s a 2013 article from The Guardian, US in bind over Egypt after supporting Morsi but encouraging protesters, which delves into the Egyptian military ousting the Muslim Brotherhood-backed, Morsi. Obama’s foreign policy enabled Muslim extremists, both Sunni and Shia types. Obama backed Morsi when he was ousted from power, but his administration hedged on calling it a coup, which would have cut off US aid to Egypt:

“Obama said on Wednesday he was “deeply concerned” by the military’s move to topple Morsi’s government and suspend Egypt’s constitution. He said he was ordering the US government to assess what the military’s actions meant for US foreign aid to Egypt.”

“Under US law, the government must suspend foreign aid to any nation whose elected leader is ousted in a coup d’etat. The US provides $1.5bn a year to Egypt in military and economic assistance.”

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jul/03/egypt-obama-us-mohamed-morsi-crisis

The al-Sisi government set about cleaning house of Muslim Brotherhood and here’s a 2014 BBC article, –Egypt court sentences 528 Morsi supporters to death, which explains, “Authorities have cracked down harshly on Islamists since Mr Morsi was removed by the military in July. Hundreds have been killed and thousands arrested.” There’s no way Egypt is going to let in Gazan refugees.

For the US, unfortunately, it does appear that academia in America is infested with radical leftists, who have indoctrinated American young people to hate America, to hate Israel and embrace Islamist terrorism. Too many of our college and university staffs are a wasteland of aging Marxists and radical extremists. Unfortunately, some of them are also prominent players in the Biden White House foreign policy team and within top Dem. circles.

Today is some Hamas-proclaimed “Global Day of Rage” urging jihad around the world, so we’ll see how many protests occur around the US and world. However, while understanding Jewish leaders and people’s concerns, it’s absolutely appalling if Jewish schools or places of worship cancel events today due to feeling unsafe. Our government should protect Jewish citizens from hate and Jewish citizens should not have to hideaway, because some Jihadist terrorists and radical leftists are threatening them.

That’s totally unacceptable in America.

So, what’s really going on with the “bioengineered” we’re seeing everywhere on food labels these days? The short answer is in 2016 Congress passed a national mandatory standard for disclosing foods that are bioengineered, that went into effect January 1. 2022. Here’s an explanation from the US Department of Agriculture:

U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue announced the National Bioengineered Food Disclosure Standard on December 20, 2018. The National Bioengineered Food Disclosure Law, passed by Congress in July of 2016, directed USDA to establish this national mandatory standard for disclosing foods that are or may be bioengineered.   

The Standard defines bioengineered foods as those that contain detectable genetic material that has been modified through certain lab techniques and cannot be created through conventional breeding or found in nature.

The implementation date of the Standard is January 1, 2020, except for small food manufacturers, whose implementation date is January 1, 2021. The mandatory compliance date is January 1, 2022. Regulated entities may voluntarily comply with the Standard until December 31, 2021.

https://www.ams.usda.gov/rules-regulations/be

It’s understandable that with the radical environmentalist dietary ideas we keep hearing about, like eating bugs and other lab produced meat substitutes, to eliminate meat consumption, that seeing “bioengineered” on labels could be disturbing.

After a bit of googling, apparently America has a long history, going back to the 1860s, with the federal government establishing safe food processing and handling regulations and food labeling. Here’s information from a 2018 University of Texas at Austin article:

For many consumers, food labels are a primary source of information about the foods and products they eat. Because of this, it is important that these labels are trustworthy, and that companies are held accountable for the claims printed onto their products.

First, to understand the importance of food labels, let’s look at why food labels were created. Originally, food labeling emerged as a safety precaution for consumers due to foodborne illness outbreaks in the 1850’s. One of the most notable deaths related to food borne illness at this time was the death of President Zachary Taylor after consuming contaminated fruit and milk at a picnic. After this highly publicized death, the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) was created in 1862 by President Abraham Lincoln which led to the creation of strict guidelines for food handling and processing. However, it would be 128 years before a recognizable nutritional facts panel was mandated on all food products.

Until the 1960’s, most Americans prepared the majority of their meals at home, but with a shift in consumer demand for prepared products came a public demand for detailed production information. By 1966, the USDA mandated that a list of ingredients must be placed on all products participating in interstate commerce due to consumer demand for accurate production information.

https://he.utexas.edu/ntr-news-list/food-labels-history#:~:text=Originally%2C%20food%20labeling%20emerged%20as,and%20milk%20at%20a%20picnic

Dietary and health advice abound, along with people very emotionally invested in their food choices. Many people also have food allergies and medical problems impacting their food choices, so knowing what we’re buying is important.

Reading labels carefully remains a good habit to follow and contacting manufacturers if you have questions or concerns can help alleviate worries. This January 5, 2022 NPR article, GMO is out, ‘bioengineered’ is in, as new U.S. food labeling rules take effect, stated, “Shoppers who suspect an unlabeled item is actually a bioengineered food can file a complaint with the USDA’s Agricultural Marketing Service.”

As far as insects as a food source, there’s some confusion, as insects in foods have generally been looked at from a food contamination perspective, so assuredly new guidelines and regulations will likely emerge if eating insects becomes part of the American diet. Here’s a 2019 CNN story, if you’re up to this: Bugs, rodent hair and poop: How much is legally allowed in the food you eat every day?

And with that, I’m going to end this blog post and go eat lunch.

In my last blog post I shared a Prepper Potpourri YouTube video that had a list of dystopian/prepper novels and I’m on my third Deborah D. Moore novel – The Journal series. I found this series available on Hoopla. I’ve recommended Hoopla, an online service that includes free audiobooks and e-books, available through many public libraries here in the US, in other blog posts. I use my local library card to sign-in to Hoopla and borrow books online. My local library also offers Libby, another digital book service, but I have had some issues using the Libby app and for a lot of books on Libby that I’ve wanted to borrow, there’s a waiting list.

Reading an apocalyptic novel where the main character is a female super-prepper is something new for me. This entire doomsday prepper/dystopian genre seems very much like the male thriller/action novels my late husband often read and occasionally I’d read one that he recommended. It didn’t require any coaxing with the early Tom Clancy novels, because I often claimed first dibs on new Clancy novels. Invariably, the main character in those male action novels was a MacGyver/super warrior all wrapped into one – fighting to save the world from death and destruction. Moore has created a female main character, Allexa Smeth, who is pretty much a female version of that. The first book in the series is called The Journal: Cracked Earth, where the US east coast is hit by some freakish bad hurricane and then other parts of the US & world begin experiencing major earthquakes.

The story is set in some small Michigan town, where besides being a super-prepper, master at gardening/foraging, spectacular cook and baker, and a weapons expert, Smeth is also the local emergency manager. Yet, her training appears to be living off-grid for years, information she’s gathered by reading how-to books, being an OCD prepper and from her online prepper groups, not professional training for being the emergency manager within a government system.

Knowing how to navigate in government systems and leverage bureaucracy to your community’s advantage is something Smeth, as the emergency manager, does not know how to do at all and seems hostile to. This antigovernment sentiment seems very prevalent within American prepper/survivalist communities and frankly knowing what government resources are available and who handles what resources, plus developing some professional relationships within the bureaucracy can often help a community acquire scarce resources (and information, which is a critical need too). Developing working relationships within a big bureaucracy can also help cut through red tape.

First, I’m going to explain the things I didn’t like about this novel. As a first novel, well, there are loads of typos & editing issues and those were distracting, but I’ve read piles of crappy romance novels in my lifetime, so I can overlook a lot of that. Decades ago, there was a romance novel fad for time travel romances and I read more of those than I care to admit and every single one was absurd. I breezed through The Journal: Cracked Earth and flew through the second novel, The Journal: Ash Fall, in this series and am now on the third one, The Journal: Crimson Skies. Hoopla is free and I doubt I would have purchased this series, but I’m curious to see where this story goes.

A lot of romance writers use predictable plot twists and this story feels like a Doomsday romance novel genre, that I didn’t know existed. I’m finding, that as soon as there’s some hopeful events, this author’s going to throw in more mayhem, another natural disaster or deadly disease outbreak wreaking epic destruction… or gunfights and that’s the way it’s gone through the second book and into the third.

Little things often irk me a lot and in this novel one of the main character’s sons has gotten out of the Army, after serving a number of years and he was a Sergeant First Class, but consistently, the author spells Sergeant as Sargent and that common misspelling is just a pet peeve of mine that makes me grit my teeth.

Often Allexa Smeth is presented as a genius at handling emergency management challenges, yet she seems to hold the people she’s supposed to be serving in contempt and she’s constantly complaining about not wanting them to rely on her… but them turning to her as their community emergency manager is part of her job. The whole moral dimension of being a public servant seemed missing in Smeth in the first book, but by the third book, while she’s still a reluctant public servant, she has become much more adept at team work with other community leaders.

There are aspects to this series that raise it above romance-novel-gone-doomsday-prepper. This novel was published in 2014, long before our surreal pandemic information dramas, but Moore includes many situations where Smeth periodically catches some news, when the power is on, which is sporadic, and she can’t make sense of what the news media is reporting. She also can’t make sense of some of the information she receives from her superior in a nearby city. Often the news media gives initial reports of catastrophes and massive causalities, then provides no follow-up coverage. The characters are left not knowing what’s really going on in the world. Lack of reliable information becomes the norm and that seems very realistic. Smeth and her small circle of family and friends are left operating by focusing on their own immediate situation and circumstances, trying to continually think ahead and preparing as best they can with what little information and resources they have.

After just reading, The Journal of David Q. Little, I’m seeing two completely different ways to develop a story told via a diary. Smeth’s story often sounds like she’s regurgitating stuff from a survival blog or a prepper video, while David Q. Little comes across as a weak man, who is alarmed and unsure of what’s happening and he’s not sure how to navigate with the rapidly changing new rules. Smeth seems a bit too confident about being prepared and knowing how to handle every situation. There’s too much modern feminist ideology entwined in the story for my taste – the, “I am Woman Hear Me Roar” mentality. Wonder Woman Survivalist, Allexa Smeth, often overshadows all the male characters, to the point she comes across as very cold and calculating and makes the men, especially her love interests, look weak and impotent.

The author obviously put in a lot of research on a wide variety of topics and has extensive experience with the modern prepper/survivalist ecosystem. Many of Moore’s characters work hard to acquire new skills, share knowledge and know-how and keep working hard to cope with the monumental challenges. The family closeness between Smeth, her adults sons and her grandchildren softened some of her harder edges, as the larger-than-life action heroine. Life continues, even when the world is falling apart with this family – birthdays and holidays are remembered and celebrated with simple family & friends get togethers and that’s something I enjoyed in the plot. The story moves along at a fast pace, so these are quick reads.

These novels include all sorts of situations and events that I’ve never even thought about, so I have no earthly idea how realistic the imagining of these apocalyptic disasters are. Before the pandemic, novels with so much bad human behavior surging would have struck me as absurd, but seeing the fallout from the BLM Defund the Police mindset, with disrespect and disregard for the rule of law spreading across the country, and the Us vs. Them partisan divisiveness spreading in America, a novel where some of the people devolve into gangs of feral animals or bad actors, unfortunately seems plausible.

This series isn’t the worst thing I’ve read and I’d probably give it a 2-3 out of 5 star rating. And, as I’m almost through the third book in this series – the typos and editing problems continue and Sergeant remains… Sargent, but the story doesn’t seem any worse than a lot of doomsday movies, which were very popular and it’s better than a lot of romance novels I’ve read. I’m not sure whether I’ll continue with this series at some point, but after Crimson Skies, I’m moving on to some upbeat books for a bit.

WordPress keeps going to autosaving and I can’t edit my last post right now – each updated effort has created more jumbled paragraphs, even though I didn’t change any settings. This happens frequently when I write politics posts – not to sound paranoid, it just does happen with my politics posts.

I’ll try later to fix my latest blog post.

Sorry.

RIP Jimmy Buffett.

“Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn’t pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same, or one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children what it was once like in the United States where men were free.”

― Ronald Reagan

https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/13915-freedom-is-never-more-than-one-generation-away-from-extinction

I posted a thread on X (formerly Twitter) this morning and I wanted to share it. I’m jumping ahead of my promised sort of book report, here, though. I am not done reading the novel I mentioned in a recent blog post. The dystopian novel that affected American history is, The Journal of David Q. Little, which was President Ronald Reagan’s favorite dystopian novel. Reagan gave Margaret Thatcher a copy of this novel. I read about this in Stella Morabito’s book, The Weaponization of Loneliness: How Tyrants Stoke Our Fear of Isolation to Silence, Divide, and Conquer. Her book is very interesting and has expanded my knowledge on totalitarianism a great deal.

Once I started googling a bit, I found this 2016 article, by Stella Morabito, President Reagan’s Favorite Dystopian Novel Has A Message For Us. Morabito is always ahead of the curve and I have learned so much reading her articles and her book. Her book is filled to the brim with footnotes, which I’m using as a guide for further reading on totalitarianism. During my Cold War era reading days, I read a lot of books on various aspects of the Cold War, but my main interests were military strategy and foreign policy, plus a lot of spy drama stuff. Here’s a bit from her 2016 article:

Here’s my X thread:

"MAGA extremists"

Oddly enough, I came across mention of President Reagan's favorite dystopian novel in a book I was reading. It's from 1967 & titled 'The Journal of David Q. Little.' Reagan gave a copy to Margaret Thatcher to read. I'm reading this novel right now. https://t.co/g6LckFUd8D

— libertybelle (@susan_heward) September 1, 2023

I like timelines, because it helps me to sort out events & try to see the big picture, which can get lost in mountains of details. So, the last democracy in Eastern Europe was taken down in 1948.

NATO was founded April 4, 1949https://t.co/OaLoT9GpV3

— libertybelle (@susan_heward) September 1, 2023

Here's the Wikipedia link to the 1948 Czechoslovak coup d'état: https://t.co/zrmcTvyKdI

— libertybelle (@susan_heward) September 1, 2023

Sorry for the repeated NATO post, but I can’t figure out how to copy the entire thread and post it, so I tried copying the links individually and ended up with this. Anyway, repeating the NATO founding timeline, which followed the Soviet Union takeover of Eastern Europe bears repeating.