June 25, 2023 · 12:04 pm

Blah, blah, blah…

Do you ever hear some political or media person say something relating to history and then wonder if they really have any knowledge about the historical event or person they’re talking about? Well, recently I heard former President Trump make some garbled reference to a communist Chinese leader had to use a lot of force against his own people for the good of his country. He didn’t name the Chinese leader or give specifics though.

While I know any mention of Trump will have his supporters rushing to defend him and his detractors getting on their anti-MAGA soapbox, what I started thinking about was how little I really know about China’s history, especially post-WWII, which was what, I assume, Trump was referring to, based on previous comments Trump has made over the years, even, praising the Tiananmen Square massacre. Here’s a Trump response to a question in a 1990 Playboy interview:

“You mean firm hand as in China?
When the students poured into Tiananmen Square, the Chinese government almost blew it. Then they were vicious, they were horrible, but they put it down with strength. That shows you the power of strength. Our country is right now perceived as weak … as being spit on by the rest of the world—”

Trump has made comments similar to this, praising strongman leaders using excessive force, many times, long before he entered national politics. I mention Trump’s recent comment, because it prodded me to assess what I really know about China’s history.

Over the years I’ve read literally dozens of books on Russian history, Soviet history and Cold War history, but somehow beyond being fascinated by the ancient Chinese military strategy treatise, The Art of War, by Sun Tzu, my knowledge of Chinese history was sadly lacking.

So, I started on a three-book series on China’s post-WWII history by Frank Dikötter. I already had his book, Mao’s Great Famine 1958-1962 (hadn’t read it though), so I purchased, The Tragedy of Liberation (1945-1957), and The Cultural Revolution (1962-1976). I’m only about a third of the way into The Tragedy of Liberation, and I’m very surprised at how many new things I’ve learned. It’s a time investment to actually sit and read books, but rather than rushing to write blog posts or throw my two cents into the instantaneous social media fever swamp of hot takes, I’m slowing down about jumping to conclusions, which seems to be opposite from the way most popular social media influencers operate.

I’d rather offer something that’s accurate, researched and where I put in some time to verify information and think about situations. I did plenty of hot take reactionary blog posts over the years and too often I relied on right-wing media or cherry-picked legacy media articles that bolstered my conclusions. Unfortunately, I think my slowing down on leaping to conclusions doesn’t fit well with the way social media and our political news operate. By the time I’m done researching and thinking about a situation, that situation will be relegated to old news and likely be long forgotten, but at least I will have learned many new things rather than investing emotional energy into social media drama.

And that brings me to the latest hot news, which wasn’t about China, but instead was back to Russia. I was following Twitter with the Wagner Group sort of coup attempt (not sure exactly what happened there) and the first thing was I saw all sorts of people, blue check accounts and anonymous ones, on Twitter posting videos ostensibly from Russia. I had no idea when or where those videos were taken, what I was actually seeing as far as military action and I had no way to verify any of it. This is exactly what happened in the Ukraine War very quickly, where both sides have been engaged in a very aggressive propaganda war.

I don’t know what’s really happening in Ukraine and I stopped reacting to the hot takes war reporting very quickly after Russia launched a full-scale invasion into Ukraine – that full-scale invasion by Russia is a fact, that for some reason a lot of the right-wing media ecosystem and very popular media personalities (like Tucker Carlson) have spent an enormous amount of time and energy obfuscating and muddying with all sorts of misdirection. Russia did launch a full-scale invasion of Ukraine and not losing sight of that fact is important. Putin was not the victim.

With this situation in Russia, numerous media and political people floated epic conspiracy theories linking all sorts of things together – some even asserting this Wagner Group action was a CIA operation. There’s absolutely no proof of that given – just neatly tying together a news story about a Pentagon accounting error from a few days ago with the events happening in Russia in the past couple days and stating the CIA-connection conspiracy theory as fact. Many Americans instantly latch onto these types of anti-American government/Deep State conspiracy theories and while certainly some conspiracies could be true and a few sometimes turn out to be true, without some real evidence I don’t want to race down those wild rabbit holes constantly. You can get lost in them or lose any sense of reality, if you start buying into so much craziness, devoid of solid factual foundation.

Instead of embracing all sorts of dubious conspiratorial links, I’m working on hardening my personal defenses against spin information war, because every time you surrender to emotion-driven spin, you surrender a lot of your mind to buying into other people’s deliberate lies and efforts to manipulate and control you. The people on the right selling these wild conspiracy theories are not operating in good faith any more than left-wing spinmeisters selling conspiracy theories are. That’s the truth. If your only defense is “so and so said this” and you either trust this online personality, without question, or you think because “so and so” is part of “your tribe” that means what he/she said has to be right, well, that’s not thinking – that’s groupthink behavior and I want no parts of it.

With the situation in Russia, I don’t know what exactly just happened, why it happened, or have any insight into what the larger takeaways are. And neither do 99.9% of the people I’ve seen reporting and commenting on it. I certainly have no evidence about big conspiracy theories.

I can say though that I’ve learned a lot about mass indoctrination, reading about Mao’s communist takeover of China and somehow, I think learning more about this topic might be more relevant than leading the pack on social media hot takes about events, which I have no verified information other than these hot takes are trending on Twitter and “everyone is saying,” blah, blah, blah.

There’s more than enough blah, blah, blah on social media.

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Filed under General Interest, Information War, Politics

June 17, 2023 · 12:49 pm

What’s old is new again

My old stand-by Betty Crocker cookbook.

This is just a prepper sort of post – no politics, but assuredly I’ll be writing more about politics soon. I went to Indiana for my second oldest granddaughter’s high school graduation a few weeks ago and ended up catching some bug. After about a week and a half, with no improvement, it was time to see the doctor. With a round of antibiotics, I’m now finally over the coughing fits and sinus infection, but now I’ve got a different infection starting and will likely have to call my doctor next week. This little bout of sickness got me thinking about preparedness in several different directions.

First thing, I realized was while I have a few pets to care for, which isn’t strenuous, keeping up with watering my little container garden was a challenge. I felt weak and exhausted for over two weeks. In a real crisis situation, well, you can’t neglect your garden for a few weeks or you could end up losing most of your plants. If I had other animals to care for, I would not have been able to keep up. So, despite the main theme of buying this and that around the online emergency preparedness community, I believe preparedness has to include some thinking about how to manage when things start going wrong, which will inevitably happen, no matter how prepared you believe you are. An injury or protracted illness could really throw all your preparedness efforts into disarray. Something’s going to happen that you hadn’t considered or prepared for, because that’s just how real life is.

For a lot of people with existing health conditions, having an assortment of over-the-counter medications isn’t really an ideal solution. I did take some over-the-counter cough and cold medicine, but when I finally saw my primary care doctor, he advised me not to take any of the over-the-counter cold medications or decongestants, because of my medical problems. I assume there are a lot of older people, in this same situation where over-the-counter medications aren’t advisable with their medical conditions and/or prescription medications. My high-level of reliance on the medical system was brought home to me again. Many healthier people could also require more advanced medical care, depending on injuries or illness, so trying to stay healthy and working on fitness should be a key preparedness focus too.

Having gone further down the road on emergency preparedness, especially since 2020, being open to making adjustments and changes is part of my journey. I don’t want to pick on an online prepper guy, but as I watched a few of this one guy’s videos, he comes across like he’s got his isolated ranch all set up and is prepared for every contingency. He has all the answers. Name a type of SHTF type event and he’s got the total plan for survival at his fingertips. I watched a few of his videos and then realized I’m probably more like this guy, with my strong opinions, than unlike him sometimes – especially with his political hot takes, even though my views are different than his. I’ve seen several male prepper online experts, who are like that about self-defense too, some with military backgrounds and some with other backgrounds, but they come across to me as overly confident that they’ve got everything handled. I hope they do have all the answers or some other people do have the answers and survive even the most catastrophic crisis, because I truly want human life to continue on earth, regardless whether I survive or not. For me, the more I’ve thought about preparedness and actually worked on projects to become better prepared, well, it’s been humbling in many ways.

I’m one of those people, who doesn’t have all the answers. My preparedness efforts are full of mistakes, setbacks, having to rethink things, trying other ways to do things. Often things that sounded simple, turn out to require a lot more practice and skill than I thought they would. Watching other people do things on videos is no substitute for actually doing them yourself, so I keep working on projects myself and trying to learn more as I go. There are some successes, so that’s encouraging and it reminds me how much worse off I’d be if I hadn’t worked on preparedness at all.

After this latest bout of sickness, I also realized that I want to prepare and have more freezer meals stocked up for when I don’t feel like cooking or if something happens where I’m sick and having some quick meals, beyond soup, would be handy. During the weeks of having that crud, I ended up buying some meals in the frozen food section at the grocery store. Disappointment followed, both with the high cost of frozen meals for what you actually get and they really weren’t very good. Whenever I hear happy economic news, I feel like I’m living in some alternative reality, because I haven’t seen any sort of great drop in prices at the grocery store, beyond a few items, like egg prices have come back down. It’s still sticker shock at the register every time I go to the grocery store. My freezer dinner experience prodded some rethinking a small part of my food storage and pulling out old and not so old cookbooks to read.

As a young wife, back in the 1980s, I began making some freezer meals and referred to the Special Helps section at back of my red Betty Crocker cookbook, pictured at the top, for guidance. I’ve always frozen extra prepared food, but rarely made a concerted effort to cook with that in mind. Now, I’m going to focus on having an assortment of frozen homemade meals on hand and more easy to heat up homemade soups and stews too.

Getting some freezer meals put together is a small project and I’m not doing some massive freezer meal prep days, like I’ve seen some ladies online do, where they put together dozens of freezer meals at one time. Cooking an extra meal here or there when I’m preparing supper and then sticking one in the freezer will work just fine for me.

While it’s a good feeling to build a prepper pantry and have emergency supplies on hand, I keep trying to use my food and supplies to improve my everyday life. After all these years living with access to online recipes galore, I never thought I’d be back to browsing through my old cookbooks, but thinking about freezer meals brought me back to the 1980s when as a young wife, I was first learning how to manage my own kitchen. My mother gave me that Betty Crocker cookbook in 1980 when I got married and it’s still my favorite cookbook. It’s also still a useful reference to have in my home.

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June 5, 2023 · 1:59 am

“She was like,” ha, ha, ha

The above video has been getting spread around on Twitter. Dr. Mandy Cohen, was reported to be President Biden’s likely choice as the new CDC director. Dr. Cohen giggles as she relates how she made COVID lockdown decisions and while critics of the pandemic social mitigation policies asserted there was no science to all the dire warnings and dictates coming from the “Trust the Science” crowd in America, this video is very damning validation. Cohen is an Obama-era health official.

While, I’d like to just move on from the pandemic, all of the drastically bad decisions shouldn’t just be ignored. Many Americans lost their jobs, their businesses and suffered extreme pain and suffering due to unscientific and untested social mitigation policies. Many Americans in hospitals and nursing homes died without their families by their side or were not allowed to have funerals in some cases or had strict restrictions on funeral services. In the end, none of these policies worked.

I don’t believe that trying to criminally prosecute individual people, like there’s a cry on the right about Dr. Fauci, especially from Trump-supporters, will ever happen. The truth is Dr. Fauci was given all that power by President Trump and the buck really does stop there. However, from everything I’ve seen with Trump supporters over the years, they absolve Trump of all blame for anything and make up excuses for his bad decisions. So, if Trump ends up being the 2024 GOP nominee and were to be elected again, I doubt he’d want to be in the position of pushing for accountability for the COVID policies that he authorized during his first term. Just last week Trump was praising Andrew Cuomo for doing a better job on COVID than Ron DeSantis in Florida. Trump later came out with some garbled walk-back that he was only talking about numbers of deaths. This little volley of comments looks to me like a good indicator, Trump would likely try to brush aside any rehashing of pandemic failures. Trump gave Fauci a commendation medal on his last day in office.

Biden ran in 2020 on being the COVID Preacher (Enforcer), so he certainly wouldn’t want to hold anyone accountable or even admit they made mistakes.

DeSantis is promising to stand up against the left’s culture war, but it’s too early to tell if he can defeat Trump in the primary.

What happened during COVID with the Dems “Trust the Science” effort was really the political left working to use the pandemic to gain more control and power over people.

I still get angry when I think about all the unnecessary suffering these “experts” caused during the pandemic and while this Mean Girl doctor, who might be the next CDC director, brought all those feelings to bear, mostly what I think about is how I trusted Dr. Fauci and Dr. Birx and these other “experts” in the very beginning. I quickly began to question things, like many other Americans. Then with the vaccines, I trusted they wouldn’t approve vaccines that weren’t safe, but evidence has been rolling in for the past year of problems with the vaccines, so that will be a whole other chapter in this epic pandemic fail.

Mostly, I think about how stupid I was to ever trust government overreach was for the public good or trust a media effort that tirelessly worked to stoke terror and pressure us to just give up our rights and con us that was required to not kill grandma or care about other people. Just do what we tell you, or you’ll be ostracized and labeled a threat to society (like evildoers, “The Unvaccinated”) I hope I won’t be fooled the next time there’s a massive power grab underway, no matter what the crisis is.

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Filed under COVID-19, General Interest, Politics

June 3, 2023 · 9:31 am

Another link for Matt Walsh’s film

It appears that YouTube has censored Matt Walsh’s film, What is a Woman, so here’s a link for it on Twitter. It’s available free for a limited time.

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June 2, 2023 · 1:04 pm

A point of view that shouldn’t be banned

I’ve generally avoided writing about the trans movement, because it mainstreams an ideology that I believe is counter to basic biology and reality. I don’t prefer to live in a world of pretend. I hoped it was a fad movement that would fade away, but it’s part of a determined leftist agenda and steamrolling anyone who challenges it.

When I was a teenager in the 1970s, the Women’s Rights movement was gaining steam and everything was about “Girl Power” and knocking down barriers to women and being a strong-willed girl, I bought into modern feminism. When I joined the Army, reality clashed with my feelings that women can do anything men can and that men and women are interchangeable. I saw women in jobs, that they could not physically do and they happily worked in the orderly room doing secretarial work or moved to some other less grueling job. On paper they remained filling a slot for the grueling job they weren’t doing. That left a readiness gap, because on paper that unit looked fully-staffed. This type of thing happened years later when my husband deployed to Desert Storm too, with pregnant soldiers, who were non-deployable.

Women can enter many traditional male-dominated fields and succeed, but when the rubber meets the road, if you put even the most fit men against the most fit women – the men have more upper-body strength and muscle mass, more endurance and will outperform the women. That reality changed my perspective on “women’s rights,” especially when it’s given more importance than having the strongest, most well-trained fighting force to defend America. Having the best-trained and performing military outweighs women’s rights or any other leftist political ideology.

Modern feminism is a leftist political ideology, that has been going through “waves” by their own definition. That feminist movement has now been consumed by the trans movement. We’re watching “trans girls”(biological males), who would not be top athletes competing against other biological males, now joining girls sports teams and outperforming top girl athletes. We’re supposed to pretend we see no physical size differences – taller, larger upper bodies, etc.

I do think most military jobs, even most non-traditional ones, should be open to women, but a few of the heavy-lifting, grueling combat jobs, I believe are best left to the strongest, most fit men. Even most fit men don’t make it into those jobs. Around the Army, the reality of what’s really going on, has been covered up for decades, because it’s career-suicide for commanders to speak the truth about the realities and now on top of the smiley face, they’ve had to put on about any problems that center on women in the military, due to political pressure, the US military is now into promoting the trans movement too. A leftist political movement now surmounts warfighting capability as a focus and that bodes poorly for America’s national defense. However, even in American families, the trans movement also has been working to eliminate parents rights to decide on irreversible medical procedures for their children or drugs that are really chemical castration drugs renamed ” harmless puberty blockers.”

I’ve never watched Matt Walsh, so I asked someone I know if he knows who Matt Walsh is and he said, “He’s a douche!” After watching the Walsh movie, What is a Woman, well, I can say the person I asked despises right-wing media and viewpoints. He reacted like most of the activists Walsh interviewed and talked to in this movie. However, he is against the trans movement targeting children, so perhaps there’s a tiny bit of common ground there. There’s been a liberal effort to get this movie banned on social media and that’s why I wanted to watch it and that’s why I’m sharing it.

I highly recommend this movie, because Walsh delves into the history of the gender ideology movement, which no one on the Left wants to talk about. The trans proponents he talked to offered circular definitions about gender and emotionally-charged reactions about feelings – no truth or science. I’ll state this clearly, I believe and have believed that the trans movement is a destructive leftist ideology that’s being mainstreamed, it’s a social contagion, and it’s targeting children. I don’t hate “trans people,” but I do believe Americans have a right to speak out and say they do not agree with this movement. I don’t know if this link to the movie will be censored or this entire blog post blocked, but here goes.

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May 29, 2023 · 8:12 pm

Honoring those who gave all

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Filed under General Interest, Military

May 16, 2023 · 8:35 pm

More spin garbage to wade through

This blog post is politics and jumps around a bit. It’s a little of this and a little of that, but the spin information war ties it all together. Yesterday, John Durham’s final report on his Trump-Russia investigation was finally released. I haven’t even looked at it and I’m not going to waste my time pouring over it, as I used to do with government reports. All of the Clinton and Dem efforts to invent, ignite and then fan the flames of “Trump-Russia Collusion” was to create and operate a years-long mass media spin information war effort to destroy Donald Trump.

Andrew C. McCarthy wrote a book, Ball of Collusion: The Plot to Rig an Election and Destroy a Presidency in 2019, which I listened to the audiobook version on Hoopla a few years ago and that covered much of the corruption I’ve seen reported with the Durham report. And since I’ve yammered on about the Dem’s corrupt spin information war for decades now, there’s really no point in going through the Durham report with a fine-tooth comb and fuming about the mountains of lies and how the Clinton machine, along with the Obama administration spread via their vast army of foot soldiers in news media and on social media platforms. They all worked tirelessly to amplify and keep these Trump-Russia narratives burning.

The Durham report won’t change a thing.

If House Republicans run headlong into ramping up investigations into the Durham report and rehashing 2016 corruption, with the 2024 presidential election right around the corner, they’ll basically be making a contribution in kind to the Biden campaign. The House Republicans can investigate and make criminal referrals to the DOJ, until the cows come home, and there is no way the Biden DOJ is ever going to prosecute top Democrats or former FBI and intelligence officials, who diligently carried water for them, especially not over Trump-Russia Collusion. You also aren’t going to find many Dems or liberal news media folks who will admit they were wrong about Trump-Russia Collusion. As evidence of this Jake Tapper, tried to admit to getting some facts wrong, in light of the Durham report, and he has been lambasted by Dem pundits relentlessly. He’ll likely be back to propping up the Dem spin narratives, even if they relaunch the Trump-Russia Collusion spin effort (which is likely). Add to that as we move toward a presidential election year, what most Americans will care about is more current issues, not rehashing the 2016 election. Many Trump supporters want to see top Democrat villains in this scandal perp walked and in jail, but that’s never going to happen with the Biden DOJ… or even a DOJ in a Republican administration.

The main thing I wish Republicans had learned from this Trump-Russia Collusion political dirty trick is that the Dem’s brand of spin information war is poison to America’s political system and poison to American culture. The entire Trump-Russia spin narrative was intended to be hyped over liberal news media, and other liberal-controlled media, to include social media. Instead of realizing that the spin war is a surefire way to divide and tear America apart, the lesson a lot of Trump-supporters learned was they just wanted a spin-warrior, who could beat the Democrats at their own spin game. They found their spin warrior in Donald Trump, a former Clinton friend, a man who hired a series of grifters and unqualified nincompoops, who invariably quit or were fired and then showed up on liberal news media to trash him 24/7. How Trump managed to pick so many disloyal and duplicitous people still amazes me, but beyond all that Trump entered politics to advance himself and he turned his WH into a daily Trump vs. the liberal media spin show, which his fans loved.

The truth is the spin war, whether it’s the Democrat version or the Trump version is poison and can only deepen divides in America. Here’s the reality check, politics can’t fix what’s broken, because the American people feed on this partisan political spin theater and we pick a dog in these spin battles.

So, with the Durham report being released yesterday, an IRS whistleblower reported to Congress that he and his entire team, who are investigating Hunter Biden corruption, have been removed from the case:

WASHINGTON – A whistleblower at the Internal Revenue Service, which is investigating Hunter Biden for potential tax violations, told lawmakers Monday his entire team was removed from the probe, according to a letter from his lawyers obtained by USA TODAY.

The letter said the IRS criminal supervisory special agent “was informed that he and his entire investigative team are being removed from the ongoing and sensitive investigation of the high-profile, controversial subject about which our client sought to make whistleblower disclosures to Congress.” The Justice Department informed the whistleblower about the change.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2023/05/16/hunter-biden-investigation-irs-team-removed/70222248007/

That’s how concerned Democrats are about the Durham report. Hillary, top FBI officials, top Obama officials, like John Brennan and James Clapper, who became liberal media “Trump-Russia Collusion” experts, to give credence to all of the Steele dossier bs, aren’t ever going to be prosecuted and in fact, the liberal media will still give them airtime to keep propping up the Steele dossier lies and trash Durham’s report.

With another presidential election cycle about to kick into high-gear, it’s sure to become even crazier. I’ve found the Clinton machine corruption appalling since the 90s, but they, along with a lot of powerful political players in Washington, are above the law. That’s just the plain truth. The reality is conspiracies are very hard to prosecute and that’s why so many organized crime syndicates get away with it. The FBI and DOJ were implicated in this Trump-Russia Collusion scandal, so they aren’t going to hold themselves accountable. Andrew McCabe, the #2 FBI official under Comey, was already on CNN today spewing lies dismissing Durham’s report. CNN will continue to give McCabe airtime. A 2017 DOJ IG investigation found McCabe lacked candor (lied) repeatedly to investigators and he was fired. CNN still hired him and present him as a former top FBI official – someone with credibility…

The Durham report reaction reminded me of all the other swirling partisan spin dramas. The Biden/House Republican stand-off over the debt ceiling is more pressing, with the deadline and dire consequences for all of us, if the US government defaults. There’s also the Dem green agenda is still being rammed through – from killing fossil fuel to pushing insects onto American dinner plates. A couple weeks ago, NY state became the first state to ban gas stoves in new homes, beginning in 2026. In just the past few days, I’ve seen a few opinion pieces in liberal mainstream media advocating for eating insects. So, the “Great Reset” agenda is real and despite all the “don’t be ridiculous” or “that’s just a right-wing conspiracy theory,” the Great Reset is an effort to expedite the UN’s 2030 agenda, which was approved in 2015. As the radical changes escalate, don’t be surprised. When some Biden official first mentioned the ban on gas stoves, Sen. Chuck Schumer, from NY, tweeted numerous times that no one is banning gas stoves. Then lo’ and behold, NY became the first state a couple weeks ago to pass a gas stove ban. When the media starts pushing some new idea, like eating bugs to save the planet, it’s part of their spin war operations – mass media psychological operations with the goal of mainstreaming that idea. They want Americans to drop their aversion to eating bugs by wrapping it up in being a virtuous, environmentally-responsible citizen. The bad people will be the dreaded meat-eaters.

I wish there was some easy way to plan for how to weather these radical changes, especially the economic turmoil, but there’s not. I’ve been trying to simplify my lifestyle and learn more basic skills. I am continuing to stock up on food, water and supplies too. Working on personal preparedness has become a key focus for me. It should be a key focus of everyone, but unfortunately, I suspect, the vast majority of Americans will wait until the government tells them it’s time to prepare or that the government’s going to fix the problems, but by then it will be way too late. The government that has created all of these major problems, certainly isn’t who I’m trusting to fix anything. Here’s the truth – with the national debt, both parties spend like drunken sailors and politicians on both sides get rich and gain power by fueling divides.

It felt liberating to feel no reason to waste hours pouring over the Durham report and writing about all the disturbing findings. I decided to focus on things in my own life. A skill I never learned was how to properly sharpen knives. I used to have an electric knife sharpener that worked okay, but sharpening knives is a basic skill I never learned. One of my sons was visiting on Sunday and he was preparing a Mother’s Day lunch for us. He asked me if I have any sharp knives in my kitchen and I don’t. I did some googling about knife sharpening and I went ahead and ordered a whetstone set – so, instead of wasting time on Trump-Russia Collusion, I’m going to be practicing how to sharpen knives and working on other projects.

I keep paying attention to prices at the grocery store and nothing in the economy looks optimistic, I can tell you that working on my own preparedness is way more important than getting worked up about corruption in Washington, which I can’t change.

It’s still important to take note of the political corruption and be aware of some news, but I’ve changed my priorities. Before you know it, people you know might start buying into the eating bugs and embracing that, all due to the mass media psychological conditioning that’s being crammed down our throats. Everyday, I find more things I want to learn how to do to become more self-reliant and that’s a much better use of my time than getting worked up about the level of Dem corruption and media corruption. It still amazes me how dramatically the feminist movement took a turn to gay rights and then that veered into the trans movement. It’s been amazing to see drivers of the trans movement are literally destroying prominent liberal feminists, who dare challenge the trans agenda and that tells you who has the power in the feminist movement – it’s the biological men in the trans movement. Anyway, I refuse to participate in these leftist movements or buy into of any of this stuff, but then again, I have always identified myself as an independent, free-thinking American citizen, not as a feminist.

Oh, and before I end this post, everywhere we turn, I expect to be bombarded with more hysterical news about “white supremacy” and dangerous “MAGA Republicans.” Over the weekend President Biden gave an incendiary speech announcing his war against “white supremacy.” Then some weird group, Patriot Front, that is ostensibly a far-right wing hate group showed up to march on the US Capitol. The timing was perfect for liberal news media to spin up Biden’s war against “white supremacy.” I googled this group and on Wikipedia, it says this group is part of a group that split from another alt-right group after the Charlottesville protests. This Patriot Front group comes wearing “uniforms” of khaki pants and blue jackets, and masks. To me it looks like a Democrat false flag operation and that Charlottesville tie was a red flag to me. There were reports of busloads of paid protestors showing up in Charlottesville. Even back in 2016, all sorts of paid political actors and operators showed up at political events to create drama and wreak havoc. This went from plants in audiences to start a commotion, which happened at numerous Trump events or to ask embarrassing questions at both Dem and Republican events, but then there were the reports of busloads of paid protestors that showed up. And yes, the issue of paid protestors is a thing: https://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-crowds-extortion-20181021-story.html.

For years with all these viral video dramas that fuel a lot of the political spin drama. I’ve told my adult kids that it’s best to ask more questions rather than reacting. I want to know what happened before the events in the video, what happened afterwards, who made the media, where was it shot, when was it shot, and was it edited. We are so used to “reacting” and social media has conditioned us to reacting rather than thinking. They’ve got buttons to click to express your emotions and they encourage controversy.

Think more and react less, is my best advice. Oh, and if you’re smart, you’ll start preparing for hard times, with at least the basics – food, water, supplies. Here again, most people I know rely on the news media and await the government experts to tell them they should be prepared for all sorts of emergencies and hard times. If you’ve been watching the lingering shortage problems, inflation climbing, political instability around the world and all the political and economic turmoil here in America and you haven’t thought, “Geesh, I should probably be prepared, in case things get worse,” then nothing I say can make an impact.

As this push for mainstreaming the idea of eating bugs escalates, pay close attention to people you know – friends, family, acquaintances and see how quickly some people start buying into this. I betcha will be surprised at how quickly this mass media psychological conditioning takes hold – experts galore selling it, celebrities jumping on board selling it and mass media giving it loads of hot air for it to rise. I won’t be surprised if some celebrity food personalities go buggy too.

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Filed under Culture Wars, Emergency Preparedness, General Interest, Information War, Politics

May 9, 2023 · 4:48 pm

Heading toward more rocky roads

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.

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May 3, 2023 · 1:53 pm

It’s not too late to build a small lifeboat

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.

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May 1, 2023 · 11:30 am

Biden’s 2024 sermon sounds just like his 2020 COVID preaching

This post is going to be a bit of politics and a few thoughts about a common idea I’ve seen expressed within the online prepper community. First, let’s hit the politics – President Biden announced his reelection campaign last week and here’s the ad:

Instead of the 2020, Biden the COVID Preacher, we’re now going to have Biden the MAGA Extremist Slayer. Various political punditry on the right describe “Wokeism” (an umbrella term for the far-left culture war agenda) as the secular religion of the political left in America, and the Biden campaign in 2020 positioned Biden as a preacher of COVID, masking alarming power grabs as moral choices to “protect our democracy.” This 2024 Biden messaging campaign is now going to be a massive effort to sell censorship and banishing opposing political viewpoints from the public square, all under the guise of “saving the soul of our democracy” and “protecting freedom.” Whatever, it’s all a bunch of malarkey.

Democrats and the liberal media are desperate to keep former President Trump in the news and do everything possible to assure he is the GOP 2024 candidate. They need Trump as the face of “MAGA extremism.” And assuredly Trump will oblige Democrats and give them plenty of craziness and outrageous antics and statements. Unfortunately, it sure looks to me like both sides in America, despite polls indicating Americans hate the divides, actually feed on the constant political spin theater and buy into it.

The amount of crazy takes I see float by on the news and social media sure look to me like moderates are a very small faction of the American electorate and that zealous liberals and zealous conservatives make up the vast majority of Americans, who pay attention to the news and are most likely to vote in elections. That’s good news for Democrats, who can sensationalize the gun violence news stories, the most extreme anti-abortion positions on the right, and then just highlight the Trump circus clowns acts, like Lauren Boebert and Marjorie Taylor Greene. The GOP is so far from the Ronald Reagan “Morning in America” vision that I no longer recognize this far-right craziness that energizes the Trump faction of the GOP. The mainstream, liberal media has become very adept at squashing news stories that reflect negatively on the liberal culture war agenda and especially on Democrat politicians. If a heinous crime is committed by a liberal wacko, the mainstream media quickly moves past that story and deflects attention to some other right-wing crazy story. This has been going on for years, long before the Trump era or Hunter Biden’s laptop story. It’s pretty common for the liberal media and Democrats to blame Trump for everything bad that happens, even when it’s crimes committed by far-left crazies or problems resulting directly from the BLM “defund the police” efforts they rammed through in 2020.

I’d imagine the Biden team will try to keep him tucked away in Delaware or the WH and away from microphones, as much as possible. The same charade as the 2020 in the basement campaign model. Basically, same old, same old with the spin information war in America still blowing hot.

Now, on to another issue that’s been bugging me and that’s the idea about building all your own systems and getting off of the systems we all rely on, that’s touted by many in the prepper community. This idea is expressed many different ways among the online prepper/homestead community and it takes various forms. Some forms, like growing more of your own food and having alternative basic systems, in case of short-term emergencies, makes sense to me. Who doesn’t appreciate a flashlight when the power goes out? Is it really practical or realistic to build all your own long-term systems for water, power, food production, etc. to survive a catastrophic SHTF event? How many people even have the technical know-how to construct such a system, let alone the means to afford that?

While becoming more sustainable is a laudable goal and I believe growing more of your own food and livestock, if you can, are very worthwhile endeavors. However, trying to build my own long-term power system is beyond my technical know-how and resources.

I’m trying to simplify my life, not embark on more and more complicated projects, based on reacting to online hysteria, that’s reaching new levels of absurdity all the time. It’s more important that we work to become good stewards of the resources we already have, rather than constantly focus on buying more and more and more stuff, in the belief that all that stuff will increase our survivability odds in a major catastrophe. With that in mind, I’m trying to shift focus to using more of the things I already have rather than this constant buy this, buy that mentality that dominates most Americans’ thinking, including the online prepper/homesteading communities.

While I can see the sense in being prepared for short-term emergencies, when it comes to moving completely away from all the systems we rely on in modern life, as a preparedness goal, well, that isn’t in my budget. Even more than that, I do not possess the technical or mechanical skills to even attempt that and I doubt most people do. What I’ve mostly seen online with preppers going this route is piecemeal efforts, that I doubt would work long-term.

When there are so many other practical things that most people can do to be better prepared, considering the vast majority of Americans aren’t prepared for even short-term emergencies, it just seems more sensible, to me, to focus on basics first and work on skill sets that increase self-sufficiency.

Trying to tackle too many large projects to build a “doomsday fortress,” overlooks the reality that in an actual major SHTF, no matter where you are, you might have to relocate. That’s why I’m focusing on increasing my everyday preparedness and trying to be more resilient. I realize that I am set in my ways and often resistant to new ideas. Along with that, as the news becomes more and more negative and over-the-top pessimistic, along with paying less attention to the news, working on remaining hopeful and optimistic is a daily focus. We’re all going to need to look for the good and some hope with the 2024 presidential campaign gearing up now.

Keeping a gratitude journal is part of my daily preparedness focus these days. It’s very easy to let a scarcity mind-set take over when you start on the emergency preparedness path, which can make you see the world in a zero-sum game way, where you believe opportunities no longer exist. Everything becomes us vs. them or I need to buy more and more and more, thinking too much about possible doom and gloom possibilities, while losing sight of all the opportunities that still exist. I don’t have the energy to react to hot take news items all day long, let alone the energy to actually do some research on all these things.

America is still a nation of vast resources. Unfortunately, along with having so much, we are also the most wasteful people on earth. I’ve found that even small changes to be less wasteful in my daily life reaps big benefits over time. Repurposing items is also something I’ve been working on always – I even save twist ties from bread wrappers and the little plastic plastic square bag clips. Yep, I keep a small metal can with those plastic bag clips:

I found this YouTube video with uses for these plastic clips, but there are dozens upon dozens of other uses – including reusing them as bag clips:

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