Samsara and Nirvana

Supreme Court Goes Full Nicaragua in PA Election Case

On February 23, 2021 C. Edmund Wright wrote at American Thinker : 

For a couple of years, my wife and I escaped Obama’s America by owning a Pacific Ocean hotel in San Juan del Sur, Nicaragua. The irony was that in supposedly socialist Nicaragua, Daniel Ortega's government left us alone far more than government did in the supposedly free country of the United States of Obama.

Still, while Ortega 2.0 might have shed most of his socialism, he had not shed his lust for power, and the job of making sure he never lost again was that of the Chief Justice Roberto Rivas Reyes of what is in effect the Nicaraguan Supreme Court. I’m not sure who was actually more powerful or corrupt—President Ortega or Justice Rivas—but Rivas’s was bigger. His motorcade, that is, and he owned the two biggest homes on the two most elevated lots in San Juan del Sur, the nation’s top coastal town, a few hundred yards from our hotel.

Today I’m not sure whose court is more corrupt vis-a-vis election law: Nicaragua’s court or our Supreme Court. It appears that Donald Trump has remade the U.S. Supreme Court—in Mitt Romney’s image! (I am not blaming Trump, just stating the obvious.)

While I think the United States Supreme Court stumbled badly in its 7-2 rejection of the Texas case on standing last year, the refusal to “grant cert” (i.e., to take the case) yesterday in a Pennsylvania case is horrifying beyond words. I could say that our election laws are now full-on banana republic, but I’d hate to insult bananas that badly.

What the Supreme Court codified yesterday, and what it started with the Texas rejection, is that election laws and procedures cannot be challenged beyond a state court, at any time, regardless of how badly those states shred the United States Constitution, and regardless of the major consequences to the other 49 states as a result. They don’t ever say that per se, but the results of what those two rulings have done are just that. Period.

Those trying to challenge Pennsylvania’s obviously corrupt and rigged election system have been told that they cannot challenge the laws ahead of the election, because there is not yet a victim. They’ve been told that fellow Americans impacted by Pennsylvania’s corrupt system cannot challenge, because of standing. Now they’ve been told that they cannot challenge after the election, because it’s after the election — and therefore moot.

Ortega on line one, asking the Democrats just how do they get away with this?

This kind of infantile and absurd logic just defies belief and takes one's breath away. And not just mine. I think it’s clear that Justice Clarence Thomas is even more mystified than am I, and he was livid. He was also, as he always is, right on the money in his analysis.

In other words, we are punting the ball again. But let’s make no mistake -- this is “not doing nothing” with all respect to Justice Thomas. This is proactive, and it absolutely legalizes institutional voter fraud and neuters state legislatures in lieu of state courts. Lawyers gonna lawyer, I reckon.

The only other quibble I have regarding Justice Thomas’s statement is that actually no, we don’t expect more of our courts any more. This is exactly what we have come to expect. We saw Brett Kavanaugh emasculated in his hearing process, and clearly he hasn’t had enough testosterone replacement shots yet, and Amy Coney Barrett, the mom, seems worried about her kiddies at school. Cancel Culture 1, Constitution 0. Voters be damned.

For the record, the broad strokes of the Pennsylvania case revolve around the fact that the Pennsylvania Supreme Court changed election laws at the last minute to expand unchecked mail in voting. The Constitution, that once relevant but now apparently irrelevant document, makes it clear that the state legislatures are in charge of state elections. In Pennsylvania, as in many states, the legislature is controlled by Republicans - while Pennsylvania’s Supreme Court is controlled by radical leftists. One lesson the late, great Rush Limbaugh helped teach us is that the left always uses the courts to get stuff done that they could never accomplish through the ballot box.

Never has that been truer than in the 2020 Election, in Pennsylvania and other places as well. As Thomas adds:

"The Constitution gives to each state legislature authority to determine the 'Manner' of federal elections...Yet both before and after the 2020 election, non-legislative officials in various States took it upon themselves to set the rules instead.... [T]he Pennsylvania Legislature established an unambiguous deadline for receiving mail-in ballots... the Pennsylvania Supreme Court extended that deadline… (and) ordered officials to count ballots received by the new deadline even if there was no evidence—such as a postmark—that the ballots were mailed by election day. … these cases provide us with an ideal opportunity to address (this) before the next election cycle. The refusal to do so is inexplicable.”

Tragically, it’s not inexplicable. It’s very explicable. It’s that the explanations are chilling and uncomfortable. Our Supreme Court is now part of the Washington Swamp, and the Washington Swamp is now totally divorced from any understanding of or caring about the rest of the nation. Roberts surrendered to the Swamp shortly after being seated. Kavanaugh and Coney-Barrett have done so even quicker.

Our Supreme Court is now no more an agent of a free people than similar courts are in places like Venezuela and Nicaragua. Our nation is becoming ungovernable, because there is no reason for a thinking person to have any respect for our institutions like the FBI, The Justice Department, or our courts on any level. We are facing dark days indeed.Continue reading at the source...https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/02/our_supreme_court_goes_full_nicaragua_in_pa_election_case.html

 

from Stilton's Place

To cope with the epidemic of biohazardous needles littering San Francisco's sidewalks, the city has now initiated a program to popularize the practice of "Booty Bumping," in which heroin enters the body by way of the asshole (which doesn't specifically have to be Nancy Pelosi). To facilitate this practice, the city is giving away the necessary equipment (basically a rubber squeeze bulb of the sort used to suction mucus from a baby's nose which, for all we know, is also some kind of perverse turn-on in San Francisco).

 

 

The Government Censors Are Here

Editorial on Issues and Insights
https://issuesinsights.com/2021/02/24/the-government-censors-are-here/

Congressional Democrats are demanding to know what communications giants such as Comcast and AT&T are going to do about “the spread of dangerous misinformation.” How quickly this country is descending into an authoritarian regime where the government controls speech and the flow of information.

Ahead of a House Energy and Commerce Committee hearing Wednesday, California Democratic Reps. Anna G. Eshoo and Jerry McNerney wrote a letter to Comcast, AT&T, Spectrum, Dish, Verizon, Cox, Altice, Roku, Amazon, Apple, Google, and Hulu. According to the New York Times, which says it has reviewed the correspondence, the pair is not pleased that “the cable, satellite and over-the-top companies that disseminate these media outlets” – likely referring to Fox News, One America News Network, and Newsmax — “have done nothing in response to the misinformation aired by these outlets.”

The hearing was called to focus on “disinformation and extremism in the media.” In practice it’s a stage for peacock strutting, spin, and projection (a diversionary tactic Democrats are well-practiced in) with the ultimate goal of gaining full control of the flow of information.

The Democrats telegraphed their intentions when Eshoo and McNerney assumed the role of prosecutors to ask the companies what steps they took “prior to, on and following the Nov. 3, 2020, elections and the Jan. 6, 2021, attacks to monitor, respond to and reduce the spread of disinformation, including encouragement or incitement of violence by channels your company disseminates to millions of Americans?”

Eshoo and McNerney further exposed their repressive intentions when they asked the companies if they are “planning to continue carrying Fox News, OANN and Newsmax” on their platforms “both now and beyond the renewal date?” and “if so, why?”

Is this not chilling? The Democrats care nothing about misinformation and disinformation, nor freedom of speech. Their objective is to use the Jan. 6 Capitol trespass-and-vandalize ruckus, as well as legitimate questions about the 2020 election, to shut down the speech of their political opponents. They lust for raw political and social power, to rule, not govern under constitutional limits, forever. It is that simple.

Before it’s incinerated by the furnaces of the Orwellian memory hole operated by the legacy media, we remind readers here that the press has been involved in its own disinformation campaign regarding the Capitol incident. It has repeatedly lied about the events of that day in an effort to portray Trump supporters, Republicans, conservatives, and small-government advocates as domestic terrorists.

Government censorship must be abhorred in a free society, and the fact we’re watching a political party in power attempt to suppress speech is clear evidence we’ve entered an era in which freedom is only for the card-carrying members of the ruling class. A federal judge shouldn’t have to say, as one did a few years back, that “we do not want the government … deciding what is political truth – for fear that the government might persecute those who criticize it. Instead, in a democracy, the voters should decide.”

But this is where we are in an America no previous generation would recognize. And the downward spiral is accelerating. Unless our decline is turned around hard and soon, it won’t be long before we’re burning books, because we’re already symbolically burning anyone who dares express a view that dissents from the Democrat-media narrative. Continue reading at the source...https://issuesinsights.com/2021/02/24/the-government-censors-are-here/

 

 

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Why Do the Election’s Defenders Require My Agreement?

Tom K say:  "This is a very sharp analysis. I love the acerbic style and hard-hitting tone."

On February 23, 2021 Michael Anton wrote on American Greatness
https://amgreatness.com/2021/02/23/why-do-the-elections-defenders-require-my-agreement/

Recently, I appeared as a guest on Andrew Sullivan’s podcast. Sullivan is vociferously anti-Trump, so I expected us to disagree—which, naturally, we did. But I was surprised by the extent to which he insisted I assent to his assertion that the 2020 election was totally on the level. That is to say, I wasn’t surprised that Sullivan thinks it was; I was surprised by his evident yearning to hear me say so, too. 

Which I could not do. 

Sullivan badgered me on this at length before finally accusing me of being fixated on the topic, to which I responded, truthfully, that I was only talking about it because he asked. As far as I’m concerned, the 2020 election is well and truly over. I have, I said, “moved on.” 

So I thought. Then I received two emails from a friendly acquaintance who is a recognized Republican expert on elections that suggested he, too, is troubled by my lack of belief. Then came two other data points, which I noticed only after the first draft this essay had been completed. Ramesh Ponnuru snarked (snark seems to be the go-to, indeed the only, device in his literary quiver) that one of the anomalies I cited in my most recent article in the Claremont Review of Books had been “debunked” by the partisan left-wing FactCheck.org. While I appreciate the insight into the sources from which National Review editors get their “facts” these days, the quote provided admits that the statistic I cited is, well, accurate. Ponurru naturally ignores all of the other points raised in my earlier article.

Jonathan Chait wrote yet another (his 12th?) article denouncing me, for this same sin of disbelief. Why did he bother? Is there even a remote chance that a single one of his New York magazine readers either read my article or encountered its argument? Or is he worried that the “narrative” of the election is so fragile that it needs to be shored up?

I wanted to move on, I really did. But when Left (Chait), center (Sullivan), faux-right anti-conservative ankle-biter (Ponnuru), and genuine, if establishment, Right (my correspondent) all agree that my lack of belief is a problem, I wondered why this should be so, and the following observations came to mind. 

[...] 

The 2020 election came down to a narrower margin than the 2016 contest: fewer than 43,000 rather than 77,000 votes in just three states. In 2016, nothing fishy in Michigan, Pennsylvania, or Wisconsin—the states on which 2016 turned—was detected. Certainly nothing like:

• Counting shutdowns in five states, in which one candidate was ahead, only to lose after the counting resumed;
  
• “Found” tranches of ballots going overwhelmingly—sometimes exclusively—to one candidate, the eventual “winner”;
  
• Sworn affidavits alleging the backdating of ballots;
  
• Historically low rejection rates—as in, orders of magnitude lower—of mail-in ballots, suggesting that many obviously invalid ballots were accepted as genuine;
  
• Mail-in and absentee ballots appearing without creases, raising the question of how they got into the envelopes required for their being mailed in;
  
• Thousands upon thousands of ballots all marked for one presidential candidate without a single choice marked for any down-ballot candidate.
  
• The absolute refusal to conduct signature audits—indeed, the discarding of many envelopes which alone make such audits possible—i.e., of the kind of recounts which are performed not merely to get the math right but to evaluate the validity of ballots;
  
• Other statistical and historical anomalies too numerous to mention here.

All of which, and much more, did occur in 2020. Any one of these things would have caused Hillary Clinton to march into court in 2016 with an army of lawyers larger than the force Hannibal brought to Cannae. 

Sullivan dismissed all of this because “Trump tried in court and lost.” End of story. He alleged with a straight face that Trump put on a serious effort run by serious election experts. To put it mildly, that’s not the way it looked to me. In any case, quick dismissals by partisan or even impartial courts do not amount to “proof” that nothing was amiss, much less do they constitute a thorough vetting of what really happened. They might be “evidence”—but only of the fact that those particular courts wanted nothing to do with the election. Judges’ dismissals are certainly not dispositive evidence that there was no fraud. 

Yet if, as it seemed to me, it’s so important to Sullivan that I personally believe that everything that happened was on the up-and-up, he might try using his platform to call for, and get, serious local, state, and federal investigations of all of the above anomalies and others not mentioned. Those investigations would then have to be reported fairly and credibly by a media that actually wants to disseminate the truth and not cover for state and local corruption or for the Biden Administration. 

Of course, none of that is going to happen. The present ruling power has no interest in investigating, much less challenging, what they insist must be the only narrative: Biden won, full stop; there were no irregularities and anyone who says otherwise is a threat to Our Democracy™. 

Sullivan’s most risible claim was that, if there is anything to any of this, it will all come out in the pending libel suits filed by that electronic voting company. But these private lawsuits were not filed, nor will they be litigated, to find evidence of electoral fraud. They were filed only to vindicate the public reputations of the plaintiffs and punish the defendants. The way this all will go down is that the plaintiffs will demand irrefutable proof from the defendants. When (inevitably) such is not produced, the plaintiffs will claim total vindication, which will then be trumpeted in the media. 

It doesn’t matter if the plaintiffs lose the suit in the sense of not obtaining a favorable court judgment. All they need to “win” is a failure of the other side to produce proof that the media will accept as such. Since the media is nothing more nor less than the propaganda arm of the present regime, it’s foreordained to reject any such claims of proof and to deny that any and all evidence presented is credible. Hence the plaintiff’s victory in the court of “public opinion,” if not necessarily in an actual court, is guaranteed from the outset. Sullivan either knows this, is being willfully blind, or is a fool. I don’t think he’s a fool. 

And, as I told Sullivan, I found the claims regarding the voting machines to be the least credible. Sullivan seized on that as a “concession” that the entire election was above-board. It is no such thing. None of the above other irregularities have been explained, nor will they ever be. Sullivan, like Ponnuru, refused even to address them. 

November 2020 was not the first time we’ve seen evidence of blatant fraud occur in big city precincts. It happens all the time: bags of ballots just appearing from thin air, tranches of votes that are literally 100 percent for one candidate. Remember when we were told that Al Gore lost Florida only because thousands of elderly Jews mismarked their ballots? Now we’re told to believe that not a single voter in some of America’s poorest precincts cast a single mistaken ballot. To say nothing of the possibility that perhaps 0.1 percent of voters in these precincts might just see things differently than their neighbors do?  This is just an excerpt, read the rest at American Greatness...https://amgreatness.com/2021/02/23/why-do-the-elections-defenders-require-my-agreement/

Genocide

On February 24, 2021 Francis Marion wrote on The Burning Platform
https://www.theburningplatform.com/2021/02/24/genocide/

“This is the post that will probably get me kicked off Fakebook.”

Read the rest at the source...https://www.theburningplatform.com/2021/02/24/genocide/

The Narrative Void

“Humankind cannot bear very much reality” is a line from a T.S. Eliot poem that has always been popular on the Right. While the Left does not have a monopoly on utopian thinking, it has never embraced realism. The Right, on the other hand, has always had an element that accepts the reality of the human condition. Not everyone on the Right or even a majority. One reality of the human condition is that most people, even the sober minded, prefer the escapism of fantasy to reality.

On February 24, 2021 The Z Man wrote on The Z Man dot com,
click here to read at the source :

The fantasy view of politics is most obvious on the Left, of course. Much of what constitutes our current politics would best be described as a paranoid delusion or maybe even a psychotic break. Six weeks on and official Washington is still playing the game of make-believe over the January protests. For five years they were convinced that invisible Russians using mind control rigged the 2016 election. Left-wing politics, which means mainstream politics, is just a long conspiracy theory.

Another thing that is made obvious with left-wing reality avoidance is that it is deliberate, something of a cottage industry. There are people who invest all of their time patching up the fantasies and inventing new ones. Here’s an example from the conspiracy site Vox, about how Progressives are trying to “catch-up” to right-wing media. The absurdity of the post is not rare. These fantasies are churned out like shark’s teeth in order to have a steady supply of new fantasies for the Left.

This is something most on this side of the great divide get about the Left. They need a devil to oppose in order to have a rallying point. The absurdity of claiming Trump was a secret Nazi was never noticed, because they needed him to be their devil. Since their devils are always imaginary to begin with, they need to be churning out new ones, because eventually the imaginary ones are no longer useful. Progressives have been plotting the final showdown with the Devil since the Mayflower.

The American Left is really just escapism. It always has been, but in a post scarcity world where even the poorest people are materially safe, the escapism has had to conjure increasingly bizarre rationales. Whether it is invisible Russians, invisible Nazis, invisible Klansman and now invisible insurrectionists, the fantasy requires a villain, so they will conjure one when one does not exist. The Left is Dungeon’s and Dragons for mentally unstable, upper-middle-class white people.

Escapism is not just the domain of the Left. Libertarianism is the most obvious form of it outside the Left. In fact, the escapism is so strong it is possible to place libertarians on the Left, next to the orcs and wizards of Progressivism. The political spectrum would then be realism at one pole and escapism at the other. The libertarians generally accept the reality of math, so they would be somewhere between the midpoint and the end point where we find the modern American Left.

In case it is not obvious, the escapism of libertarianism lies in the fact that you can never have a libertarian society. Hans-Hermann Hoppe has explained at length how it is impossible to go from a modern society to a libertarian one. Even if you sort that puzzle, there is no way to maintain the libertarian society within libertarian theory. Put another way, the libertarian society is like any other fantasy world. Its appeal is in its impossibility, not in its plausibility. It is escapism.

For at least half a century, the Republican Party has been built on the escapism of what we now call civic nationalism. Evangelicals, for example, unhappy with left-wing social changes, organized to get their people elected. They finally got one of their guys in the White House and he did nothing for them. The reaction to this burst of reality was the Tea Party movement, which was really just a civic nationalist reaction to the failures of the Bush administration. It too crashed on the rocks of reality.

Donald Trump was the ultimate civic nationalist and he got nothing done. Part of the anger at Trump and his voters is that they accidentally proved that civic nationalism was always a big lie. The fake anger of the Left was always about their escapism, not anything Trump actually did in office. The real venom comes from the GOP, who sense he ruined the game for them. The Trump phenomenon ruined the fantasy of civic nationalism, removing that form of escapism from the system.

This is a truth that the core of the dissident right has always grasped, but never found a way to exploit. Most people, especially people in politics or cultural movements, are not interested in reality. They want a story, a narrative, that makes them the good guy fighting the selfless fight against the bad guy. Politics in general is not about reasoning from fact to some new facts or truths. It is not about making broad generalizations based on observable truths. Politics is about storytelling.

This is the great lesson of the interwar years. The people on the winning side knew the war was a horrible blunder committed by their rulers. Because they were on the winning side, they had an easy story to explain it. The bad guys were to blame, even if their own rulers were reckless and stupid. Ultimately, the fault lay with the losers and they would be made to pay for their crimes. The losers, in contrast, had no story to explain why their rulers lied to them and “stabbed them in the back.”

Into the void raced liberalism, communism, and fascism. Liberalism could blame the old rulers, but it suffered from being a story told by the winners. Communism told a story that failed to include the facts of the war. Communism was always a story about the future, not the past. Fascism, in contrast, offered a story that included the past, the present and a future. To the modern ear, Hitler sounds like a raving lunatic, but in his time, he was a master storyteller. He made fascism a pleasant fantasy.

This is why our present is full of bizarre conspiracies and fantasies. The Left has total control of the institutions, but they keep churning out new fantasies, because they cannot square the circle of who they are. How can the underdog also possess the high ground of society? How can they have control of the institutions, yet the system still suffers from institutional unfairness? The Left is spiraling into madness because its plot has an unreconcilable contradiction at the heart of it.

We are living in an interregnum of narrative collapse. The various right-wing fantasies, like libertarianism, conservatism and civic nationalism have collapsed. Those stories no longer make any sense. Only old people cling to them. The Progressive story is in the process of narrative collapse. The explosion of conspiracy theories and subcultures is due to the hole at the middle of a politics. The future will belong to those who create a new story that adequately explains the past, present and the future.

. . .

Here is another recent and excellent piece from the same website which you should read entitled Why Can’t The Sheep See? @ https://www.theburningplatform.com/2021/02/24/why-cant-the-sheep-see/

Reported by The Federalist:

This past weekend, something ominous and cruel happened on Amazon.com—although it could have been foreseen given the recent ramped-up levels of censorship. With the removal of Ryan T. Anderson’s 2018 book When Harry Became Sally: Responding to the Transgender Moment,” Amazon openly signaled something to the American public and world.

The digital book-burning has begun; take cover if you’re not a raging leftist.

But the book didn’t pass muster with all the thousand-sexual-partner Grindr app users who make up the Big Tech elite. They decided it was bad. It doesn’t fit with San Francisco values, even if it was tightly argued and brimming with irrefutable evidence.

So, Amazon has been getting increasingly woke lately. Apple was always woke. They conspired, along with Google, to take down Parler. Was it because Parler doesn’t support the Democrat party platform? That was my impression. So I decided to curtail all my Amazon spending and found alternatives instead. I suggest that you do the same, as much as you’re able to. Even buying from left-wing small companies is safer than buying from Amazon. The small companies can’t hurt you.

By the way, if you want to buy Anderson’s book, you can get it on sale from Christian Book.

This was an excerpt, read the full article at Wintery Knight dot com…

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