Breakfast For The Brain Weekend Edition

Have a great weekend Deplorables!

Impeachment Theater Offers Americans Glimpse Of The Unseen-Unelected Who Actually Rule Over Us

Via Zero Hedge

American voters have been introduced to the idea that the elected President of the United States can be accused of “undermining” foreign policy determined by the permanent bureaucracy, which spends billions of our tax dollars but is not even slightly interested in our input.

We’ve been told top bureaucrats who supposedly serve at the pleasure of the president are actually entitled to their jobs and firing them is a crime, with the president presumed guilty unless he can prove he had an acceptable reason for terminating or reassigning them.

We’ve learned that Made Men of the bureaucratic empire and its political wing, the Democrat Party, cannot be investigated for corruption unless the most exquisite preliminary rituals are followed and the investigators can demonstrate the absolute purity of their intentions.

Outside of Impeachment Theater, we’ve been told it’s heroic for the bureaucracy to organize “resistance” against the elected president and congressional representatives, if the Washington empire disapproves of the voters’ choices.

We’ve discovered obscure lower-court judges can hijack entire segments of national policy on a whim. Some of these imperial proclamations have been expressly premised on the notion that American citizens have less to say about their own government than foreign nationals do.

We’ve learned a president the imperial bureaucracy likes can issue executive orders that cannot be reversed by presidents it disapproves of. The people are belatedly informed that some matters are settled forever on the “one man, one vote, one time” principle. The essence of self-government, the true right that matters above all others, is the right to say “no.”

We’ve learned over the past three years that the American people no longer have that right in most cases, but their nominal employees in the federal government do. If the imperial bureaucracy makes a demand of you, good luck with trying to work up a “resistance” movement. Good luck getting any favorable attention from the media that has fused with that bureaucracy and enjoys a revolving door of employment with it. But if you, the Little People, cast votes the imperial bureaucracy doesn’t like… well, watch out. They’ll fight you every step of the way and spend untold millions of YOUR dollars against you. Then they’ll get in front of cameras and expect you to applaud them as heroes. It was always a swindle to convince the American people that democracy serves as a failsafe check against authoritarian power.

We were fooled into thinking our government could never become dictatorial, no matter how much power it claims, because we can always vote the bums out. Guess what, kids? As we’ve seen since 2017, most of the power and money is controlled by people you never get to vote against. You learn that the people you don’t vote for are very capable of defending their privileges against the people who DO. And you learn that far more issues than you ever suspected are considered “settled.”

Read the entire article HERE.

Buttigieg’s Biggest Boondoggle: An Army Of Federally Funded Leftist Activists?

Via The Daily Caller

Democratic presidential frontrunner Pete Buttigieg is calling for a vast expansion of “national service” to enlist a million young Americans to perform federally approved activities. Buttigieg says his program will “repair the social fabric in our nation” and “build social capital.” But Buttigieg’s “call to service” could quickly become a “summons to submission.”

Buttigieg, the mayor of South Bend, Indiana, wants to create “a universal, national expectation of service for all 4 million high school graduates every year.” Buttigieg declares, “The goal is for ‘where did you serve?’ to be as important a question at a job interview as ‘where did you go to college?’” What right does any politician have to decree the questions by which young Americans are judged?

If the duty to “serve” is “universal,” it won’t be voluntary. Buttigieg seeks to create a program that would be morally obligatory without being legally compulsory – at least initially. One critic derided Buttigieg’s plan as a “Shame Corps” that young people would feel browbeaten to join, while a supporter of Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, a 2020 Democrat, derided it as a “glide path to the draft.” Former Rep. John Delaney made a one-year mandatory service requirement for every 18-year-old a keystone of his short-lived Democratic presidential campaign. Compulsory service for all young people is also being floated by the congressionally created National Commission on Military, National, and Public Service. The more people who enlist in Buttigieg’s salvation scheme, the easier it becomes to make the program mandatory for everyone else – in the name of fairness.

Read the entire article HERE.

Algorithmic Feudalism

Via Liberty Blitzkrieg

This comes down to power and control, and the tech giants are now maturing into their predictable role as algorithmic gatekeepers of a new digital feudalism. Google has the power to shape your mind by limiting what you have access to, while at the same time wielding the power to destroy your livelihood with a tweak of an algorithm. Although a lot of the most nefarious stuff is still being conducted at the margins so the masses don’t realize what’s happening, stealth censorship will continue to be rolled out until the internet most people use becomes for all practical purposes an information gulag where nothing but shameless propaganda is pumped onto screens by hidden algorithms tweaked (for your own good) by billionaires.

A perfect example of this can be seen in how YouTube hides ones of the most popular videos ever made regarding the attacks of September 11, 2001. The short clip made by James Corbett, is titled 9/11: A Conspiracy Theory, and has over 3.2 million views. Nevertheless, here’s what YouTube spits out if you search by the exact title of the video.

Keep scrolling and you still won’t find it. This isn’t YouTube helping users find the information they want, it’s YouTube hiding content from its users. Moreover, the only reason I’m aware of the censoring of this particular item is because I’m familiar with the video from years ago. You can be certain this sort of thing is more common than you realize and will only get worse.

The internet was supposed to free information while connecting people and ideas across borders. This promise is being lost with each passing day, and rectifying the situation is one of the most significant challenges we face. Should we fail, we can look forward to a future where humanity consists of little more than digitally lobotomized automatons responding like lab rats to algorithms created by tech CEOs and their national security state partners.

Read the entire article HERE.

Eat Mor Capitulation: The Chick-fil-A Betrayal

Via American Greatness

Chick-fil-A has alienated the staunchest cultural supporters but has not even remotely appeased the belligerent passions and cultural bloodlust of its detractors.

After years of standing by its founding principles in the face of unjust, ugly, and unrelenting criticism from the Jacobin Left, Chick-fil-A abandoned those principles. After years of steadfast support from the cultural Right, Chick-fil-A has betrayed that support. Chick-fil-A on Monday raised the white flag in a battle it was winning by announcing it would no longer support the Salvation Army and Fellowship of Christian Athletes (FCA); two faith-based organizations whose religious tenets, aligning with those of Chick-fil-A, guided them in support of traditional marriage, but whose actual philanthropic activities never discriminated against anyone.

Of course, Chick-fil-A used some anodyne language about ”a more focused giving approach to provide additional clarity and impact with the causes it supports,” and noted that they had fulfilled their giving obligations in 2018 and would instead pivot to focus on “education, homelessness and hunger.” (Donations to the Salvation Army and FCA weren’t general fund donations, but were instead earmarked specifically for programs to assist in the education and feeding of children in need.)

Honestly, I am not sure why Chick-fil-A made the decision it did. Business was booming. While it’s PR issues due to leftist opposition were significant, it did not seem to affect their bottom line.

Quite the contrary. Chick-fil-A’s brand was one of the fastest-growing in the market space. By June of this year, Chick-fil-A grew from the seventh largest restaurant chain in the United States to the third-largest, behind McDonald’s and Starbucks. Its sales in 2018 topped $10.46 billion, a 16.7 percent increase over the year prior. It remains the most profitable fast-food chain in America on a per-location basis, outperforming second-ranked McDonalds by an average of $1 million per location. In fact, Chick-ilf-A’s per-store income in 2017 was greater than that of McDonald’s, Starbucks and Subway combined.

I can only think that a desire to expand into Europe and the international market as well as in areas around college campuses coupled with a changing corporate culture focused more on PR concerns than foundational principles.

It’s also possible that once Chick-fil-A grew large enough, its culture organically became an administrative, HR and PR focused one instead of an ethical Christian based one. Things like this tend to happen as organizations grow—timid and mercenary bureaucracies and bureaucrats replace bold visions and visionaries. Maybe though, the answer is much more petty. Maybe the executives were tired of being yelled at by the mob, or given hostile stares by their peers. I really don’t know.

Read the entire article HERE.

Joseph Stalin Warns Dems May Be Going Too Far Left

Via The Babylon Bee (Satire)

MOSCOW—Brutal totalitarian dictator Joseph Stalin has warned Democrats that they may be going “too far left.”

“The Dems are kinda scaring me with all this far-left stuff,” Stalin said during a brief visit from his father’s house below. “Yes, I was one of history’s most deranged mass murderers, killing, like, 20 million people, but even I knew a boy is a boy and a girl is a girl. And we didn’t have any of this weird transgender athlete stuff—we just used steroids to stifle the competition and fired AK-47s at athletes’ feet until they ran faster.”

“Honestly, I’m a little worried,” Stalin said, distancing himself from the leftist wing of the Democratic Party. “If they keep this up, they’ll kill even more people than I did.”

Stalin’s comments immediately faced backlash on social media, with progressives sarcastically asking Stalin whether he thought “a livable wage,” “good healthcare,” and “mass starvation resulting from government’s inability to plan an economy” were “too far left.”

He has been canceled, reburied, and his old tweets are being investigated.

Check out all of the Bee’s great takes on politics and culture HERE.