Thursday Morning Breakfast For The Brain

Good morning Deplorables, the madness never ends…

Sin Taxes & Other Orwellian Methods of Compliance That Feed the Government’s Greed

By John W. Whitehead

With every new tax, fine, fee and law adopted by our so-called representatives, the yoke around the neck of the average American seems to tighten just a little bit more.

Everywhere you go, everything you do, and every which way you look, we’re getting swindled, cheated, conned, robbed, raided, pickpocketed, mugged, deceived, defrauded, double-crossed and fleeced by governmental and corporate shareholders of the American police state out to make a profit at taxpayer expense.

We have no real say in how the government runs, or how our taxpayer funds are used, and no real property rights, but that doesn’t prevent the government from fleecing us at every turn.

Think about it.

Everything you own can be seized by the government under one pretext or another (civil asset forfeiture, unpaid taxes, eminent domain, so-called public interest, etc.).

That house you live in, the car you drive, the small (or not so small) acreage of land that has been passed down through your family or that you scrimped and saved to acquire, whatever money you manage to keep in your bank account after the government and its cronies have taken their first and second and third cut…none of it is safe from the government’s greedy grasp.

And then you have all of those high-handed, outrageously manipulative government programs sold to the public as a means of forcing compliance and discouraging unhealthy behavior by way of taxes, fines, fees and programs for the “better” good.

Surveillance cameras, government agents listening in on your phone calls, reading your emails and text messages and monitoring your spending, mandatory health care, sugary soda bans, anti-bullying laws, zero tolerance policies, political correctness: these are all outward signs of a government—i.e., a societal elite—that believes it knows what is best for you and can do a better job of managing your life than you can.

This is tyranny disguised as “the better good.”

Indeed, this is the tyranny of the Nanny State: marketed as benevolence, enforced with armed police, and inflicted on all those who do not belong to the elite ruling class that gets to call the shots.

Read the entire article HERE.

The Incredible Shrinking Impeachment

Via The Wall Street Journal

The Democratic grounds for ousting Trump are weak—and damaging to constitutional norms.

So that’s it? That’s all there is? After all the talk of obstruction of justice, collusion with Russia, bribery, extortion, profiting from the Presidency, and more, House Democrats have reduced their articles of impeachment against President Trump to two: abuse of power and obstruction of Congress. Honey, we shrunk the impeachment.

Read the entire article HERE.

Hillary Clinton, Chris Steele Allege Boris Johnson Is A Russian Stooge

Via The Federalist

Given his dismal track record, it’s stunning that Christopher Steele has again surfaced, just before the U.K. election that will decide Brexit, to claim that Johnson is a Russian asset.

Hillary Clinton is back, and so is Chris Steele, this time in the United Kingdom. They are no less than implying that current Conservative (Tory) Prime Minister Boris Johnson is a Russian plant. And it’s no mistake that these allegations are being made just before a U.K. general election on December 12 that will decide the fate of Brexit.

It started last month, when the U.K.’s leftwing Guardian newspaper reported the existence of a secret report that said the Russians spent five years “cultivating leading Tories including Johnson…” The 50-page “dossier” from the U.K.’s intelligence and security committee is “based on analysis from Britain’s intelligence agencies, as well as third-party experts such as the former MI6 officer Cristopher Steele…”

That’s crazy, because Steele is the same man who claimed the Russians had been “cultivating, supporting, and assisting” Trump “for at least five years.” A sprawling, unlimited-spend, two-year U.S. special counsel investigation found that false.

This Guy Can’t Be Trusted

Readers will remember that Steele was hired by Fusion GPS, an opposition-research outfit hired by a law firm called Perkins Coie, to manufacture ties between Trump and Russia. Meanwhile, Perkins Coie was hired by, and working closely with, the Clinton campaign and other Clinton operatives.

Steele paid a British national with ties to Russia—Edward Baumgartner—to create a “dossier” tying Trump to Russia via wild and unsubstantiated claims, which Baumgartner created using unknown Russian sources. Once the dossier was created, Steele and other Clinton operatives, including the infamous Sid Blumenthal, injected the allegations of the dossier into the Obama administration. This included getting the dossier circulated at high levels within the State Department, and within the Department of Justice and FBI.

Eventually, using the dossier, the FBI secretly spied on the Trump campaign. And the Clinton campaign tried to use the FBI’s investigation to smear Trump, which amounted to interference in the 2016 election by the Clinton campaign, using Russians to assist her efforts. Using Steele, the Clinton campaign planted media stories smearing Trump as a Russian agent, then responded to them as if they had appeared organically.

In the U.K., which has stricter libel laws than does America, Steele wouldn’t even back up his dossier in court. Instead, he emphasized that he never wrote it, which is of course true, because Baumgartner and unknown Russians wrote it.

Read the entire article HERE.

South Park Has Jesus, Santa Snorting Cocaine on Christmas Episode

Via Newsbusters

know it’s South Park and nothing’s sacred, but come on! Did they really have to have Santa AND Jesus snorting cocaine in their season finale Christmas episode?

On Wednesday’s “Christmas Snow” episode, South Park had too many drunk driving crashes so Santa got a county ordinance to stop all liquor sales until January 2.

The people of South Park were in such a funk after losing their holiday spirits that they turned to Randy Marsh to come back to the town with his Tegridy weed. Randy made a special Christmas batch dusted with cocaine. That gave people their holiday spirit back but they started driving around and crashing their cars again.

After Santa got weed banned, Randy started selling pure cocaine to the town and petitioned to have it legalized. This led to Santa going into everyone’s homes at night, a la the Grinch, to steal all the town’s cocaine. Randy came to the rescue to chase Santa for his supply and they both went over a cliff.

Finally, Randy got Santa to try the cocaine and he marveled at how pure it is. Then Jesus appeared and was shown snorting cocaine, too, confirming, “It’s a good high.”

Jesus then performed the Christmas miracle of making it snow cocaine over the town so the people can go back to driving under the influence.

Merry Christmas, from South Park!

Read the entire article HERE.

Amazing New Plant-Based Meat Tastes Like Real Meat To People Who Have Obviously Never Eaten Meat

Via The Babylon Bee (Satire)

EL SEGUNDO, CA—Meatless meat was once scoffed at by the public, ridiculed for its flavorlessness and complete lack of similarity to actual meat. But now there is a new product on the market from the innovators at High Horse Inc., a plant-based meat manufacturer with a new meat alternative that tastes exactly like real meat to people who have obviously never eaten meat a day in their lives. They call it AintMeat®.

“The first time I tasted AintMeat® I was blown away by how much this tasted like the real thing,” said San Francisco Healthgood store owner, Honeysuckle McWhisp, a 32-year-old man who has not eaten one speckle of meat in his entire hippy life. “I think meat is disgusting, that’s why I’m vegan. So when I eat AintMeat® and it tastes disgusting, it brings back a lot of my memories of what meat I think meat tastes like. It’s amazing what they can cook up in science labs these days.”

“Plant-based meat used to be a fantasy, but now it is the future,” said Dr. Keller Heron, one of the inventors of AintMeat®. “But after a lot of hard work and even harder science, we finally have something we as vegans can proudly say tastes just like the very thing we do not eat and cannot stand the taste of. We have brownish, reddish piles of soft, spongy mush: something nobody would have imagined scientists could accomplish. We have AintMeat®.”

High Horse Inc. is proud to move the world to a new place beyond animal cruelty and into a more natural, organic future, where meat is processed from strange chemicals and protein globs in test tubes and beakers, bubbling and slimy in science labs, forming into coagulated steaming piles of brown mush that drip strange pink fluid and smell like wet cardboard — just as mother nature intended.

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