Breakfast For The Brain Weekend Edition

Served up a bit late today but have a great weekend.

The Republican Party Sucks

Via American Greatness

The brute fact is that the GOP today—unlike its original incarnation—has no rootedness in any specific moral conception of political life. It is an unmoored, mercenary instrument for hire.

Once upon a time, the Republican Party didn’t suck. Actually, there were lots of times it didn’t suck.

It didn’t suck when, at its founding in the late 1850s, it declared slavery an inhumane, barbaric practice, and eventually ended it. It didn’t suck when it ended repressive and predatory Mormon polygamy a few decades later. It didn’t suck when it declared late 19th-century corporate monopolies to be injurious to representative democracy and citizen welfare, and diminished their power.

It didn’t suck under President Dwight D. Eisenhower, who presided over a postwar era of peace and prosperity. It didn’t suck when it fought segregationist Democrats to ensure equal application of the law. It didn’t suck when it fought against communism for half a century, and then won.

But starting with the presidency of George H. W. Bush, it really began sucking.

It was Bush Senior who pushed America into the first Persian Gulf War amidst a massive PR snow job involving fake stories about little Kuwaiti kids. It was Bush who framed that war as a glorious opportunity and morally obligatory step toward a “new world order”—by which he meant the eventual dissolution of national borders (including those of the United States) and the rise of one-world-government.

He also pushed economic corollaries to his political one-worldism. He relentlessly preached free trade ideology, eventually signing NAFTA in December of 1992. He laid the groundwork for the World Trade Organization, which would officially emerge in 1995. He began pushing for open trade with Communist China. He refused to protect American manufacturing—auto manufacturing, among other types—against subsidized imports intended to destroy American industries. His 1990 Immigration Act triggered a perpetual flood of cheap Latin American labor which inevitably undercut working-class wages at home.

Every step of the way, establishment Republicans supported him. All in all, in just four years, the Republican Party, under Bush Senior, initiated the de-industrialization of the United States of America; the devastation of thousands of working-class communities and families; the acceleration of disruptive demographic change; and the national slide toward dependence on—that is, control by—China.

So, obviously, all that sucks. What also sucks is that ever since, the Republican Party—with only a few exceptions here and there—has just sucked more and more.

Take W’s tenure. It includes an FBI which failed to intercept a devastating 9/11 terrorist attack, months in the making, which killed 3,000 people, despite many opportunities for detection.

It includes W’s proto-Woke demand, immediately after the attacks, that we all become as reality-resistant as he was and deny, against all sense and reason, that Islamic terrorism had anything to do with Islam. It includes his refusal to consider any alteration of Middle Eastern immigration into the country.

It includes the legitimation and foundation of the lawless, panoptical surveillance state we now live in.

It includes large-scale Middle Eastern wars poorly prosecuted, initiated with little or no exit strategies, fueled by delusions that Iraqis and Afghans not only wanted something like American-style secular, liberal democracy, but also were capable of maintaining it.

To top it all off, it includes policies which helped trigger the 2008 financial crash. And once again, establishment Republicans supported him the whole time. So that sucks, too. Subsequent presidential candidates Mitt Romney and John McCain also sucked, as did the whole do-nothing lot of Congressional Republicans between Bush and Trump.

Unsurprisingly, the Republican Party continued sucking once Trump arrived.

Nearly all its leading lights lined up against the only candidate in decades to address the concerns of the party’s own base. For every Newt or Rudy, there were dozens of snarky, Romney-like Republicans who tried, overtly and covertly, to take him down. Those who didn’t mostly sat by in silence as rogue federal agencies tried to remove Trump from office based on false allegations fabricated by the agencies themselves.

And now, post-Trump, the Republican Party still sucks.

Read the entire article HERE.

Biden Cronies Plot Ways to Charge Donald Trump and Have Him Extradited to New York

Via Big League Politics

Government officials with close ties to President-imposed Joe Biden and his family are plotting ways to charge Donald Trump with crimes before he can run for the presidency again in 2024.

Politico reported on Thursday morning that authorities in West Palm Beach are already making plans to potentially apprehend Trump and extradite him to New York when he is charged for whatever crime that left-wing prosecutors concoct from whole cloth.

These Democrat-linked officials want to make sure that Gov. Ron DeSantis cannot intervene to protect Trump. There is a provision in Florida law that would allow DeSantis to determine whether or not Trump “ought to be surrendered” to another state. These officials are colluding in an attempt to deny DeSantis his right to prevent this malicious prosecution.

“The statute leaves room for interpretation that the governor has the power to order a review and potentially not comply with the extradition notice,” said Joe Abruzzo, clerk of the Circuit Court of Palm Beach County.

Abruzzo would be the official tasked with bringing about a fugitive-at-large case against Trump. Abruzzo has deep ties to the Biden family, being a close friend of Joe’s brother, Frank. He claims that “the full extent of the law will be followed and carried out appropriately, without bias” despite his connections to the Biden family.

Big League Politics has reported on how Democrats have been fantasizing for years about arresting their political opposition using any justification:

“In an interview with Robert Costa of The Washington Post, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) brought up the authoritarian idea of arresting all of the members of President Donald J. Trump’s administration.

“Well, let me just say that we, do have a jail down in the basement of the Capitol,” she said. “But if we were arresting all of the people in the administration we would have overcrowded jail situation, and I’m not for that.”

She was responding to a question by Costa about whether Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin could be held in contempt or arrested for refusing to hand over Trump’s tax returns to House Democrats, which Mnuchin claimed would violate the law since it does not serve a “legitimate legislative purpose.”

“But I think again, getting to the committee, Richie Neal, the chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, he has a path — again all of this is so low and precedent-based to do the right thing as we go forward,” Pelosi continued. “And there are several options. One of them is to go directly to court.”

Read the entire article HERE.

Vaccine Virtue Signaling And The Cult Of Woke

Via Zero Hedge

All tyrannical systems need a large contingent of cheerleaders in order to survive and thrive; a group of exploitable and devout acolytes that will carry the torch and evangelize the masses with the ideology of control. Without this aggressive percentage of the population, totalitarians cannot remain in power. In the US and most of the west, leftist ideologues have filled this role nicely. They claim they are fighting for the rights of the downtrodden but their actions speak much louder than their words.

It appears that the SJWs are trying real hard to normalize covid vaccines by manufacturing a consensus. If everyone is doing it, then you might get left out and isolated from the crowd, and that’s a scary thought, right?

Maybe I’m reading too much into this, but I’m detecting some serious desperation behind this astro-turf movement against “anti-vaxers”. No one listens to the cult of woke, no one likes them and no one trusts them to be informed or honest in their agenda. Yet, they wield considerable power in our society because they are being backed by governments and corporations. Their relationship to the establishment is symbiotic.

This is not to say any of these people are aware of the underlying agenda. The mindset behind vaccine virtue signaling could be attributed to some base frailties the average leftist suffers from:

First, they have a habit of relying on the government and the system in general to provide for their feelings of normalcy. That is to say, they worship the covid vaccine partly because they see it as their ticket to appeasing the government and being given access to certain comforts. Sadly, they don’t realize that those comforts can be taken back anytime they want if they were not so cowardly.

In my county residents here have been ignoring the covid mandates for most of the past year. No one wears the masks. No one is using social distancing. And over 70% of the population is not vaccinated. The consequence? Only 17 deaths in the past year, most of which were people with preexisting conditions, and we have been free the whole damn time because we chose to be.

Second, leftists always argue from a position of “the majority”, even when they are not the majority. Covid is a tool, like a psychological crowbar used to leverage compliance, because the presumption is that it is a threat to everyone. And, if everyone is threatened by the same bogeyman, then everyone is part of the same monolith, the same collective. And if everyone is part of the same collective, then everyone must fight that bogeyman together in unity. If you do not work with the collective, that means you are working against the collective.

“We live in a society”, the leftists arrogantly spit and sneer, “which means you must do what WE say is best for everyone”.

As I already thoroughly outlined above, covid is not a threat to everyone. It’s not even a threat to more than 0.26% of people. We do NOT “live in a society”, at least, we don’t live in their society or under their rules. They don’t care about saving lives, this is just the excuse they need to exert control. Control is what they most desire.

How do I know this? Look at the mania surrounding the very existence of anti-lockdown activists and “anti-vaxers”. Look at how much they talk about us. They can’t stop themselves. Why do these people care so much whether or not we take the vaccine? If it actually works, then they are perfectly safe from us, and when we all die horrible deaths from covid they can say “we told you so”.

What they really fear is that we are right and they are wrong. The science is certainly on our side and has been for the duration of the pandemic. The WHO was wrong, the CDC was wrong, the Imperial College of London was wrong. The anti-lockdown activists were closer to the mark than all of them combined. The masks have been proven to be useless. The lockdowns have been proven to be useless. The death rate predictions were proven to be highly exaggerated. And, now the very need for the vaccines is in question.

In terms of the recent mainstream media narrative, we can draw a couple of conclusions: For one, the vaccine rollout is not going according to plan. Everyday the media is awash in stories about “vaccine hesitancy” and what the government needs to do about it. This tells me that far too many Americans are refusing the shot, so, the propaganda is being turned up to eleven.

I suspect the vaccine virtue signaling is a part of that campaign, or it is at least being encouraged by the establishment. Don’t you want to be on the right side of history? Don’t you want to be on the “side that cares about people”? Or do you want to be on the “selfish side”, the side that wants to kill grandma, the side that is racist and sexist and nasty and icky?

Another easy conclusion we can draw from the media is that this is not going away and the establishment intends to press the issue if we continue to defy them. I have seen the suggestion of “force” only gingerly broached in the past, but recently the narrative is becoming more aggressive. The word “force” is appearing more often. The media seeks to remind us that under that law, the establishment could make us take the vaccine. The message? We might as well get the vaccine now so that we can avoid any unpleasantness later.

We all know this is eventually going to end in war, but the elites need a huge ratio of pro-mandate people to effectively subjugate liberty minded individuals. They don’t have it and it shows.

Woke adherents see all of this same propaganda everyday; they hear the message loud and clear: The system is indicating that the vaccines will be mandatory whether by government declaration or by corporate requirement. So, leftists are scrambling to show their allegiance to their god (the state), and they act as good little foot-soldiers to gain extra virtue points.

Read the entire article HERE.

‘Economist’ Proposes “Re-Employment Bonus” To Bribe Government-Sponsored Couch-Sitters To Get A Job

Via True Pundit

Despite the best efforts of our friends in the mainstream media to deny it, this is a trend that we’ve been tracking for more than a month now. As the pandemic fades and employers reopen their doors, many are finding it hard to bring back their previous workers or attract new, qualified applicants.

It’s been reported in South Carolina and in Massachusetts. Many of the former workers who have been interviewed have admitted that federally enhanced unemployment benefits are simply too good to walk away from, particularly when their old jobs may not be around if another surge in COVID pops up.

Now that problem has shown up in Chicago as well, but one economist has come up with a plan.

Perhaps Washington should offer cash bonuses to people who are willing to go back to work. Diane Schanzenbach, director of the Institute for Policy Research at Northwestern University, doesn’t think the $300 per week federal enhancement should be terminated. Instead, she has proposed the adoption of a “reemployment bonus.” (CBS Chicago)

Here’s how that could work: the extra $300 a week in unemployment benefits for 17 weeks (which brings us to September 6th when the added benefit expires) would add up to $5,100. What if the government gave you 40 percent of that – or more than $2,000 – if you got a job now? You’d have employment to pay the bills, and a lump sum of cash in hand.

“You get one amount if you worked in July, another if you took a job in August, and it sort of phases out to zero,” explained Schanzenbach, who said a reemployment bonus would not only need to pass Congress, but lawmakers would also need to design it so the example above is merely an example.

Is this really where we’re going to land in dealing with the situation? A problem was created when the federal government rushed to give away a bunch of “free money” without putting any caps on the benefit to prevent it from exceeding what workers were making before Uncle Sam shut down their employers’ businesses. So now we’re going to address the problem by… giving away more free money? You’re telling me we’ve reached the point where we will literally have to bribe people to go back to work.

Read the entire article HERE.

Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm on Colonial Pipeline Crisis: If You Drove an Electric Car, ‘This Would Not Be Affecting You’

Via Breitbart News

Secretary of the Department of Energy Jennifer Granholm said at a press conference at the White House on Tuesday that people who are driving electric cars are not affected by the hacker-forced shutdown of the Colonial Pipeline.

“I just have a question for each of you. I’ll start with you, Secretary Granholm, because ladies first,” a reporter asked. “Obviously, we have the acute issues with the Colonial Pipeline ransomware attack. But looking more holistically in a macro view, how does this speed up the efforts at DOE to move in more of a renewable direction since this is going to have an impact on people at the pump?”

“Yeah, I mean, we obviously are ‘all in’ on making sure that we meet the President’s goals of getting to 100 percent clean electricity by 2035 and net-zero carbon emissions by 2050,” Granholm said. “And, you know, if you drive an electric car, this would not be affecting you, clearly. “

“But it’s just — it’s another — it’s — I don’t want to — this company is acting in a responsible way,” Granholm said. “They took their pipeline down so that the ransomware would not spread. And so, up to this point, they have — they’re carefully reviewing so that they’re doing this in a responsible way.”

“The broader issue is a very important issue,” Granholm said. “It’s an issue for the president’s priority and the American Jobs Plan — the issue of investing in a transmission grid, for example, so that you don’t have the cyber issues associated with it.” The secretary added, “So there’s a lot of broader questions in this, and we hope that we’ll be able to see that investment in infrastructure that will facilitate clean and renewable energy.”

Read the entire article HERE.

Be sure to stop by at Def-Con News to get our morning started off right.