Allyson

Chris and I have talked a bit about the possibility of Civil War. I’m not sure it will happen, mostly because I believe the vast majority of millennials are just too damn lazy to rise up, but also because I trust in Pres. Trump to keep things under control.

However…

I believe Tim Walz and others like him are actively attempting to start a Civil War. I don’t mean that figuratively. I don’t mean it as a metaphor. I believe he actually wants to whip up his constituents to a froth and send them out as cannon fodder against ICE, DHS, and other authorities.

Walz posted this on X on January 7th, after the Good shooting. A number of conservative friends said it was just Walz posturing, flapping his arms and making noise to stay relevant. I don’t think so. His words were exceptionally clear: “To Donald Trump and Kirsti Noem: You’ve done enough. We have soldiers in training, and prepared to be deployed, if necessary.”

If he had ordered the National Guard to stand against ICE and/or DHS (and thank the gods he did not), he would have started a Civil War. Or tried to. He would have asked Minnesota NG to face off against a Federal authority, present and following the President’s lawful orders. Ordering local authorities to stand against Federal authorities is, essentially, the definition of Civil War.

I have no idea if Walz is intelligent enough to have figured out that what he’d said was almost but not quite a declaration of war against his own country’s government. Someone in his office must have, because after that tweet, he changed his tune and was overly clear about the NG being deployed ONLY to do traffic and local law enforcement.

I hope to hell that Trump or one of his advisors called up Walz’s office and had a little chat, explaining how bad that would be for everyone and for our country. I hope that Walz and his cronies got the message. I doubt they did, though. They knocked it down one notch, so they wouldn’t get impeached or arrested, but they’re continuing their ridiculous defense of rapists and murderers.

I don’t know how to deal with the people on the Left who are making noises like ICE is horrible. I have had a handful of people I’ve known long enough to consider them “not liars” even if I think they’re uneducated and not thinking right, who are telling tales about ICE. The stories go that ICE is picking up American citizens who have their papers on them, throwing them into dark, dank, moist detention centers with no toilets, no water, no food, and no access to lawyers or telephones. They’re kept there for hours upon hours (most of the stories talk about 8 to 16 hours, but less than 24, and they’re very specific about it being less than a day), have to beg passers by to let them out to pee, and are denied health care for injuries caused by ICE. They give names of ICE agents. They detail how they were sorted into “citizens and non-citizens” early on in the process, so ICE knew they were Americans. The stories go on and on.

When I go to research it, I can’t find any of the information. The names come back empty. There’s no other people making the claims, even though in the stories there are many people being detained. It’s relatively obvious to me that they’re JUST stories, and have no basis in the truth. But of course I can’t ask for proof, because that’s a hanging offense. Even when I say, hey I’d like to get the word out but you know I only pass on things I can verify (a longstanding moral on my part, I *will not* pass along stuff without bone fides included, and have not for many, many years)… crickets.

It’s exhausting. I’m mentally wrecked most of the time now. The left gets more and more frothy, and impossible to talk to or get information out of. They don’t seem to understand the basic “boy who cried wolf” issue that’s going on. Right now, I just assume anything from the left is wrong, either a lie, an exaggeration, or whatever. I have to, because I just don’t have time to investigate *everything* that’s thrown at me. I have a job, I run a household, I have relationships to tend to and children to watch after. So if something truly bad actually happens, I’m just going to ignore it, and assume it’s the same bullshit rhetoric they’ve thrown around every other time.

And just briefly before signing off, a few words on Iran.

In the 1979 timeframe (give or take a couple of years… I was just a kid who didn’t know shit about politics at the time and I’m going on memory here), I had a friend whose family was moving to Tehran. They had planned it for quite a while. And then the regime change happened, and suddenly their entire world fell apart. They didn’t go to Tehran, and I’m glad, because I firmly believe they’d be dead. I would have been 7 or 8 when it happened. The only reason I remember that, from my very privileged place in society, was because it interfered with a friend’s travel plans.

Iran went from being a fairly modern country to being a third world shit hole in very short order. Women were not allowed to work, first, and they had to cover their hair. Then they weren’t allowed to drive. Then they couldn’t be on public transit or out and about without an adult male family member. Then they had to keep their entire bodies covered with voluminous robes. Then the full burka, covering everything but the eyes. A few years ago the Iranian government decided eyes could be too alluring, and had blackout panels put into place in the burkas, so that you couldn’t even see a woman’s eyes. In 2021 or 2022, they decreed a woman shouldn’t speak in public.

Last night, I watched a live video feed out of Tehran, of women dancing in public, wearing nothing but miniskirts and white tee shirts that said “Fuck Khomeini” on the front in large, English letters. No shoes, no head coverings, no long arms, no tights or stockings. Bare skin, hair, eyes, and minds exposed to the evening air for the first time in almost 50 years. I saw a photograph of an Iranian woman lighting a cigarette from a burning Khomeini flag. I listened to hundreds of thousands of Iranians chanting “Iran! Iran! Iran!” I am witnessing history.

This is people from ALL walks of life, which is why it’s not slowing down despite Khomeini’s attempts to murder every protester. Cutting off the internet didn’t silence them. There are young people there, risking their lives to demand freedom from oppression, REAL oppression. They risk being shot, because the authorities there are using live ammunition to “put down” the protesters. Many are being arrested, and they’re starting to shoot and hang them. They’re going to their deaths with their hands held up in signs of victory, afraid but incredibly brave. There are youngsters who were born after Khomeini took over, and who’ve never known a day of freedom, never seen a free Iran. There are middle aged people who had their childhoods viciously and violently ripped away from them. There are old people, who remember the freedom of pre Khomeini Iran, when the Shah was trying to bring the country out of the dark ages and into the light. Those old people have whispered the stories to their children, and grandchildren, and great-grandchildren so that they didn’t die.

When Karen from Minnesota says she is oppressed because she can’t have an abortion or because we’re enforcing our immigration laws, I point her at the women of Iran. THAT is what oppression is, and THAT is how it’s fought. With dancing. With singing. With praise. With joy. Not with temper tantrums and lies.

Well said. I felt the need to share it. Well worth watching in its entirety.

I know the term “weaponized incompetence” and have used it to describe actions of others before. But when I did, it was for stuff like the kids “not knowing” how to clean a bathroom or do the dishes, or a friend’s husband who would scream at her because he “didn’t know how to make dinner for himself” and therefore she couldn’t ever be out at dinner time.

I’ve talked about the exhaustion of dealing with Leftists… I know YOU all know that, and are likely a lot more exhausted than I am. I hadn’t realized that it was yet another iteration of weaponized incompetence, though. And that knowledge gives me ideas on how to change my interactions.

“But why…” Well Karen, do you think it’s okay for a kiddie diddler to be hanging around the playground at your kid’s school? If you say yes, then you need to be put on a 72 hour hold because you are not well. If you say no, then that’s the answer to “but why?”

But I don’t believe I’ll even bother with that much. “Are you telling me that you cannot understand why ICE is in our city, when there are thousands of social media reports on it every day? Are you really that uneducated?”

While protesting, in and of itself, is not protected by our Constitution, American do consider it to be a right. As with all things, though, there is a right and a wrong way to go about it. We’ve all seen plenty of the “bad” way of doing it on social media of late. So let me share with you the same information I shared with my children when they wanted to join a protest at school.

• First and foremost, do you care about the subject of the protest enough to put your life on the line? If the answer to that is no, then don’t go. It ends right there. While it may not be likely that you’ll be killed at a protest, it is never off the table, and you have to think of that very issue first, every single time.
• Can you clearly explain what the protest is about, what it is actually protesting, what relief you’d like to see as an outcome to the protest?  If not, educate yourself before you go back and ask that very first question again.
• Do you understand that, at a protest, you may be arrested? Being detained and/or arrested may involve bodily harm to you, and you MUST be willing to be arrested and/or detained, knowingly, before attending.
• Are you aware that you may be “group thinked” into performing actions that you didn’t intend? Any protest can easily and quickly turn into a mob, and a mob is an animal that doesn’t have single parts. It’s one big entity, and you can and likely will get sucked up into it. In order to avoid being part of a mob while being at a protest, you must always be aware of your surroundings and you must never devolve into letting someone else think for you.
• You must know that you may be ordered to stand down, detained and/or arrested, hit with non-lethal rounds (rubber bullets, beanbags, etc), sprayed with pepper spray or other chemicals, knocked down and hurt and injured, hit with icy cold water from water canons, spit on, screamed at, and dozens of other non-lethal things.
• There is always, ALWAYS the chance that someone will do something truly stupid, push the authorities too far, and someone gets shot. That someone could be you, EVEN if you are not part of the truly stupid person’s stuff. Bullets move in a path, and authorities who are rushed can and will shoot downrange. They’ll attempt not to get innocent people hurt, but it can happen. There is no protest, ever, that doesn’t include this possibility.

I support the right to protest. I support the right to publicly air grievances. I support free speech. But none of those block traffic, emergency vehicles, LEOs, or authorities. The moment you take your protest to a roadway or block non-participating people, you are breaking the law and you not only may be arrested, you SHOULD be arrested. The only time you should be on a roadway is if it has been lawfully blocked off by authorities to allow you a space to protest in (and this does happen, and it’s fine).

Do not block or impede people who are not involved in your protests. It can become violent, which is never good. More importantly, though, it makes those people angry with your protest. Protesting is supposed to be about bringing notice to an issue that needs changing, and if all your protests are doing is ricocheting around your own echo chamber, and pissing off the people who live in the vicinity, then you’ve lost. People in the area should look fondly upon you as the folks who came, made a loud noise and brought attention to something, then left the streets cleaner than they were when they arrived. THAT is the kind of protest that people pay full and positive attention to.

If all of the above is not being taught to you by the people organizing your protests, then they are not safe people. Stop, walk away. They may only be ignorant, which is dangerous… or they could be using you as cannon fodder, which is even more dangerous, for you.

Yeah, I know, we’re all tired of hearing it. But I want to throw out my two cents, as someone who was only recently liberated from the Left.

When I try to evaluate situations that are politicized (and this situation definitely has been), I attempt to re-set the incident in a non-politicized setting and see if I’m still angry/upset/whatever. So let’s look at this entire situation between ICE and Ms. Good from another angle.

Let’s pretend this was not ICE. Let’s pretend this was a random person walking on the roadway (not illegal, but some might consider it stupid). He didn’t have a gun. He didn’t have a method of defending himself. Another person approaches Ms. Good at her car window and orders her out of the vehicle. She doesn’t comply (whether that’s legal when ordered by ICE or not doesn’t matter for this scenario). Instead, she backs up to leave, inadvertently aims her car at the random person walking, and then shifts into drive and hits the gas.

The end result is similar: the person walking or standing is hit. The difference is that, being unarmed, the person who was hit is actually damaged, and possibly killed. How do we know this? Well, cars weigh a lot, and when you gun an engine that way, you move fast (especially when shooting forward off an ice patch as Ms. Good was doing). Even at slow speeds, a car or van can do a ton of damage to a human body, and bumpers are placed right where kneecaps are.

In my pretend scenario, Ms. Good’s intent would only come into play for one reason: to determine the length and breadth of her punishment. The fact that she would be punished (whether it be for manslaughter, murder, or intended murder) does not change. Only the severity of it. There is no excuse on the book that allows someone in a vehicle to hit someone not in a vehicle.

Period.

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So to my understanding, Maduro stole more than one election. There’s information online about elections in 2018 and earlier, and then 2020, and again in 2024. This most recent one was won by the opposition leader, supported by Maria Machado (who couldn’t run, don’t know why, didn’t bother looking it up). Maduro ignored the win and claimed the presidency anyhow.

Sometime in Trump 1.0, we put a $15mil target on Maduro’s head. Biden’s people upped that to $25mil. Both sides of the aisle wanted this guy gone, very obviously. And why shouldn’t they? Venezuela has good oil reserves, and we’re set up to refine them. They have stuff we want, and we have stuff they need. Seems like a good connection. We also want to stop cocaine from coming to America from Venezuela, and since it seems that Maduro and his cronies were in on that, it just feels like a win all over.

Having the crazy Left standing up and protesting the capture (not murder, not assassination, not maiming, but *capture*) of a wanted fugitive that has a price on his head put there by both a Republican AND a Democratic President is just… bizarre. I don’t understand it at all. As several people have pointed out, the Left has been crying “no kings” for some time now, but when we removed an honest to goodness dictator, they get their panties in a wad.

Of course, the anger is all because “orange man bad.” It’s TDS run amok. I hate saying that, but it’s true. Most people have no idea what they’re talking about. And frankly, I’m not the idiot whisperer. I am not interested in educating most of the people who are Left of me. It’s exhausting even to talk to them. I have to prove every point and they get to “feel” I’m wrong. There’s no point.

All of this brings me to talking about socialism. I originally hail from Canada, having moved to the States some 25 years ago. I am American now. I have assimilated (with the possible exception of my continuing love of Tim Horton’s coffee and my occasional mispronunciation of “roof” lol). I now teach American history to people at living history museums. I love my chosen country, and I will defend her to my last breath.

Having grown up in Canada, however, I can tell you that socialism is not a good thing. Canada isn’t entirely socialist, but it’s very democratic (mob rule) and that’s not far from socialism on the political spectrum. The health care system is definitely socialist, and it’s dismal. The insurance is much less complex than America’s, certainly, but the CARE is horrendous. Here, insurance is a shit maze, but the care you get is phenomenal. I’ll pick door #2 every time, thank you.

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From Rebecca Harvey on Facebook:

She thought she was studying milk. What she uncovered was a conversation. In 2008 evolutionary anthropologist Katie Hinde was working in a primate research lab in California, analyzing breast milk from rhesus macaque mothers. She had hundreds of samples and thousands of data points. Everything looked routine until one pattern refused to disappear.

Mothers raising sons produced milk richer in fat and protein. Mothers raising daughters produced a larger volume with different nutrient balances. It was consistent. Repeatable. And deeply uncomfortable for the scientific consensus.

Colleagues suggested error. Noise. Statistical coincidence. But Katie trusted the data. And the data pointed to a radical idea. Milk is not just nutrition. It is information. For decades biology treated breast milk as simple fuel. Calories in, growth out. But if milk were only calories, why would it change based on the sex of the baby? Katie kept going.

Across more than two hundred fifty mothers and over seven hundred sampling events, the story grew more complex. Younger first time mothers produced milk with fewer calories but significantly higher levels of cortisol, the stress hormone. The babies who drank it grew faster. They were also more alert, more cautious, and more anxious. Milk was not only building bodies. It was shaping behavior.

Then came the discovery that changed everything.

When a baby nurses, microscopic amounts of saliva flow back into the breast. That saliva carries biological signals about the infant’s immune system. If the baby is getting sick, the mother’s body detects it. Within hours the milk changes. White blood cells increase. Macrophages multiply. Targeted antibodies appear. When the baby recovers, the milk returns to baseline. This was not coincidence. It was call and response. A biological dialogue refined over millions of years. Invisible to science until someone thought to listen.

As Katie surveyed existing research, she found something disturbing. There were twice as many studies on erectile dysfunction as on breast milk composition. The first food every human consumes.
The substance that shaped our species. Largely ignored. So she did something bold. She launched a blog with a deliberately provocative name, Mammals Suck Milk. It attracted over a million readers in its first year. Parents. Doctors. Researchers. People asking questions science had skipped. The discoveries kept coming. Milk changes by time of day. Foremilk differs from hindmilk.

Human milk contains over two hundred oligosaccharides babies cannot digest because they exist to feed beneficial gut bacteria. Every mother’s milk is biologically unique.

In 2017 Katie brought this work to a TED stage. In 2020 it reached a global audience through the Netflix series Babies. Today at Arizona State University’s Comparative Lactation Lab, Dr. Katie Hinde continues shaping how medicine understands infant development, neonatal care, formula design, and public health. The implications are enormous.

Milk has been evolving for more than two hundred million years. Longer than dinosaurs walked the Earth. What we once dismissed as simple nutrition is one of the most sophisticated communication systems biology has ever produced. Katie Hinde did not just study milk. She revealed that nourishment is intelligence. A living responsive system shaping who we become before we ever speak. All because one scientist refused to accept that half the story was measurement error.

Sometimes the biggest revolutions begin by listening to what everyone else ignores.”
– thanks Dale McElroy

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…and to all, a good night!

Way too many years ago, I went to an interfaith seminary, and trained to be an interfaith minister. It’s one accomplishment I’m very proud of, though I also think I learned as much or more by interning with a UCC minister friend for a year. We studied many different faiths, and how they interact. While I, myself, am quite pagan, I do understand different faiths call to different people. I rather like the idea that various gods have “their” people. G-d (the Jewish deity) called the Jews to be his people, and gave them Commandments, instructions, and information… much of which they didn’t pay as much attention to as they should have. A lot of their rituals and celebrations honor the folks who got them out of messes that their religious indiscretions got them into.

Hanukkah is not a big religious festival for the Jews. It was a minor one, until Christmas became so commercialized and messed with the Jewish kids. So now Jewish kids get presents as well as gelt, and some of the more pagan aspects of Christmas have snuck into Hanukkah celebrations. It’s all good. Winter is a time of darkness, and whether you celebrate the Birth of the Sun, the Birth of the Son, or the Miracle of the Lights, it’s all about warding off the darkness (albeit in very different ways).

This Hanukkah is different, though. Way too many of my Jewish friends (and I have a surprising number of them) are afraid this year. They have watched too many of their fellow Jews be slaughtered, and very few criminals being brought to justice. They’ve heard too many people on the Left calling for their extermination, or celebrating those who harm Israel. They’re not celebrating Hanukkah this year. They’re lighting those eight lights over eight nights because it’s a mitzvah, a … “a helping.” They are putting the light back into the world, in whatever way they can. Lighting the Hanukkiah and singing Ma’oz Tzur are acts of peace, but also acts of rebellion against the violence they are seeing.

For those who may not know, the history of Hanukkah, in short:

Hanukkah’s history centers on the 2nd century BCE Maccabean Revolt, where Jewish fighters led by Judah Maccabee reclaimed Jerusalem’s Second Temple from Greek-Syrian oppressors who had desecrated it. After retaking the Temple, they cleansed it and rededicated it, but found only a tiny cruse of oil, which miraculously burned for eight days instead of one. This “miracle of the oil” established the eight-day “Festival of Lights,” celebrating Jewish perseverance, religious freedom, and divine presence. — Grok

My family and I have celebrated Hanukkah every year since I was in seminary. The act of lighting the candles, sitting quietly in the dark, being a family… these have become important to us, even though we’re not Jewish.

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I don’t know who Elsa Kurt is, but this showed up yesterday afternoon on my feed, and I agree with it. It speaks better words than I can.

Chris will tell you that, during Trump 1.0 when I was suffering from TDS, I would often talk about the “mean tweets.” At the time, I was befuddled, and I couldn’t explain why they bothered me so much. I think perhaps now I have a better idea of how to put it into words. Elsa here has helped.

I can see and approve of, and indeed love, the THINGS that President Trump is doing while simultaneously decry some (but not all) of the things he says and/or tweets. I see all the good he’s done for our country, and I am very supportive of that. I see our economy recovering, spending going down, tariffs doing what they ought to, criminals being ousted from the country, and a general upswing in mood. But I also see his words. And they are troubling to me.

At one time, I lived in my parents’ home and in a very abusive situation. My mother only ever hit me once. At the time, I was a foul mouthed teen and I probably deserved discipline (though not a backhand with her ginormous wedding rings on). Her abuse was more sinister, though. It was mental. She was (and is, I suppose) an alcoholic who was undiagnosed and who refused to admit it. She drank frequently, and acted poorly when drunk. She was mean in general, but when drinking became a nightmare. I would be severely punished for such offenses as putting forks in the dishwasher wrong, having the wrong look on my face at a given moment, or asking for physical attention (hugs, etc.). Anything other than an “A” grade was also to be punished. Punishments ranged from being sent to my room, to berating and mocking me, humiliating me, and grounding me for months at a time. It was the digs, though, the mental and verbal digs that just kept coming, that destroyed me.

There was a time when I was 15 or so, when I finally broke and I went to the ER local to me, and begged them to lock me up on a 72 hour hold. After hours of talking to a therapist and various doctors, they basically told me I was fine, it was my mother who was sick. I could not get it through their heads that it didn’t matter if she was the sick one, _I_ was the one who had to change, because she wasn’t going to. That wasn’t just an assumption on my part, either. She’d told me that, to my face. I ended up medicated, because dulling my senses was the only way to get through my time living with her. I took up drinking and drugging, and inappropriate sex, because I needed to get love from somewhere.

Why are you talking about all this, you ask? Because when Trump does one thing and then says another, it shoves me right back into my days with my mother. It’s not so much of a match that I feel gut punched, but the discomfort is there. My mother could put on a dazzling display of “loving parenthood” when anyone else was around. Most people thought I was damn lucky to have such an attentive, wonderful mother in my life. They had no idea of the personal hell I lived through, every single day. When I see someone whose words and actions are at a mismatch, it is my natural reaction to look twice and thrice at every word and action they have made and are making.

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I started writing for this blog about a year before I switched to thinking of myself as conservative. Or rather, for Miguel’s blog. I stuck to things I knew well, like prepping and cooking. I rarely touched on political things, because I knew people wouldn’t agree, so what was the point? And then Chris asked me to write “From Behind Enemy Lines.”

At first, I found it offensive. I didn’t think HE meant it to be offensive, but it bothered me. A lot. I was standing “over there” and “over there” was “behind enemy lines” and therefore in his mind I must be “enemy.” That’s the logic that I followed. Since I have known Chris for over 25 years at this point, I know he doesn’t think of me as an enemy (and didn’t when I was on the Left, either), so I knew I must have misunderstood something. Still, it was a burr under my saddle, and it irritated me. I really didn’t want to be writing stuff that I knew no one was going to like.

I used the pseudonym “Hagar” because I was absolutely terrified to out myself in public. No matter how you play the game, this blog is public. I didn’t want anyone on the Left to think I was conservative, and I didn’t really want to be dragged through the mud every time I posted. So “I” didn’t post, Hagar did. As with reenacting, putting on a new face allowed me to write and communicate more effectively. Hagar might get blasted, but Ally was safely tucked away where no one knew her or how to get to her.

Over time, I came to understand that none of you were attacking ME. Some of you might have attacked my positions over the years, but no one attacked ME. And so when we made the big switch to this blog, I used my real name. I opened the door a crack.

As I wrote things for this blog, I had to do research. That’s just the type of person I am. Even though I could just have told everyone “what they were thinking over on the Left,” I didn’t consider that enough. I’ve always been one to be thorough in my writing. So I went down the rabbit hole. I started finding out just how much of what I was told on a daily basis was lies. I had to go look stuff up on a constant basis, because I wanted to prove my stance. I’d get to the research, to the raw numbers, and realize I was wrong. I’ve tried very hard to be open and honest when I’ve been wrong, both on the blog and in my real life.

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