From Behind Enemy Lines

As you know, I attempt to keep abreast of the Left media so that I can report things here, and also to help those on the Right understand things that might require some translation. Even though I’ve moved more Right (or the Left has moved more left, whatever), I intend to continue doing this. It is important to me to not have an echo chamber, and to listen to news from a variety of sources. This leads me to today’s article.

Kamala Harris Swears In Senate Members from Times of India

You’re welcome to read the article. It’s a confusing bit of media. The heading would lead you to believe that the article is talking about Harris swearing in the new Senate members. It really has little to do with that. Instead, they talk about how J. D. Vance was laughing during the swearing in (the video just repeats itself a few times btw), and a video went viral of him doing so. It’s reported like this is a Big Deal. It’s not. He was smiling through the entire thing, pleased as punch to see so many of his friends being sworn in. As he should. He wasn’t laughing. I’ve watched the thing.

One of the quotes from the article gives you a feel for what they’re aiming for (and missing, imo, but that’s another story): “Many of the Republicans Kamala Harris swore in today could not pronounce her name, the Time Magazine headlined its article…” They later suggest that those Republicans could pronounce her name but chose not to. The bottom line is, they’re more worried about the name than the people being sworn in. I will tell you, I only remember how to pronounce her name because Kamala rhymes with mommala, which was part of a SNL skit, I believe. I have to say it over in my mind to remind myself! It’s an unusual name. Now, should they have made the attempt? Yes. It’s a statement of respect, and while I don’t expect any of them to respect her, they should respect the office, and they should treat her as if they respect her for ceremonial things like this. That they didn’t says stuff to me, but it’s still pretty minor.

The article also talks about how the “smiling people” coming to her to be sworn in were her bitter enemies only weeks ago, as if this is two-faced in some way. Why would they not be smiling? They won. We all won. They said she was a threat to the American way of life, and I believe that she was, and may continue to be if she stays in politics. They also make some claims about the claims made by Republicans about Harris, claims of “her wanting to ban Christmas from the calendar” and “bringing dog meat to immigrants’ stoves.” It’s asinine and silly. The only part they sort of got right was the claim that she tried to skew the election results by flooding the polls with illegal immigrants. I’m still struggling to understand who in their right mind would vote against a law that protects our voting places.

Read More

It has been an interesting year for me. Most of my 2024 was spent figuring out why my politics were so skewed. I’ve become more active in my prepping (again). I lost weight. I gained weight. I finished another cookbook and published it (The Clay Table), and finished writing and partially editing another (Rise Up, a bread cookbook, hopefully due out in the summer).

In 2025, I am going to be a busy little critter. I have a fantasy anthology I’m putting together (Tales from the Turning Leaf Tavern), which comes along with a Kickstarter, a “real” cover artist, and a bunch of other new (to me) aspects of authoring. I have 10th century Viking, 15th century English, and 18th century American reenactments to participate in. I have my 18th century cookbook to put together, write, and edit. I have a series of YouTube video lessons on how to take an idea from your mind and turn it into a book that’s available on Amazon. I have TikTok to keep up on, provided there’s still a TikTok to use. I have reading to do, and sewing. And then there’s the list of never ending household chores: laundry, dishes, vacuuming, tidying, cooking, etc…

All in all, though, I’m very happy with where I am. If you’d suggested 20 years ago that I would be sitting here, a published and popular author, I would have laughed at you. I could not have envisioned a time when historical groups vied for who got me for what dates, because I “bring so much.” It was inconceivable to think that I would be teaching food history to people at libraries… and be paid for the privilege. I am in a really good place.

I’m excited to see what Trump brings to America in his second term. It is my strong hope that his various people do their jobs well, and that the country starts out strong on January 20th. I want to see DOGE get rid of a lot of the useless stuff that’s gathered up into the government over the years. I hope to see improvement in schools, along with cutting away any fat in that arena as well.

Mostly, I’m hoping to see grocery costs come down. I know it won’t be immediate, but Trump has four years. I’m hoping that by his second year in office, we’ll see a distinct down-trend in the cost of American grown foods.

Happy New Year, everyone. Thanks for reading Vine of Liberty, and being a part of our virtual family. May the blessings of the Divine go with you into the new year, and fill your lives with health, wealth, and joy.

First off, Merry Christmas! If you’re on the blog on actual Christmas morning, go open presents! Read this later. *grin* I’ll be doing the same, because I’m writing this in advance, so that I don’t have to look at the blog today. There.

Right… last week the Continuing Resolution was supposed to pass. All 1500 pages of it. Musk made We The People aware of it, and We The People made the decision to call our politicians to say HELL NO. Those 1500 pages were not passed. I considered that incredibly positive. And then I heard the commentary from the Left and others:

“House Republicans have been ordered to shut down the government. And hurt the working class Americans they claim to support,” Jeffries posted on the social platform X. “You break the bipartisan agreement, you own the consequences that follow.” (1)

“They come in and undermine us two days before the government shutdown deadline?” she asked. “That doesn’t seem like, at all, a good way to do business.” (2)

“I thought it was a reasonably good compromise,” he added. “The problem was one or two people in our conference, instead of just opposing it, had to go out and demonize and distort things, provisions in the bill.” Republican Rep. Kevin Bacon (3)

There are bunches of other comments that made me wince. One senator I caught a clip of basically said that because We The People chose to tank this pork-ladened CR, we were snatching disaster relief from the Carolinas and elsewhere. That one made my blood boil. Biden just sent a billion to Africa. We HAD money to take care of our own, and Biden and his people sent it elsewhere. Coming in at the last second and tacking aid onto a CR that’s meant to keep the government running is just trashy.

There is a LOT going on with all this. The bottom line is, we want to see an end to the bloat in Washington. That means that a lot of Democrats and probably quite a few Republicans are going to get their panties in a wad. I am really okay with that. I’m okay with anything that reduces the size of government. Here’s the thing… our Founders never imagined career politicians like we have today. They couldn’t have. It’s so against their beliefs, because it essentially mimics the aristocracy in Britain. That’s exactly what they were trying to avoid.

So… Trump and his team have come in, and they’re up to making changes. To the people who’ve suggested Trump is overstepping by attempting to lead the country now instead of waiting for January 20th, I say, “At least *someone* is attempting to run the damn country. Biden sure isn’t.”

Read More

ABC is being forced has agreed to pay $15 million toward Trump’s Presidential Library(1) after being found guilty of defamation of character. “ABC News has agreed to pay $15 million toward Donald Trump’s presidential library to settle a defamation lawsuit over anchor George Stephanopoulos’ inaccurate on-air assertion that the president-elect had been found civilly liable for raping writer E. Jean Carroll(2).”

This is an interesting ending, one I sort of wish Trump had pushed to completion instead of settling. Carroll has never managed to get Trump convicted of rape. What she did was make complaints, and her lawyers set things up such that the jury decided the Bad Orange Man had to be guilty of something, so they went with the lesser charge of sexual assault and/or battery. Please know, that charge (which was not, to my knowledge, defined beyond that) can be handed off to someone who patted the ass of someone in public. It’s ridiculous. I have a real problem with it, because if someone has committed sexual assault, it needs to be dealt with in a court of law. If you can’t prove that it happened, then you need to walk away. Does it suck? Yeah, sometimes it does. But this is America. We don’t get to presume someone guilty until proven innocent, as they do in other countries.

Regardless, he was never convicted of rape, and ABC has to pay for saying he was. It’s not enough, though. We need to get back to our roots, where someone is innocent until PROVEN guilty. Not guessed. Not raked over the media coals. PROVEN guilty, in a court of law, in front of a jury of peers or a judge. I’m tired of the media telling us what to believe.

There have been a few wins for Trump, of late, beyond winning the Presidency. Near as I can tell, he’s basically stopped WWIII. Canada is so upset that they’ve got politicians standing up and vowing to tighten the border while simultaneously saying that Canadians must stand up for Canada and how dare the United States stand up for the United States! It’s rather funny, or it would be if it were a joke.

In the media, we’re seeing interesting reports. Democracy Forward is saying that Trump loses 93% of his cases in court(3), but it isn’t quite that simple. If you go to Policy Integrity’s “round up,(4)” you can see a list of the things Trump won and lost in his first term. If you actually read them, some of the “losses” are wins for Trump. It’s hard to understand, because they (the media, and these sites that report about court cases) just seem to dump everything out in a way that’s difficult to follow. I can only assume that’s because it hides the fact that Trump is doing pretty well.

Read More

The subject of vaccinations is of importance to me because I strongly believe in childhood vaccines. Robert F. Kennedy has plans for vaccines, and the Left is in a tizzy over it, so I wanted to discuss it a bit. But first…

A bit of background on me. My first daughter was born in the 90s, and as a dutiful parent, I took her in for her first set of shots when I was told to. She got her shot, and about 30 minutes after she got it, she started screaming. Not crying, but screaming, that sound that causes parents to run to the ER. I thought at first it was just a bit of lingering pain from the shot, so I did warm washcloths at the vaccination site, baby Tylenol, snuggles, breastfeeding, all that stuff. The screaming continued. She barely breathed. It was just a continuous scream, like the sound out of a piece of machinery. I called my doctor, and in the middle of that call, she stopped. Other than the fact that she was exhausted from screaming for a couple of hours, it was like nothing happened. She was bubbly, happy, eating again… My doctor suggested that we wait until she was older to get any further vaccinations, because that was definitely Not Normal.

I ended up not getting any of her childhood vaccines. I was too afraid that she would end up screaming and in pain again. By the time my daughter was about 3 or 4, Dr. Andrew Wakefield published a study that made claims he had proven that vaccines caused autism. I skimmed his study, but at the time I was not a good researcher, nor was I an experienced adult. I assumed that Dr. Wakefield wouldn’t have been published if his study wasn’t good. I decreed that my child would never be vaccinated again.

Of course, that didn’t happen. To get my kid into school, I had to get her vaccinated. I didn’t live in the States at the time, and my option was to lie and say I was a member of a religion that didn’t allow vaccinations. That was the only exception allowed. I didn’t lie, and my kid got vaccinated, in a truncated schedule that allowed her to enter kindergarten with her peers. She was fine, and she’s not autistic.

We now know, of course, that Dr. Wakefield’s study(1) was critically flawed, and that vaccines do not cause autism. In fact, not only is there no causation, there’s not even any correlation. His study and one other made some extremely bad jumps in (lack of) logic and the scare of the late 90s and early 2000s was enacted. I was caught up in that. I did not want my later children to be vaccinated, because my memory of my first child’s experience, along with my emotional reaction to the study, put me into a froth. My partner explained that the study was wrong, and sent me off to learn more about it.

That led to one of my first true research deep dives. I had to educate myself in order to understand a lot of what I was reading. I didn’t want to depend on experts, because it was an “expert” who had misled me the first time. By the time I was done, I was not only willing to get the kids vaccinated, I was demanding we do so.

Read More

We’ve all heard it. That damned One Percent. If only they would share their wealth! If only the One Percent would pay their fair share! How dare the One Percent take away from me and mine!

The outrage is real, but what’s behind it?

The short answer is, greed. It’s more than that, though. There’s a sense of entitlement we build up for various reasons, and we, as Americans, have certain expectations. Someone, somewhere, told us that we deserve to own a house by the time we’re 30. Someone said that we ought to have a car by age 25. Someone implied that we should be able to afford lavish vacations by age 50. The list goes on.

This elusive “someone” goes right back to the media, in my very strong opinion. Television shows and movies highlight the people who are exceptions to all the rules. That’s just film, after all. None of us are interested in seeing boring stuff on tv, right? You go to television (and books and such) to read about the extraordinary, the strange, the unusual. But when it’s force fed to us on a regular basis, it can seem like each of us, ALL of us, should have those things.

The bottom line is, not all of us can afford to own our own homes. Not everyone can afford a car. Not everyone can afford to have one parent stay home and watch the kids. Not everyone can afford expensive medical care. It is (in some cases) a sad state of affairs, but it is the way of the world.

The basic status of human beings is poverty. While we’re working on “extreme poverty” around the world (defined as not having the basic human needs of water, shelter, food met), basically about half the world population lives in poverty. It should be noted, however, that 90% of those who live in the worst poverty tend to live in African and Asian countries (World Poverty Statistics 2024 | Social Income. https://socialincome.org/en/int. Accessed 2 Dec. 2024.).  In America, we consider a person to be living in poverty if they’re bringing home (before taxes) $14,580 a year (or roughly $40 per day). Elsewhere in the world, “poverty” is defined as bringing home less than about $7 a day (“Overview.” World Bank, https://www.worldbank.org/en/topic/poverty/overview. Accessed 2 Dec. 2024.).

Read More

I wanted to share this young man’s post on TikTok with you, because it says a LOT in a small space.

@truscum_tr_nny Trans activists love to fuck EVERYTHING up for transsexuals. Thanks a lot. #Trump2024 #transsexual #Igbtrepublican #republican #conservative #LGBT #transgender #kamala #CapCut ♬ original sound – Nicholas

So… long story short, Trump is going to stop public taxpayer money (ie Medicare/Medicaid) from paying for transition surgeries. The kid isn’t the least bit upset about that. No, he’s upset over the fact that when gender dysphoria was considered a mental disorder, it was treated as one. That means that necessary care, through a doctor who’d gone to the trouble of having you tested six ways to Sunday, was covered. Just like being diabetic was covered. Or being clinically depressed was covered. Now that “being trans” is a social movement and they’ve removed it as a mental disorder, it’s not covered.

Now… I’m going to say something that would make the Left clutch its pearls, but y’all might just agree. I believe that gender dysphoria should be reinstated as a mental disorder. So should a few other things, but that’s another post. And then we, and by we I mean We The People, should get off our fucking high horses and stop making mental disorders so shameful for people.

I have mental disorders. I have Generalized Anxiety Disorder. If you met me, you probably would never know. It’s an invisible disorder, and I’m lucky that it’s well controlled  by medication. I don’t hide that I have it, and I often share with others who suffer from anxiety who feel alone or scared. Too many people want to demonize those who have mental disorders, and frankly, it irritates the fuck out of me. Here’s the thing… your body might not produce insulin, so you have to get it in a bottle. My brain over-produces certain chemicals, and I need meds to make it stop. It’s not a shameful thing. It’s just a thing.

Read More

@notmelissavitelliKeep melting down

♬ original sound – MelissaVitelli

This couple is part of the reason I found the LGB community on the Right. The lady in the back is the Trump person, and the one talking in front is her wife. Her wife did not vote for Trump. Her wife, however, is not an idiot.

The reason I’m posting this because this is how it’s supposed to work. You can vote differently, think differently, even have different values (to a point), and still be loving partners. For a very long time, I did not back anything Right… and my partner still loved me. I still loved him. Now I have one partner who’s very Right, and one who’s moderately Left, and I love them both. It helps me hear outside my echo chamber, among other things, and it also makes it very clear to me that we often have the same goal but with different ideas on how to achieve them.

Those who’ve chosen to end relationships over Trump winning are also choosing to enact the stupid Handmaid’s Tale stuff. They’re feeding right into it. They are training themselves to REact rather than to act. I find it difficult to watch. I also find it rather disgusting to watch women cut off their hair or say they’re going to purposefully gain weight “to be unattractive to men.” Excuse me, but there are women out there who have lost their hair because of disease, who have no choice of the matter, and they are still beautiful. There are women who are fat and they are beautiful. I’m fat, and I’m beautiful. 🙂 Those women who are doing the 4B movement are just douches. It’s horrendous, and so against every single thing the Left purports to be for.

It’s been a heck of a few weeks, but things seem to finally be slowing down slightly. I am behind in postings, and hella busy, so if I miss one or two, I apologize. It’s National Novel Writing Month, and I’m writing a new cookbook. I hope to have the first draft complete by Dec 1st. That eats a lot of time, because it requires me to do a LOT of writing each day, but it’s very productive.

I got talking with friends about the differences between the Left and the Right. The biggest one that I see is the concept of morals. These are, of course, very sweeping generalities. Take what you will from them.

The Right has a very strict sense of morality, and while there are people under the Big Tent with different beliefs, generally speaking the vast majority hold incredibly similar morals. You can be a straight laced, white Christian and be Republican. You can be as gay as they come, pagan, and be Republican. But if you think it’s okay to punch people because of their beliefs, you can’t really be Republican. The opposite is true of the Left. On the Left, if you aren’t clad in rainbows and supportive of whatever the victim-de-jour requires, you can’t be Democrat. On the other hand, you can have wildly different moral codes, and in fact have moral codes that change depending on the moment.

The Right likes to talk about how intolerant the Left is, and the Left makes all sorts of claims about intolerance on the Right. Trump’s election win has the Left trotting out Karl Popper’s essay on intolerance, of course. Let me share:

“Less well known is the paradox of tolerance: Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them. — In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. We should claim that any movement preaching intolerance places itself outside the law, and we should consider incitement to intolerance and persecution as criminal, in the same way as we should consider incitement to murder, or to kidnapping, or to the revival of the slave trade, as criminal.” — Karl Popper, The Open Societies and Its Enemies

Read More

BLUF: Be compassionate. Yes, even if it hurts. Yes, even if they’re assholes and dickwads. I want to know that I picked the right side. I want to know that this is the side that isn’t lying to me.

Right, we have a new President Elect. Trump defied the odds, and he took it all. He is the President Elect. He won us the Senate. And it looks like he won us the House. I’m sure most of us have been celebrating in some fashion or another for the past couple of days. And now it’s time to buckle down.

The Right have decried the Left for having majorities and doing nothing with them. We have the majority across the board for the next while, and we NEED to be doing stuff with it. We need to enact those campaign promises. Better economy, getting dangerous criminal aliens out of the country, lower grocery costs, better housing market, and the list goes on. This isn’t going to happen overnight, but Trump must put himself to work immediately and start getting things done.

The Left is so aflutter with terror right now that there might actually be a teaching moment, if the Right can keep things together. For the next few weeks, between election results and inauguration, the Left expects to be treated like dirt. We can’t. We must act with compassion.

Read More