On August 7th, NPR published Republicans have long feuded with the mainstream media. Now many are shutting them out

Danielle Kurtzleben from NPR went to Wisconsin to get a story about “abortion rights”. She claims she wanted to do two stories, one on Democrats and one on Republicans. She was very surprised when the Republicans didn’t even bother to reply to her. They just ghosted her.

The problem is that it is easy to read somebody’s bias from questions they ask. Asking to speak to a senator about “the uploading the second amendment” tells the staffer that you are on a different side than somebody calling to talk about “stopping gun violence”. The mere questions you ask will say more about you than you are likely to get from them.

The phenomenon is impossible to quantify, but many Republican candidates are showing that they don’t want – or need – to get their messages out via legacy media outlets. That can reduce the scrutiny they face while running for public office, hampering voters’ ability to make informed choices.

Here is her hubris and bias on display. She considers it her job to scrutinize Republicans running for public offices. “Joe, what is your favorite flavor of ice cream?” vs “Mr Trump, why are you discriminating against muslims? Are you a Islamophobia?”

Of course they never seem to feel that Fox News is “legacy media”. Legacy media only includes their banner carriers, The Washington Post, The New York Times, CNN, NPR, MSNBC. Isn’t it surprising that MSNBC is considered legacy media even though it is younger than Fox? NBC is older than fox, but not MSNBC.

The problem is that we just don’t trust “legacy media”. We have to many examples of the legacy media twisting what we say to get their narrative.

In 2016 Katie Couric created a documentary Under the Gun. In that documentary Katie asks members of a Virginia gun rights organization to answer a question on background checks. The film then showed 9 seconds of silence from the gun owners. As if they couldn’t answer. Fortunately they had their own recording and it showed that when asked they all had answers.

The video of them sitting there silently was from footage show while the sound crew asked them to be quiet so they could get sound levels.

In other words, Katie lied.

How many times did the legacy media misquote Trump or take his words entirely out of context. There is an entire industry of producing pink pussy hats based on the false premise that Trump was grabbing pussy at a beauty contest. The hot mic comment was a statement about power, if you are rich and powerful you can take video of yourself smoking crack, paying for prostitutes, snorting cocaine, selling access to the presidency and nothing will happen to you.

Opps, that isn’t what Trump said, he made a comment about how if you are rich or powerful you could grab a woman by the pussy and she wouldn’t complain.

It is a good thing that more and more Conservatives and Republicans are learning to tell the legacy media to go shove it. I love DeSantis’ ability to flatten reporters with gotcha questions. He really does a great job. I’m coming to respect Kari Lake’s ability to punch back at reporters as well.

To post publicly is dangerous. Every time we write a blog posting it remains as a stepping stone into our past. The terms we use will be judged in the future. The images we choose to post will be considered, weighed, and likely found wanting.

The internet is forever. J.Kb. has written about the evil that is things like OnlyFans. Places where young girls go and become hollow husks of people, losing an intimate sharing that the could have kept for their partner in the future.

There is a story that a young lady was picked to be the model for Ivory Snow soap. “99 44/100% pure” was the tagline. You can’t have your public face be anything but pure. This young lady decided it would be a good idea to perform in an X rated film. She lost the Ivory Snow gig and never had another non-porn gig there after. The story of Marilyn Chambers is out there if you want to read about her.

She made money but didn’t have a great life. Multiple divorces and a drug habit were some of the issues she faced.

One recent blogger that had an unfiltered style of writing had to stop posting when he was doxed and harrassed. In a society where the government lies to tell the truth is dangerous.

Miguel is the public face of this blog. The other authors have setup a small amount of separation between our public persona and our private lives as our postings could have professional ramifications.

Yet still we post.

This post isn’t about this little blogger or the better blogs out there, this is about how history is rewritten by the victors.

The latest authority figure that is rewriting history is Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers. She is out there telling the country that the teachers union wanted the kids in school. It was the politicians that closed the schools, her people are dedicated to the children and wanted to teach.

But the internet remembers. It remembers when it was revealed that teachers unions pushed the CDC to recommend that the schools be closed. Even today schools are full of “must mask” rules. In this part of the country about the only place you are required to wear a mask are the schools and doctors offices.

There are a few at risk people that have businesses open to the public that require masks to enter, but they are very few and there is always an option to go elsewhere.

The teachers unions seem to be one of the most self serving entities in the country. Their hypocrisy knows no real bounds.

Back when Chris Christie was the Governor of NJ he went to battle with the teachers union of NJ. One of the counter attacks was how much Christie was paid. He pointed out that the head of the teachers union in NJ was paid almost three times as much as he was and had significantly less responsibilities.

The country is going through a vast gas lighting. They tell us that a grand mother walking through the capitol taking pictures is a fundamental threat to our country but a mob burning a city is peaceful. They tell us that acting in self defense is murder but that violent criminals should be set free.

We are told that it is a “Gun Safety Bill” when infringements on a fundamental right proposed.

We need to remain vigilant to the rewriting of history as we watch. Keep copies of articles and videos, you might only see them one time.

Back in 1991 during operation Desert Storm, the US military was firing Tomahawk Cruise Missiles into Baghdad. We were watching some of the footage on CNN. The new crew was on the roof of the hotel in Baghdad when they heard something. The cameraman pointed the camera down the street and filmed a Tomahawk missile flying down the center of the street. It got to the end of the street and turned at the intersection and continued onward.

We saw it. We saw it exactly once. I’ve never seen that video again. 30 years later I aks “Did I really see that, or am I misremembering.”

Document it. Remember it. Save copies.

Don’t let them gaslight you.

Mrs. Elizabeth Powel asked Dr Benjamin Franklin, “ so what have we got? A Republic, or a Monarchy?”

Dr Franklin answered, “A Republic, if you can keep it.”

But today you find so many talking about “Democracy”. Democracy is two wolves and a lamp arguing about what to have for dinner. It is mob rule.

The republic our founding fathers gave to us is amazing. The people have done much to damage it, making the election of senators a popular vote being one of my least favorite changes.

The fact that they were able to put it all on four pages plus the bill of rights is in itself amazing. If you were to look at other constitutions you find hundreds if not thousands of pages, most of which translate into “Unless the government wants to.”

Our Constitution lays out our form of government and then sets acknowledges the some of the rights given to us by our creator. Rights the exist regardless of government.

The Atlantic is left leaning. They love to pontificate from the basis of false premises and to build their arguments.

The Constitutional Flaw That’s Killing American Democracy is one such article. Yes, our Constitution protects the Republic, not “American Democracy.”

So what does Jedediah Britton-Purdy think the flaw in the Constitution is? According to the author it is the fact that it is just so darn hard to change the Constitution.

The Constitution doesn’t have to be something we merely inherit; it could be something we can change ourselves—starting with rewriting the too-stringent rules for making such changes.

People on the left seem to crave power. How the get there never seems to bother them, as long as they get the power they want. When the Democrats were in the majority in the Senate they decided to kill the filibuster in regards to judicial appointees, because the Republicans were just nah sayers. All they ever did was say “NO”.

So the filibuster was killed. The Democrats loved it. Until that exact moment when the Republicans took control of the Senate. At which point they started screaming that the filibuster should be reinstated. It is always the way of the Left. They change the rules and tell us the new rules are good, up until the moment those same rules are used against them.

Some federal judge in California doesn’t like Trump’s executive order because it will harm some set of people or return to the status quo of pre Obama? Then it is just wonderful that the judge puts a nation wide injunction against that EO.

Some judge in Texas finds that Biden’s EO is unconstitutional and articulates the reason why and it is absolutely unacceptable that a single man in a black robe stop a Presidential Executive Order.

But the Constitution is too fundamentally antidemocratic a document to serve democratic purposes reliably. If we want to make it genuinely and lastingly democratic, we will first have to consider changing it in the most basic way: by amending Article V, which governs amendments and so serves as the gatekeeper for living generations …

For years SCOTUS turned out liberal opinions that were only loosely based on the Constitution but reflected “the will of the people.” The will of the people is written in our Constitution. The will of the people can change that document. Having a “living constitution” which is malabule to whatever the current leftist judge wants it to say is not good law, it is not good government.

The Constitution limits our Government. It is not there to limit us. It is not there to give the government power over us.

But the root of judicial oligarchy is that the Constitution is almost impossible to change. Article V requires that amendments be ratified by three-quarters of the states, either through the state legislatures or in special conventions. (The convention route has happened only once, when the Twenty-First Amendment repealed Prohibition in 1933.) The upshot is that it takes only 13 states to block a proposed amendment. And to send an amendment to the states in the first place, the proposed language must be approved by a two-thirds vote of both houses of Congress.

Today many of the arguments by the left start with an ad hominem attack. Instead of looking at what the Constitution actually says they attack it because it was written by “cis white males”. Here’s the thing, just because you don’t like the person or the people, that doesn’t mean that what they created isn’t good or true.

We must continue to stand up to the lies our opponents tell. We must continue to call out the messages of hate the spue. We are freemen and will continue to be free for as long as we can keep it.

My family recently started watching The Big Bang Theory My wife hasn’t laughed this hard since she was watching reruns of Friends. My family has fun laughing at Sheldon while looking right at me as I have some of the same tendencies.

I stumbled upon an article in The Pudding that is a good insight to the sort of censorship that happens, often in a klutzy heavy handed way.

Just ask somebody that saw Salor Moon in Japan coming to American and hearing it is a children’s show. Censorship happens.

This article is from a person that was watching in China

I quickly became a fan of the sitcom when it was officially introduced in China on a video streaming website in 2011. But when I rewatched the show in 2022 on Youku, a Chinese video streaming website backed by e-commerce giant Alibaba, I couldn’t help but notice weird jumps, pauses, and disconnected canned laughter.

In 2014 streaming platforms in China received a notification from regulators:

imported American and British TV shows must be ‘reviewed and approved by officials before streaming to the public

The article has some neat graphics work in it to show what was cut and what wasn’t. It looks OK on mobile but better on a full screen.

Go read for an idea of what the Chinese government censors internally:
The Big [Censored] Theory

That peculiar institution of The South was a euphemism for slavery. Today people point to the south and blame the south for slavery.

Slavery existed before the first European explorers arrived in the New World. Slavery existed between the North American tribes long before they met the white man. Slavery and human sacrifice existed in south and central America before they met the white man.

The slave trade in africa started long before the Europeans got there and continues to this day.

To make money you want to buy when at a lower cost than you will sell. The price you can sell at is changes according to changes in demand. Sometimes you can move goods to where they are more valuable by moving through time. It gets more valuable over time.

It is much faster to increase the value of something by moving it from where it costs little to where it sells for more.

A simple two legged trade route has the lowest profitability. There is easier to compete on a two lagged route and in general the value does not increase as much as when you have a multi-legged route.

In the 17 hundreds, Boston was known for making rum. The base for making rum was molasses. Since there were many places in Boston making rum it was relatively cheap to purchase in Boston. On the other hand, the demand for molasses was very high. Trading rum to the sugar plantations of the caribbean wasn’t very profitable as the caribbean islands made rum themselves.

On the other hand, the pirates and slavers of the african gold coast were more than willing to trade the nearly worthless slaves for the much more valuable rum. So the ship owners of Boston sent their trading vessels to africa to trade rum for slaves.

Those slaves were transported to the caribbean and sold. The profit from the sale of the slaves was then used to purchase molasses to be brought back to Boston.

This generated huge profits for the ship owners of Boston.

At a time when England was actively suppressing the taking and transporting of slaves, including into the English colonies, the caribbean islands did a brisk trade in slaves.

And the traders of Boston shipped out rum and came back with molasses.

From the movie 1776 is a scene where the they are working to create the Declaration of Independence. One of the members from the southern states throws the triangle trade route in the face of John Adams in song.

Hawaii has finally issued a gun permit. They are now at 1 issued.

They have have records going back 20 years and according to Guns and Gadgets this is the first permit issued in that time frame.

Even when the McDonald opinion was issued requiring that every state have a method of issuing, I.e. No Issue was found to be unconstitutional, Hawaii had standards that were impossible to meet.

They make the claim that their very strict gun laws keep “gun violence” at a very low rate.

Gun ownership v. Violent crime with guns and Gun Permits v. Violent crime with guns are both cherry picked statistics. Some states with very limited gun ownership and permits have low violent crime with guns rates and some states with constitutional carry and significant gun ownership have low violent crime with guns rates.

In both cases, the gun rights infringers refuse to actually look at violent crime rates, they always limit it to violent crimes committed with guns.

There was a situation back in the 80’s or 90’s where a small town in Michigan(?) passed a city ordinance requiring every citizen of the city to be armed. Their crime rate dropped. Of course the infringers screamed because the crime rate in adjoining towns went up.

Hawaii has issued 1 gun carry permit since high court ruling

There are also reports flowing out of New Jersey that people are starting to receive their carry permits.

Things are changing for the better for gun rights.

There are times when you just know it is an article from the Babylon Bee…

And then you find out it’s not…

It’s now illegal for anyone under 21 to buy canned whipped cream in New York, officials say it’s to stop teens from inhaling nitrous oxide

Yep, that nanny state of the east has decided that nobody under 21 is allowed to purchase whipped cream, because some of them might be inhaling nitrous oxide.

The law, which went into effect in November 2021, is meant to prevent teenagers from using canned whipped cream to inhale nitrous oxide, otherwise known as “whippets.”

“Inhalants are invisible, volatile substances found in common household products that produce chemical vapors that are inhaled to induce psychoactive or mind-altering effects,” according to a US Drug Enforcement Administration factsheet.

Approximately 1 in 5 young people have used inhalants like whippits by the time they reach eighth grade, the DEA said. Abusing inhalants can “cause damage to the parts of the brain that control thinking, moving, vision, and hearing.”

I just can’t. The fear mongering from conflating nitrous oxide and other inhalants is pitiful.

Laughing gas, they are stopping adults from buying whipped cream because they might inhale some laughing gas.

As part of a “firearms enforcement blitz” from June 16 to July 31 in 41 southern Illinois counties, including St. Clair, Madison, Monroe, Clinton and Randolph counties, state police officers performed 710 “compliance checks,” which resulted in 295 people being “placed into compliance” with the state’s Firearms Owners Identification Card, or FOID card, law.

This Orwellian language actually means that the Illinois state police took people FOID cards from them and then forced those people to turn over their firearms. It would not surprise me if the Illinois state police keep records of who purchases what firearms. I know this did happen in Maryland. In Maryland you nad to fill out a 4473 and a MD version of the 4473 but with a lot more questions. The MD version was then sent to the state police and they kept records.

In the best of all worlds, these people would be people that had become prohibited persons under federal law. If you know that somebody is a prohibited person then it makes sense to revoke their FOID and require them to get rid of their firearms.

In order for one of these people to come into compliance they had to:

• Surrender their FOID card
• Transfer all firearms out of their possession
• Complete a firearms disposition record to detail the guns involved

Why do they need a firearms disposition record unless the IL state police are tracking what firearms people own. No wonder they hate firearms that are made by people for themselves according to federal law and according to the second amendment.

In still more Orwellian language:

Compliance checks are not about confiscating guns, but about ensuring individuals who have lost their firearms rights to transfer their firearms to law enforcement or someone who is legally able to possess them

Hmm, not confiscating guns… True, you have to transfer all firearms out of their possession. And they say right there that these people have lost their firearms rights. That means they are prohibited persons?

Nope, they don’t have to be a prohibited person to lose their FOID card and firearms rights within the state of Illinois. Law enforcement, school administrators and others are required to report when they believe a student or person should have their rights infringed.

Nearly 300 southern Illinoisans have to give up their firearms after gun rights revoked