Day: April 13, 2021

Closing Thought–13Apr21

For awhile now we have been bombarded by the lame conspiracies fro that group of morons that call themselves QAnon….and then their part in the insurrection of 06 January is well documented….regardless of the many that disavow their part in the craziness of that day.

Personally, I believe that those idiots that embrace the QAnon BS are mentally challenged……much like the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers….those overweight in-bred dickless idiots.

But maybe there is something to what I am feeling about QAnon……

Many who believe in QAnon, the notorious far-right conspiracy, may have mental illnesses. While QAnon followers believe in a lot of things, the central tenet of their complicated and ever-changing belief system is that national Democrats, aided by Hollywood and a group of so-called global elites, are running a ring devoted to the abduction, trafficking, torture, sexual abuse, and cannibalization of children — rituals of their Satanic faith. And former President Donald Trump is the only person willing and able to mount an attack against them.

Sophia Moskalenko, a research fellow in social psychology, Georgia State University, during research for ‘Pastels and Pedophiles: Inside the Mind of QAnon’, a forthcoming book she co-authored with security scholar Mia Bloom, noticed that QAnon followers are “different from the radicals I usually study in one key way: They are far more likely to have serious mental illnesses.”

As per court records of QAnon followers arrested in the wake of the January 6 Capitol insurrection, 68 percent reported that they had received mental health diagnoses. This was analyzed by Michael Jensen and Sheehan Kane for ‘Profiles of Individual Radicalization in the United States’, a research project “dedicated to improving the understanding of the human causes and consequences of terrorism”.

https://meaww.com/most-q-anon-followers-mentally-ill-capitol-riot-68-percent-diagnosed-study-sophia-moskalenko-radicals

That does it for me.

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”

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A Senate Of One

Let’s talk about that institution that is about as worthless as its members……the US Senate..

With two Senators from each state, the U.S. Senate is a geographical body, not a democratic body. The two Senators from California represent more people than the 44 Senators representing the smallest 22 states. That makes the U.S. Senate neither representative nor democratic.

That boils down to one thing……Eleven percent of the population gets to veto anything the other 89 percent agree to!

Steve O’Keefe explained why the Senate is undemocratic…..

The 17th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution called for the direct election of Senators by the voters of their states. Prior to that, Senators were appointed by state legislatures. Something must have happened to compel two-thirds of the states — the super-majority required under the Constitution — to change how Senators were chosen. What was it?

Graft. The way Senators were appointed is they bribed influential state legislators to appoint them. Consequently, Senators tended to be the wealthiest, most repugnant people in the commonwealth who could not possibly earn the vote of a majority of their constituents. Hard to believe, but 100 years ago Senators were hated even more than Senators are hated today.

With direct election of Senators came the 11% solution. The filibuster was meant to protect the ability of minority opinions to be heard but it has had the opposite effect. At first, it did allow Senators the ability to speak their mind, with 60% of the Senate required to shut a Senator up. Crafty Senators realized the power of the filibuster was not stalling popular legislation, but eliminating the ability of the Senate to conduct any other business around the filibusters.

A deal was cut to allow the ordinary business of the Senate to proceed in exchange for requiring 60 votes on any legislation where any one Senator indicated an intention to filibuster. A marvel of Democracy the Senate is not! One Senator can force any law to require a supermajority, Senators representing as few as 11% of the people can block a super-majority, and it takes a super-duper-majority of 34 states to change the rules. Who came up with this system? Oh yeah, white wealthy land “owners.” Hey, that sort of describes the Senate we have now.

The Senate GOP is broken….and the Dems are trying to repair the damage but they will fail…..why?

Joe Manchin (D-WV).

Here is what Manchin thinks of the voting rights legislation he will be considering….

Joe Manchin, who thinks of himself as the new Kingpin of the Senate, says he’ll oppose any voting rights legislation that doesn’t have the backing of Trump supporters:

The only thing I would caution anybody and everybody about is that we had an insurrection on January 6, because of voting, right? … We should not, at all, attempt to do anything that would create more distrust and division.

Seriously?

This wholly owned by the wealthy bucks all efforts to move forward….he is against $15 an hour, he opposes the end of the filibuster, he is against tax increases on the wealthy (to be fair he opposes 29% tax and supports 25% increase)….and he is a Democrat.

Manchin is relishing the idea that he is in control of the Senate……”Joe Manchin represents a state that is 1/22 the population of California and 92% white yet he can singlehandedly block policies supported by 70-80% of Americans,” noted Ari Berman of Mother Jones. “This is why the U.S. Senate is so broken.”

One person is in control and progress will come to a screeching halt…..

Partial list of Biden agenda items that are toast in the Senate if the filibuster remains: • $15 minimum wage • Universal gun background checks • Dream Act • “For The People” Act • John Lewis voting rights act • ACA public option • Equality Act • George Floyd police bill

This should not be happening…..time to cease this type of control from ever happening again.

Do you want one person capable of bringing this democracy to its knees?

If the filibuster is removed then this person would lose all his power and the country can enact programs that move the progress forward.

NO one man deserves this much power in this republic.

Be Smart!

Learn Stuff!

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”

 

A Cold War Reboot?

I admit it I am old…..I lived through the original Cold War for most of my life and even witnessed the death of the old Soviet Union….when the USSR died it was hailed as a new beginning of a world that would be at peace and prosperous.

Well the world got more prosperous thanks in part to the advent of globalization….the peace part has yet to be achieved.

While we await the promise of peace the US is stirring the pot for a reboot of the policies of the Cold War.

This time the new ‘enemy’ is China…..

There has been lots of rhetoric around the ‘China Problem’…..and now the Senate has made it official that we are rebooting the Cold War….

The Senate Foreign Relations Committee announced a new piece of bipartisan legislation to confront China through prioritized military spending and more arms sales in the Indo-Pacific, sanctions, money for “democracy promotion” in Hong Kong, and other areas where the US seeks to counter Beijing.

The legislation still needs to go through the Committee before being introduced in the Senate, but a draft of the bill, titled the Strategic Competition Act of 2021, was released by Senator Bob Menendez (D-NJ), the Committee chairman. Menendez negotiated the bill with Committee Ranking Member Jim Risch (R-ID).

In a release on the Committee’s website, the 281-page bill was described as the “first major proposal to bring Democrats and Republicans together in laying out a strategic approach towards Beijing — and assuring that the United States is positioned to compete with China across all dimensions of national and international power for decades to come.” Menendez is convening a Committee meeting on April 14th for a vote on the legislation.

The bill calls for the US to strengthen military ties in the Indo-Pacific through arms sales. The bill reads: “The United States should design for export to Indo-Pacific allies and partners capabilities critical to maintaining a favorable military balance in the region, including long-range precision fires, air and missile defense systems, anti-ship cruise missiles, land attack cruise missiles, conventional hypersonic systems, intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance capabilities, and command and control systems.”

Senate Unveils Sweeping Legislation to Confront China

The Cold War will be rebranded  as well as the reboot…..

When it comes to future conflicts or present-day war games, they have all the advantages and we have none! Or as Eric Edelman, a former undersecretary of defense for policy, told CNN recently, “Russia and China are playing a home game, we are playing an away game.” And mind you, we’re talking about a home game that could stretch from the Baltic Sea and the Arctic regions of Eurasia to the South China Sea. Those two “near-peer rivals” (as the U.S. military has taken to calling them) seem to have all the luck. I mean, count on one thing: imagined future flare points for conflict – “a fictional global crisis erupting on multiple fronts” in those war games – won’t be in the Caribbean, off New York City, or near the Baja Peninsula. As a result, the US will have to be fully prepared, at staggering expense, to deploy and support forces thousands of miles away for the future conflicts the Pentagon is now imagining.

Fortunately, that military is, it seems, planning ahead for just such a future. As CNN’s Barbara Starr recently reported, this summer it’s going to engage in highly classified computer war games with two near-peer enemies with fictional names. No one, however, should doubt for a second that they will be China and Russia. This will happen just as the next Pentagon budget is being set in place and, in a recent exercise gaming out a future conflict against such adversaries, an anonymous Defense Department official confirmed to Starr that “we found the Blue Team, the US and allies, kept losing.”

The Cold War, Rebooted and Rebranded

We are returning to the ‘good old days’ of the Cold War…..that will mean more and more taxpayer cash will flow into the Pentagon and the rest of the nation will suffer.

Time to invest in some form of diplomacy….and leave the weapons and threats aside……but sadly talk does not equate into profit for the defense industry….and we all know it is more about that than the good of the nation.

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”