Sad News

Corrections from Always On Watch in red.  Somehow I miscommunicated where Mr. AOW is on the timeline of life.

Mr AOW is on the verge of passing away after a brief struggle with kidney disease caused by long-term diabetes and high blood pressure.  He is now under hospice care.

Mr. AOW is a US Army veteran, Vietnam Era. He and Mrs AOW began dating 49 years ago this month.  They  married on June 17, 1972.  A lifetime with each other and living in the same house all those years!

He has been in poor health for years, and I just want to say that AOW is an incredibly strong and Godly woman who has taken care of her husband in their house while also teaching children. AOW is a stellar example of living one's wedding vows "in good times and bad, in sickness and in health."  Let's keep her and the soul of her soon to depart husband in our prayers.

Here is Mr. AOW's "ABOUT ME" from his blog:

I am a veteran of the Vietnam War Era and a political conservative even though I'm from Southern California.

I have been married over 40 years to the best blogger on the web: Always On Watch (aka AOW and Mrs. AOW).

Severely disabled by a brain hemorrhage in 2009, I still love life!

I have the use of only one hand, so my seek-and-find typing is very slow.  However, I do read and appreciate comments to my blog.

I believe that laughter is the best medicine.  Send me jokes!  I'm an equal opportunity insulter.  Heh.

Rest in Peace when your time comes, Mr. AOW.

Dems Play Politics, Repubs Play Pocket Pool

Silverfiddle Rant!

Casey Stengel is up there with fellow baseball great Yogi Berra for colorful quotes. Here are a couple that could apply to the fumble-fingered GOP:

"Been in this game one-hundred years, but I see new ways to lose 'em I never knew existed before."

"Can't anybody here play this game?"

Democrats know how to play the game.  Sandy Cortez scored bigtime and helped the beta boy in the process:

"Wow. We officially raised $1 million for Texas relief at 9:17pm.," she tweeted. "Thank you all so much. Folded hands I'm at a loss for words. Always in awe of movement work."

By Friday, she tweeted, that figure had risen to $2 million and she announced she was going to fly to Houston to join with Texas Rep. Sylvia Garcia to distribute supplies.

Meanwhile, Ted Cruz hit himself in the head with a ball bat... while striking out...

After returning to Houston on Thursday afternoon, Cruz told reporters outside his home it was "obviously a mistake" and that "in hindsight I wouldn't have done it."

Love her or hate her, Sandy knows how to play the game.

Meanwhile, the GOP can't catch a break.  Can they catch a clue?

Mega Dittos!

Silverfiddle Rant!

Rush Limbaugh has died.  Conservatives are mourning, and many sick, pathetic leftists who live bitter, shriveled lives are celebrating his death.

I am already on the record stating I gave up conservative talk radio years ago (is Hannity still on the air?) but I did hear Rush every now and then because my rightwing wife is a Rush 24/7 subscriber.

  

The man was indeed a unique talent, and I don't see anyone wearing the talk radio crown the way he did.  Big national talk radio is waning, and radio will eventually transition to something else, as it has continually done since Marconi and Tesla.

What is Rush's lasting legacy?

What did he mean to you?

Open forum, please stay on topic.  Be warned, if you respond to a cut-and-paste boilerplate spammer or a slobbering leftwing troll, your comment gets zapped along with the main comment.  That is just how Blogger works.

The Maoist State of America

Silverfiddle Rant!

Another day, another un-woke celebrity cancelled by the Red Guard...

The persecution of Gina Carano
Her sacking perfectly illustrates the hypocrisy and intolerance of the woke elites.

So far, she has not opted for a self-flagellating Maoist Struggle Session, which seems to be all the rage lately.  She must be smart enough to realize you cannot appease the baying mob.  

"The guillotine's thirst for blood is never slaked."

These theatrical self-shaming debasements all hit the same notes.  You could play word bingo with them: Systemic racism, inexcusable, painful, white privilege, people of color, etc...

...but the most disturbing aspects of the public self-accusations are the admissions of "ignorance," and the promise to "learn" (be reeducated).  This ends in a dark place.  I leave you with a few examples that could have been taken directly from historical accounts of Mao's Cultural Revolution:

NY Times food critic offered this obsequious self-mortification for criticizing a woman of color:

“I’m a white woman who has and will continue to benefit from white privilege and I recognize that makes what I said even more inexcusable and hurtful. The fact that it didn’t occur to me that I had singled out two Asian women is one hundred percent a function of my privilege (being blind to racial insensitivities is a discriminatory luxury).

My favorite, a florid burst of self-censure from the Poetry Foundation:

“To our community of contributors, subscribers, partners, and visitors which includes,” it noted, “but is not limited to, Black, Latinx, Indigenous, Middle Eastern, Asian, trans, non-binary, and queer people, undocumented and other immigrants, people with disabilities, and those struggling financially: we apologize for our silence in the face of crisis amid the call to dismantle institutional racism.”

The host of "The Bachelor" fell afoul of the Social Control Ministers at Ingsoc when he did not collapse into an attack of vapors and immediately organize the horsewhipping of a woman contestant who attended an antebellum themed party when she was in high school. 

His groveling self-rebuke hits all the required notes with an economy of words:

“What I now realize I have done is cause harm by wrongly speaking in a manner that perpetuates racism, and for that I am so sorry.”

"By excusing historical racism, I defended it. I invoked the term ‘woke police,’ which is unacceptable. I am ashamed over how uninformed I was. I was wrong,”

Here are quotes from a college professor's particularly operatic apology for the crime of extolling the virtues of college football: 

"I am sorry for the hurt, sadness, frustration, fatigue, exhaustion and pain this article has caused anyone, but specifically Black students in the higher education community and beyond," writes the Ohio State University professor. "I am struggling to find the words to communicate the deep ache for the damage I have done."

My center is as a learner, so movement for me will involve unlearning and relearning by listening, reading, dialoguing, reflecting and writing as a means for increasing my awareness and knowledge about systemic racism and the experiences of people of color and people who hold marginalized identities different from my own."

I am just beginning to understand how I have harmed communities of color with my words. I am learning that my words—my uninformed, careless words—often express an ideology wrought in whiteness and privilege. I am learning that my commitment to diversity has been performative, ignoring the pain the Black community and other communities of color have endured in this country. I am learning that I am not as knowledgeable as I thought I was, not as antiracist that thought I was, not as careful as I thought I was. For all of these, I sincerely apologize.

I know it's not anyone's job to forgive me, but I ask for it—another burden of a white person haunted by his ignorance.

In this last sad example, a former fighter pilot and Boeing executive apologizes for writing an article opposing women in combat.  33 years ago:

In an apology upon leaving the company for an article he wrote in 1987 opposing women in combat, then-Boeing executive Niel Golightly said the article was “painful because it is wrong. Painful because it is offensive to women. Painful because it reminds me of the sharp and embarrassing education the uninformed and unformed ‘me’ of that time received as soon as the piece appeared.”

This will not end well.

Links:

The Humiliating Art of the Woke Apology

Ohio State Professor Apologizes.  He is so very, very, so very sorry

Alison Roman apologizes again to Chrissy Teigen for her 'tone deaf remarks'

Jonathan Chait and MSNBC’s Chris Hayes Take Friendly Fire for Defending Fired Star Wars Actor Gina Carano: ‘Stop This Bullsh*t’

Swing and a miss! Strike two

Silverfiddle Rant!

CNN's Chris Cillizza splains...

Why Democrats blinked in the Senate impeachment trial

Poor Dems in government and the press are like the guy in the gay cowboy movie, still clinging to President Trump and declaring, "I just can't quit you!"

What say you?  Please sound off on the election, the aftermath, and this shabby impeachment.  Its an open thread.

How the Election was Stolen

Silverfiddle Rant!

Molly Ball has come out bragging about how she was privy to a cabal of powerful special interests that colluded to steal reelection from President Trump.

Joy Pullmann at The Federalist has the best analysis. I recommend it to anyone wanting to understand what happened.  

No voting machine corporations risking financial ruin to oust the bad orange man, no Russia-China-Venezuela conspiracy, no krakens, just good old fashioned political chicanery, Democrat party lawsuits, and changing the voter rules enough to provide space for mischief.

Here's the salient point from Pullmann's analysis:

Mail-in ballots are known as an unreliable voting method, even without its potential assistance to criminal fraud such as ballot-stuffing, because they create margins of error well within the margin of actual votes in a close election. That’s why labor unions, Jeff Bezos, and many foreign countries refuse to use them.

What that means is, the number of mail-in votes this election--which usually have rejection rates of 5 to 20 percent--was much greater than the margin of Biden's victory in the key battleground states he won, and rejection rates this election were miraculously almost zero.  

"They Rigged It"

First, the conspirators invented a crisis:

One of the core problems with the 2020 election is that many states did not follow their voting laws, suspending them with the excuse of COVID (which the Centers for Disease Control said the day before the election, after most votes were already cast, was not necessary).

The lawyers moved in to protect these ad-hoc changes, and then the press blanketed us with propaganda crafted to psychologically condition us to their planned outcome:

The article shows how these activists pushed a narrative that election results would not be known on election night as part of their campaign to box out Trump. It then openly admits to a subsequent orchestrated attempt to anoint Biden the winner before all the votes had been tallied. This is how leftists made their “fever dream” a reality.

The next part was easy. Poll workers had wide latitude to accept or reject mail-in ballots, the number of which was greater than the overall election margin:

Therefore, in a mail-in election such as 2020, in which half of the total votes and most of the Biden votes were mail-in, one can control the outcome simply by controlling the poll-watchers and vote-counters. Even if they are honest, their unconscious bias or the simple mayhem of unreadable handwriting and signatures creates the conditions for untrustworthy results.

We have no way of knowing how many of the approximately 65 million 2020 election mail-in ballots were legal — meaning, how many fully complied with all applicable state laws to be validly completed by eligible voters. It could be all of them. It might not be. Nobody with power seems to care to find out.

Please go read the whole article. If you must insist the election was stolen, this is the most logical theory.

See also:
No, the 2020 election wasn’t stolen — but yes, it was underhandedly tilted

LARPing towards Armageddon

Silverfiddle Rant!

We need to rise above "automated bot-level arguments" and beat back the "hyenas of social media"

The Realignment Podcast, Ep. 89: Eric Weinstein, Reckoning with Capitol Chaos and How to Save America

Eric Weinstein crystalizes into coherent thought so much of what is going on right now. He also points to the way out of the nuthouse and back to some societal sanity.

You can listen to the podcast here on this blog, at the Realignment podcast website, or on your smart phone with Spotify or Google Podcast app (all free).  I enjoy podcasts because I can listen in little bites on the way to work or while doing chores around the house.  The podcast player keeps track of where you were and you can pick it back up anytime.

Weinstein's Key Points:

Post WW II America has been a rare period in time and place blessedly free of the societal ructions and human catastrophes so common in human history. 

We have to "deprogram" our fellow citizens out on the fringes, offer redemption and welcome them back.

We must stop canceling people, even those we vehemently disagree with. Redemption is a basic human need.  It is healthy for people and societies.

Institutional Media is driving our societal destruction.

The extremes of MAGA and Woke are cults.

We are LARPing to Armageddon.

Joe Biden is worse than Neville Chamberlain. 

The Wuhan Lab Theory is viable, much of what the "experts" are telling us about covid is confusing and often not credible.

Our leaders have failed us.  Everyone born before 1964 needs to get off the stage. Younger people need to "stop playing in the present and prepare for the future."

Weinstein's interview starts at the 7 minute mark. Skip to the 8 minute mark if you are impatient.  The first 10 minutes or so are Weinstein describing how deception, fakery and role-playing are a big part of the public displays we are witnessing.  From there he proceeds to criticize the talking heads who ascribe "meaning" to unfolding events as clueless, incurious, historically-ignorant half-wits no more qualified than you or me to provide commentary.

Taking A Break From The Web

Time for me to take a break from blogging, from Twitter, and from Facebook — and from watching and reading the news, too.  

We are helplessly watching the systematic dismantling of our republic.  As far as I'm concerned, every person who voted for Joe Biden is the enemy of our republic — and my enemy.  Really.

I can't keep watching and cataloguing the decline of our beloved republic:  

The watching and cataloguing of the above are literally making me sick.

Moreover, Mr. AOW's condition has declined, and he needs more caregiving now. 

It's all I can do to teach a few hours a week and keep up with the home front. 

The last thing that my mother said to me before she died in 1987: "Don't hurt your health."

I'm going to take Mom's advice.  For the sake of my health, after over fifteen years of intense blogging, I'm not going to spend much time on the web for the foreseeable future.

Take care.

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