Category: Conservatism

Boris the Loris

Posted on by Vladimir

Boris Johnson is, without a doubt, the biggest political disappointment in my personal panoply of choices throughout my life.

When Boris wriggled his way into the limelight and he looked like he was going to be the man to actually lead Great Britain into the new golden age. Giving the impression to the electorate that he was going to be ferocious in their interest. He was going to be the firm and confident hand that would guide Britain out of Europe, would be the man to make trade agreements and alliances throughout the globe and who would also start pushing the advantages of infrastructure toward the north of the country.

Then came Covid 19.

And the pressure of the crisis revealed the true character of Boris Johnson. He got infected and had a rough time of it. Contrast his approach to getting the disease, to the 74 year old Donald Trump who was fiercely brash about getting over it as soon as he could, pushing his medical staff to treat him with Regeneron, an experimental antibody cocktail, to excellent result. Boris was very ill. Maybe he tried to get back too fast -but whatever reason he has become almost hors de combat in the real challenges facing Britain. He has been seen to ally himself to The Great “Green” Proposed swindle.

Boris has laid forward a plan to ban the sale of petrol and diesel vehicles in the UK in 2030. A masterly piece of seeming to be revolutionary and visionary without actually taking responsibility for what actually happens. In 2030 working people in the UK will be forced to take on expensive-to-buy and maintain electric vehicles, most of the people will try to cling onto the cars they already paid for and own and try to get even more mileage out of them because they will lack the spare 20K Pounds or so to afford the rich libs’ toy. But that doesn’t seem to worry Boris – after all the chances he will be PM in 2030? Crashing madly toward zero as things stand.

He claims to be an environmental “believer” yet he is embarking on a course which is going to require the extraction and production of untold millions of batteries requiring huge supplies of mined materials. All of which are abroad, all of which will be imported. He will dump this on the British people and economy in the hope that no-one has a clue as to what is going to happen when, after around 8 years the batteries in the new cars are going to need to be replaced – and what will happen with the extremely polluting used ones?

The title of this article is “Boris the Loris”.

Pygmy Slow Loirs

Most people don’t know that a Slow Loris is a cute furry little mammal that has one outstanding characteristic. It is venomous. The only primate that is (and one of only very few mammals).

Perhaps the one comfort we can take from “Boris the Loris” and his venomous behavior, is that when the fight comes over the Green Scam , Boris’s support for that planned scam will be as poisonous and toxic as his plan to lead Britain to greatness was.

Secure elections need secure voter confirmation

Posted on by Vladimir

In all the “sturm und drang” about stolen elections, the threats of lawsuits, the mathematical “proofs” that there must have been fraud. Rumors of election machines that change votes fake boxes arriving etc etc. One thing seems very clear to me.

The problem is not what we think it is.

The idea of a free election is that no-one knows how each individual voted. The process we have separates the physical voting from the counting. Or, at least it is supposed to.

We are about to embark on two run off elections in Georgia for the two Senate seats there. The elections will happen on January 5th. Inauguration is January 20th 2021. This is IMPORTANT.

It is safe to say that there is going to be enormous pressure and vast amounts of campaign cash flying around.

How do we work to ensure that this election is a secure as it can be? How do we help prevent any suggestion of hi-jack?

There will be lots of organization and money involved in turning out the vote. The GOP probably has observers named for the vote counting.

But there is a gaping hole in this process. Especially for mail in ballots.

The verification of the vote is based on the envelope. Before the envelope is opened the signature on the envelope needs to be scanned and approved. There is also another step that needs to be done.

The envelope needs to have a code that is tied to the voter who is submitting it. Both the envelope and the signature should be scanned and, if they do not match they must NOT be opened. Period. Bear with me for a few moments. The key point is to PREVENT false votes entering the system.

There need to be observers at every in-person voting station and they need to verify, by inspection, that the voter is correctly checked in by the judges. A count must be kept of a) verified voters who have cast ballots b) the number of ballots in the boxes . The observers (Dem and GOP) need to be able to verify the information and to sign the affidavit that reports how many votes were received at that polling station.

There are anecdotal reports from various voting locations that Party observers were either prevented from accessing the polling station or were prevented form being able to observe the verifications or the counting. There needs to be a mechanism for enforcing the needed access. If an observer is prevented from entering a polling station there needs to be IMMEDIATE action. The polling place should be flagged, the overseeing authority needs to be immediately informed. Everything at that polling place should be sequestered from the vote.

There is more to this than these steps. Voting machines must be tested beforehand and must be checked and signed off on by technical experts from each main party involved. Each machine. No exceptions – including any slated as substitutes. The location of each machine needs to be specified and logged. Each machine needs to be tested after use as well to make sure it is functioning correctly.

I do not know all the wrinkles and in and outs. But what I do know is that once the votes are separated from the voters it is almost IMPOSSIBLE to then prove fraud. You can assert it with confidence based on mathematics but it is the gateway that needs to be protected and verified – for in-person voting by ballot of by machine and for write in ballots with the envelope and direct correlation of envelope, signature and code for the voter.

No mailed in ballot that has been opened before election day should be allowed in the system unless there is a proven way to do it with all observing parties present and to sign off on the totals of verified ballots received.

If the GOP does not organize to take care of business in this regard then we kiss goodbye to sorting out anything afterwards as we are finding out now.

You cannot un-stir the cream out of the coffee once it has been added. Once you have opened the door to adding illegal votes to the process you lose the ability to control the integrity of the election.

Idiot Khan and Dick loose in London

Posted on by Vladimir

Sadiq Khan is Mayor of London. He is a pompous blowhard who pretends to a socially progressive agenda. There appears to be no racist trope that he does not subscribe to.


The Guardian Newspaper in the UK is a squishy liberal apologist toilet roll of a publication.

Here is a link to an article that is in The Guardian and about Sadiq Khan’s plans for the Metropolitan Police force in London.

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2020/nov/13/met-police-told-40-of-recruits-must-be-from-bame-backgrounds?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

The astounding thing is that the article comes within a gnat’s whisker of actually being useful.

I am, personally, not a fan of the British Police as an institution. In fact in many ways I despise their performance and management. But! The police I knew who lived where I lived? Not a problem at all. They knew most of us, they drank in the same pub. Somewhere in the 60’s and 70’s the Home Office decided that it needed to cheapen the police force and spread it thinner so that it would appear that they were being “efficient” and the era of “Panda Cars” was born. By the years at the start of the new millennium they had become “Pander Cars” in that the police sat in the cars and ignored what they were seeing in areas like Rotherham, Manchester, Oxford, Huddersfield, Rochdale. They missed or enabled or tolerated the activities of known sexual abusers because they were afriad (in some cases) of being seen as “racist”. That is th elevel of the leadership in the police forces of Britain today. Too afraid to deal with crime but very sensitive to criticism of being racist.

And now Khan and the current “leader” of the met Police , Cressida Dick, want to validate the fear of racism by balkanizing policing in the British capital based on race.
If only they had followed through on the original thought – recruit people from the community. Not by race. Just people who wish to be of service to their town, village, area, . Recruit and do the requisite, thorough, background checks, give these men and women solid , professional training and a rewarding job and career. Keep them trained, keep them there. Subsidized housing, professional treatment. Have a strata of support but defer to the leadership of the local constable in all matters in the local community. ALL MATTERS. Stop treating the people who sit in offices as the “elite” and start treating the “plods” as the elite.

Above all – stop trying to treat policing in the communities as an afterthought and start with respect.

Let Khan and Dick run this kind of thing and you will have a racially stratified police and community where merely talking to someone is going to become a careful algorithm of race, class, location, language – even caste. That will reduce policing and move even more resources not into policing the community but in servicing the slew of racial requirements using increasing numbers of civil servants eating the policing budget.

Billionaire Socialist is an Oxymoron.

Posted on by Vladimir

Why do Billionaires pay for the Democrat Party? Why does so much of the “old Money” in San Francisco, LA, New York, Boston help fund the party that is, supposedly, the party of Marx, Engels, Trotsky and Lenin?

Though cowards flinch and traitors sneer..
Karl and Freddy

Well… could it be they are concerned about not paying their fair share of the national need?  Is it because they think the gap between have and have not in society needs to be reduced and that Dems are the troops for the job? Could it be that the likes of Hoyer, Bloomberg,  Hoffman, Powell Jobs, Geffen Benioff and the long list of Dem billionaire donors are so filled with their gut wrenching guilt over their “whiteness” that they feel they need to fund a political party just to abuse them?

Or do they have their own reasons which actually make sense?

First of all – people who have money generally like to keep it and the goodies that go with wealth.

People who inherit wealth seem to go in two different ways – they spend their inheritance profligately and become fodder for various magazines around the world. Or they tend to be careful with their trust fund, keep it safe and seek to grow it to pass on their heirs.  But most people who make their pile, wish, within reason to keep most of it.

So why would they be out there sending money to the Democrats?

This hinges on the difference between “Wealth” and “Income”.

The recent NYT article that attempted to cast President Trump in a bad light (has there been an article in the NYT in the last 4 years that has NOT sought to cast DJT in a bad light? Answers on a postcard please ) made much of him only paying $750 dollars in Federal income tax in one year (they of course, forgot to add in the tax credit he used for a couple of million but fairness was not the look they were going for).

Whoa Nelly! How could a gazillionaire pay so little? This is Criminal!!!! Well, not so fast cowboy or cowgirl.  No-one is taxed on how much money they HAVE. They get taxed on their earnings, just like us little folks. And they can use their money to make sure that professionals do their tax returns to minimize their payments.  Now if they are seen to support higher rates of taxation rest assured, they are quite happy for those below them in the income pyramid to pay more.

But the impact of such increased taxation is much higher on those lower down the pyramid. Most people are paying as they earn for their future, their family, and their security and well-being. Most of us are paying off our house or paying rent. Fair enough. We have a certain ‘nut’ that we have to make each month to keep our noses above the water line. But there comes a point in the scale where most of the necessities are taken care of, the house is paid for, the earnings provide more than enough. Regular expenses are not a monthly concern. Keep saving and you will have reserves to last quite a while, earn even more and you will be able to buy things that you don’t need.

So if the super earners decide that taxes should be increased what they are saying is that YOU – Joe Schlub – need to pay more of your paycheck in taxes and fees. But that will impact you in other ways – less money for savings for emergencies, less money for kid’s school or college, longer payback on the mortgage. Less expensive holidays. Now add to that support from the well off for things like higher taxes on energy – that increase is paid by everyone.  From the poor to the rich. And the impact is heaviest on the poor, not the rich.

People seem to have forgotten that many politicians have become rich from their government positions Many of the top Dems are millionaires – and they are not the only ones.

So why are the Extremely wealthy underwriting all this? Why do rich wealthy celebs send money to bail out street thugs who get arrested for criminal acts under the guise of “protest”? Why do they push for increased taxation and increased regulation (that results in extra taxation paid by the poor)?

They wish to avoid taxes on wealth. Socialism is all about seizing the wealth of the rich for redistribution to everyone. Not the “income” – the “wealth”.  Imagine what the tax bill would be for Michael Bloomberg if he had to pay a certain percentage of the worth of all his owned properties, businesses, bank accounts every year? Or any billionaire.

What makes the Dems hold off? Well the leadership are millionaires and certainly do not wish to have their own smaller applecart upset, also, threaten to do it and billionaires will asset strip the USA so fast and transfer the wealth to Abu Dhabi, Switzerland and other, saner places. And the tax base of the USA would crumble. Remember this other fact – the top 10% of EARNERS pay 70 % of the income tax paid in the USA.

The Billionaires seem to have realized that paying a little more in taxes. Putting a little largess about to the upper tiers of the leftist organizations and they can feed the alligator of socialism with the work and bread of the middle class in the hope that they will be eaten last. They get away with it because if you scratch a socialist you find a greedy little person underneath.

Just remember one major thing here – there is nothing, in law, preventing any billionaire (or millionaire for that matter) from liquidating all his or her assets, turning them into cash, using some of the cash as a trust fund to live on for the rest of his or her days in total security taking just one property as a family home, and then giving the remainder to the government. It is totally legal. How many have done it?

Instead Billionaire Gates gave his fortune to a private “charity” that he runs, and which does what he says. Did not have much faith in the ability of the Government to use his money wisely. Though Bill does have absolute faith in them to use my and your money wisely.

Government Fear is the thing to fear the most.

Posted on by Vladimir

Covid 19. The Wuhan Virus, Kung Flu, the CCP Virus – it is certainly “big news” and it has certainly shut down the normal operations of a good part of the planet.

I am not a virologist or a medical anything. Closest I have ever come to being a medical person is working in IT at a Hospital. However, I do have a fair amount of recent unwanted knowledge and experience with health care which does give me a view on the way this virus is being handled.

Back when this started to get on my radar – same as for other people I guess – back at the end of January and beginning of February I was fairly in-synch with the view going around that we needed to head off the sudden tsunami of sickness that would sweep away the Health Care industry if the virus was anywhere near as bad as it looked like it might be.  We needed to slow the rise, we needed to give ourselves time to ramp up services so that when the sequestration was over – two weeks – and the infection started barreling through the populace – our front line people would have what they need to deal with the demand.

But some areas were slow to respond, some didn’t respond some got to it later than others. So now we have opinions all over the place. The one thing we have not had, just making an observation here, is an overwhelmed medical system. Though NY came close, I think.

But now we have a rotating random series of lockdowns, mask mandates, partial closures and so on with no real rhyme or reason.

But what we still have are many vast reservoirs of uninfected people. There are approximately 365 million people in the USA, 8.2 million reported “cases” (don’t know if a “case” is a positive test or positive symptoms). That means that there are over 300 million uninfected people.

The first question that comes to my mind is – have the resources to deal with a flood of virus cases been put into place? Has the vast amount of money that has been spent put us in a safer position? Because unless we UN – lock we are going to run out of money.  If there is no functioning economy, things are going to get progressively worse and a LOT of people are going to be deep in the fiscal doo-doo.

The trouble we face right now is that politicians and pundits alike have not stated what they consider to be a manageable level of infection rate? No-one that I have seen – and thanks to lock-down I have a lot of time to read and to check online and on video – has stated what they consider to be the acceptable level of infection that can be managed.

This means that they are free to act upon their own “whim” or how they perceive it will benefit them the best.

The simplicity is that there is a virus, it is going to infect people until an effective vaccination is developed and there is no guarantee that this holy grail will be found in a swift and timely manner.

Government leaders have to make decisions – unfortunately those decisions mean that some people are going to die. Let’s be straight here – people die every day. They die from infections, injuries, illness, malfeasance and accidents. The Government and the Civil Servants cannot change any of that.  But still the Government Leaders and the Civil Servants keep scurrying around trying anything to avoid making a decision which they may be called to account for. So they keep picking out courses of action where they try to fend off “infection”. All the time knowing that the infection is going to show up every time people start intermingling after been sequestered.

The Government needs to be transparent in its actions. It needs to state how many seriously ill pandemic patients the system can deal with. Then it needs to track back from that to how many “positive tests” will result in that number of serious cases and that needs to be set as the public threshold. Simple, and tough. Please note that the large majority of patients requiring serious care actually recover – even those who are most at risk.

The Government needs to be the thing it fears the most.

Transparent.

The Grating of the Awokening

Posted on by Vladimir

Much has been made in the past few days of the “Great Awokening” (h/t The Federalist). The almost lemming like urgency with which the professional sports associations are hurling themselves over the cliff in their pursuit of appearing to care.

The problem they keep running into is that the NFL, NBA, MLB and perhaps even the lesser lights of NASCAR and MLS actually do not care about their fans and certainly do not understand them. At all.

Let me bring forth an example – I picked two of the NFL “Good guys” for this example. Two men, great players in the league, very successful, beloved by fans and men who have given tremendous support to the community while having great careers. I picked Warrick Dunn and JJ Watt. Well JJ Watt kind of picked himself as my example because it is his statement at the Chiefs – Texans game that prompted me to write this little blog post.

Both Mr Dunn and Mr Watt are successful professional athletes, Both of them are know for their supportive work for the community. Warrick Dunn for his initiative to get single parent families into their own houses and JJ for his work rising funds to help the City of Houston after the devastating hurricane Harvey and floods.

Last Thursday the Texans and the Chiefs organizations decided that they were going to have various demonstrations of “support” for better Racial conditions in the USA, more awareness of others, all in support of quieting the current situation where there are riots in Democrat run cities where activists threaten ever increasing mayhem.

Into this tempest in a teacup the NFL (and NBA and MLB) decided that they should be telling their fans how they, the organizations, felt about it all. So they decided that they would have demonstrations of their support for such divergent activities a Black Lives Matter, Police Funding, Defunding and other such stuff. They decided that these demonstrations, the names on helmets words in the end zone would be added to let the fans know, what they should think as well.

So when the two teams of players at the game in KC went through their show unity, when they had stood or knelt at various parts of the intros, there was some surprise that the fans at the game were booing. It didn’t appear to the Management that they understood that their fans had come to see professional Football. They had not paid for tickets for some sort of revival tent meeting.

JJ Watt made the following observation to the Press:

“The moment of unity I personally thought was good,” the star defensive end told reporters after the game. “I mean the booing during that moment was unfortunate. I don’t fully understand that. There was no flag involved. There was nothing involved other than two teams coming together to show unity.”

Now I think JJ was being mild here. Don’t get me wrong. But what this shows is that he – hero though he is – does not understand the roles of performer and fan. If he and his fellows had wanted to have a moment of unity and shout out – they certainly have enough money to have paid for a minute of commercial time to film them doing it which they could have paid to run, as a commercial during the game. Why not? Or, better yet they could have had their private moment – private.

Not because what they were doing was wrong. It is neither right nor wrong it just is.  It is the expressed attitude that the time attention and money of the audience, the fan is something that the players and the owners are free to exploit to make themselves feel better, even at the expense of the actual reason everyone is there.

People support sports teams for a variety of reasons. Most of us support the teams we grew up with, the ones our family supported back in the fun days of our youth. WE find reasons to like our team and the players that play for them – the players make us believe that they care about this team, this location these fans and we like to think that this could be possible. So, for a few hours every week we can all have our own little fairy tale that we are part of and we can enjoy it. We can enjoy it even when our team fights hard and loses, or plays badly and wins.

I admire people who can perform athletic tasks at levels I would not even dare dream of. I love watching good rugby, football, cricket, American Football, Baseball. I have absolutely no desire, at all, to be lectured by those players about real life. I do not care about their opinions or their woes – in much the same way as I do not expect them to care about my opinions or woes.  Play the game you contracted to play.

Yes, I agree it seems a small, annoying point that I am making. But I ask you to consider this simple scenario

The world itself is not made a better place by professional sports. There are no great civilizational advances to lay at the feet of the businessmen the coaches or the players. It is a mighty big footprint in a bowl of water. Lift it out and it disappears.

The whole of this edifice is created and balanced on a fantasy – as I described above – the  professional players get paid to play and act like they care about the team, the city the fans, and we pay our money to be entertained and to hope that, just maybe, they might actually care.

And that runs just fine.

Until the mask slips and they show, surprisingly, that they really do not care. They do not understand that they are being paid by the attention money and presence of the fan. Without it – they are just people in a sandbox playing a weird game.

And when the fantasy gets punctured – as JJ Watt just did – suddenly what has been raw passion becomes something less, something uncomfortable. Maybe it will continue but decline, but it will change because Cognitive Dissonance demands an accommodation.

Should American Football disappear – and it looks like they are managing themselves into a decline – fans will just find something else to watch.  The more reasons and discomfort you put their way – the more they will look for something else. Here’s a thought for every posturing athlete – from a fan.

I cannot, truly, pass on my disgust and irritation at being lectured by people who have been blessed with physical gifts that have enabled them to indulge a privileged lifestyle and to be handsomely recompensed for doing so – because of people like me paying for it. If you wish to be paid to lecture me you are going to have be a damned sight more intelligent than the crap you are doing in public makes you appear to be and much more eloquent and reasoned in your presentations.

The “Kabuki Riots” of the Left

Posted on by Vladimir

The current wave of riots and disturbances are NOT worthy of the attention they are getting. First of all – they are small groups – threatening? Yes, certainly in the confines of a street a couple of hundred people seeking to threaten and brawl ARE threatening – but only in that street.

And be sure to note that these little vignettes are being played out in Democrat controlled cities. Not across the country. When law enforcement in cities, counties and states makes it very clear that the laws will be enforced then the little ‘moblets’ find other, softer targets to attack. The objective is not to “seize power” – in most of the cities like Seattle Portland, Chicago, Denver, Saint Louis the city administration is so busy sucking up to them it’s a wonder the city councils and Mayors are not squirming on the ground out in the streets eagerly showing their bellies to all and sundry.

This is a grand distraction. The Democrats have nothing to offer, they are busily defending a candidate who cannot talk coherently and a VP candidate who has more baggage than street shopping cart lady. All they can do is point to widely photographed pictures of small riots and claim there is unrest in the country.

They are trying to keep President Trumps continuing drumbeat of good, recovering economic news, foreign affairs accomplishments and the fact that for the past four years most minorities have never had better economic gains than they have when being led by President Trump.

Actually, the country is doing OK considering what we have been through. People are getting on with living helping each, starting to open things hope, hoping to do a bit more next and the week after. You know, the American way.

This is violent street theater. It is being used for obfuscation. It needs to be dealt with directly by law enforcement and local DAs actually doing their jobs and wide ranging RICO and anti-terrorist investigations being done that actually start to tie the funding and logistics to the correct parties.

The Cloudy Atmosphere

Posted on by Vladimir

I read an article today on Ars Technica a site I keep track of though I find it inadequate in many respects, not because of bad writing – the article itself is well written – but because the people writing and editing on this site very rarely try to present a rounded picture.


https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/06/us-poll-shows-broad-support-for-renewables-climate-measures/#p3


The article is about how Climate Change and tackling it have become more important to a majority of Americans and how there is a majority who favor supporting the expansion of renewable energies and increasing government regulation to encourage it;

While it's intriguing to see how many people accept reality, it’s the questions about energy policy that produce the most interesting answers. When asked about whether the US should prioritize developing wind and solar energy or expanding oil, natural gas, and coal, 79 percent chose renewables. That’s considerably higher than Pew’s polls from just a few years ago. That number is the partly due to strengthening support among Democrats, but it’s also the result of growth among Republicans in the last few years—65 percent of whom chose renewables.


This seems like a fairly innocuous commentary – borne out by surveys. The USA is becoming more “Climate Aware”!

But is it really? Did the survey ask the key question – what are you willing to pay in money or inconvenience to achieve the improvements you say you support? How much more per gallon on gasoline? What percentage increase in your electricity bill? What increases in your personal taxation will you support to do this? That is the key about support.

Like a lot of conservatives I am a fan of doing more with less. If we had the money our house would be solar powered and off the grid. As it is we are on our own well and we have a septic system and, should good fortune smile we would install solar not because of fears of Climate Change or Ars Technica articles – but because it is neater and more self reliant. Though I say that in the sure and certain knowledge that, should it become viable for people in our kind of demographic to afford a full off the grid solar set up we would immediately be attacked for the materials used in the panels.

It is easy to get people to say they support programs and initiatives that they do not have to personally pay for. I myself am totally willing to enact a hefty tax, payable by journalists and leftist think tanks exclusively, to fund better gun safety and training in schools. I have my doubts that it would pass, though it should.

I stopped listening to the left and the likes of Ars Technica on the day I realized that they are opposed to Nuclear Power which is the ONLY mass scalable energy supply that has a viable, no emission future.

It has never been about “climate”.

Tweet Twitter, Tweet. Twits

Posted on by Vladimir

There is an interesting phenomenon going on in our society. It is a phenomenon that most have heard of, the vast majority never use or pay attention to it specifically yet it is being used to drive the hysteria that is currently exploding across our country.

It is “Twitter”.

Probably the most self absorbed talking group imaginable.

For the people who are wrapped up in it, Twitter is all important. It is where most of the mainstream media goes to get leads for stories. But more than that – they read tweets in the effort to get to what they think are the concerns and state of mind of “The man on the Clapham Omnibus” . (That reference is to a metaphor describing a reasonably well educated man, ordinary and reasonable that was used by a judge in England to give a picture of “ordinary people” as guidance for a jury). Rather than getting outside of their bubble of comfort, they “research” on Twitter.

But Twitter is not representative of anything other than a place where people fire off short pithy (sometimes mildly interesting) messages, or to snark at others. It is, in short, the place where gossips gather. And nobody else. The main consumers of the Twitter Brand are consultants (PR and political), politicians and a whole layer of people who dabble and scrabble. There are also many many accounts called ‘bots’ these are accounts set up to auto generate tweets whenever certain key words are used – in this way a large amount of tweets are generated and it all looks like an angry blizzard when it is. For the most part it is “sound and fury signifying nothing” to quote Shakespeare. So what we have are algorithms being triggered by keywords in some tweets which unleashes a storm of bot driven traffic. This storm then generates fear in the hearts of the PR people who have bought into the “Oh Twitter is the voice of the people” and they encourage their principals to follow the suggestions of the triggered bot mob.

The problem then becomes that many organizations, concerned over their “image” and wanting to be “out in front” of things use the impressions that their PR people have gathered from their exhaustive work on Twitter (cough, ahem) and then take what they think is remedial action. This leads to ludicrous examples of virtue signaling – the CEO of Chik-Fil-A washing the feet of black people – not sure what he thought he was making up for with that. Or the Police Chief that kneels in response to a crowd. All the kinds of things that make most people go “what on earth????”

The truth is that most people that I have met in the USA are just not racist. They either do not care enough to be racist, or they are too busy working on the exact same issues that all races are working on – how to hold a good job, make a good marriage, bring up good children and have a great life. IN my 67 years of living in Europe, the UK and the USA I have never bumped into anyone who even mentioned “white supremacy” – ever. I have met people who had generalized bad impressions of different nationalities but race was not the common denominator causing the dislikes.

I fear we have come to a point in the USA – and possibly in the West where the collapse of trust and credit in the media is irreversible. For too long the media has seen itself as being above the people it is supposed to inform, the media itself has been beholden to groups of partisans who wish to see an agenda advanced and not a populace informed.

As for the corporations that jump and shy at everything that doesn’t reek of rainbows and unicorns – there is a Darwinian force at work, I think, which will, eventually work itself out and not to the advantage of the virtue signaling prone. Again I have yet to talk to or with any friends who are impressed with the likes of Amazon, Taylors of Harrogate Yorkshire Tea, the Premier League in the UK, Facebook et al and their seemingly endless desires to impress upon us that we are sadly in need of educating by the woke businessmen. Time will tell. I think the companies that will come to the fore will be those who prove that they stand for themselves and are content to let their customers do as they wish.

What does “Matter”?

Posted on by Vladimir

The group, Black Lives Matter, is not a group to fight racism. It is clear from their literature that they are about getting some racism of their own approved and working. If they were “against racism” they would have joined in campaigning against the blatantly racist policies of New York High Schools against Asian students when it comes to applying for the better schools within the NY Public School System (To be honest I was immensely surprised that there are public schools in NY that are good – it was nice to hear that ) but apparently the admitting process to the limited number of places has been configured to reduce the chances of Asian students getting in. Didn’t see “racist fighting” BLM in the forefront of the fight against this egregious example of systemic racism within NYC. Why not? Didn’t see any virtue signaling celebrities producing videos decrying the anti-asian bias embodied in the policy of the NY School System. NOT A WORD.

Their concern for “Black Lives” does not extend to protesting and actively campaigning against the corrupt administration in Chicago that has been overseeing the ongoing black on black slaughter that has been going on for years in the city. Preferring instead to criticize the police and forever ignoring the Aldermen and Mayors that have done nothing to end the carnage. NOT A WORD.

I think that there IS a “systemic reason” why they are invisible on most NYC admissions, Black on Black crime in Chicago, They are not seeking an end to racism. It is why their rhetoric adopts a preference for racial punishment. It is because the Organization that calls itself “Black Lives Matter” is not “fighting racism” . It is using the buzz words of “fighting racism” to carve out a piece of the influence peddling on the hard left of American politics. It is an organization making a move to bolster the ability of the hard left to influence and back off certain segments of the voting public. The Left battle plan for achieving power relies, heavily, on the Balkanization of the US middle and working classes. Let me explain;

The maxim “Black lives matter” has but one sane response “Yes, they do”.

Note I made no qualification didn’t add any context such as “but all lives matter of course”. Just the simple statement and the only possible response to it. But that is not what the Organization that has taken that statement as its name actually want people to do. They want to segue from that to the nebulous “ you are evil racists and must do as we demand” . The two things “Black Lives Matter” and “Endemic racism is the problem” have no logical connection – Black lives matter because they are human life, and that principle is true for all of us. In the USA every citizen , every resident has the right to have their personal rights respected by the government and the minions of government – without exception.

And THAT concept is something that we can all work towards. The Founders of this country set the Republic up to do exactly that – it is supposed ot be a country of laws and respect for individual liberty. How can we all, all of us, work to make that happen? How can we ensure that the police, in every interaction they are involved are working to ensure that the rights of the individual are respected and preserved while doing their job? It cannot be based on “race” because we are are a country of many races. We are a country of individuals and not working on that is where the system breaks down – when it does.

Black lives Matter is a simple statement that has been hijacked.