Flyover Patriots

Welcome to the Biden Police State

By Rob Meyne

March 7, 2024
3-min read

If you want to know what it is like to live in a police state, just look around. We’re officially there.

That isn’t to say it can’t get much worse; undoubtedly it can, and it will if Biden’s nascent fascists are given four more years.

Shamefully, there are very few in the media who are willing to stand up for their free speech rights, much less yours. If it were up to the Times, the Post, and CNN, you would be silenced and shuffled off to one of the re-education camps the Hildebeast once suggested we deploy to change the way conservative Republicans think.

It is no longer debatable that our freedoms are being chipped away. The only thing that IS debatable is why don’t more people seem to care? Most people simply don’t know how bad it is; but they will when the state targets THEM.

Most air marshals, according to the Marshal’s Service, were taken off their jobs – providing security on aircraft – and deployed to follow people who just happened to be in Washington on January 6. These people are suspected of being Trump supporters but did not even go to the protest. You read that right. Federal officers are traveling the nation, following people who aren’t even suspected of a crime. If that does not remind you of the Gestapo, I don’t know what would.

One reporter who was in the Capitol, covering the event – the news – has been arrested. Why? What horrible crime did he commit? Assault? Rape? Murder? No. He is essentially charged with trespassing misdemeanors. His real “crime” seems to be that he is an honest and objective reporter trying to find the underlying cause of what happened that day. He is not charged with insurrection, terrorism, or violence of any type. He is targeted only because he was in the building doing his Constitutionally protected job.

His name is Steve Baker. He currently works for the Blaze. He was carried off in handcuffs and leg irons and taken to prison.

Importantly, on January 6, Baker did not protest, interfere with anyone, or do anything even remotely violent. When Capitol police asked him to leave, he left. For that, he is being prosecuted. In the meantime, New York Times reporters who stood at his side have not been prosecuted.

Baker has recently been reporting on the pipe bombs found at the headquarters of the Republican and Democratic National Committees. (My old office at the RNC was within 50 feet of where the pipe bomb was found.)

There are a ton of problems with the popular narrative on this. For one thing, the timers used were basic kitchen timers, which can be set for a maximum of one hour. Yet we are told they were placed the night before. What? We are to believe terrorists placed these pipe bombs and then planned on coming back the next day to set the timers. Is anyone that stupid?

Finally, consider that an FBI informant by the name of Smirnoff – not Grey Goose or Tito’s – has been charged with lying to the FBI. He has served as a trusted, paid informant for the FBI for fourteen years. They have come to respect and depend on the intelligence he has provided. So, what happened? Why did they suddenly decide he is a crook?

It is simple. He reported that he was informed by a Ukrainian businessperson that they had paid the Biden’s $10 million, 5 for Hunter and 5 for Joe. The information came from an official at Burisma, the company paying the Bidens, and for which Hunter Biden was paid for a no-show assignment.

What is the message the DOJ and FBI want to send? It is clear. They are attempting to intimidate anyone who may have information that puts Biden in a bad light. If you deliver information that is inconvenient for the fascists of the left, you can go to jail.

Christopher Steele, who was also a paid FBI informant, delivered unverifiable dirt on Trump – all of which turned out to be made up out of whole cloth – and has faced no penalty for it. Steele got secondhand rumors from Russian sources, all untrue, and the FBI used them as an excuse to spy on the Trump presidential campaign.

If liberals did not have double standards, they’d have none at all.

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Pick A Lane:
America is At Risk, and We Can’t Afford the Luxury of Protest Votes

By Rob Meyne

Feb. 22, 2024
5-min read

If you’re like us, you’ve probably heard a lot of folks expressing the usual quadrennial complaint that “both candidates suck.” That may be a tad inelegant, but you get the point.

Many surveys show a huge majority of voters wish we had better choices.
You can count me among them. I’d love to be able to pick between Thomas Jefferson and Abe Lincoln. Let me know when we can work that out.

There is, however, this thing called “reality,” and it says that, barring a miracle, one of the two major party candidates will be elected president. The only relevant decision a person needs to make is this: under which of these two candidates can we reasonably expect the nation to be better off?

There is a lot of talk about the “lesser of two evils.” If one wants to look at politics in that way, be our guest. The question we would offer to inform the discussion a bit is this: in what part of life are we not faced with alternatives that are the “lesser of two evils?” Put another way, what part of your life is perfect? (My wife is perfect, and please tell her I said so.)

Most of human existence involves choosing from among two or more options, and they are never perfect. That is the nature of life, and certainly of human beings. As long as politics involves people, our choices among candidates will be imperfect. Get used to it, get over it, and next time support better candidates.

For today, let’s get back to reality.

For those who want to sit this one out – to note vote, or to vote for a third-party candidate with no chance of winning – you need to ask yourself whether the future of the country is more important than casting some kind of protest by way of a wasted vote?

If you don’t vote, no one sits and cries. No one will beg you to reconsider. No one will write it down and say, “Mr. Jones in Topeka didn’t like the candidates, so we need to do better next time.”

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Tucker Carlson’s Bombshell: Election Fraud is Far
Worse than You Think

By J Robert Smith

Feb. 18, 2024
2-min read

This weekend, I was drafting a piece for American Thinker. The subject was the lack of adequate election reforms in battleground states, much of that to keep the cheating in place. Per The Epoch Times, Trump may have already lost the autumn presidential contest. That’s sobering in itself.

I took a break to watch Tucker Carlson’s latest podcast on X. After I watched the entire podcast, I dumped the draft I had been working on all day. What I was writing only touched the surface of a far more sophisticated, massive fraud being conducted by elements in the U.S. government. We’ve all heard of the Deep State, but the specifics on how it worked well ahead of the 2020 presidential election to defeat Trump were stunning.

Carlson’s guest was Mike Benz, who leads the Foundation for Freedom Online. Benz’s bio at the group’s website states that he “is a former State Department official with responsibilities in formulating and negotiating US foreign policy on international communications and information technology matters.” So, he poses expertise, experience, and insider knowledge about the Deep State’s workings in matters related to communications and the internet.

The tease to Carlson’s interview sums it up powerfully:

“The national security state is the main driver of censorship and election interference in the United States. ‘What I’m describing is military rule,’ says Mike Benz. ‘It’s the inversion of democracy.'”

In an interview that ran a little over an hour, Benz skillfully provides loads of detail and a narrative thread that puts meat on the contention that we citizens really aren’t in control of of our government. Our impact on a presidential election – at least starting with the 2020 contest – is minimal if at all.

This isn’t said to dishearten anyone. Knowledge is power, goes the the old saying. Acquiring the knowledge about how elements within “permanent government” are acting in brazenly unconstitutional ways to determine the outcome of presidential and, perhaps, congressional elections is knowledge we must possess in order to defeat this novel form of tyranny. We mustn’t be intimidated by the scope of this attack on our rights and the rule of law. Fighting back isn’t an option.

Carlson’s interview with Benz can be found at here at X (formerly Twitter). You’ll be derelict in your duty as a patriot if you fail to watch this important podcast.

Mike Benz’s X account can be found here. If you have an X account, it will be well worth following Benz for more insights into what appears to be the greatest threat to our liberties in the nation’s long history.

The Foundation for Freedom Online website is located here.

American Thinker’s Andrea Widburg offers an excellent summary of the Carlson-Benz interview here.

American Thinker feature writer Clarice Feldman also offers this in-depth analysis here.

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Racist Leaders Presume You Are, Too

By Rob Meyne

Feb. 4, 2024
3-min read

The names of many contemporary movements, organizations, and legislation are focused-grouped tested to ensure they sound as appealing as possible. Nomenclature has a lot to do with the ability to successfully market something.

Terms like Black Lives Matter, or Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI), or the Inflation Reduction Act are designed to generate support for policies that do not reflect what their name suggests.

No reasonable person questions that black lives matter. Nor do they oppose the ideas of inclusion or inflation reduction. Yet frequently a majority of reasonable people oppose the specific actions being taken in pursuit of those objections. The devil is always in the details.

Years ago, you may recall there was opposition to harvesting tuna, because marine mammals were often killed in the process. Accordingly, there was a suggestion that tuna operators should form an alliance and call it “Friends of the Dolphin.” No doubt you could have generated cash contributions to such a group from a lot of people who would have been horrified to find out what it really was.

If you’ve paid attention to the dumpster fire that is also known as the Biden Administration, you will remember they tried to enact components of the “Green New Deal” (AKA, the Green New Steal). These were radical revisions to the way we use and generate energy, manufacture and distribute products, and to whom we give huge taxpayer-funded subsidies. It was politically unpopular and economically devastating. The bill went nowhere. So, they just called it the Inflation Reduction Act. Members of Congress had only a few days to read the thousand page bill, and team Biden just put most of the elements of the Green New Steal into it.

The voters don’t like it? Simple: change its name and pass it anyway.

If you said you were opposed to the Inflation Reduction Act people thought you were in favor of inflation. Sadly, this kind of disingenuousness, and outright lying, drives much of the political process.

Monikers like DEI are crafted to sound like a commitment to a laudable goal but do nothing to tell you the nuts and bolts of the proposals. You can certainly favor the concepts of DEI without favoring the methods leftist elites use to make them happen. The left routinely disguises their true intentions – their actual policies – by labeling them in a misleading way.

It has often been said the left succeeds when the people are not informed but conservatives succeed when they are.

Consider this: any policy that treats people differently based on their skin color or national heritage is racist. That is the definition of racism; treating people differently because of the amount of melanin in their skin. Yet that is exactly what most DEI programs require.

Equity, in fact, is the polar opposite of equal opportunity. Equity requires the allocation of benefits and opportunities based on race. Management by equity requires that merit be a secondary consideration. That is an uncomfortable reality, but until we come to grips with it, we will continue to struggle to find answers to some of our most important problems.

For as long as I can remember, I have been astonished at how people on the left look at everything through the lens of race. Leftist leaders simply don’t believe race isn’t the first thing conservatives think about when they begin their day. Most Democratic leaders assume we are all obsessed with race because they are.

Perhaps more than anything, solutions to problems of race will elude us as long as half the nation assumes the other half shares their obsession with race. Saying that out loud is not likely to make you friends among Democratic leaders.

More to come.

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If You Trust the Government,
You May Need Therapy

By Rob Meyne

Jan. 27, 2024
4-min read

The portion of Americans who trust the government to do the right thing has plummeted to historic lows. Less than 20% of us trust the government. The other 80% might ask “are you not paying attention?”

It takes a willingness to ignore facts, and reject common sense, to believe much of what the government tells us. This is true for all levels of government, but particularly nationally.

This is not the same thing as saying the government never tells the truth. Sometimes it does. But every sentient creature in America should view governmental messages with skepticism and do their own homework before determining what is true.

Pew comments on the lack of trust in government:

“Public trust in the federal government, which has been low for decades, has returned to near record lows following a modest uptick in 2020 and 2021. Currently, fewer than two-in-ten Americans say they trust the government in Washington to do what is right “just about always” (1%) or “most of the time” (15%). This is among the lowest trust measures in nearly seven decades of polling. Last year, 20% said they trusted the government just about always or most of the time.”

The real question, today, is why WOULD you trust the government?

The Gallup survey shows, unsurprisingly, that Americans trust their local government much more than the federal.

This is a fairly good rule of thumb. If all politicians should be viewed with skepticism – all PEOPLE should be viewed with some healthy skepticism – certainly, it is easier to learn about your local office holders than those who work in area code 202 and spend their nights at places like the Capital Grille.

A related, and hugely important, question is what media should we trust? The quick answer is “not many.” But here is another good rule of thumb: you should put more trust in people who encourage you to personally learn about issues than those who discourage it. You will likely never hear someone from MSNBC or CNN telling you to learn about things for yourself. That is the mark of a news outlet that is more interested in propaganda than truth.

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Kari Lake can’t be bought.
Nikki Haley is.

By J. Robert Smith

Jan. 27, 2024
5-min read

In a recorded conversation with Arizona Party chairman Jeff DeWit, Kari Lake is offered money by DeWit to back out of the race for the U.S. Senate. DeWit was playing bagman. He claimed to have gotten a request to approach Lake from “back east.”

“There are very powerful people who are gonna keep you out,” he [DeWit] said. “But they’re willing to put their money where their mouth is in a big way.”

The audio of the conversation was posted at Rumble. On Wednesday, DeWit resigned his position, charging that he was set up by Lake and her campaign. But he wasn’t set up. He incriminated himself. His words are his words. He brokered an offer to Lake. If he hadn’t resigned, he should have been removed by the Arizona GOP’s executive committee.

“Money is the mother’s milk of politics,” said the late Jesse Unruh, who was a Democrat mover-and-shaker in California for years. He coined the phrase.

Money has always made politics go-round. Doesn’t matter. Clean money, dirty money… money to candidates, money to officeholders, their families, friends, and favored interests. Money – and let’s add power, which corrupts plenty of politicians, bureaucrats, and every other suckerfish in the business.

Difference between past generations and today is politics is flush with money. Meaning, seas of bucks. Much of the dough is anonymous. Two Supreme Court rulings made that so.

Citizens United vs. the FEC was the biggie. Per Vox, July 1, 2021:

Citizens United stripped the government of its power to limit the amount of spending on elections, especially by corporations. But the decision also gave the Court’s blessing to nearly all laws requiring campaigns and political organizations to disclose their donors.

Republicans and conservatives (not one in the same) initially cheered the ruling. But what’s happened is that corporations have been taken over by so-called progressives. Corporate money tilts toward Democrat candidates. A lot of it.

Making matters worse, a second SCOTUS ruling (Americans for Prosperity vs. Bonta) struck down most donor disclosure laws. Scads of very wealthy people can give anonymously. It’s called “dark money,” and Democrats and left-wing causes are the greatest beneficiaries.

While most big dollars flow to Democrats and the left, there’s still some big money making its way to Republicans.

Nikki Haley, who’s the establishment’s attempt to foil Trump’s candidacy, is the recipient of some really big money.

Haley’s nonprofit – Stand for America, Inc. – didn’t redact some of donors names from tax forms a couple of years ago.

(From Politico, August 26, 2022):

Many of the GOP’s biggest donors are among those who funneled anonymous contributions to former U.N ambassador Nikki Haley’s nonprofit as she lays the groundwork for a prospective 2024 presidential bid, according to previously unreported tax documents obtained by POLITICO.

Haley’s nonprofit policy advocacy group, Stand For America, Inc., has received major donations from people including New York hedge fund manager Paul Singer, investor Stanley Druckenmiller, and Miriam Adelson and her late husband, casino mogul Sheldon Adelson, the Internal Revenue Service filings reveal.

You can bet that big-dollar donors are calling the shots in Haley’s presidential campaign. In fact…

Bloomberg reported on Jan. 24, 2024 that “Wall Street” donors were keeping Haley’s campaign from sinking.

Simone Levinson, a Haley backer and a co-host for the fundraiser, said she had not seen any donors drop their support of the candidate.

“People don’t just look at numbers, they look at behavior,” Levinson said, referring to Trump’s combative speech Tuesday night, in which he lambasted Haley. “People are now being reminded of this divisive hate-spewing rhetoric of the Donald. Is this really what you want representing our country, as opposed to Nikki?”

Topping things off, Haley has become a rich woman through politics.

Reports Forbes, August 8, 2023:

Since then [resigning as U.N. Ambassador], Haley’s net worth has ballooned from less than $1 million to an estimated $8 million. How did she make so much money in so little time? By following a tried-and-true playbook for politicians looking to cash in on their fame. Speeches to companies like Barclays and organizations such as the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs provided more money in a day than Haley had previously earned in a year. It’s not clear how many talks she gave from 2019 to 2021, but Haley hauled in $2.3 million from just 11 events in 2022.

Even Haley’s husband is in on the act. It isn’t unusual for family and friends to trade on an officeholder’s (or past officeholder’s) ties to have nice paydays.

Per the Daily Beast, August 12, 2023:

The latest financial disclosures from former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley reveal as much as $500,000 of her husband’s net worth derives from a mysterious “military technical services company”—an apparent shell entity tied to a government contractor seeking tax credits from her successor’s administration.

There is no evidence that Haley or her husband, Michael Haley, have broken any rules. However, the materials suggest the family could benefit financially from state and federal policy, including from the export of military equipment to Taiwan.

Haley isn’t extraordinary. Too many politicians – Republican and Democrat, conservative and liberal – have sold themselves for a pound of flesh – or a side of beef or a whole hog, nowadays. And they’re not necessarily violating the law to do it.

Some politicians like Donald Trump and Kari Lake aren’t playing the game. In part, that’s why both catch holy hell. Haley does play the game, and for her, the payoffs are lucrative.

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Equal Opportunity for All Should Be Our Goal

By Rob Meyne

Jan. 21, 2024
5-min read

In 2011, Chicago pastor Corey Brooks lived for a while on the roof of an abandoned motel in his South Side neighborhood. He was protesting urban violence and hoping, through contributions, to raise money for a community center.

Brooks is a longtime advocate for people in his neighborhood, a devout Christian, and a respected leader. In the thirteen years since he lived on that roof, Brooks has learned firsthand of the damage being done to young blacks by contemporary Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) efforts and Critical Race Theory (CRT).

Brooks has become a vocal and effective opponent of DEI, CRT, and other schools of thought that teach Americans that you’re either a victim or an oppressor based on your skin color. Brooks writes intelligently and clearly in a piece from Tablet Magazine. It is worth the read.

DEI has evolved into a catch-all phrase that leftists use to refer to everything that is good and worthwhile about fighting racism. If DEI a just referred to good faith efforts to lift up people who might need a helping hand, that would be one thing. No serious and sane person would object to that. That is not what DEI is. As is so often the case with the gospel of the left, the reality of their policies is different from their rhetoric.

It is likely that most people who embrace equity – people who run our schools, have jobs in corporate HR, or maybe work for a non-profit – talk about the concept as if it is a general, all-encompassing effort to pursue a fair and equal world. One doubts that most equity devotees can even define what it means. Most such people no doubt mean well. But the problem is they end up giving energy and momentum to a disastrous concept they don’t actually understand.

The people who implement equity as a policy, however, know that it isn’t the same thing as equality of opportunity. Equity demands equal results based on one’s membership in a group; equal opportunity has a goal of a color-blind society, where effort, talent, and merit matter and skin color cannot hold you back.

In practice, as it is actually implemented by government, DEI tells us that wealth, opportunity, rewards, and benefits should be allocated according to race, sex, and national origin, not by merit. It is all about racial quotas and rejects the role of merit in our society. DEI is perfectly suited for a socialist society but is antithetical to our own.

CRT is an intellectually vacuous set of objectives that have their roots in the Frankfurt School of communism. Yes, no one likes to admit that, and it doesn’t make one sound less conspiratorial to point it out, but it is true. Critical theory in general began with Marx and others who saw all of society as a war between the classes.

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Another Reason to Dump Fox News: Mike Lindell

By J Robert Smith

Jan. 15, 2024
2-min read

Fortune reported that after Fox News fired Tucker Carlson, it lost $690 million in value. That isn’t chump change. It’s stock prices have dipped by 12% since saying bye-bye to Carlson, according to invezz.

Making matters worse, Fox capitulated in a lawsuit filed by elections machine company Dominion Voting Systems. That payout was an eye-popping $787 million. Per invezz, another elections machine company “Smartmatic has filed a similar – but bigger – lawsuit.”

Variety reported in May of last year that Carlson was fired to settle with Dominion. Claims Variety:

“[An] unnamed [Fox] board member told Carlson that the condition does not appear in any of the settlement’s documents, and instead was a verbal agreement. If Fox didn’t comply, the settlement was off, Carlson was told.”

So, given the big dollar crunch, why would Fox give the heave-ho to any longtime advertisers?

Fox opted to “fire” advertiser Mike Lindell, who created and founded the My Pillow company. Lindell’s company sells more than pillows. My Pillow has struggled ever since retailers started to cancel the brand. Lindell dared publicly challenge the 2020 presidential election results. My Pillow being axed by Bed, Bath, Beyond a few years ago years ago was notable. Bed, Bath, Beyond closed its brick and mortar stores after years of financial struggles. There is a God.

You’d think the Murdochs would be all-in on repairing the financial hemorrhaging anyway they could. Along with finding new revenues, retaining tried and true advertisers is a no-brainer. But no go.

Instead, the Murdochs and their board continue to inch Fox News toward being yet another corporate news media outlet. Fox may never move as left as CNBC and CNN, but its a good bet that over time it’ll morph into a GOP establishment prop.

I dumped Fox when it booted Carlson. I don’t miss it. There are plenty of ways to get reliable news across the internet. Epoch Times and The Blaze are solid news sources, among others. Carlson has programming on X and pay-for programming. I’m also watching Newsmax more often.

Mike Lindell and his employees deserve better than what retailers and Fox News are doing to My Pillow. But remember this: Payback is hell. The day will come when they’ll wish they never played the cancellation game.

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Is Hunter’s Middle Name “Diogenes?”

By Rob Meyne

Jan. 3, 2024
4-min read

If you turn on Netflix or even broadcast TV, you would likely see something that would have been startling twenty years ago. Nudity, profanity, and main characters that identify as transexuals or ficus trees are common.

A similar situation has evolved in American presidential politics. Every week, something happens that would have been a headline-generating event in our parent’s generation. The unusual has become usual. The uncommon has become common.

The search for a decent journalist makes Diogenes’s challenge seem like a piece of cake. (It is not at all certain Diogenes ever said he was looking for an “…honest man.” If he were, he could steer clear of Washington and not reduce his chances of finding one.)

Digoense, by the way, was a founder of stoicism, and would be considered weird even if he was hanging out with the bizarre crowd at a waterfront sunset in Key West. Diogenes was known for doing all manner of things in public that one normally does in private – defecating, fornicating – all in a crowd. He sounded like someone you’d want to party with. If he lived today, he would livestream himself in flagrante delicto. Basically, he’d be Hunter Biden without the influence peddling gig.

Biden and Trump are the two likely nominees, but people are lining up in droves to say they wish they had another choice – anyone – hog, dog, or frog. Both candidates have high negatives and their average age is “deceased.” Trump at least still exhibits signs of life and mental acuity. Biden would likely lose a political debate if he had the gonads to accept one, unless he debated a kumquat or three-toed sloth, in which case it would probably be a push.

Never has a major political candidate been indicted for a crime while he was running for office. Certainly, never has a sitting president indicted his opponent. Never have the political machinations of state, local, and federal governments been coordinated deliberately to try to put a candidate, for whom they have expressed great disdain, behind bars. Never have the courts been used to try to throw a candidate off the ballot by claiming they were part of an insurrection.

If memory serves, the only significant political figure to run for president from prison was four-time candidate Eugene V. Debs, with home I share a hometown, who ran as a socialist. His highest vote total – something shy of a million – was when he was in prison. Somehow the phrase “Vote for Inmate 3994739 never quite caught on as well as the ”Hey, look me over” song used by Birch Bayh (also from Terre Haute) in his first run for the Senate.

On the Democrat side, the evidence that Joe Biden is a crook increases faster than Hunter’s bar bill at the Chateau Marmont.

The problem, of course, is not just that Hunter is a piece of human dung, although that is irrefutable. The PROBLEM is that this particular piece of dung routinely paid his father directly, as did other family members, paid him exorbitant rent, and even paid many of his bills for him. That Joe benefited financially from Hunter’s influence peddling is undeniable. Plus, courts have held that a person can be enriched in a way that qualified as criminal even if the actual financial largesse accumulated only for his close family. If a wife or son is “paid off,” does anyone really believe the husband or father does not benefit?

So we have a massive case of influence peddling, money laundering, and plain old-fashioned bribery that is being ignored or slow walked by a very corrupt Attorney General. On the other side, we have a former president who has been indicted in two jurisdictions with spectacularly weak cases that will require juries to accept legal arguments that are literally unprecedented. Another case is civil because the paucity of evidence against Trump would not sustain an actual criminal indictment.

So you have two possible or even likely crooks competing for the votes of people who loathe them. You have a complacent, lapdog media where true journalists are as rare as an honest Biden, and you have the entire political structure of one of our two major political parties doing their best imitation of a banana republic. Oh, and you have a credible third-party candidate taking votes from both of the major candidates.

You’ve got an economy on the brink and war breaking out on TWO international fronts with our allies involved and a non-zero chance we’ll have American boots on the ground. A cyberattack, EMP, or global nuclear holocaust is also a non-zero possibility.

And those are just the GOOD things happening.

If one tries to take the positive approach, that can help, but coming up with a rational reason to think everything is going to work out fine is more difficult by the day.

For now, I have to go buy a kumquat and see if I can talk a three-toed sloth into running as an independent. I’ll get back with you.

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There May Be Hope for AI, and America

By Rob Meyne

Dec. 29, 2023
5-min read

We are fortunate that a major advancement in how we learn about public policy is on the way. This is good news. Stay tuned for a moment.

First, if you’re one of those people who says it is hard to be informed about current events, it is time to decide if you care enough to do it. Sorry, but the stakes are so high you need to decide if the future of the nation matters enough to you to be an informed citizen. Pick a lane. Our only hope for the future of the country is that enough people will sufficiently care that they will be well-informed and base their voting decisions accordingly.

It is understandable that we all have busy lives. But we do those things that are most important to us. If you aren’t informed, it is ultimately because you don’t put a high enough priority on it. We all have the same number of hours in a day. How we use them is up to us.

I don’t care about the San Diego Padres. They could disappear entirely, and it wouldn’t affect my daily routine at all. My friend at work, though, loves the Padres. She can tell you in what order they batted last night. But she can’t tell you what charges have been made against Trump regarding January 6. (She hates Trump and assumes he led an insurrection but can’t tell you what evidence exists to prove that.)

We learn about those things we care about. If you want to know what matters to someone, find where they spend their time, attention, and resources. That is your answer.

One good thing about the web is that it has never been easier to learn about current events. There is more information available, instantly, than ever before and more is out there every day. There are more web pages than there are people. And it isn’t even close.

The catch, of course, is that most media is biased. And AI is being used to develop false stories. Yes, you must look at more than one source and learn which is truly credible. When you read a story or watch it, note if there is a reliable reference for the information. Most are not well-sourced. I make a point to read things I don’t agree with every day, just to force myself to hear the other side, learn what they think, and possibly – hopefully – learn information that may conflict with what I had thought to be true, or even completely new information that may change my views.

As an aside, I am astonished that most people are afraid of finding out they are wrong. I love it when it happens. I WANT to have the correct information. I will arrogantly add, of course, that it doesn’t happen often 😊. I study this stuff so closely I am, if you’ll excuse me saying so, well-informed. Most people are not. But if I learn facts that conflict with what I thought to be true, I am happy because it matters more to me to be correct than to have my political biases confirmed. Most people are too insecure to be that comfortable.

I would never look at just one source, but one that I do recommend, and that impeccably sources their stories, is the Blaze. Its founder is a conservative guy but not a member of either party. He criticizes Republicans Democrats equally. And he invites us – on radio, online, and in his books – to make up our own minds.

His last book was over 400 pages, more than 50 of which were footnotes. Check it out and decide for yourself. Beck has been attacked by the left, of course, because he is effective. They generally don’t attack people they aren’t afraid of. They don’t waste their time. Beck has even been called a White Supremacist, which is simply a lie. No one in public life is more committed to equal opportunity, or more against racism, than Beck. But the mainstream media and political elite don’t want you to hear him.

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