It hardly matters who wrote this. It is a great synopsis of the current SOTU. Thanks for posting it.
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These are the questions I wrote today under the heading of “the Question” - to which Jeanne has supplied her interesting answer here (before I wrote them).
The election process as ordained by the Constitution has been corrupted by the Democratic Party.
The First, Second, Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, Eighth, Fourteenth, and Twenty-Fifth Amendments have all been challenged or even in some cases defied by the Democrats in power in the legislative and executive branches of government. Laws protecting the officers of the judicial branch - the justices of the supreme court - are being ignored. So how is the Constitution “keeping America”?
Equality under the law has been blatantly and unapologetically abandoned. That is what the Constitution was designed to protect. So I ask again, how is the Constitution “keeping America”?
And how are “the people” keeping the Constitution?
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I haven’t followed the conversation closely since I posted this yesterday (though somewhat). But they’re playing a hybrid warfare game against us, including but not limited to information and psychological warfare (lawfare is also a major element). The hybrid warfare may combine elements of a chessboard where various pieces or aspects of the hybrid war are arrayed against us. But it also contains elements of a poker game, where we can’t really be sure of the kinds of cards the adversary is holding. To some extent, they want us to believe that the pieces on the board (which should be visible) correspond to the cards that they hold, which we can’t be sure of. So, their strategy is to play much more audaciously than their real position might rationally justify, and count for their advantage on our confusion and lack of nerve.
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The Constitution, the document, the law, the idea of the great experiment in written form, the original document is the “standard” raised by our Founders to which we can return, those who are “wise and honest”, at least, and desiring of keeping our Republic.
Leaving it was bound to happen, “peoples is peoples” after all. The “leaving” started nearly as soon as it was signed. Obviously, leaving it has escalated in recent decades, so one might barely recognize its current manifestation. But, there is the original, and there are Originalists, and there are run-of-mill people who are waking up to the notion that something is very wrong with our country under the Obama/Biden administration.
It is just a piece of paper. It is just an idea for an experiment in self-governance rather than a king or a dictator, and an idea of natural rights, rather than rights granted by the king or dictator. And like all ideas written on paper, they are only as good as the actions of the people who wrote them, those who believed in the idea and those who struggle to fulfill the idea…to live the idea.
There is nothing like a time when a noble idea, such as this, is lost to those who thought it would be ever their life…nothing like the time when it is being lost, to make them decide to take it back and keep it better.
That’s is all we can do; decide to take it back and keep it better.
“Don’t it always seem to go that you don’t know what you’ve got
till it’s gone”
Our future is coming, our children’s future, our grand-children’s future. Why concentrate on what has happened to bring us to the present? We know what it is. We know who is to blame… over centuries we know who is to blame. All of us, but especially we, who live in the last decades of the 20th century and now in the 21st century. Apathy and willful ignorance. The kids are picked up for school, the garbage is collected, the toilets flush and the stores are always fully stocked with stuff that other people made cheaper, grew quicker; producing miracles when needed, and life was easy and good if you played it well. What could go wrong? How could anything alter that good life? It will just go on and on and on…
When even MSNBC recognizes the disaster of Biden’s agenda, thanking Joe Manchin for voting against the BBB Bill and imagining the worse disaster the country would be in had that passed, you know something is shifting in the awareness of the country. The people of corporate media are hurting enough to wake up and smell the bullshit being shoveled by the fascists.
Whom do we trust now? We have to trust ourselves first. And…I guess we have to drag along those of us that are clueless about the SOTU.
So, as usual, Jillian, the people that are willing to think and act are the ones that are going to keep the Constitution. Fortunately, their numbers are growing.
I don’t know what my part is in the future. Helping to get Virgil elected so that he can use his experience and knowledge and integrity and common sense to help make local decisions in a county that has not been run well for the past 8 years, and to help in the difficult times to come as the budget is affected, and to help make local government more strong and important to offset federal and state rulings. Keeping my family protected and prepared, producing food and grains for the country, encouraging voting for conservative republicans, and hopefully not anything having to do with revolution or war or global disaster.
Keeping hope alive and keeping history alive and keeping America alive, maybe that is all I can do.
Sorry this is so long and winding. I guess I have more time on my hands lately. Or maybe I know deep within me that there are many more people who are thinking as I am, and I want to offer that hope to you.
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Well put! Yes, I think that’s all we can do.
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I’ve been trying to gather my thoughts on all these destructive policies, trying to make sense of it all, and trying to put together a post on it all. Modern Western democracy has failed, that much seems clear to me, and as I’ve argued before I continue to think that universal suffrage was the biggest single change that set us on this path of decline. Perhaps the powers that be have also come to the conclusion that the system has failed, that the national debt situation is out of control:
Why The National Debt Situation Is Much Worse Than It Looks
The behaviour of the powers that be today seems increasingly unhinged, but one theory is that in fact what we are witnessing is a controlled demolition of modern Western democracy, to be replaced by an authoritarian system of global governance. How else can we explain the fact that our governments everywhere are undermining their own nations, degrading and humiliating their own armed forces, recklessly further increasing national debt, and suppressing dissent with increasingly draconian legislation, all in lockstep?
I had for a long time thought that the agenda of open borders was really motivated by a desire to open up the world to free trade, but the Chinese in particular have not been pursuing this sort of policy and so it’s creating a lopsided world, not simply a borderless world. If Western nations continue to weaken themselves in this way while China remains closed, then it seems as if the powers that be in the West are paving the way for China to become the dominant nation in the world, which simply makes no sense to me at all.
Another alternative explanation is perhaps that the powers be, increasingly freed from public scrutiny due to their stranglehold over the media, have simply collectively gone mad, that groupthink is a major factor. I am not inclined to believe that the powers that be are genuinely concerned about the environment, or our health, or about LGBQWERTY rights etc however. They do have a secret agenda that much I feel certain about, whether that agenda will lead to the outcome they desire or not is quite another matter.
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I think you’re right over the target - “what we are witnessing is a controlled demolition of modern Western democracy, to be replaced by an authoritarian system of global governance”.
The reason the “powers that be” - the globalist oligarchs - are “paving the way for China to become the dominant nation in the world” is because they are getting rich off of that, using China’s slave labor.
I heard someone explain it that the “plan” originally was for the Western oligarchs and China to be like business partners, with the West being the “senior partner”. But of course the CCP had other plans, and now they are poised for a “hostile takeover”.
Which is why you see oligarchs like Soros getting nervous about China.
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Just received “The War on the West” Douglas Murray’s new book. Have only started a few pages. He has come to the same conclusion; that the West has been and is being dismantled by the PTB in the world. Only the West is evil, wrong, destructive, etc. All other nations and their systems are positive for humanity. Okay…
That’s their story and they are sticking to it. Enough people buy into that story and their goal is accomplished until it all bellys-up when the money is gone.
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What is the PTB?
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“Powers That Be” is my guess!
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Thanks. (note to self: “Duh!” 
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Jeanne - Disregard my lapse of memory on the meaning of PTB.
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Amen! An excellent statement of the position. We also need to consider what to do in case what the Soviets called ‘the pessimistic variant’ prevails, but that’s another discussion.
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“The pessimistic variant”?
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The ‘pessimistic variant’ is that the political lobotomy that the Left has been carrying out on the younger generations is irreversible, and we find ourselves in the position of being a permanent minority, albeit a large one.
The Left are never content. If by fair means or foul, then can get the numbers to do it, they will do things like admitting Puerto Rico as a state, packing the Supreme Court, expanding ballot harvesting, de-masculinizing the military, hollowing out the police …
We need to have a Plan B. This is not the place to talk about it in any detail, but it would mean achieving, however we can, some sort of very advanced Federalism – up to but, hopefully, not including secession. The sort of arrangement that, in theory, ‘autonomy’ has meant in those empires which consisted of different ethnic groups – like the Austro-Hungarian empire, for example. (Anyone who knows more about this than I do – not hard! – feel free to expand or amend or correct me here).
We’re not there yet. But many of the things we need to be doing – forming Community Defense Groups, for example – are dual-purposed.+
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“A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state…” – That’s the first right protected in the second amendment – “… the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.” – That’s the second right protected in the second amendment.
10 USC §246 defines the militia as all able-bodied males 17 to 45 years of age…
§246. Militia: composition and classes
(a) The militia of the United States consists of all able-bodied males at least 17 years of age and, except as provided in section313 of title 32, under 45 years of age who are, or who have made a declaration of intention to become, citizens of the United States and of female citizens of the United States who are members of the National Guard.
(b) The classes of the militia are-
(1) the organized militia, which consists of the National Guard and the Naval Militia; and
(2) the unorganized militia, which consists of the members of the militia who are not members of the National Guard or the Naval Militia.
https://uscode.house.gov/view.xhtml?req=granuleid:USC-prelim-title10-section246&num=0&edition=prelim
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Okay. Can you explain how this applies, concretely, to our situation at the moment?
I’ve argued everywhere I can that all patriots who have not done their military service yet, and who are able to by age and condition, should enlist in the National Guard. (Although I know no one will. We’re dedicated, but not that dedicated.)
Otherwise, we need to organize ourselves.
Note that there is a serious push from among the Left to outlaw the existing militia groups as ‘private armies’. This push is being led by Mary McCord, a law professor and former government advisor. Here’s a transcript of an NPR interview with her:
My experience has been that many of the local ‘militia’ groups have got people in them who are totally ignorant of the law, and are really romantics, acting out their Rambo fantasies. Not good.
We’ve got to be exquisitely knowledgeable about the law, both Federal, state and local, when it comes to firearms … whether held for personal use, or by people in some sort of organized group. Many people are not just ignorant about this subject, but have completely wrong ideas about it. (Those two fellows in Georgia now serving life terms in prison for killing a possible thief are examples. You will not always have a ‘Joe Horn’ jury. [ Joe Horn shooting controversy - Wikipedia ])
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NPR! If NPR calls in a witness you can bet the witness is on the Left. Remember what was going on in 2020 - mob violence, riots, arson, looting, murder led by Antifa and BLM, all with impunity, while elected authorities, Democrats all, looked on with satisfaction, even actively encouraged the criminality. But citizens trying to protect private property with arms were “illegal”? Such nicety, such fine discrimination on the part of the lady professor! What government did she advise? Obama’s?
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Oh yes It’s the same here with the BBC. I don’t watch the BBC news program any more, except ‘accidentally’, because the news is so obviously biassed., and I want to avoid brain aneurisms.
Even my conservative British friends – who remember the BBC of old and think it’s still the same – believe that America is a racist hell where young Black men on their way to a tutorial in aeronautical engineering are wantonly shot down by racist policemen … daily, when they’re not being the targets of crazed white gun-owners…
Trump, of course, really made their presenters’ brains boil.
A nice book on their bias is here:
The Noble Liar: How and why the BBC distorts the news to promote a liberal agenda [ Amazon.com ]
And a news item here: One Million Households Drop BBC Liscence Fee Over Past Two Years
In the UK, if you own a TV set, you are forced to pay about $200 a year to the BBC, whether you watch it – or anything – or not. They have ‘detector vans’ driving around to catch people with TVs who have not paid their ‘license fee’. (Every receiver is also a tiny transmitter, evidently, although the detector vans may be mainly a bluff. Whatever, works with me.)
The Conservatives – talk about RINOs, you haven’t seen the half of it! – may … finally, finally, are getting around to taking the BBC off the government teat.
A shame, really Because the BBC used to, and does, present some excellent programs, that … in the old days, anyway … might not have been made by commercial firms. And it’s very nice indeed to be able to watch a program without it being interrupted every ten minutes by an inane advertisement.
So, in theory, a non-market institution that produced ‘public interest’ programs, like this one [ BBC Kenneth Clark's Civilisation 01 The Skin of our Teeth - YouTube ] sounds like a good idea, at least to a non-minarchist conservative like me.
But, just as every non-profit, even ones funded by grasping cruel billionaires, eventually becomes liberal … so also do such institutions. Anyway, technology has made it much easier, now, to produce excellent television/vidoe programs for not much money, and to make the old ones available.
We could probably produce an entire college-worth of degree programs, based solely on YouTube videos. (Which is an idea for a different discussion, on how to break the Left’s near-monopoly of higher education. I’ve got a cunning plan.)
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Please tell us your cunning plan, Doug. A cunning plan is badly needed.
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