Quote of the Day - Stephen Kruiser Edition

From his daily Morning Briefing, titled:  Defund the Public Education Leftist Indoctrination Mills

While I have never been one to view anything as an existential crisis, I’ve more and more come to believe that the upcoming presidential election will be a watershed moment for the United States. If Joe Biden wins, it will be the complete triumph of decades of public education indoctrination. The drift of so many young Americans towards socialism and anti-American sentiment is the direct result not being taught real American history, but being fed a leftist line that seeks to rewrite and/or whitewash much of what made this country great.

Do read the whole thing, but seriously, Stephen?  Now?  You're a pundit.  I'm just the average guy, and I figured that out a few years ago.  Defunding public education isn't enough.  We need to nuke the site from orbit until the rubble bounces, and salt the Trinitite.  Public education isn't "fixable."  The problem isn't the schools, its the people who run them.  We have to get them away from the children.

And for those of you who ask "Well, what do we replace them with?" please read Education, Societal Division and a Proposal

51 Years Ago Today

Man first landed on the Moon:


I have become convinced that the United States peaked on this day, fifty years ago. The decay had already become apparent, but we as a nation carried off the single most difficult, incredible effort in human history.  I'm blessed to have been alive during that time.

I've Been Saying This for Literally Decades

Our Educational System Makes U.S. Land of Useful Idiots

Hey Roger, try reading  Education, Societal Division and a Proposal

A Moment of Zen

After those last two überposts, I need one.  Badly.

Banff National Park, Alberta, Canada

“The Pentagon has built its entire advanced weapons on Chinese quicksand,”

In relation to my previous post, read this article from the South China Morning Post.

Excerpt:

After China’s 2010 strong-arm tactics against Japan, some in the West raised warnings but were soon drowned out by economics, a supply glut engineered by China and limited political will. “The Pentagon has built its entire advanced weapons on Chinese quicksand,” military consultant James Kennedy wrote in a Defence One commentary in 2016.

China controls the market of refined rare earth minerals crucial to the defense industry for advanced electronics and metal alloys.  The United States has one (1) active rare earth mine, and its entire production is sold to a Chinese state-owned refinery.

So if the SHTF and China simply cut us off, our military technological superiority will shortly be eliminated.

I've been just a fountain of joy recently.

 

Endgame

This blog has been, for me, a seventeen-year exploration of other people's ideas.  If you've been here long, you'll know that I use short quotes and long excerpts from other people's writings to make the points I write about.  Like most people, I am not an "original thinker."  I try to expose myself to as much as I can, and weigh it against my experience and reason to determine truth.  Then I put it down in pixels to help me get my head around it.

Over these past seventeen years (hell, over the last 25), I have slowly come to some conclusions that I'm not happy about.

Remember that last nearly 10,000-word überpost?  I told you that so I could tell you this.  Hopefully I won't be as long-winded this time.

Quote of the Day - Victor Davis Hanson Edition

From his recent piece Year Zero at NRO, but do read the whole thing:

Gun sales are at record levels. I supposed the revolutionaries never investigated the original idea of a police force and the concept of the government’s legal monopoly on violence? It was not just to protect the law-abiding from the criminal, but to protect the criminal from the outraged vigilante.

Only police can stop blood feuds such as the ones we see in Chicago or like the medieval ones of Iceland’s Njáls saga, or the postbellum slaughtering of the Hatfields and McCoys. We are already seeing a counterrevolution — as the Left goes ballistic that anyone would appear on his lawn pointing a semiautomatic rifle to protect mere “brick and mortar.”

Without a functioning police force, do we really believe that the stockbroker is going to walk home in the evening in New York City without a firearm, or that the suburbanite in Minneapolis in an expansive home will not have a semiautomatic rifle, or that the couple who drives to Los Angeles with the kids to visit Disneyland will not have a 9mm automatic in their car console? The Left has energized the Second Amendment in a way the NRA never could, and for the next decade, there will be more guns in pockets, cars, and homes than at any time in history.

Truth

Sixteen Years Later...

...and there are simply more like this out there than before.  A repost from 2004:

It is ABSOLUTELY ESSENTIAL to Keep the Hands of Fucknuggets Like This OFF the Levers of Power

All you have to do is change "Bush" to "Trump."  And I still want to keep these fucknuggets away from the levers of power.

Metastasized Marxism

"An empire toppled by its enemies can rise again.  But one which crumbles from within?  That's dead... forever." - Col. Zemo from Captain America:  Civil War

There is often truth in fiction.

Nation: (n) -  a large body of people, associated with a particular territory, that is sufficiently conscious of its unity to seek or to possess a government peculiarly its own - Dictionary.com

Margaret Thatcher once observed, "Europe was created by history. America was created by philosophy." 

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." - Declaration of Independence

Of all the philosophical ideals ever committed to paper, "the pursuit of Happiness" must count among the greatest, but "all men are created equal" ranks a close second. Of course, these ideals were untrue in practice, but the character of Death expressed another truth in fiction in Terry Pratchett's Hogfather, "You need to believe in things that aren't true.  How else can they become?"

We have been a nation often described as a "melting pot," but more accurately as a "salad bowl" - the individual bits not melted together, but working (more or less) in harmony to be more than the sum of their parts. 

We have never been perfect.  No nation ever has.  But we have been good, a beacon to the peoples of other nations, the "shining city on the hill" as Ronald Reagan put it.  But not perfect by a long shot.

Advisory:  This is my first überpost in quite a while.  You've been warned.