Author: Doug Santo

Geologist | Author | Photographer
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Is it just me, or do alternate lifestyle people seem to have personality disorders more often than others.

“Temper tantrums”: Trouble at Shep Smith’s new CNBC show, allegedly — ratings and otherwise

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Over the target, taking heavy flak, bomb bay doors open.

House Democrats Announce ‘Investigation’ of Arizona Audit in Really Desperate Sounding Letter

How worried are national Democrats that election malfeasance will be exposed in Arizona like it it was in Georgia?

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California School mandates the teaching of racism to preschoolers

California School District Makes History With Mandatory CRT-Based Program for Preschoolers

California. Can it get worse? Why yes, yes it can. Democrats slowly become Palestinians.

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DeSantis campaign merchandise. “Don’t Fauci my Florida”

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Losing people

California Fleeing

Joel Kotkin, Wendell Cox:

“…Some longtime Californians view the continued net outmigration from their state as a worrisome sign, but most others in the Golden State’s media, academic, and political establishment dismiss this demographic decline as a “myth.” The Sacramento Bee suggests that it largely represents the “hate” felt toward the state by conservatives eager to undermine California’s progressive model. Local media and think tanks generally concede the migration losses but comfort themselves with the thought that California continues to attract top-tier talent and will remain an irrepressible superpower that boasts innovation, creativity, and massive capital accumulation.

Reality reveals a different picture. California may be a great state in many ways, but it also is clearly breaking bad. Since 2000, 2.6 million net domestic migrants, a population larger than the cities of San Francisco, San Diego, and Anaheim combined, have moved from California to other parts of the United States. (See Figure 1.) California has lost more people in each of the last two decades than any state except New York—and they’re not just those struggling to compete in the high-tech “new economy.” During the 2010s, the state’s growth in college-educated residents 25 and over did not keep up with the national rate of increase, putting California a mere 34th on this measure, behind such key competitors as Florida and Texas. California’s demographic woes are real, and they pose long-term challenges that need to be confronted.

Source: Derived from U.S. Census Bureau Estimates

The state has suffered net outmigration in every year of the twenty-first century, but its smallest losses occurred in the early 2000s and the years following the Great Recession, when housing affordability was closer to the national average. Home prices have risen since then—and so have departures. Between 2014 and 2020, net domestic outmigration rose from 46,000 to 242,000, according to Census Bureau estimates.

The outmigration does not seem to have reached a peak. Roughly half of state residents, according to a 2019 UC Berkeley poll, have considered leaving. In Los Angeles, according to a USC survey, 10 percent plan to move out this year. The most recent Census Bureau estimates show that California started falling behind national population growth in 2016 and went negative for the first time in modern history last year…”

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This requires federal intervention. This is corporate communism. Where are the Republicans?

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Kurt Schlichter on Cubans protesting for freedom and what it highlights about our elite class

The Cuban Freedom Protest Is Awkward for Our Garbage Elite

Kurt Schlichter:

“…Oh, that wasn’t embarrassing at all – a couple days after our glorious FBI, fresh from failing to stop several mass murderers it knew about decided to ask the American people to narc on their family members, the Cuban people took to the streets to protest just this type of commie garbage. Great timing. This is the kind of quality work that has led to our ace Inspector Erskines having no idea what the Maddow-loving leftist with the list of Republicans and a rifle was doing at that softball field.

Now, it’s not just the FBI encouraging kids to turn-in their birthing people to the authorities for unapproved thoughts that channels the Castro vibe. It’s a whole bunch of things going down that demonstrate, conclusively, that our elite is down with the oppression. And, of course, it’s all in the name of democracy.

It was just this last July 4th that the esteemed, among jerks, New York Times informed us that the flag is a symbol of badness. Meanwhile, the Cuban people, and the people of Hong Kong, are waving the red, white n’ blue around like woke corporations waved rainbow flags right up until the last day of Pride Month.

This all comes a week after the regime got caught tuning into Tucker Carlson’s texts. The whole listening into the private communications of dissenters flex seems kind of familiar too. The NSA sort of denied it – weasel words are red, flashing lights to lawyers like me – but then, exactly as predicted, some public servant leaked these nonexistent intercepts to the lapdog press. 

The best part of that fiasco was the members of the Never Trump Residue Caucus, like Jonah Goldberg, denying that the establishment would ever do this, then insisting they were correct even after it became clear to all sentient life forms that this is exactly what the establishment did. I’d link to Heavy G’s tweets where, in the classic internet formulation, he insisted that he was not owned as he slowly shrank and transformed into a corncob, but he blocked me…”

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How stupid is liberal media? This stupid.

We live in the age of stupid.

This is what passes for rational argument in liberal media and is transmitted to an admittedly small, national audience. There is a Texas Democrat fleebagger on the panel.

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The FBI is a mismanaged, politicized joke. Has it hit rock bottom?

Hat tip to Kane

Related:

59 of 96 phones assigned to Mueller probe missing; GOP senators demand answers from DOJ

Related:

Rank and Vile – Stunning Inspector General Report Shows FBI Facilitating Predator Coach Larry Nassar Rape of U.S. Gymnasts – Worse, The FBI Lied to Investigators and Then The DOJ Refused to Prosecute

“…An absolutely damning Inspector General investigation of FBI conduct in the rape and sexual assault of U.S. Gymnasts reveals how FBI agents facilitated Nassar’s sex crimes by taking no action despite numerous witness statements to them.

Worse yet, the FBI never reported the sexual assaults to local law enforcement… and to top it off, the FBI agents lied during the investigation of their conduct, and the DOJ under AG Bill Barr refused to prosecute the FBI liars…”

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Baltimore may be a worse run Democrat hell-hole than Chicago. Well, maybe not as bad as that, but close.

41% of Baltimore high schoolers have a GPA below 1.0

“…BALTIMORE (WBFF) – Baltimore City Schools has reached an alarming low in student performance. Project Baltimore has learned, during the first three quarters of this year, nearly half of high school students in City Schools earned a grade point average below a D.

When Jovani Patterson ran for Baltimore City Council President last year, he ran on a platform that included accountability in education.

“They take. They take. They take. Yet, despite the amount of money they get. We don’t see much change. Our schools outspend 97% of other major school districts,” Patterson said during a 2020 campaign ad…”

What a disgrace. This is an American disgrace. Baltimore is populated by American citizens.

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On Texas Democrat fleebaggers

Image

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Europeans reject Covid passports

France

Ireland

https://twitter.com/NewsForAllIre/status/1415427037163044866

https://twitter.com/NewsForAllIre/status/1415400101435084808

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On Cuba and similarities to woke liberal nonsense in the US

Antonio García Martínez on what people taking to the streets are protesting

Antonio García Martínez:

“…It’s hard to convey to those who live in the free world what life is like under a totalitarian dictatorship. I’d never experienced anything remotely like it before I traveled to Cuba in 2017 to report a story for WIRED magazine, and it was one of the most memorable and unpleasant experiences of my life.

The first thing is the fear: you as an individual exist naked without any recourse against the depredations of the state. I was reporting illegally, with no journalist visa, which would have taken at best months to get. The police could have knocked on the door and hauled me away to the cuartico (little room) at Villa Marista, the Cuban Lubyanka, or disappeared me into some other extrajudicial hole. The authorities did just that yesterday to Camila Acosta, a correspondent for the Spanish newspaper ABC for “crimes against state security.” The Founding Fathers’ warnings about tyrannical kings and their obsession with habeas corpus hit differently when you’re confronted with an unaccountable state machine and no recourse to rule of law or individual rights.

The second thing you notice is the deception: To live in Cuba is to live in a web of lies. It begins with the media, which is pure propaganda repeated by everyone, chorus-like, or else. As a cope, everyone has a half-dozen make-believe realities in their heads, which they selectively deploy depending on whom they’re addressing. I’d ask person A about person B and they’d warn me they worked for the state and to be careful. Then I’d then speak to person B and they’d tell me the same about person A. Perhaps both were correct. I wasn’t exempt: I’d lie about what I was doing in Cuba since I wasn’t supposed to be there. Everything is a regimented fantasy. Underneath it is an ever-shifting haze of rumor, speculation, and wishful thinking.

The American tourists who visited Cuba during the Obama period saw nothing other than a Potemkin Airbnb reality they inhabited for a few dollar-fueled days. To really feel the brunt of the Cuban state you need to live as Cubans do, or run afoul of the sliver of relative freedom the state affords foreigners. I’ll share two anecdotes where that normally translucent atmosphere of repression revealed itself to me.

The first occurred while I was meeting one of the tiny number of independent journalists who around 2017 were tentatively stepping out of the official channels and launching their own blogs. (He’s in the United States now but I’ll keep his name out of it.) The scene was the Café Mamainé, one of the few trendy hangout spots that had sprung up in the relatively upscale Vedado neighborhood of Havana. The journalist was recounting his independent reporting from the eastern part of the island after Hurricane Irma, when the government (as with COVID) was caught horribly unprepared.

“By showing the reality of the government’s lack of preparation, we hope to increase accountability in our democratic process….”

Me, the idiot American who didn’t quite understand yet how this worked, interrupted him: ”What accountability? What democracy? This is a total dictatorship.”

He stared at me like I’d relieved myself on the cafe’s floor, looked quickly around us, and then proceeded to utterly ignore what I’d just said as if it hadn’t happened. In Cuba, there’s very much a Set of Things You Cannot Say. “Cancellation” is a rather harder proposition there than it is in the U.S.

The second example was at a festive barbecue held in the studio space of one of the small number of Cuban artists who have managed to sell their pieces overseas for hard dollars. The company was friendly, composed of sets of mutual friends with family in tow. The hour was late, rum had flowed, and per usual, the Cubans settled down to a convivial game of double-nine dominoes. One boy, I’d guess his age around nine or ten, was engaged in the age-old ritual of punking his elders by telling salty jokes he’d heard from adults. It was the classic humor format of putting different stock characters in a comedic situation, and joking about how they’d handle it. In this case, the joke was about waiting interminably for a bus, a common Cuban occupation:

Y la divorciada (and the divorced woman)…

Hahaha….

Y el cuentapropista (and the small-business owner)…

Hahaha…

Y el fidelista (and the Fidel supporter)…

Suddenly the warm atmosphere was shattered as everyone, as if on a pre-arranged signal, raised their voices at once. Everyone chastised him loudly, as you would a child about to stick their hand into a fire. One couldn’t joke about Fidel supporters, even in a private social setting among friends: who knew who was an informant? Nobody wanted the knock on the door or the acto de repudio the next day.

And just like that, the domino game went on and the boy stopped with his jokes. The reflex was automatic, as natural as covering your face when sneezing.

That’s the reality of Cuba you don’t see from a tourist hotel…

…Despite the various challenges we face, the reality is that Americans have not  known hard times within living memory — real hard times, not invented ones based on Twitter dramas and “misinformation.” All that Americans have known since World War II is ever higher plateaus of freedom and material wealth, with all the horrors of the world — killing fields, political prisons, autocratic demagogues, a real resistance — held so far out of their mind’s eye they don’t even know what they look like anymore.

But there is no law of physics that dictates that the good times must continue.

The sad reality is that countries can and do choose to commit suicide, as we’ve seen with Syria and Venezuela more recently, and Cuba, three generations ago. Embracing some revolutionary philosophy that promises to heal all ills and right all wrongs, and then exploiting the worst human tendencies to implement that wild-eyed vision, is the sure path to ruin.

America is not remotely at the level of Cuba, but it sure seems we have a growing taste for apocalyptic politics and orthodoxies enforced by public acts of repudiation. We have developed a high tolerance for snitches sanctimoniously ratting out people publicly for personal gain, lists of Things That Cannot Be Said, and citizens huddling in private groups to share ideological samizdat they dare not discuss in public.

America wasn’t built on “content moderation” guidelines and “problematic” this and that. It was built on the inalienable right of every citizen to tell their government, as well as any fellow citizen, to go fuck themselves and read and write and do whatever they like. The perfect is often the enemy of the good, and the hellbent drive toward some supposed utopia often ruins an imperfect society that would be better served by a more fervent embrace of its founding principles. We’ve lived so comfortably in the society those principles created that we delude ourselves into thinking they can be dispensed with in the name of some newfangled orthodoxy.

I can’t help but think here of the president who avidly fought the empire of which Cuba was once the extension. In his 1967 inaugural address for California governor, Reagan issued a warning:

Perhaps you and I have lived too long with this miracle to properly be appreciative. Freedom is a fragile thing and it’s never more than one generation away from extinction. It is not ours by way of inheritance; it must be fought for and defended constantly by each generation, for it comes only once to a people.  And those in world history who have known freedom and then lost it . . . have never known it again.

Such a people is then condemned to live in the crumbling ruins of their once-beautiful country, as Cubans are now, struggling feebly for their own subsistence and against their own government. If you’re fortunate, you live out the rest of your days nostalgically recalling what your nation was once like, as my grandparents did, while having to build a new life in a foreign one. Some mistakes a free people get to make only once…”

Doug Santo