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Open thread 12/27/23

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  • ghostsniper December 27, 2023, 8:59 AM

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uZCzH8q1hcY

    Days Of Future Passed, 1967
    With the London Festival Orchestra

    The Day Begins
    ——————-
    Cold hearted orb that rules the night,
    Removes the colours from our sight,
    Red is gray and yellow white,
    But we decide which is right.
    And which is an illusion?
    Pinprick holes in a colourless sky,
    Let insipid figures of light pass by,
    The mighty light of ten thousand suns,
    Challenges infinity and is soon gone.
    Night time, to some a brief interlude,
    To others the fear of solitude.
    Brave Helios wake up your steads,
    Bring the warmth the countryside needs.

    Dawn: Dawn Is A Feeling
    ——————————
    Dawn is a feeling
    A beautiful ceiling
    The smell of grass
    Just makes you pass
    Into a dream

    You’re here today
    No future fears
    This day will last
    A thousand years
    If you want it to

    You look around you
    Things they astound you
    So breathe in deep
    You’re not asleep
    Open your mind

    You’re here today
    No future fears
    This day will last
    A thousand years
    If you want it to

    Do you understand
    That all over this land
    There’s a feeling
    In minds far and near
    Things are becoming clear
    With a meaning

    Now that you’re knowing
    Pleasure starts flowing
    It’s true life flies
    Faster than eyes
    Could ever see

    You’re here today
    No future fears
    This day will last
    A thousand years
    If you want it to

    The Morning: Another Morning
    ————————————-
    Balloons flying
    Children sighing
    What a day to go kite flying
    Breezy school
    Away from school
    Cowboys fighting out a duel

    Time seems to stand quite still
    In a child’s world it always will

    Fishes biting
    So exciting
    Lunchtime sounds so inviting
    At the bill
    He gets a thrill
    Sitting, watching Bobby Quill

    Time seems to stand quite still
    In a child’s world it always will

    Yesterday’s dreams
    Are tomorrow’s sighs
    Watch children playing
    They seem so wise

    Mary Green
    Today’s a queen
    One thousand dollies are her dream
    In cotton frocks
    And golden locks
    Her palace is an orange box

    Time seems to stand quite still
    In a child’s world it always will

    Lunch Break: Peak Hour
    —————————–
    I see it all through my window it seems
    Never failing like millions of bees
    All that is wrong
    No time will be won
    All they need to do-o-o-o
    What can be done?

    Peak hour, peak hour, peak hour

    Minds are subject to what should be done
    Problem solved, time cannot be won
    One hour a day
    One hour at night
    Sees crowds of people
    All meant for flight

    Peak hour, peak hour, peak hour

    It makes me want to run out and tell them
    They’ve got time
    Take a step back out
    And look in at their debt
    And their time

    Minds are subject to what should be done
    Problem solved, time cannot be won
    One hour a day
    One hour at night
    Sees crowds of people
    All meant for flight

    Peak hour, peak hour, peak hour

    The Afternoon: Forever Afternoon (Tuesday?)
    ——————————————————
    Tuesday, afternoon,
    I’m just beginning to see,
    Now I’m on my way,
    It doesn’t matter to me,
    Chasing the clouds away.

    Something, calls to me,
    The trees are drawing me near,
    I’ve got to find out why
    Those gentle voices I hear
    Explain it all with a sigh.

    I’m looking at myself, reflections of my mind,
    It’s just the kind of day to leave myself behind,
    So gently swaying thru the fairy-land of love,
    If you’ll just come with me and see the beauty of

    Tuesday afternoon.
    Tuesday afternoon.

    Tuesday, afternoon,
    I’m just beginning to see,
    Now I’m on my way,
    It doesn’t matter to me,
    Chasing the clouds away.

    Something, calls to me,
    The trees are drawing me near,
    I’ve got to find out why
    Those gentle voices I hear
    Explain it all with a sigh.

    Evening: The Sun Set: Twilight Time
    ——————————————-
    When the sun goes down,
    And the clouds all frown,
    Night has begun for the sunset.

    See it with your eyes;
    Earth re-energized
    By the sun’s rays every day.
    Take a look out there,
    Planets everywhere.

    When the sun goes down,
    And the clouds all frown,
    Night has begun for the sunset.

    Shadows on the ground;
    Never make a sound,
    Fading away in the sunset.
    Night has now become
    Day for everyone.

    I can see it all
    From this great height.
    I can feel the sun
    Slipping out of sight;
    And the world still goes on
    Through the night.
    The Night: Nights In White Satin
    —————————————
    Nights in white satin,
    Never reaching the end,
    Letters I’ve written,
    Never meaning to send.

    Beauty I’d always missed
    With these eyes before,
    Just what the truth is
    I can’t say anymore.

    ‘Cause I love you,
    Yes, I love you,
    Oh, how, I love you.

    Gazing at people,
    Some hand in hand,
    Just what I’m going thru
    They can understand.

    Some try to tell me
    Thoughts they cannot defend,
    Just what you want to be
    You will be in the end,

    And I love you,
    Yes, I love you,
    Oh, how, I love you.
    Oh, how, I love you.

    Nights in white satin,
    Never reaching the end,
    Letters I’ve written,
    Never meaning to send.

    Beauty I’d always missed
    With these eyes before,
    Just what the truth is
    I can’t say anymore.

    ‘Cause I love you,
    Yes, I love you,
    Oh, how, I love you.
    Oh, how, I love you.

    ‘Cause I love you,
    Yes, I love you,
    Oh, how, I love you.
    Oh, how, I love you.

    Late Lament
    —————
    Breathe deep the gathering gloom,
    Watch lights fade from every room.
    Bedsitter people look back and lament,
    Another day’s useless energy spent.
    Impassioned lovers wrestle as one,
    Lonely man cries for love and has none.
    New mother picks up and suckles her son,
    Senior citizens wish they were young.
    Cold hearted orb that rules the night,
    Removes the colours from our sight.
    Red is grey and yellow white.
    But we decide which is right.
    And which is an illusion???.

  • ghostsniper December 27, 2023, 1:09 PM

    Break Out The ‘sheen gunz
    ===================
    As I’ve said numerous times, the worst thing this rotten assed gov’t has ever done was to hijack the public school system for THAT undermines all other societal ills in this country as it has rendered multiple generations of people incapable of thinking for themselves.

    Now, this:

    Michigan school district treats girl as boy behind parents’ backs
    ADF attorneys sue Rockford Public School District for referring to middle-school girl by masculine name, male pronouns while concealing actions from parents
    Monday, Dec 18, 2023
    GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. – Alliance Defending Freedom attorneys filed suit against a Michigan school district Monday on behalf of a mother and father after district employees began treating the couple’s middle-school daughter as a boy without their knowledge or consent and taking steps to conceal these actions from the parents.

    Dan and Jennifer Mead withdrew their daughter from the eighth grade at East Rockford Middle School in October 2022 after district employees, acting in compliance with Rockford Public School District policy, treated their daughter as a boy by referring to her by a masculine name and male pronouns without notifying the Meads or seeking their consent. Employees had altered the girl’s official records to remove references to the district’s actions before sending the records home. The Meads only discovered the district’s actions when an employee unintentionally failed to completely alter a report about their daughter before sharing it with them. By concealing this important information, the district violated the Meads’ fundamental parental rights. The U.S. Constitution protects their right as parents to make decisions about the upbringing, education, and health care of their children.

    “Parents, not the government, have the right to direct the upbringing, education, and health care of their children,” said ADF Senior Counsel Kate Anderson, director of ADF’s Center for Parental Rights. “Schools should never deliberately hide vital information from parents, yet that’s exactly what the Rockford Public School District did. District employees didn’t even notify Dan and Jennifer—let alone seek their consent—before beginning to call their young daughter by a masculine name and male pronouns. Worse, district policy required employees to alter official records to conceal the district’s actions. By intentionally concealing this information from the Meads, the school district violated their constitutionally protected right to make decisions regarding their daughter’s education and wellbeing and destroyed the trust the Mead family had placed in the district and its employees.”

    The Meads’ daughter started sixth grade at East Rockford Middle School in August 2020 as an 11-year-old. As the fall semester progressed, she fell behind in her studies, and Jennifer Mead began to communicate regularly with her daughter’s teachers and other district employees about her progress, as well as her wellbeing more generally. Over the next two school years, the Meads’ daughter met regularly with a school counselor, and the Meads placed significant trust in the counselor as well as other district employees. The counselor freely shared information about those meetings with Jennifer, most notably, about changes to the girl’s wellbeing the counselor had perceived.

    In May 2022, the Meads’ daughter sent a message to the school counselor asking her to e-mail her teachers and tell them to start calling her by a masculine name. From then until the end of the school year, just a few weeks later, the counselor corresponded multiple times, at length, with Jennifer but did not notify her of her daughter’s request to use a masculine name. When the Meads’ daughter started eighth grade in August of that year—from the very first day—employees began referring to her by the masculine name without the Meads’ knowledge or consent. Within weeks, they were regularly using that masculine name and male pronouns for the Meads’ daughter.

    Despite informing the Meads of the details of her discussions with their daughter up to that point, the school counselor chose not to tell them about this request. Indeed, district employees chose to affirmatively conceal this information from the Meads. It wasn’t until Dan Mead met with a district employee in October 2022 to discuss the district’s plan for accommodating his daughter’s recent autism diagnosis that he and his wife realized the district had been making a concerted effort to hide his daughter’s masculine name and pronouns from them. The district had removed references to the masculine name and male pronouns from documents that the Meads would see until one employee inadvertently gave Dan a document that included comments from a teacher using the masculine name and male pronouns to refer to his daughter.

    At first, the Meads thought this was a mistake—that another child’s information had been included in their daughter’s documents. But they soon learned the truth. When the Meads asked district employees to refrain from using the masculine name and male pronouns, the district refused to comply with their wishes. District policy required such actions from the employees.

    As ADF attorneys explain in the lawsuit, the district’s violations of the Meads’ constitutionally protected parental rights destroyed the Meads’ trust in the counselor, administrators, and other district employees with whom they had shared intimate details about their daughter’s and their own lives. As a result of this breach, the Meads were compelled to withdraw their daughter from the district’s schools.

    ADF attorneys filed the lawsuit, Mead v. Rockford Public School District, in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Michigan, Southern Division.

    Alliance Defending Freedom is an alliance-building, non-profit legal organization committed to protecting religious freedom, free speech, parental rights, and the sanctity of life.

    https://adfmedia.org/case/mead-v-rockford-public-school-district

  • Terry December 27, 2023, 5:22 PM

    Dot gov schools-

    I linked this from WhatFinger originally:

    https://twitter.com/EndWokeness/status/1740008011962126681

    • Anne December 28, 2023, 11:47 AM

      Terry–thank you so much for linking to this video! What are you and I and everyone else here going to do in our own communities to help these teachers overwhelm their union–to be safe from their union as they try to clean up this mess?
      Second thought–the problem is this: this is NOT the FIRST generation of failed students. THE PARENTS of these kids are also failed students! Just watch them make decisions at an intersection without a traffic light, or watch them try to count back change–these adults 50 and under began the slow descent. That is the conversation we have to have out loud! Who was the Tonight show host that used to go out and ask simple questions of people on the street? How many years ago was that? Those people are now parents and some are now even grandparents. How deep and all encompassing was that rot? Was it just California, or just Chicago, or just Atlanta? I don’t think so — I think it was all over this country in heavily populated areas. Those rural areas that were high producers of agricultural products seem to have escaped the first one or two generations of that breakdown. Big city girls didn’t really want to go out and teach in N. Dakota!
      I know a young woman–later 40’s who teaches 4th grade. She will tell you honestly the only reason she took the job of teaching was she couldn’t find a career she liked. Being a teacher offered all the benefits and time off–she will tell you “I hate kids that’s why I never wanted any”! How concerned do you think she is in the classroom? How determined or dedicated? Here are some interesting links:
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Education_Association
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Federation_of_Teachers

      *Note: I once looked for and found a former national president of one of the above groups. He was in his early fifties. He had buried himself and family way out in the boonies. When I asked why he replied: “I was afraid–mostly I was afraid of my own people”.

      • ghostsniper December 29, 2023, 12:15 PM

        We have met the enemy, and it is….

      • Terry December 29, 2023, 5:36 PM

        Anne,
        “What are you and I and everyone else here going to do in our own communities to help these teachers overwhelm their union–to be safe from their union as they try to clean up this mess?”

        I already tried to do something in the small village I live in. My wife and I were funders of a serious effort to get the head commie kicked off the school board here. It was a success. However the commies did everything possible to make my life very difficult after the leftist owned news rag published my name.

        There are three generations of dumb, dumb parents now with even dumber kids in these dot gov run schools. The dot gov run elementary and high schools in Idaho are in the bottom 25 percent ranked test score moron arena nation wide.

        The USA is a moron nation. A couple percent of the total population is running the whole bad ass apple press. To wit, the skies are filled with jets spraying the atmosphere with what? We are getting snow here that is not natural snow in any manner. And the dumber than dumb fools around these parts think all the visible shit behind these jets is engine vapor. Or dumber yet, they never even look up at the sky!

        So Anne, I am not going to do anything in regard to these schools and their slaves in the making.

        The new imported hoards will be eating these lost generations very soon.

        • ghostsniper December 29, 2023, 5:51 PM

          Terry sed: “We are getting snow here that is not natural snow in any manner.”
          ==========

          Can you elaborate on that?

          Here it is, 29 Dec, and we have not received ANY snow at all this season.
          Cold? Yes, sort of. Rain? Yeah, some, not much.
          But NO GD snow at all!!!
          In the 17 years we have lived here in southern IN we have always had snow by now and in 2006 we got LOT’S of snow. But the amount we have received each year since has been less and less. WTF good is winter if there is no snow??? White Christmas my pimply ass…..

          • John A. Fleming December 29, 2023, 10:11 PM

            Relax. It’s just weather. Some years are bountiful, some are not. It might be a good time to inventory the family’s “lean year” supplies and stock up.

            The wind and moisture flow in the Eastern Pacific is very very different this year than last. So far. It’s as if the prevailing winds have reversed directions this year. Moisture flow, the so-called “atmospheric rivers” is being diverted into Mexico and Canada. And the rivers are thin this year, there’s not a lot of tropical moisture being generated and sucked into the mid-latitudes. I watch almost daily the GOES weather movies, flipping between whole disk and North America and my local view, in the various visible and infrared bands. With the moisture being diverted away from the CONUS this year, the Midwest is in the no moisture zone. The Rockies are about 70% of average. California is dismal, 30% of average as of this date, and 9% as of the April 1st average.

            There’s still plenty of time for the large-scale wind and weather pattern to change to something different. Don’t panic till the end of January. If it stays like it is now into February, that’s the way it will be the rest of the winter.

          • Terry December 30, 2023, 7:14 PM

            ghost,

            Here is a link to get your interest perked.

            https://youtu.be/uJs_NKWzsT4

            Dane Wigington is an excellent source for doing your own research on the subject of weather manipulation and the use of aircraft to disperse all manner of chemicals into the atmosphere. Dane has an excellent video at his web site. This is not any conspiracy, but proven factual information. I was a sceptic until property my wife and I own was subject to “an atmospheric river” a while back. NOAA made hints about this event for two weeks prior to the actual time it occurred, exactly where they “warned” that there would be major storm caused damage.

            Site here: https://www.geoengineeringwatch.org/

            Watch video “The Dimming”

            • Nori December 31, 2023, 7:34 PM

              Terry,thank you for the links. The YouTube vid was riveting,it answered a lot of questions without any political poisoning whatsoever. Bookmarked geoengineeringwatch.org for further study & resources. Our dod and its cohorts were,and remain,insane.
              Blessings of the season to you and yours,and to all AD’ers.
              A Happy and Hopeful New Year as well.

  • Joe Krill December 27, 2023, 5:52 PM

    An extremely interesting article regarding lawsuit against Brandon Straka…. This dirty cops welfare retirement just bounced.

    This is Capitol Police Officer Byron Evans.

    Officer Evans sued me under the KKK Act alleging that I violated his civil rights and that I conspired with white supremacists to commit assault and battery against him on January 6th. (follow this thread to see how Officer Evans later admits he never came into any harmful or offensive contact with any protestors on J6)

    Seen here in this interview on CNN, Officer Evans describes his experience of watching the January 6th riot on television from a secure location.
    (*I was not present on Capitol grounds during the riot that occurred on the west side of the building).

    Officer Evans, along with 7 other black and brown Capitol Police officers, sued me… alleging that I am a racist and a white supremacist, and that I bore responsibility for their injuries. (More on Officer Evans’ injuries below).

    In discovery, we were able to compel Officer Evans to answer exactly where he was when I allegedly caused his assault and battery and violated his civil rights.

    His response? Officer Evans indicated that he spent about half the afternoon behind locked doors in the Vistor Center, then the remainder of the afternoon in a room in the Senate office building. (see excerpt from his interrogatory responses below)

    I was never present in any of these locations, and did not enter the Capitol on January 6th. I was on the east side steps for 8 minutes, and the outer grounds shooting street interviews for about 30 minutes.
    When asked what the nature of his injuries were that he was suing me for, Officer Evans responded, “Exposure to pepper spray, bear spray, fire extinguishers, and other pollutants”, “heightened stress and anxiety”, and “exhaustion and pain in legs (this injury is not explained)”, and emotional injuries such as “stress, anxiety, anger, and grief”
    *Besides having never seen or met Officer Evans in my entire life, I also had no chemical pollutants with me on January 6th, and didn’t spray any.
    In addition to the fact that I never met or encountered any of the officers in this lawsuit, that none of them were on the same side of the building as me during the short time I was there, and that I didn’t spray any chemical pollutants of any kind on January 6th, Officer Evans also admits here in his interrogatory that he didn’t come in contact with the chemical pollutants until late January 6th and the morning of January 7th, when I would have been sleeping in my hotel bed, then on my way home from
    Officer Evans, along with Capitol Officer Michael Fortune and 6 other Capitol Police officers not only claimed that I violated their civil rights and violated the KKK Act, but they also claim that I caused their “assault and battery”.

    I committed no acts of violence on J6; and did not plan, organize, or encourage any.

    In this interrogatory answer, Officer Evans admits that he sustained no physical injuries other than breathing in the remnants of chemical pollutants that had been sprayed (by people who weren’t ME) many hours before he allegedly breathed them in.
    Officer Evans’ attorneys at the Soros-funded law firm “Lawyer’s Committee for Civil Rights Under Law” approached me and my attorney for a financial settlement.

    Initially, they told us that they could not calculate the value of Officer Evans’ injuries without first having access to my bank statements to assess my net worth.

    I said absolutely not.

    Then they returned to us and told us that for $120,000 they would drop the lawsuit against me by Officer Evans and the other 7 black and brown Capitol Police officers (I had no contact with any of these officers on J6 and have never met any of them. I also had no contact with ANY officers on January 6th, and was never accused of or charged with any violent crimes or acts of violence.)

    I decided I would rather fight them to the end no matter what it costs, all the way to trial if necessary, than give them a single dime.

    And now, the remaining counts against me of assault and battery were dismissed, and the case is now over.

    This case against me has clearly demonstrated how the left will use their lies about racism and white supremacy (and their lies about J6) to game the system, knowing these false allegations carry weight and power, and that they can be used to drag people through the legal system to try to extort money out of people through settlement or judgement.

    Any police officer who participated in this scam should be forced to resign in disgrace.

    @elonmusk @TuckerCarlson @DonaldJTrumpJr @VivekGRamaswamy @pnjaban @RonColeman @MrAndyNgo @RepMTG @mattgaetz @BuckSexton @clayandbuck @marklevinshow @glennbeck @Timcast @JackPosobiec @JamesOKeefeIII @RepClayHiggins @DC_Draino @JesseKellyDC @charliekirk11 @RealCandaceO @CondemnedUSA @tracybeanz @UncoverDC @gregkellyusa @therealroseanne @dom_lucre @LauraLoomer @hodgetwins @DineshDSouza @SebGorka @ericmetaxas @shipwreckedcrew @McBrideLawNYC @CaraCastronuova @RevolverNewsUSA @RealAlexJones @RichValdes @johnrich @RepTroyNehls @Cernovich @MikeBenzCyber @DarrenJBeattie @bennyjohnson @MTGrepp @dbongino @Newsweek @KyleSeraphin @julie_kelly2

    • • •

    Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to force a refresh

  • Snakepit Kansas December 28, 2023, 4:37 AM

    In the semiconductor industry some years ago, some company or individual had a shaky claim about having patent infringement on some equipment commonly used. This group went around and tried to sue several smaller semiconductor manufacturers who had subcontractors who “may” have used such equipment in their processes. In short, it appeared to be somewhat of a scam trying to sue small companies that did not have the legal staff nor money to fight the shaky patent infringement case. I think that for a sum of money such companies could make the lawsuit go away. Pure crooks.

  • Anne December 28, 2023, 10:21 AM

    As a young single woman I built a small but successful business. I knew and understood my field better than most, but I did not know how to manage a business. I was tired and I wanted to get out. Because the business had been built on my personal reputation and legal qualifications I decided to just close down. I refused to sell. I paid a “bankruptcy attorney” $5,0000 to help me close down without causing any harm. I thought that was the right way to manage the accounts as I had about $7,000 outstanding to future customers. My vendors had promised to cover that $7,000 so that none of my customers would be harmed. My “attorney” never filed the paperwork, never did anything except try to force me into selling cheap to a member of his “community”. I refused so he did nothing. Later when I closed down without legal guidance and the newly appointed young city attorney received a complaint I was in deep trouble. I asked “my attorney” why he never filed the paperwork or did anything to help. You want to hear this answer–your gonna love this one:
    “The trouble with you is you are a young woman with no family”. When I asked why he didn’t even show up to help at the hearing his response was bone chilling: “I just bought a new Mercedes Benz and had scheduled to take it in for it’s 500 mile check up”. My company was taken over by members of the same group and survived for another 35 years! Funny how that worked.

    Twenty years later my DH and I had another experience which required an attorney. You will vomit when you hear what that one did!
    So NO, NO attorneys, unless they are funded as a non profit trying to assure our democracy survives.

    • Joe Krill December 28, 2023, 12:03 PM

      Anne, would love to hear what they did. “Twenty years later my DH and I had another experience which required an attorney. You will vomit when you hear what that one did!”

  • Anne December 28, 2023, 3:15 PM

    Saving that one for the best time to offer it up to AD readers! In the meantime, I can’t open JOE KRILL. Sorry to be such a computer amateur!

    • Terry December 31, 2023, 2:16 PM

      Anne, I am looking forward to the rest of the story.

  • ghostsniper December 28, 2023, 5:14 PM

    I’m a Meta insider working on Project Lazarus. We’re building an Al that can take over a deceased persons social media accounts and continue making relevant posts as if that person is still alive. This includes age progressed photos, interacting with other peoples content and everything else needed so that person continues on in the digital realm after physical death. We were originally told this would be a service offered to people struggling with the loss of loved ones and people who had missing children. Seemed like a decent idea.

    Things are getting weird now and I’m having second thoughts about what this is actually going to be used for. The Al is extremely capable of impersonating people. It doesn’t take as much initial input as one might think to train the Al how a certain person interacts with the digital world. It’s very convincing. An entire island of people could go missing and with little to no downtime the Al could take over all of their social media and the world wouldn’t have a clue that life wasn’t just continuing as usual. A lot of the project is becoming more compartmentalized.

    Things have taken a dark turn it feels like. They’ve forbidden communication between people working on different things. Something isn’t right and I don’t know what I should do. I’m not going to post any personally identifiable information but I will try to answer questions that won’t expose my role within the project.

    I always thought the excuse given – to mitigate grief – was a very thin one. And now that we’ve seen hundreds of people in a single area apparently liquidated in a short time on Maui, it appears to be fairly obvious what the purpose of this technology is.

    The world is much weirder than most people are able to imagine. It increasingly appears that Christian culture was holding back old gods who are much darker than most history records.

    https://voxday.net/2023/12/28/dead-internet-to-fake-internet/

  • Casey Klahn December 28, 2023, 6:33 PM

    And now, this PSA.

    Colorado’s SecState placed Trump back on the ballot; Maine’s SecState removed Trump from the ballot.

    But they didn’t steal the 2020 election. Only an idiot thinks that.

  • Joe Krill December 28, 2023, 8:06 PM

    America has passed. Multiculturalism does not work!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! The day of not being ashamed of who you are is long past.

    https://revolver.news/2023/12/notice-anything-different-between-this-moscow-subway-and-nyc/

  • Anne December 29, 2023, 8:04 AM

    How, or where will we find another like this?
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Patrick_Moynihan

    • azlibertarian December 29, 2023, 9:31 AM

      In the museum, in the room next to where you can find the dinosaurs.

    • ghostsniper December 29, 2023, 9:57 AM

      31 years ago, yesterday.
      ================
      https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/opinions/1992/12/28/defining-deviancy-down/03bd5544-2b4a-4271-8450-51ef99f27418/

      ‘DEFINING DEVIANCY DOWN’
      By William RaspberryDecember 28, 1992
      When our correcting mechanisms are overloaded, what was once deviant becomes acceptable.I remember telling my children a few years ago (it was an unusually peaceful time around the house) that they should try to keep Dad’s fussing in perspective. “All parents have a certain amount of fussing in them,” I said.

      “It doesn’t matter whether the fussing is about gang fights and drug abuse or only unmade beds and minor curfew violation; we’ve all got our fussing quotient. I’m just glad that I’ve been able to expend my quotient on relatively minor stuff.”

      I thought it was just my awkward way of expressing gratitude for three pretty decent children. Now I find I was committing sociology.

      I’ve just seen a paper of Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s (The American Scholar, Winter 1993) in which the New York senator explores the notion that communities have a certain amount of punishment (fussing) to mete out for deviant behavior. We keep the level of punishment more or less constant by redefining deviancy.

      The basic notion comes from Emile Durkheim (1895), with an elaboration by Kai T. Erikson, whose 1965 examination of crime in the Massachusetts Bay Colony was designed to test Durkheim’s theory. Listen to Erikson:

      “To start at the beginning, it is a simple logistic fact that the number of deviancies which come to a community’s attention are limited by the kinds of equipment it uses to detect and handle them. … A community’s capacity for handling deviance, let us say, can be roughly estimated by counting its prison cells and hospital beds, its policemen and psychiatrists, its courts and clinics.”

      Durkheim’s interesting theory is that there can be no such thing as a “crime free” community (he suggests it may even be dangerous to reduce deviancy too much) but only communities that redefine “crime” to accommodate their means for dealing with it. Judging only from the amount of deviancy they punish, there’s no difference between a halfway house and a monastery.

      If the redefinition of deviancy only involved “criminalizing” such things as inattention at prayer, the refusal of itinerant Quakers to doff their hats in the presence of magistrates or my children’s forgetting to let me know where they are on a Saturday night, Moynihan might dismiss the whole idea as quaint.

      But he makes a point that Durkheim seems to have neglected: that redefinition works in the other direction as well. Behavior that once was deviant and punishable (whether by law or social sanction) can, when our correcting mechanisms are overloaded, be redefined as acceptable.

      The clearest example intimately associated with the senator is our national attitude toward unwed parenthood. When Moynihan (then an assistant secretary of labor in the Johnson administration) wrote his controversial study predicting family breakdown among black Americans would lead to social disaster, about a fifth of black babies were born out of wedlock. The rate for whites: 1 in 40.

      Today, nearly 27 years later, one-fifth of white babies are born to unmarried mothers, while the rate for blacks has reached two-thirds. But much of the talk today is about the irrelevancy of “Ozzie and Harriett” models and the ascendancy of “alternative lifestyles,” as though the thing lamented by Moynihan is in fact a healthy smorgasbord of new “choices.”

      There are other examples of “defining deviancy down,” as Moynihan puts it, including the “deinstitutionalization” of mental patients, lowered expectations for school performance and the growing acceptance of criminal violence. Reminder: The 1929 St. Valentine’s Day Massacre,” which merits two entries in the World Book Encyclopedia, consisted of seven gangsters being killed by four rival gunmen. Comparable violence, which might occur any weekend in Washington or Los Angeles, has been redefined as very nearly normal.

      The redefinition is not benign. There is unimpeachable evidence that family structure (and not just public attitudes regarding family structure) matters enormously to the well-being of children. The homelessness of the deintitutionalized (or never institutionalized) mentally ill is a rebuke to the society. Violence, no longer linked primarily to the drug trade, has changed our cities for the worse.

      I know: We worry in public and appoint commissions to examine homelessness, school failure and gunplay. We campaign for stiffer sentences (including execution) and occasionally build more jail cells. But, like Moynihan, I doubt that we are as serious as we ought to be about what is happening to us. Our predisposition is still to redefine the problem down to manageable proportions, to normalize what once alarmed us.

      “We are,” as Pat Moynihan put it, “getting used to a lot of behavior that is not good for us.”

  • Anne December 29, 2023, 9:56 AM

    I remember his work to help African/Americans become self-sufficient and keep their families together. A work that encouraged their participation in our economy in an active way. He was famous for challenging the liberal agenda of “helping” those communities.

  • ghostsniper December 29, 2023, 2:35 PM

    Too stupid to get out of their own way
    ==========================
    The BIG HAMMER will set them free.

    The most potent example of US emasculation in the region by far though is the situation of the Galaxy Leader, a merchant marine ship configured as a car carrier. The ship is British owned, Japanese operated and was transiting through the Red Sea when it was boarded and commandeered by AnsarAllah partisans on November 19th, 2023. In spite of US and UK demands that the ship and its crew be released, the ship as of this writing (December 28th, 2023) remains firmly in AnsarAllah control just off the coast of Yemen – so much so, that the ship has been turned into a tourist venue and has provided an endless well of motivation and pride for the Arabs who are firmly in support of ending the Israeli campaign and occupation of Palestine.

    The US response to this, has been to memory hole this inconvenient fact with help from the mainstream media, pretend it didn’t happen and is no longer a crisis. So much for reliance upon the “blanket of safety” the presence of an entire US Carrier Strike Group (CSG) allegedly can provide for its allies. Again, this is the escalating cost of the US’ alliance with Israel, since AnsarAllah has made clear that its actions are in support of the partisan forces of Palestine, and that only Israeli-linked shipping, either Israeli owned, operated or transiting to Israeli ports of call are at risk.

    This creates enormous issues for global shipping, as the largest civilian shipping fleet in the world is now MSC, which owns a fleet of merchant marine and tourist cruise ships, and is 50% owned by Rafaela Aponte, a Jew born in Haifa and the daughter of a Swiss Israeli banker, a fact that MSC is trying hard to keep concealed.

    https://stopshoutingblog.substack.com/p/winning-clown-world-style

  • ghostsniper December 29, 2023, 5:44 PM

    WashPo op-ed scribbler Robert Kagan, husband of State Department warmonger Victoria Nuland, has suggested that some extra-legal removal method may be needed to solve the Trump problem if the idiotic indictment barrage falls short. Everybody who read his piece thought: Oh, they’re actually proposing to whack him. That would set things off nicely.

    You’d suppose the Party of Chaos might loose its Antifa / BLM mobs, and other shock troops onto the streets well before November on some George Floyd type pretext in order to invoke a “national emergency,” giving “JB” & Co. license to declare martial law and perhaps postpone the election. Everybody will see through the play. Try it and see what happens.

    But, if the election actually happens and Mr. Trump wins, I’d expect the Dems to unleash holy hell on the country post election day just for the sheer sadistic pleasure of watching whatever is left of America burn down. This time, proponents of the 2nd Amendment may not stand idly by, especially with the big city police forces decimated. There will be ten-thousand Kyle Rittenhouses out there defending the streets from the ragtag and bobtail of diseased imbeciles in their black bloc uniforms cringing behind their sissy umbrellas.

    https://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/do-you-dare-even-look-forecast-2024/

  • Anne December 29, 2023, 9:05 PM

    Thanks Ghost for posting the piece about Moynihan–it brings forward the details I was hoping could be found!

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