QUESTION OF THE DAY: Guess who was brawling inside the Rock n’ Roll McDonald’s in Chicago on 12/27/14?
So, here’s another example of how civilization is just collapsing in Chicago and a wilding is happening, where the “youth” of the city cause massive property damage and bodily harm to others and the Chicago police are afraid to put a stop to any of this. Without watching the video, can you first guess who you think will be committing the violence in the Rock n’ Roll McDonalds?
(a.) The Amish
(b.) Homeschooled kids from the suburbs
(c.) Kids with stable two-parent homes or kids in private school
(d.) Chicago Public School students or graduates
Ding, ding, ding! If you picked (d.), you are a winner!
Those of us in Chicago lose, as always, because this is where political correctness has taken our city. The police here are afraid to stop this kind of behavior from the “youth” because they’re scared of Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson turning one of these thugs into the next “gentle giant”. They commit crimes and hurt people…but if the police intervene and stop the criminals and the criminals are injured, then the Justice Brothers waddle out and threaten a race war.
White people are scared to death of a race war…but I wonder how it would look any different from a Saturday night at the Rock n’ Roll McDonalds.
If Chicago can no longer keep tourist areas like Navy Pier and the Rock n’ Roll McDonalds off Michigan Avenue safe anymore then the city’s in really bad shape. All during Mayor Daley’s administration, there was violence on the South Side and the other terrible parts of town…but it never bled into the tourist zones. Now, nowhere in Chicago is safe. The thugs beat and rob and murder in Boystown, Michigan Avenue, Navy Pier, the Gold Coast, Lincoln Park. It’s no longer just the South Side that is Murder Central.
DIVERSITY!
ANOTHER AIRPLANE VANISHES INTO THIN AIR: How long will the public believe it’s just a mystery?
Another airplane has gone “missing”.
This time, it’s an AirAsia flight en route to Singapore.
I remind you that this is just 10 months after Malaysia Airlines flight 370 also supposedly vanished without a trace. In the year 2014. Poof! Nothing to see here, folks!
Here’s what I think is really happening: hackers are taking over these planes and causing governments to shoot them down (I don’t think it’s a terrorist network at work…I think it’s something ridiculous like Millennials eating pizza in a dorm room somewhere, behaving like real life is a video game). But, the governments who have to shoot the planes down don’t want to admit they are doing this. So, the governments involved are lying to the public and pretending they don’t know what happened to the planes, knowing from public relations consultants that the public loses interest after about 6 months and people stop caring.
Ask anyone on the street if they remember the missing Malaysian airlines crash and I’d wager you’d hear “Didn’t they find that plane?” or “What Malaysian airline crash?” (or, if you’re talking to a Chicago Public Schools graduate, “What’s Malaysia?”).
The AirAsia disappearance just happened yesterday. Drudge has it flashing on the homepage in red right now as a breaking story. Maybe by morning the plane will be found, safe and sound…or debris will be spotted floating in the ocean this time. But at the moment I’m wondering if the hacking of Sony and the Christmas morning hacking of Playstation and XBox are related to these two airline disappearances.
Is this a pattern that’s all the work of rogue computer hackers out for “Lulz”?
I don’t believe it’s Muslims who are behind this. And I don’t believe it’s North Korea. I think the people behind this are smarter and are not tied to Islam or a nation state.
I’m wondering if this is a Matthew Broderick in War Games kind of scenario. Are hackers out there having some “Lulz” (as the Internet calls using computers to engage in “pranks” like these, even if they have horrifically real consequences) and exploiting holes in airline security in Asia? For the uninitiated, a large swath of male Millennials has withdrawn from society and essentially lives in front of computer screens, waging war against one target or another.
The call these “faggot raids”…where people (usually Millennial males) who grew up on video games like “World of Warcraft” blur the lines between fantasy and reality and engage in cyber warfare against an appointed enemy in real life, as if they were playing a video game. “Faggot raids” are what these gamers-cum-cyber-terrorists call themselves. “Raids” are what World of Warcraft calls a group of players coming together for a mission in the game…and somehow Internet parlance called taking on these “missions” in real life “faggot raiding”. It’s my understanding that they don’t mean this as a homophobic pejorative, but as some self-awareness at how pathetic they are for behaving this way.
Trolls organize to bring down a target…but lose interest pretty quickly and have to move on to something new. Could these hacking attacks against Sony, Playstation, and X-Box be linked to the missing airlines? What if the “faggot raiding” parties have grown bored with their usual stunts and have taken their “raiding” to the next level?
Would governments admit that “faggot raiding” parties of civilian Millennials are behind these atrocities?
It seems crazy to me to believe that North Korea perpetrated the Sony hack. The FBI sure moved fast to pin it on North Korea, though…and the White House was falling all over itself to repeat that line. When does the FBI ever move that fast to pin the blame on someone? I don’t remember the FBI even admitting that Al Queda was behind 9/11 until some time later. With this Sony hack, the FBI was like Commissioner Gordon figuring out it was The Riddler at work and firing up the Bat-Signal before the first commercial break.
And after that, there was a big “nothing to see here, folks” embargo on any proof that the FBI was telling the truth. Did North Korea — a country that is pitch black from space at night and is as backwards as things come in our modern world — somehow hack Sony and mostly just screw around with payroll documents (you know, like a juvenile hacker in a “faggot raiding party” would)? That has never made any sense to me. If they had the ability to hack computers like that, why didn’t they hack the computers at Hoover Dam and cause it to explode…or hack the federal government’s payroll operations…or hack Wall Street? Wouldn’t those be things that North Korea would do…if North Korea could do those things?
That whole “pin this on North Korea” thing feels like something Olivia Pope would have come up with on the TV show Scandal. North Korea is the last politically correct villain left in the world. Have you noticed that all recent movies involving any kind of attack on the country have been using North Korea as the bad guys (instead of Muslims, the Chinese, or Russia?). The Red Dawn remake (North Korea invades the US!). One of those “Die Hard in the White House” movies, I can’t tell them apart (North Korea attacked in one of them, for sure, and either Aaron Eckhart was President or it was Jamie Foxx, I don’t think anyone really knows). Hollywood is afraid of offending China and losing ticket sales there by having Chinese villains. And Hollywood is afraid of offending Muslims by accurately portraying Islam as the driving force of evil in any movie (because Hollywood executives are afraid of jihad retaliation for such accuracy). Ain’t nobody scared of North Korea because the North Koreans are the bad guys in just about everything produced in the action genre in the last five years.
But, we’re supposed to believe that North Korea hacked Sony because it was upset about a James Flacco (sic…spelling courtesy of Obama) movie?
And we’re also supposed to believe that Malaysian Airlines Flight 370 just vanished out of our dimension, possibly out of our time stream?
Isn’t a much simpler explanation that rogue computer hackers are behind all of these things?
I actually believe that most times in recent years that airplanes mysteriously crash that they were in fact shot down by governments. That could be our government, or it could be others. But governments don’t want to own up to doing this. How many mysterious crashes of planes have reports of rockets in the air, spotted by people on the ground?
What if the common thread in all of these mystery crashes is really that in every one of them the planes were shot down by governments because the planes had been hacked and the fear was that the planes would be used in 9/11 style attacks?
The governments shoot the planes down…and then disavow any responsibility for the action. The planes just “vanished”.
In other instances where a villain is needed, just trot out North Korea. Can’t blame Saddam Hussein or Osama bin Laden anymore. So, just say that North Korea did it. Otherwise just say “the plane disappeared”.
Am I the only one who can so easily see Kerry Washington holding a big glass of wine and wearing her giant white hat, standing in the Oval Office set of Scandal, telling the actor playing the President on the show to do things like this?
I think this might have actually been an episode of Scandal from Season 1, come to think of it.
WORTH YOUR TIME: Watch “The Babadook” on Amazon for only $5.99
CLICK HERE for “The Babadook” on Amazon
I don’t recommend many movies to people because one of two things always happens: (1) they end up hating it and are then mad at me for recommending it (and I never hear the end of that) or (2) they end up not liking it but don’t want to tell me (because they think my feelings will be hurt). Years ago, I worked as ghostwriter for a famous crazy person who used to scream at all of us on staff…and one of my coworkers, Andrea, always said (whenever someone would worry about hurting someone else’s feelings in the office) “Honey, none of us around here have any feelings left.” But, I do hope you like “The Babadook” as much as I did.
I love when Amazon has movies online while they are in theaters. Here in Chicago, “The Babadook” was only playing at one little out of the way theater and I was tempted to go see it (breaking my own rule of no longer watching movies in theaters). I decided two years ago to never see movies in the theater anymore because I don’t want to financially support the same Hollywood studio system that funds the Democrat Party and all of the other tentacles of the Left. Going to the theater costs as much as $30 for two tickets in Chicago, before any snacks or drinks are purchased from concessions. I’ve been waiting for most things to come on Netflix or I’ve been getting DVDs from the library. And I’ve saved a fortune (that delightfully didn’t end up in the DNC’s coffers by way of Hollywood).
But, there are some movies that intrigue me enough to see while they’re new…and “The Babadook” is one of those. I was thrilled to find it on Amazon right now for just $5.99 (when I would have spent $10 at the theater for a ticket…and an extra $4.50 round-trip on the train if I had gone out to see it). So, I got a bargain and some really great, inventive and atmospheric scares.
I enjoyed “The Babadook” so much that I’m adding it to my list of Halloween classics that I’ll watch every year when I’m in the mood for a good, scary movie.
I’m a big fan of 1970s horror movies, when the production companies making them had very little money and had to be creative and economical with scares. I don’t like modern horror, with a lazy reliance on either gore or computer generated effects. “The Omen”. “The Exorcist”. “Rosemary’s Baby”. “The Mausoleum”. “The Changeling”. Quite a few films with Vincent Price in them. Those are the spooky horror movies I enjoy. Supernatural thrillers and chillers, usually where one family encounters some manifestation of evil and seemingly the entire rest of the world refuses to believe that anything supernatural is happening.
“The Babadook” feels like one of those old classics. It’s creepy…and there are moments that will genuinely give you shivers and goosebumps. It’s full of imagination too, with that 1970s attitude where the moviemakers don’t feel any obsessive need to explain everything or spoon-feed the narrative to you.
I think the last movie I saw that I enjoyed almost as much in the horror genre was “The Others”, which was 13 years ago. And I’d rate that a solid B…while “The Babadook” is an A+.
I also really enjoyed it because it’s an Australian movie. For some reason, the British and Australian horror films are always scarier to me than anything made stateside. Maybe it’s the foreign setting that takes me out of reality enough for the scares to really hit me. Or, maybe it’s because the budgets are smaller with these pictures and the moviemakers are then forced to have better scripts, more talented actors, and more imaginative scares.
I won’t spoil anything about the film and will leave it up to you if you wish to view the trailer (it’s a well-done trailer that doesn’t give things away). I will say, though, that “The Babadook” is thought-provoking in a lot of ways. I’m wired to see political connections in everything and I’ve been working on several projects for the last year that have put me in regular contact with some very nasty people on the Left. I’ve encountered real, palpable evil in the last year, unlike anything I ever imagined truly existed before. I don’t use the word lightly, but there’s no other explanation for some of what’s behind the Left but to call it demonic. And I have seen a demonic energy manifest in several forms and in unexpected places.
It’s chilling to see something like that come into play in “The Babadook”. Either it’s a remarkable coincidence, or the moviemakers behind this project at some point in their lives encountered an evil similar to the Left. That kind of scratch-at-your-eyes, irrational hatred, claw-at-the-air-wildly special brand of demonic insanity that the Left trades in.
After seeing this movie, I have a new shorthand for that: babadook. From here on out, any deranged and dangerous person on the Left that I encounter that has that particular kind of demonic air about them will be a babadook to me. Especially if that person is doing something that is harming children.
If you want to watch a good scary movie tonight, I highly recommend “The Babadook”.
Megan Fox Museum Audits: Part Two of Brookfield Zoo Audit (Monkey House)
Here’s Part Two of Megan Fox’s audit of the Brookfield Zoo, looking for anti-human prejudice and Leftist propaganda. Each section of the zoo has its own special kind of indoctrination. The Monkey House, I’m sure you can guess, is all about equating humans with animals and forcing displays on children that lower people to the level of animals. Watch the video and see different variations on this theme, always with a a little white boy sitting in positions like a monkey or a white man doing something superimposed over the shape of a monkey.
For political correctness, of course they used a white person for these illustrations. It’s okay with the PC crowd to directly compare a white person to a monkey. Actually, it’s more than “okay” to them…it’s a central facet of the Left’s religion of “Scientism”.
You wouldn’t believe how upset Megan and I made the Left with these Brookfield Zoo videos. The whole series scored almost a half a million hits on YouTube combined, in just under a month. What we discovered is that when the Left is challenged on things like this, they go bananas. They don’t know how to respond and they apparently aren’t used to being challenged. They’re a brittle bunch…and they lash out like wild animals when questioned.
Come to think of it…if anyone’s to be compared directly to animals, it’s the Leftists. Though that’s an insult to animals. And, truthfully, I’m more comfortable comparing Leftists to what they actually are: demons. The children of darkness, scratching and clawing and gnashing their teeth. Animals might not have souls, but they don’t operate from a place of evil either. Since Leftists are atheists for the most part, they don’t believe they have souls. And they sure as hell act like it.
This obsession with lowering humans to the level of “just animals” has to be part of the Devil’s work. Growing up Catholic, we didn’t spend much time on the Old Testament in school and the Book of Genesis was something mostly reserved for art class or penmanship (where we would either draw pretty pictures of the Garden of Eden or Noah’s Ark or we’d copy lines of verse in our special handwriting books to practice our cursive). Catholics, at least in Cleveland in the 1980s, didn’t spend any time at all debating whether the Book of Genesis was or wasn’t a word-for-word historical truth. We kept our focus on the New Testament and learned from Jesus’ teachings…and as far as I remember, Jesus didn’t spend any time at all talking about how life on Earth began.
It’s interesting to think about, sure, but it’s not something I have ever invested emotionally in. Growing up Catholic, I was taught that this was a key difference between us and both protestants and atheists. A religion teacher in high school promised that once we graduated and headed off to college that we’d be surprised to find that both protestants and atheists were obsessed with the book of Genesis; one side was committed to insisting that every word was true and the other was obsessed with mocking all Christians because they believed it to be just a creation myth, one of dozens from around the world.
I was always taught that humans are the caretakers of animals and that we’re a notch above them for a reason. We’re different from them and share a planet with them and have a responsibility to use them wisely. That means being kind and compassionate to them, understanding them wherever possible, and not harming them if it can be avoided. Cockroaches that have invested a kitchen should receive no mercy…but a single spider crawling on the wall deserves a humane relocation to the front yard instead of a swat with a newspaper.
I’ve never believed that humans came from monkeys. I believe that humans are here as caretakers of monkeys…and all the rest of the animal kingdom. I feel that humans and apes are examples of convergent evolution: we’re similar in a lot of ways but we didn’t come from them. This is like how sharks and dolphins look a lot alike in many ways, but dolphins didn’t used to be sharks. And both of them look a lot like ancient marine reptiles like ichthyosaurs, but neither sharks nor dolphins evolved from them.
I don’t think a zoo is the place for displays about the origins of life because I think zoos should focus on the animals that are alive today, not ancient history. Zoos should tell us all about the remarkable things that the animals displayed in the zoo can do. Let’s leave debate about what evolved from what or into what to another venue. That’s a great discussion for Sunday school or biology class, where a good portion of a semester can be devoted to various theories. For an afternoon at the zoo, let’s stick to displays that show how far a monkey can jump, what orangutans eat, how strong a gorilla is, and what other amazing things each of these animals can do.
When zoos veer off onto other tangents in these exhibits, it feels like an old episode of Dick Cavett where Gloria Swanson, Margot Kidder, and Janis Joplin are on…but it’s BizarroWorld so instead of asking any of them interesting questions about themselves, Cavett (in this alternate reality) instead decides to read the phone book. Could you imagine that? Gloria Swanson (aka, Norma Desmond). Margot Kidder (aka, Lois Lane). Janis Joplin (aka, Founding Member of Club 27). Right there, on his set…but instead of having one of the most fascinating conversations ever with three iconic people who were as different as night and day (and day, I guess), just imagine if Cavett had instead decided to begin somewhere in the “Ds” and recite an endless list of names and numbers (when no one asked him to do that). Wouldn’t that be horrifically disappointing?
This is how I feel when walking through a zoo and instead of telling us anything about the amazing creatures on display the zoo decides instead to either tell us that we’re nothing but relatively hairless monkeys or guilt trip us with another lecture about how humans are the bane of the planet and that we’re all DOOMED because the Anthropogenic Apocalypse is nigh.
There are orangutans at the Brookfield Zoo. There are gorillas too. They have all sorts of amazing monkeys I’ve never seen before and don’t know the names of. That’s partly because instead of having any information about them, instead Brookfield thought it was more important to have pictures of a little blonde haired white boy sitting on his haunches exactly like a monkey (who is squatting beside him).
What sinfully missed opportunities and poor judgment by the Zoo’s management team.
DIVERSITY! Huge brawl ruins WinterFest at Navy Pier in Chicago
Yesterday (12/26/14), thugs in Chicago took the term “boxing day” literally and engaged in an all-out brawl at Navy Pier, ruining the WinterFest carnival. Would you like three guesses as to the sort of people who were brawling? Was it…
(1) The Amish?
(2) Homeschooled children from the suburbs?
(3) Kids with a father living at home with them or who attend private school?
(4) Chicago Public School students?
Ding, ding, ding…if you picked #4, you are a winner.
Note that the news reports go out of their way to NOT describe any of the perpetrators and NOT show any of the thugs committing the crimes, despite there being eyewitnesses taking video (that the media won’t show). When the media refuses to report on the race of a criminal it’s like the international media refusing to say that the person who blew up a building or exploded a bus was a Muslim. You’re just left to guess and read between the lines.
We’re in an interesting news cycle that’s kind of a perfect storm: black “youth” viciously attacking the unsuspecting across the country, but Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson have revved things up to such a degree in the politically correct media that people are afraid to talk about it (and of course with Obama in the White House, no opportunity is wasted to make race relations in this country more divisive than ever). If the police respond to any situation where black “youth” are robbing, beating, or murdering people, then the thugs become the poor misunderstood “victims” and martyrs…even if they’re caught on film engaging in a melee.
In truth, I think people are out of their minds to go to Navy Pier to begin with. That’s just Mistake Number One and is asking for trouble on any day of the week (let alone Friday). It’s not someplace that most Chicagoans go to anyway (unless you are going to the Shakespeare Theater there, which I guarantee you is safe from any spontaneous brawls erupting during the middle of Pericles). Really, Navy Pier is just a place that tourists go to…and where criminals go to then prey on the tourists. It’s the equivalent of a watering hole on the serengeti…and the rich white tourists are the prey. You have to be deaf, dumb, and blind if you can’t guess who the predators are.
Diversity!
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Megan Fox Museum Audit: Part One, “Adventures with Agua” at the Brookfield Zoo
Megan Fox and I have been working on a few projects under the banner of “Story Time Digital Media”; one of those is a study of the museums and cultural institutions in Chicago to see what sort of subtle bias exists in what’s being put in front of the children here. Our theory is that even well-meaning places (like the Brookfield Zoo) end up with exhibits that push the Left’s agenda because people hired as Directors slip these things in whenever they can. Most people don’t even notice them.
The 1990s and 2000s seemed to have been the zenith for this sort of sneaky propaganda. All of the faded, mostly-ignored exhibits from that era have a lot of bias in them…this was the height of Al Gore’s popularity and the whole “Inconvenient Truth” bandwagon. None of these things have been updated much in recent years and new exhibits built around Chicago don’t seem to contain this garbage (that we’ve seen so far, at least). I’m fascinated by this.
Megan and I are working on putting together our first documentary film on the subject, with a companion book of essays, and these YouTube clips are the first step towards that. What we’re interested in is taking a look at places we remember from childhood as being propaganda-free…and then looking at what happened to them in the 1990s and 2000s when people in our age cohort were no longer paying attention to these places. When I was in my 20s and early 30s, I didn’t go to zoos or museums much. I certainly didn’t go as often as I did when I was a kid.
Now that my friends all have children who are zoo-going age and I take my godchildren to these places, too, I’m floored by how much the marketing and branding has changed. The Brookfield Zoo, in particular, is very focused on teaching little kids that humans are bad and are a blight on the planet. That’s not the sort of zoo experience I had as a child going to the Cleveland Metroparks Zoo.
This “Adventures with Agua” exhibit (that the Illinois EPA installed at the zoo) is the craziest thing I have seen in a long time. It is a religious experience for the Left. In this exhibit, you can:
* self-flagellate for being a “bad person” for wasting water and making the planet sad
* learn the 35 New Commandments for being a “good person” by never washing your face, always wearing dirty clothes, and never taking vacations anywhere far away (unless you are one of the elites on the Left…and then no rules apply to you)
* purchase carbon credit and water indulgences to make up for past sins
* accept the reality that the game is rigged and you can never really become a “good person”, because no matter what you do you will never, ever do enough to save the planet since we are all doomed and the Anthropogenic Apocalypse is nigh
It’s all so crazy.
When I was a kid and my parents would take me to the zoo, I would learn so many cool things about animals that I was beside myself the whole car ride home. I just couldn’t wait to take out my markers and paper and draw pictures of the animals and I would beg for books on the animals and to learn more about them. The zoos got me so fired up that for a number of years I wanted to be a zookeeper or paleontologist when I grew up. The zoos hit a home run with my imagination.
Does this “Adventures with Agua” do that for kids today?
Do children listening to the zoos’ “humans are bad” garbage come home excited to learn about the animals?
I don’t think so. I imagine some kids even walk away from the zoo resenting the animals, since every exhibit seems determined to guilt trip the children into thinking they are responsible for these animals dying. At some point, if you are told over and over again that you are responsible for all the misery and suffering of a certain thing…then you resent that thing, because if that thing no longer existed then you would not have to listen to how bad you are for being responsible for harming that thing.
What an epic fail the Brookfield Zoo is.
Are zoos where you live like this too?
BRAINSTORMING: What was the tipping point for the Left’s power grab in American culture?
Maybe you know the answer to this, but I’ve never seen it published anywhere.
I’m very interested in nailing down when, exactly, the Left maneuvered into place to set the stage for their (presumed) conquest of America. I’m looking for the Before & After line: a year (or even down to the month if that’s possible) where nothing was ever the same again.
Recently, I’ve started researching the “Rural Purge” at CBS. This was part of the pop culture shift away from programming that highlighted classic American values to the “urban, gritty, cynical” shows that have become the norm today. There’s a “Before & After” moment in 1971 where the CBS executives decided to cancel all the shows like Green Acres, The Andy Griffith Show spin-off MayBerry RFD, Petticoat Junction, Hee Haw, etc. that had a rural flare…and move into shows that were darker and had “bite”.
This was supposedly to appeal to a younger demographic at the time; those “younger” people back in 1971 are today’s Baby Boomers.
So…these changes brought about by the “rural purge” were catered to the Baby Boomers. That fits with the generational dynamics theory that the Boomers are responsible for all of the upheaval and detriment to our country. The children of the Greatest Generation grew up to reject everything they associated with their parents, and that included patriotism, love of country, and classic American values. The Boomers wanted to be the opposite of their parents.
Now, as the Boomers reach the end of their lives I feel like they want to watch the world burn. Are they so narcissistic that they don’t want America to exist after them? Do these people want to see America destroyed so that they will be the Last Generation?
In a comment on another thread, someone suggested Watergate was a big turning point in the Left’s rise to power. That was their first taste at true icon toppling, and they liked the taste of that blood. The media, especially, enjoyed bringing down a president.
It’s complicated because the Left was shut back up into the attic after Carter’s defeat…and the Reagan, Bush, Clinton, and Bush II years kept the Left locked away. They roared back with a demented vengeance in 2008, though…and for the next two years America will be assaulted with every deranged Leftist fantasy imagined (while they still have the chance). The 2016 election will be interesting because the Left will not willingly be locked up in the attic again. I don’t believe the Left will allow Hillary Clinton to be the Democrats’ nominee (as she would do what her husband did in 1992, and lock the Left away again). I also fear Democrats will successfully install Jeb Bush as the Republican nominee…setting the stage for another GOP loss (or hedging the bet that if elected Bush III would really be no different as president than Hillary Clinton would have been, if she’d been allowed to be the Democrats’ nominee).
My working theory is that something happened around 1970 or so that created the mindset of the Left and put them in position to take over the country. Then, other factors locked the Left away for 30-some years. The events of 9/11 caused a psychotic break for the country and then the Left was able to capitalize on the Iraq War as an echo of Vietnam…and that brought the picture back full circle to the 1970s in terms of the Left’s momentum.
If that’s true, then the key to defeating the Left and locking it away again should be found in looking back at the early 1980s and the things that Ronald Reagan did. How did he restore America’s patriotism? How did he defeat the Soviets? How were Americans motivated back then for the cause?
Dealing with the Left is really like reading a book or watching a scary movie about an ancient evil that gets unleashed every now and again from some object (like an occult mirror or a black cauldron or a magical ring) and it falls upon a generation to defeat this horror and lock it away again. We’re that generation. The evil is loose.
Now we just have to figure out how to lock it away again.
Thoughts?
HULU has an interesting look at Christmas episodes from TV shows through the years
Click here for Hulu’s “Hulu for the Holidays” lineup.
One of the mysteries of modern life that I’ve been trying to figure out is the exact year that the Left culturally took over and started to change the American psyche. I believe this change happened in the 1970s and that the coming to power of the Baby Boomers had a large part in it. I’ve never been able to tie down the exact year, though. This is the transition from an America where people were proud to be American and loved this country, loved God, and loved each other to a country that is constantly being torn along racial, gender, economic, and other demographic lines by the Democrat Party (which is committed to holding power by dividing Americans along as many lines as possible and then running the table by turning one group against each other in every congressional district coast to coast).
I feel like a cultural archaeologist trying to find the year of the tipping point. Maybe you have thoughts on this. I believe the shift had already happened by the time I was born in the mid-70s; urban decay had not only started by then but it was even celebrated on shows like Sesame Street, where the gritty, ramshackle version of New York was depicted (not the shining, glimmering New York of movies from the 1950s and into the 1960s). By the time I was born, it was already the norm to show a course, rundown, and expletive-strewn Manhattan, rotten to its core.
Who decided this?
I’ve always wondered that. And for what purpose?
Better question: what good has it done anyone?
Hulu’s lineup of Christmas shows is an interesting case study, as they have offerings through the years. Roughly, anything prior to 1970 shows families celebrating Christmas and showing at least some religious observation of the holiday. You’ll find episodes like The Brady Bunch‘s Christmas story about mom Carol losing her voice and little Cindy asking Santa to bring it back so she can sing at church for Christmas. That happened in 1969. Christmas was depicted as a wonderful holiday, with the kids all trying to hide presents from one another and the family considering it a Christmas miracle that their mom was able to sing at church.
By 1972, though, the cynicism had crept in. The Bob Newhart Show episodes are about people largely hating Christmas or considering it a hassle. Yes, it was a show about a psychiatrist and most of the supporting cast were neurotics with all sorts of problems…but Christmas was a downer to these people, not a time of celebration. The focus had already shifted from the birth of Christ to topping each other in games of who can give the best presents.
1980s Christmas specials aren’t represented on Hulu’s lineup of shows, but I remember most of them being about “saving Christmas”, in the sense that Santa Claus was in some sort of trouble and the Smurfs or Care Bears or Garfield the Cat or whoever had to rescue him. So, “saving Christmas” entailed making sure that the presents were delivered. There was nothing about the Christ child to be found in those cartoons.
I think modern shows airing in 2014 have done a better job with Christmas, though they still focus a lot on the presents and say almost nothing about the birth of Jesus. But shows like Black-ish (which is surprisingly funny) have put the focus back on families spending time together at Christmas (and not making it just about presents).
Was the Vietnam War the cause of the culture change? And we’re still paying for that all these years later?
Did Vietnam so traumatize the Boomer generation that they abandoned God and became the neurotic wrecks seen on The Bob Newhart Show…and then a decade later these people became so materialistic and empty and focused just on presents?
I wonder what’s going to happen when all the Boomers are gone. I enjoy reading the writings on the site Generational Dynamics, though the author (a Boomer) tends to think those of us in Generation-X view Boomers unfairly as “The Worst Generation”. I don’t know if they deserve the title of “The Worst”, but on their watch the country truly has changed…and not for the better.
I don’t see the transition from that special Brady Bunch Christmas episode that celebrated miracles to the Bob Newhart cynicism as progress. I think it’s sad…and I don’t think it was necessary. Increasingly, I feel like the Boomer generation behaves collectively like an abused child who grew up to become a horror for everyone else to deal with. And we in Generation-X have another 10 years or so of dealing with this horror…and then trying to find away to undo the damage.
From the 1970s until today, Democrats have mostly controlled all of our largest cities in this country…and they’ve all mostly rotted to their cores. Democrats are responsible for completely annihilating black families and now Democrats are working hard to import Hispanics and keep them poor and Spanish-speaking, so that they don’t assimilate into wider American culture and prosper. Democrats have for decades been actively working to impoverish America and turn the country away from God and family.
You can see this transformation just by watching a hodgepodge of old Christmas episodes from TV shows through the years. It’s really quite remarkable. I’m putting it on my list of things “To Do” to do a comprehensive study of this, looking year by year at all the shows and movies that featured Christmas and explore how this change was made and investigate the “Who” and “Why” behind it. I’d like to think that the Left can only swing the pendulum so far in the negative direction before it swings back, but Detroit has been run into the ground by Democrats and every year I think it’s hit rock bottom and it will start to bounce back and that’s never happened. So pendulums apparently can get stuck (and once-great cities can permanently earn the nickname “Satan’s Diaper”).
What can be done about any of this going forward?
I had a minor revelation while watching one of the Bob Newhart Show episodes on Hulu this morning as I was starting prep work for Christmas dinner today. There was a scene where all of the neurotics that Bob Newhart treated as patients sat around in a group and talked about bad Christmas memories they had. Some toy they didn’t get as children. Some imagined slight or another from their parents. And Newhart indulged them all, listening to their complaints…before finally asking them if they had any good memories. None of them were interested in talking much about the good times. Dwelling on the slights and negative memories was apparently much more fun for them. To me, this is typical Baby Boomer behavior.
Do you ever do this…focus on negative memories instead of positive ones?
A few years before I met my boyfriend Justin, I went to a dating workshop run by a matchmaker here in Chicago. One of the things she taught us was that no one on Earth wants to hear your negative memories of anything. So why are those the ones that people enjoy sharing the most? Right now I have a bad memory from one Christmas in Cleveland that I could share with you right here. It paints my dad in a bad light and makes him look like a jerk. That’s my perspective of what happened, anyway. I have to admit there is always a weird impulse to lead with a tale like that. Why is that? Were people like this before the 1970s? Do we have the impulse to revisit the bad memories because our culture conditions us that this is what people do?
My boyfriend Justin is a Millennial and he was taught in public school to say something critical about whatever’s put in front of him. Not something complimentary, but always something critical…something he doesn’t like. I’m 10 years older than him and part of a different generation and I was never taught to do that. The nuns in Catholic school taught us to always have three things to say about any topic when having a conversation, which I think is a useful skill. Only one of those things could be negative, according to the nuns, and the negative comment had to be sandwiched in between the positive ones. Justin just spouts criticisms and feels good about himself for doing it…like pointing out the things he doesn’t like about whatever’s in front of him validates him as being smarter or better than the person who created that thing. All of his age-peer Millennials I’ve encountered are like this.
Over the three years we’ve been together now, I have tried to bring him over to my side of thinking and whenever he starts up with a negative memory or a negative story, like at Christmas, I ask him to tell me a favorite memory and a positive story. And he struggles to do it. It’s alien to him.
But if you watch the old Christmas specials before 1970, you’ll see that they’re all positive stories…they are all life-affirming…they are all happy tales full of joy and love and the true meaning of the season. I’d like all of us to get back to that. It starts on the individual level. No one alive today needs to hear a negative story from me about my dad and a disappointing Christmas from 30 years ago. I don’t need to revisit that particular Christmas either today (or any day). Let that memory fade away to nothing. Instead, I choose to focus today on all the wonderful Christmases that I’ve enjoyed through the years: all the great people who’ve been a part of my life and who made my life special by being a part of it during the holidays.
Let’s retrain our brains and eliminate the conditioning to default to negative memories and tales of woe. Ain’t nobody got time for that.
I bet living only in pleasant memories and a positive present will help make new Christmas memories going forward, too…ones that are worthwhile and full of joy and happiness. The Left wants us to be miserable and to wallow always in criticism and sorrow. The best antidote to that is pure and unadulterated JOY.
Her Majesty the Queen’s Christmas Message – 2014
Her Majesty the Queen’s 2014 Christmas message will be broadcast at 3pm British time today (so the above is last year’s message until the new one can be added later).
UPDATE: Here’s the 2014 message:
Is watching the Queen’s Christmas message part of your holiday tradition?
In Cleveland, it always aired right around the time that Disney’s Christmas parade from Orlando was on…and I remember my grandmother switching over (with me being none too thrilled about that, until the importance of the Christmas message was explained).
Growing up in the 1980s, the forces of all that was good and right in the world were embodied to me in three people: Pope John Paul II, President Ronald Reagan, and Her Majesty the Queen. Three icons, in opposition to the evils of the Soviet Empire and its stranglehold on half of Europe. All these years later, it’s a great comfort that Her Majesty is still here. The 1980s felt so much safer than life today because our leaders seemed able to talk about the evils of the world without being politically correct.
Reagan didn’t feel the need (or heed the advice of consultants) to talk about the Soviets as “the Empire of Peace” the way that every Western leader must tiptoe around Islam. While Queen Elizabeth has never been political, she’s always embodied the best of Britain and has always been a passionate advocate for her people. In 2014, it feels like British people have no more say over the conquest of their island home than we do in America over the colonization of the United States by the Third World. We never voted on this, but those in power decided the West should be colonized by the Third World and every Western country should become “multicultural” (where Third World cultures supplant and usurp the existing cultures of the West).
I don’t expect Queen Elizabeth (or any Western leader) to ever denounce this because I think that ship has sailed. They’re all too afraid of Islam and too afraid of the political Left. It’s like as if someone is breaking into your house and intends to kill you, but you’re afraid of speaking out about it (because I guess you think they’ll kill you faster if you draw attention to what’s happening). Better to just ignore them and let them kill you in your sleep later that night, I suppose.
The Queen’s Christmas Message never touches on any of this and I’m not sure if people in Britain ever speak about what’s happening there any more than Americans talk about the Left’s efforts to permanently alter the culture and demographics or our own country. Will Prince George be forced to take a Muslim wife in the future, like in the book “The Camp of the Saints”? Is that the future for Britain? Are Americans all destined to speak Spanish next?
It’s both cruel and reassuring that I grew up in the 1980s and witnessed the West successfully stand up to communism…so I know that standing up to evil like this can in fact be done. It’s just sick that no Western leader has the guts to stand up to Islam and the Left’s colonial machinations in the same way. Part of me suspects that the remnants of the KGB and politburo are behind all this: if they could not defeat the West militarily or economically, then the long plan is to colonize the West with Islam and the Third World…so that Russia and China will inherit the Earth. But what Earth would really exist to inherit?
I hope you appreciate Queen Elizabeth and the work that she’s done through the years for the British people, particularly during the Cold War and also as a princess who learned how to repair military vehicles and who stood with her father and mother as they refused to abandon London or their people during the worst assaults by Hitler’s Reich (another time when the West was unafraid to stand up to evil). It’s very popular for the jaded, cynical Internet to attack any icon and every comment section on any article about the Queen no doubt contains vile attacks on her (by Millennials or younger who just think it’s cool to icon-topple). The anonymity of the Internet is something the Devil must delight in every day, because it allows vicious and disturbed people to slash and tear away at everything traditional and good in the world. The Left is committed to ripping the world apart and replacing it with — something — and the Internet is hastening this. I don’t think the Left even knows what it wants to usher in as a new world order, because the Left exists solely as the opposition to what we have currently…and the Left’s DNA is just to push the envelope further and further and strike down traditions with no real concept of what comes after all the icons are toppled and everything that maintains civilization is trashed. The West is being colonized by the Third World, with Britain and Europe being conquered by Islam and the United States being colonized by Central America. Christianity is relentlessly attacked by the Left while Islam is promoted as an enemy-of-the-Left’s-enemy-is-a-friend. The fools on the Left don’t realize that once Christianity falls that Islam will turn on the Leftists, as the useful idiots that they are.
Aren’t these Satan’s goals? To smash, to plague, to topple, to destabilize? At 38, I’ve come to realize that the goals of the Labour party in Britain and the Democrat party in the US are largely consistent with the wish list of the Devil himself, who seeks a world ripped to shreds by chaos.
The Age of Mutliculturalism is really the eradication of the West (and the stability and advancement for humanity it has brought) and the colonization of Western countries, where immigrants from the Third World come to new shores and establish colonies that eventually topple the Western nations that exist now. Once the neocolonists gain permanence and power, they demand the host country comply with their whims and change their ways to adapt to their culture. Instead of assimilating to where they move, immigrants today demand their new home become like the horrible place they left. They demand that the West become subject to Islam or under the yoke of socialism and communism (and the institutional corruption endemic to both)…and in time the only natural result will be the transformation of Western countries into the likeness of the Third World.
The Labour Party in Britain promotes this. Democrats want this here. And the Leftists who believe this is the key to winning permanent political power don’t see the coming crash…since these other cultures out there in the world aren’t all equal and their beliefs and habits aren’t on par with those of the West.
This is such a strange time to be alive, watching Western countries colonized by the poorest nations in the world. The West is being conquered without resistance and with no shots being fired. I never believed we’d live in a country where a portion of our own people joyfully cheered on our destruction or gleefully allowed our immigration laws to be ripped up, with no consequences at all for the lawbreakers. Since this is happening in Britain and Europe and Australia and Canada as well, it’s part of some sick suicidal impulse on the part of the West.
Did the Romans go through this too? Does civilization just naturally advance to a certain point where the most advanced nations decide they’re too tired to keep going and so enlightened that they delight in allowing other tribes to move in and usurp them?
This year, Muslims plotted to assassinate Her Majesty and seemed to have been stopped only by luck. What will happen if they succeed in their next attempt? Will that be the sort of event that wakes people up?
I wish people would talk about this Neocolonialism for what it is…and that someday someone would explain why the elite feel it’s a great thing to be importing millions of unskilled, illiterate, poor people from the Third World into the West at breakneck speed. I know what Democrats in the US and Labour in the UK want this: they believe the Third World immigrants are votes in the bank for the Left, because they’ll be loyal to the Left so long as the Left gives them welfare checks. But, what happens when all the money runs out, which it will soon?
What I really can’t understand are the Republicans who want America flooded with colonists from the Third World. Supposedly the Chamber of Commerce pushes for this because it keeps wages low, but I don’t know what jobs illiterate peasants are supposed to take. The Unions drove the factories out of America decades ago and the Obama Regime has made it difficult for new small businesses to open. Here in Chicago, every block has a restaurant, bar, or shop that’s gone out of business (some of them having been staples in the neighborhood for 50 years). Do we really need that many gardeners, dishwashers, housekeepers, and nannies for the Republican elite?
I truly hunger for a national political leader to call out the Left and the GOP Cocktail Party establishment on this. There’s a reason that Central and South America are not prosperous and it’s because of the backwards cultures there. There’s a reason that America has thrived and became the greatest country in the world…and it’s because of the culture that we’ve had here. Eroding that by mass-importing the Third World (and its culture here) is madness.
Will 2015 be the year that someone finally speaks out on this…some leader emerges with the guts to speak the truth?
Wouldn’t that be a remarkable Christmas message, though I know someone like the Queen would never deliver it. Winston Churchill would have. Teddy Roosevelt would have. I wish there was an American presidential candidate on the horizon that would do that.
It’s a personal mission of mine to try to figure out this coming year who’s really behind all of this. It’s convenient (and more than a little accurate) to blame George Soros or the UN…but I still don’t understand who benefits in the end. Say these people succeed and collapse the West. Say that Islam conquers Europe and Great Britain. The United States falls to Central America and American culture is replaced with a socialist or communist regime (more so than what we have now under Obama in 2014). Australia gets overtaken by Malaysians and Indonesians and whoever else the Left is importing there. What then?
If Islam and the culture of the Third World were any good, then wouldn’t those parts of the world be flourishing now?
Doesn’t it seem logical that replacing the West with colonies of Islam and the Third World will just create a planet where no countries flourish and civilization collapses?
The only entity that I can ever think of who could want to see that is the Devil himself. Which makes recent history read like it was written by David Seltzer or Ira Levin.
What challenges we all face going into 2015, in a world where evil’s on the march like never before and good people are too often terrified of speaking openly about that. It’s a world where the West is under siege from all sides and we don’t have a strong leader to rally behind or a media that will report the truth. It’s so easy to feel hopeless and helpless in this.
But, I can’t believe that God wants the West to fall. And I can’t believe that those who love all the West stands for are powerless to stop this. It’s just a much longer and protracted fight than any of us would want…and I think things will get much worse before they get any better.
What a cheerful way to start Christmas morning, I know. I suppose I just really hunger for someone, anyone, to take the microphone and broadcast a rallying cry to the West like Churchill and the King did during the darkest days of WWII…where the politically-correct brigades and the complicit media didn’t prevent national figures from standing up for their own people and denouncing Neocolonialism and Islamization. I yearn for someone to stand up and call out the invasion and occupation of the West for what it is.
Why won’t that happen?
Have you seen the flash mob “Let It Go” Frozen video from England?
I have to admit that while I think flash mobs are silly (and tired at this point), I thought this was adorable. Though it was filmed in England, it reminded me a lot of the last day of school before Christmas break in Cleveland when I was a kid. We’d have mass that day and then some sort of Christmas assembly, where there would be singing of various degrees from wonderful to meh. I remember being wildly excited the whole time and there always being rainbow candy canes that tasted like cherry and everyone had on either red or green sweaters.
Disney achieved something remarkable with “Frozen” and it appears to have been totally by accident. My boyfriend Justin has a job freelancing with some companies that work peripherally with Disney and people in that industry all attest that the House of Mouse had no idea that “Frozen” would be a hit. I don’t think it’s the Broadway style music, though, that made it so popular (though that did help).
I think it was the setting and the characters and the fact that it was not a forced multi-culti offering. Disney put out a product that was not pushing “diversity” for the sake of “diversity” and people went nuts for it. They had hungered for it. I doubt Disney will learn any lesson from this, though. The MBAs in the C-suites over at Disney have probably invented all sorts of reasons why Frozen was such a hit, but I doubt they will admit the truth: it was a lovely movie about European princesses, sisterhood, and a gorgeous, snowy background. There was no racial tension, no “the historic first this” or “the groundbreaking first that”, or any of that PC-garbage.
Every year I wonder if this is the last year that Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson (the Justice Brothers) will be allowed to race-bait and provoke hatred and division wherever they go. I wonder if this is the year that Americans wake up and say enough is enough with all of this garbage. I’ve been working on a project with Megan Fox for the last year that has really shown me how mousy most Americans have become and how afraid they are of both the media and the Left’s PC-brigades. People are truly in a constant state of fear of these people on the Left. They fear them the way that people in Chicago feared Al Capone’s gang back in the day…only this is a national fear.
I think “Frozen” was so successful because people could escape into that movie and live momentarily in a world without any of this garbage. The Left has been pitting Americans against one another in a long tribalist siege, dividing everyone along lines of skin color or imagined “nationality” (anything to keep people from just seeing each other as “Americans”…so instead everyone has to be African-American or Mexican-American or Whatever-American instead). Sadly, even good people do this, without realizing it. I was at Christmas party today and was having a lovely time…until someone asked, “What’s your nationality?” Of course, “American” is not accepted as an answer. This person wanted to play that tribalist, “nationality expert” game. And you know what? At 38 I am just too old for that.
I’m from Ohio (Cleveland, specifically), so I talked with this person about growing up in Cuyahoga County as if it was a foreign land steeped in magic and wonder. If the intent of the nationality experts is really to learn about a person and where he is “from”, then they should be thrilled to listen to stories about northeast Ohio in the 1980s for an hour. The answer these buffoons want, however, is some tribalist tripe about one great-grandparent or another being from somewhere in the old Holy Roman Empire that no longer exists anymore. But I think this game is just so stupid that I won’t play it. I don’t think anyone should play this anymore either.
That’s my biggest Christmas wish this year: that in 2015 and beyond we can, as Americans, start wising up to what the Left’s up to and that we as a people stop voluntarily dividing ourselves along these tribalist lines. My family’s from Ohio. I’m really proud of that. Though I live in Chicago now, I’ll always have a special place in my heart for the city of lights, city of wonder, that is Cleveland. But I don’t give a damn about where anyone related to me a hundred years ago lived in Europe. I’m an American and I’d love to see an America where the Left didn’t win time and again by disuniting us psychologically, emotionally, and so casually.
This isn’t done to anyone living in England, where they get to be just “British”. It’s not done to anyone living in Australia, as they are just “Australian”. People in Canada are just “Canadian” and people in Mexico are more or less getting ready to pour across our unsealed southern border. The few remaining there get to just be “Mexicans”, though.
But Americans always have to be split into something else, even at a Christmas party. I’m tired of it and want to do something about it in 2015.
I want the nationality experts to just “let it go” and take pride in being an American. Hasn’t the Left had enough decades of this tribalism already? Can’t we turn the page and start something new in 2015?
What think you?










