Paddling with Hollywood
Cheerfully our little crew paddled down the river, enjoying small Class II splashy whitewater rapids here and there, swift enough currents everywhere else that we need not really paddle much, if at all.
Turning aft, I squawked captain-like from my otherwise supine perch in the bow “Hard to the oars, ye pack o’ worthless lazy bones!”
The kids would laugh a bit at my best captain o’ the high seas bit, tepidly dip their paddles in the water like they were thinking about trying to paddle, and then go back to chattering amongst themselves about school, fellow students in school, classes, interpersonal politics and Politics with a capital P in school. Overall it was what had been hoped for when I made reservations with the outfitter the week before. Time with my kids and their friends, in nature, floating down a river, watching bald eagles, osprey, mergansers, wood ducks, migratory songbirds, deer, and on the lookout for bear.
Pausing to listen for and then spot white waterfalls cascading steeply out of the high canyon walls, I, the lookout, would occasionally point out where the crew could perhaps look up to if but briefly admire these little moments of grandeur passing by us. They did look the first half dozen times, and then tired of being bothered to do anything. I ended up dragging my hands in the cold foamy water, hoping to create some drag that would necessitate some serious paddling. When my hands turned red and then a purplish blue and stopped responding to commands to open or close, I gave up on influencing the kids in any way and just quietly admired the ride.
About two and a half hours into the drift, the kids started to sing. At first these were summer camp songs, and then theme songs from movies complete with beat-box noises from my daughter, and then songs from movies, mostly being rap-like. Their voices were sweet, and they would constantly run over each other, and then good-naturedly correct someone, and then try to get back on track in harmonic unison. Being of free and easy spirit, the kids were into having fun, and they would individually or together abruptly break out into a song-ending editorialization about the singer, the performer, the musician, or the movie the particular song came from.
The Earth Day environmental song, apparently popular now, was a big hit on our boat. They sang it over and over and over.
“And the zebra, I like how he says ‘I’m a zebra, I am striped, and I don’t know if I am black or if I am white’,” said the girl of this apparently surprising revelation, unaware that Dennis Prager, Rush Limbaugh, Larry Elder, and a slew of other radio talk show hosts and conservative politicians have been preaching an equal opportunity color-blind society for many decades.
And after about half an hour of back and forth chatter about this environmental planet cartoon movie and its song, it dawned on me that these kids are deeply enthralled by Hollywood and its entertainment business. They and their young impressionable minds are completely captured by images and made-up voices from highly paid songwriters and movie scripters, whose lines become memorized as moral guide posts along their young lives.
Many adults over the past ten or twenty years have bemoaned the advent of and then exponential increase in realistic at-home video games, the prevalence of handheld devices, and the trance-like state our children have grown up in glued to and Matrix-like plugged into these things. Well, I saw that we have transitioned beyond the gluing-in-and-tuning-out stage where we had to scream two inches from our kids’ face to ask them what they wanted for dinner. Now we see the fruits of others’ indoctrination labors playing out over a decade or more: Our kids are wholly owned little robots of the entertainment industry, which is vacuous, morally bankrupt, materialistic, shallow, value-less, corrosive, and meaningless. No wonder our kids parrot all kinds of silly nonsense that emanate from movies and popular music; they are constantly bathing their brains in it.
And people like me thought the fight for America’s soul was a political one in Washington, DC!
Nope.
I learned on that day-long raft trip through spectacular natural beauty that the fight for a solid America is still at home, where we thought we had some influence, and we still might, and on college campus, where our parenting has been outsourced to welcoming Marxist professors eager to turn our kids inside out.
Yes, on this trip I had been paddling along with my kids and their friends, enjoying their happy company, but really I had been secretly and unknowingly paddling with Hollywood that whole way, and did not realize it until the very end, when I could say nothing.
The sea captain and his crew taking a break in a wondrous, magical waterfall in the middle of nowhere, on the run from Hollywood and pop culture
How I feel about my many liberal friends
If you have suffered abruptly ruptured friendships and precarious family relationships because of politics since Obama, you are not alone. You are among most people, especially if you have any independent, conservative, patriotic, or traditional pro-America beliefs. Obama brought with him the most divisive political atmosphere since the early Cold War, and his believers implemented that divisiveness with astounding aggression.
Here’s a small example.
A couple years ago I sold a really neat “vintage” National Park Service ranger hat to a lady in Texas via an online auction site. She was thrilled with the hat when it arrived, as it was described accurately, packed carefully, and she paid a fair price for it. She was happy about the exchange until she looked me up and saw what I believe. Suddenly she became unpleasant and full of nasty comments; about me, not that hat. Just to be sure, I used one of the many online services to look into her background, and sure enough, she was a rabidly partisan person who brooked zero disagreement. She judged me not by the happy transaction that had caused our paths to cross, but by whether or not I toed her political line.
Here’s another small example.
In early 2016 I was in detailed discussions with a woman in Vermont to buy her small business. It was perfect for what I can do and like to do, and for one of my kids. We got down to brass tacks, and she encouraged me to get my own website ready. I sent her the purchase contract and we set a mid-2016 date to meet and consummate the transaction. And then all hell broke loose. She had looked me up online and went from being an interesting and likable person to a hate-filled, snarling, angry jerk. The deal was off, because I had the “wrong” ideas, none of which had anything to do with the business we were going to transact.
And I am not even mentioning the many actual friends I have had, some for over thirty years, who have disavowed me, walked away from me, harangued me and then abandoned me, because I calmly disagreed with their assertions about politics and culture. It pains me even now to think how these paragons of virtue and open-mindedness behave so poorly, so intolerant of other views. Apparently traditional views that were A-OK in America for 220 years suddenly became so toxic and so, so bad, that anyone espousing them automatically had to be excommunicated, shunned, thrown overboard, humiliated, attacked, and so on.
It’s a crock o’ crap.
Since the 2016 election, liberals seem to have gone collectively lemming-like over a cliff and down into a pool of fiery, angry hate. Whether it is on a street where someone is simply wearing a MAGA hat (I don’t own one yet, but I do plan to get one; Nick Sandmann inspires me), or at a Trump rally, or on a social media site, liberals engage in physical violence, vandalism, and constant bullying of people they simply disagree with. They have worked themselves into a fantastically intolerant lather over election results they dislike, and gosh, they spare no one a full flaming if that person disagrees with them!
Even old friends who love them!
FakeBook’s censorious purge of conservative and independent voices (while retaining true haters), as well as Twitter and Instagram’s ongoing war on independent thinkers and conservatives (while allowing the Hamas terror group’s account to remain), is the natural result of all that intolerant hate for ideas and people who are not in lockstep with liberalism.
And of course I could do the same to them. I think liberalism is a cancer on America. I think the national Democrat Party has become the party of sedition and treason, that it has declared open war on America and its citizens, and that you can easily make the case for outlawing the party and legally punishing its members. I think Obama is an arch criminal who should swing. But all that does not mean I hate my liberal Democrat friends who liked or even adored Obama. That’s their business. I am not going to judge them because they made a mistaken choice about politics.
Here is a simple meme I made up tonight, from one of my favorite movies, “Some Like it Hot,” a truly subversive and pro-tolerance movie that still makes me involuntarily laugh out loud like a bleating camel or a braying donkey. This meme sums up my approach to remaining friends with liberals who, despite their best efforts to ruin our decades-long relationship, I still love and can still enjoy.
I’d say this is a model for how America should work. How it used to work. Tolerance, people, tolerance. We should still all be in the same boat, headed in the same direction, and at least respectful of one another. After all, nobody’s perfect.
Re: Disaster Named Harrisburg, Kudos to Judge John McNally
Dauphin County Judge John McNally made me feel so proud the other day, because he held the City of Harrisburg liable for all the major bullhooey it has poured onto mere citizen Mike Brenner. Brenner has literally been fighting City Hall because City Hall brought the fight to him.
Brenner made the mistake of leasing his property to the Harrisburg City Public Works Department, where men and machines are stored. After the city stopped paying rent to him for the use of his property, but nonetheless occupied the premises and allowed it to fall into disrepair like the rest of Harrisburg has, Brenner went to court.
Who wouldn’t go to court in these circumstances? The law is the law is the law, and no one is supposed to be above the law. The law is supposed to apply to everyone equally, and especially to government agencies and entities.
Well…the temerity of this citizen! Who is he to expect just compensation from the City of Harrisburg?! Who is he to expect the city to live up to its legal obligations?
So instead of being a standup guy and paying Brenner what he has been long owed, Mayor Eric Papenfuse decided that the city would not only renege on its signed lease with Brenner, but then commence eminent domain proceedings against him to take the property by force.
So here we have a county judge who recognizes corruption and evil when we and he sees it, as personified by the sweaty faced lump of Jello that is Eric Papenfuse, and he issues a decision that the city must actually live up to its lease terms and pay Brenner what the city owes him. Never mind that what the city is doing, what Eric Papenfuse is doing, is downright evil and the very definition of abuse of official power.
Does anyone wonder why Harrisburg has fallen to pieces over the past four decades, with most taxpayers fleeing to better locales? All my life I have either visited my family here, or lived here, and it just keeps getting worse and worse.
Thanks only to Judge John McNally, Harrisburg City’s mayor is getting the comeuppance he has long been due to receive. Now let’s see the citizens of Harrisburg wake the hell up and begin voting for better human beings to make our city’s official decisions for us. We cannot afford losers like Papenfuse to continue to bankrupt Pennsylvania’s capital city with petty coercion and minor league control games.
p.s. When first elected as mayor, Papenfuse swore that people would go to jail for the fraudulent incinerator debacle that bankrupted the city. Several years later he has swept it all under the rug. Eric, you are an incompetent, lying sack of sh*t, and you cannot go back to running your used bookstore soon enough. Then let the federal charges begin to rain down on his sweaty, greasy head.
p.p.s. I am a plaintiff in an ongoing lawsuit against my beloved city over its patently illegal anti-gun ordinances it passed several years ago. Papenfuse has also engaged in a lot of virtue signalling with that unnecessary lawsuit, while costing us taxpayers yet more money. The guy is a disaster.
NYT caused latest Synagogue shooting
One day last week the New York Times printed an obvious we-really-hate-Jews cartoon almost exactly like one of Adolf Hitler’s best, and the next day a young man filled with that same hate went to a synagogue in San Diego and shot people, one of whom died.
The young man was directly influenced by the NYT cartoon. No way can we separate the two incidents, they are directly connected, and it is time to hold the NYT accountable for the violent havoc it has been wreaking on America for many decades.
The NYT’s incessant drumbeat of hate and vitriol aimed at its political enemies (Republicans, Christians, non-assimilated Jews, conservatives, patriots, constitutionalists, Trump supporters etc) has grown in my adult life to include nearly everything this media outlet produces, daily. No barrier exists between its wild editorial pages and its supposed “news” writings; they are all mixed up, one and the same subjective, politicized, partisan nonsense aimed toward vilifying people the NYT owners and staff hate. For example, like its sister-in-crime the Washington Post, the NYT has actually published articles blithely explaining away ANTIFA violence and vandalism, thereby providing political and legal cover to these modern day Brown Shirt street thugs.
Once the easiest read of the paper, with dreamy fairyland luxury property listings, even the NYT real estate section has references to so-called climate change and environmental policy. That the NYT is 100% propaganda from front page to back page is not a question, and it is doubtful any senior person working there would seriously deny it.
The bigger question is how to hold both the NYT and its readership accountable for Lori Gilbert-Kaye’s death in her house of prayer, and for the myriad other acts of violence and hate directly resulting from hateful things that incite violence which the NYT publishes and prints.
The readership, too, you ask?
Yes, you bet. It is the NYT readership that is truly behind the NYT’s ability to incite violence against people. The effete, latté drinking, supposedly high-minded and oh-so-intellectual know-it-all liberals who read the NYT like it was just handed down from Mount Sinai will, on the one hand, decry the one and only semi-conservative news outlet out of hundreds of leftist ones, Fox News, and yet they will stand by their corrupt NYT, no matter how many times its factually incorrect stories and its corrosive role in our society are documented.
So yes, Lori Gilbert-Kaye’s innocent blood is on the hands of both the NYT and the NYT readers, too, as they alone give credence to and empower this glossy fountain of hate and violence. In a sane and fair world, they would abandon the NYT and denounce it. For shame on the NYT readers that they do not.
One must wonder why the NYT has not yet enjoyed a fate similar to that which it has encouraged against its own political enemies through its ANTIFA proxies, say, some Molotov cocktails through the ground floor windows…a taste of its own medicine would be delicious. I’ll bring the hotdogs and beer. Not that I am suggesting anything, no no no…just ask the NYT!
Below are some photos taken of a protest at the NYT a couple days ago. These are mostly Jewish people, including lawyer Alan Dershowitz, protesting about the cartoon. Imagine the nice sized crowd possible to protest the NYT’s treatment of evangelical Christians, or Mormons (see the ad on the light post for the anti-Mormon “Book of Mormon” play), or conservative Catholics, or American patriots against treason…hopefully those protests will happen. For now, we must be satisfied that a handful of American Jews are waking the hell up that liberals and liberalism are not their friends.
Malcolm X warned us all about Harrisburg School District’s spectacular failure
Harrisburg School District is such a phenomenal, record-setting disaster that I will not repeat here even the barest and yet really most unbelievable facts involved with America’s worst school district. If you do not believe me that our local school district is really so bad, such a catastrophic failure, then go ahead and do an Internet search yourself. Type in “Harrisburg school district,” and you will find plenty of mind-bending substance about it, even in the teacher-union-friendly mainstream media, like the local Patriot News/pennlive.com.
Even Mayor Eric Papenfuse is joined by the very partisan, very liberal Pennsylvania Auditor General in targeting the city school district and its partisan teacher unions. For the uninitiated, across America teacher’s unions are the political henchmen of one political party, and they have destroyed countless public school systems in the pursuit of converting their dominance in the class room into a political power dominance. Using little black kids as sacrifices on the altar of political power, white liberal-dominated teachers unions have spread more destruction to American black families than any other single political entity or force. So when political partisans like Mayor Papenfuse and AG DePasquale, and their partisan media chums, go after one of their own, then you know it is really, really bad. And thus, by any measure, the Harrisburg School District is in really, really bad shape.
The problem is not just that the failed Harrisburg School District is “bad,” it is all of the avoidable collateral damage that surrounds it that makes it such an evil experience. Yes, as the school district has failed ever more spectacularly over the years, the taxes have similarly gone up and up while the few redoubts of sane living within the city proper have real estate values that correspondingly fall with those rising taxes. That then leads to white flight to safer, less taxing suburbs with successful public schools. Yes, there is open corruption. Yes, there is open, unmitigated professional incompetence. Yes, there is open self-serving political football by city council members, the teacher unions, and the city administration. Yes, there is open fraud and waste and abuse by everyone involved, from the janitors to the highest school officials.
But more than anything, this monumental failure of what should be the simplest public education is a symbol of one of America’s biggest failures: The domination of American black voters by white liberals.
No greater threat to Black success exists than the American white liberal. No greater racist against American blacks exists than the swarm of white liberals thrumming hive-like around every single black community, feasting parasitically off the automatic voting that American Blacks reflexively do for the one single political party of the white liberal.
Harrisburg school district is a symbol of what ails American blacks, because Harrisburg is like nearly every other major American city school district across our great nation: Black, broke, and Democrat.
That last factor, the Democrat part, is what has destroyed everything positive that emancipated slaves once brought to American industry, culture, and science. It is as if American blacks could not get enough abuse from their former Southern Democrat slave owners and Klansmen, and decided to throw in with their intellectual successors, the white liberals of the 1960s.
White liberals and their Uncle Tom capos have been selling poisonous snake oil to American blacks for well nigh 60 years now, and despite that long trail of failure, abject poverty, cultural deprivation, high crime, and misplaced anger, all nicely summed up right here in Harrisburg’s school district, American blacks continue to vote for the very people and the same failed ideas and philosophies that have led them to this incredibly bad place.
Malcolm X said it 55 years ago: American blacks who reflexively vote for the Democrat Party and for white liberals “are the biggest chumps in America.”
Malcolm X was no Republican, no political partisan. He fiercely wanted success and every sort of freedom for his fellow ex-slaves. What he warned them against was being used and dominated by the parasitic white liberal that right now infests the heart of every single failed black community across America. He wanted blacks to stop giving away their votes to people who promised them the rainbow and who yet delivered them ever increasing poverty and failure.
The first step to fixing the Harrisburg School District disaster is for Harrisburg’s black community to cease giving away their votes to the same people and philosophies that created this disaster in the first place. Clean house politically, look around for new ideas, and new voices to implement those new ideas. It will take time to fix, we know that, because sixty years of unwarranted loyalty to white liberals has sown a lot of poisonous seeds. To my fellow Harrisburg citizens, let me ask you this: What have you got to lose by trying something different? You have already lost just about everything by voting for one political party and one failed philosophy. Give another party and philosophy a try.
Do it for yourself, do it for Malcolm X.
Malcolm X would have predicted the failure of Harrisburg School District, as he called American blacks who reflexively vote for white liberals and Democrats “the biggest chumps” and “traitors to your race.” White liberals own the Harrisburg school district debacle, and Malcom would have told us to expect that.
Mueller Report shows Trump colluded
No question about it, the Mueller Report issued yesterday shows without any question that President Trump colluded all right…with Mueller and a totally corrupt political establishment. Trump’s willingness to work with these evil people and play by their evil rules gave them credibility they did not deserve. And I am upset about this.
From the every beginning of this baseless Grand Inquisition-style witch hunt, Trump
- gave the Mueller hit team –staffed completely with Clinton Campaigners– every document they sought
- allowed White House staff to testify without immunity and without parameters
- did not invoke Executive Privilege
- did not fire Mueller, or Rod Rosenstein
At the very end of this two-year fiasco that cost $25 million taxpayer dollars, tore apart America, and slandered and bankrupted innocent people, Mueller’s political report says they could find zero evidence of collusion with Russia or of “obstruction of justice.” That is, no crime. And although the Mueller hit team was made of partisan lawyers who still know better, in terms of what the law requires, they still looked at creating fake “obstruction” charges, even though there was no crime that anyone was trying to cover up through obstruction.
Like many Americans, I am upset by all this and what it means.
I am upset that Trump was such a good guy, that he put up with this political Grand Inquisition hit squad to the very end, that he did not simply fire everyone involved in the very beginning and start his presidential term with a clean slate, like every president before him has done.
I am upset that Trump was naive to think that if he played by the rules, even the crooked rules that Mueller went by, and did what was right, he would be treated fairly by what is obviously a partisan effort to damage his reputation and undermine his ability to govern.
I am upset that Trump has not played hard ball with these destroyers of American government and cultural fabric. The fake collusion allegation in the first place, and the illegally funded and so obviously phony Steele “pee dossier,” should have been dispensed with on Day Two of the Trump Administration.
I am upset that Trump has not held his FBI director Wray to a high standard, and has instead allowed Wray to simply coast along, ignoring the obvious criminality of Hillary Clinton, Andrew McCabe, James Comey, Bruce Ohr, Peter Stzrok, Brennan, Clapper, and others who used their official government positions for aggressively partisan political purposes. Every one of these corrupt criminals must be investigated and prosecuted and held accountable for committing the biggest political scandal in American history.
Additionally, the American media establishment must be held concretely accountable for their constant daily drumbeat about the wild speculation that was the entire Mueller effort, as though that speculation and those rumors were worthy of being real journalism. Somehow Americans must directly confront individual fake journalists who prostitute the First Amendment for their partisan purposes, and the owners of FaceBook, Twitter, Google, etc. Shouldn’t we all be protesting at their homes? Confronting them when they are out to dinner at a restaurant? Certainly we should be protesting at their businesses. Bring some rotten eggs, make it a substantive protest to show our dissatisfaction at being lied to by this false profession called journalism.
We must bolster the few honest media outlets that exist, like Breitbart, One America News, and let Fox News know that its precipitous slide toward mainstream bullcrap partisanship will be met with an equal loss of interest by its current audience.
Finally, we must increase our number of citizen reporters, to be like Laura Loomer and Matt Christensen. What they do is actual news analysis and investigation, something the mainstream media no longer does.
The Mueller Inquisition demonstrated exactly what American taxpayers are up against: the overt double-dog-dare-ya use of democratic institutions and processes to achieve non-democratic ends, no matter how damaging to America. These are power hungry tyrannical people, and they must be confronted forcefully. Or we lose our country.
If President Trump does not do the things listed above, and more, to lead our Republic toward freedom and away from a destructive, power hungry Washington political establishment, then I and many others will be really, truly upset with him.
Trump and that French Fire Water
President Trump tweets his immediate concern for extinguishing the blazing Notre Dame cathedral in France yesterday, and the next thing ya know, half of France is supposedly upset with him. And just to prove that there really is a little Wizard of Oz man behind that fake news curtain directing fake anger at Trump, both official and semi-official French outlets vented their displeasure and mockery of his comment.
All these French critics proved is that President Trump cares more for the Notre Dame cathedral, and for France as a free Western nation, than do the French themselves.
France has actually been on fire for years, and instead of extinguishing their own self-arson, they have poured gasoline on the flames through deliberate official action and inaction. By importing millions of openly hostile, imperialistic, non-conforming, non-integrating foreigners, France has injected a death serum into its own veins. We know this injection feels like France’s veins are on fire because of all the street level battles that have followed.
Islamic terror is real, and Islamic culture war against France and Catholic churches is real, but it is the least of France’s problems. Rather, it is the culture war against traditional French identity and values facilitated by the watered-down French Vichy intelligentsia itself (Trump’s loudest critics yesterday) that is the greatest threat to France.
Think of the official response to the 2015 Bataclan massacre in Paris by Muslim terrorists, who after the initial gunfire then walked among and picked through the dead and dying to find survivors they could further maim and sadistically torture: “Any person who thinks this event (and all the others like it) is about Islam vs. France is a bad person. No, the actual terrorists are not to blame; we French are all to blame.” It is complete nonsense, and it allowed France’s famous openness and freedom to be further stifled by an official clamp-down on pro-Western, pro-France activists.
Here in America, yesterday I listened to fake news talking weasel head Shep Smith of Fox News also shamefully carry water for the terrorists and arsonists.
If President Trump could walk on the water he recommended for the Notre Dame fire, his critics would complain that he can’t swim, and if he called for help while drowning in it, they would arrest him for disturbing the peace. Trump and his fellow pro-West leaders can do nothing correct in the eyes of his opponents. While the Bataclan dead bodies served up a big warning sign, it is difficult to create a better image of France’s nose-dive toward self destruction than the burning Notre Dame cathedral, and the French anti-France response afterwards.
Dear France, do you want to survive? If yes, then take all your fancy vino and pour it into a giant moat around your southern borders to keep the invaders out, or save it up for putting out the inevitable fires that are coming to your cities and towns.
France, the Notre Dame Cathedral, and the cross, all on fire
Bataclan massacre in Paris by religious Muslim terrorists. These bloody bodies were swept under the rug by French officials and their establishment media allies
PolyClinic Psychiatric Hospital has the Craziest Signs
“We have been down here in the bowels of the PolyClinic Hospital for over thirty years, and yet we still regularly meet people who have worked upstairs in the same building for years who exclaim ‘I had no idea you were here in our building’,” said Joe Marinak, the Select Hearing Center‘s senior audiologist, now adjusting the ear buds in my head.
Having grown up shooting guns and working around chainsaws and farm machinery at a time before hearing protection became standard issue, my hearing now seemed just a little challenged. So it was time to get it checked again. So I used the closest hearing-checking facility possible, and sauntered over to the hulking concrete building, thinking “how hard could it be to locate…it’s an audiology center in a medical building…right?”
I was lucky to find Joe at all.
The welcome sign and the directory sign that greet visitors to that building are a freak show of bad planning and haphazard carelessness. The signs are almost crazy, kind of like most of the facility, which is, in fact, almost entirely devoted to psychiatric care (that is crazy people in non-PC talk land, which is where you are right now…non-PC talk land, not crazy people).
Here are some photos of some of the signs I encountered at PolyClinic on my journey to the “Select Hearing Center.”
While you are looking at the Memorial Building column, make sure to watch out for Landis Building locations. And how about the Mature Adult Services…is there a place for Immature Adult Services? After all, are not adults by definition mature, as age goes?
There is the at-first-glance-normal, quintessential “welcome” sign that is first presented to visitors when they enter the building foyer. The problem with this sign seems to be that there are actually two old buildings (Landis and Memorial) adjoined in the middle, where the common entrance remains, and at one time in the distant past people working and visiting there recognized that each building was separate and served distinctly different purposes. Now, however, each building has evolved and kind of morphed into one big indistinct building, and as such “it” has a bunch of service destinations listed: Lobotomies, second floor, electroshock third floor, padded cells in the basement, and so on (OK, I am joking here; this is just more non-PC, but it is, after all, still a crazy person place). The challenge to the people mis-managing this basic welcome sign developed whenever the services provided began to outnumber the lines on the sign. And so this sign has a greater number of destinations for both buildings than the sign has lines to accommodate. So the various destinations are just kind of listed ad hoc, no particular arrangement. Not even alphabetical. Maybe the people in charge of the signs are conducting experiments on the visitors? Or on the inmates? Or maybe they are laughing at us all, standing there dumbfounded, trying to make any sense out of any of this written communication.
Which way did he go, Mac? If you want Quality, you go one way, and if you want Safety, you go the exact opposite direction. This is called being Vertically Non-Integrated, or Linearly Mis-Aligned. Otherwise known as extremely confusing and unintelligible.
My favorite bizarro sign is the marketing one labeled “Our Pathway Journey.” It purports to represent the clear path upward and onward that the facility is taking toward improvement, better patient care, higher professional standards, and so on. Logically, such a sign, designed as this one is, would indicate that the path toward “quality” is the opposite of that toward “well-being,” despite the natural desire to think that walking the same single path with the Pennsylvania Psychiatric Institute will eventually arrive at all of these desirable destinations together. These are mutually exclusive directions, and to achieve one, you must trade off some other goal. You cannot walk the same pathway and arrive at all your destinations.
Check it out. The “Our Pathway” sign has arrows literally pointing in all directions, like a medley, like a random scattershot, like a crazy person would do if you asked them for directions. Arrows pointing in mutually exclusive, opposing directions actually tell us that this facility is helter skelter, and not organized. But if you are a crazy person, it probably makes perfect sense. Maybe a crazy person designed this sign for the UPMC Pinnacle Penn State Pennsylvania Psychiatric Institute.
Talk about taking that fork in the road!
And nowhere in the building will you encounter a sign that says “You are now on the first floor of the Landis Building.” There is no “You are Here” map, anywhere.
No signs except the barely visible “Vending Area” sign on the very right hand edge of the photo. There were zero vending machines anywhere near this location.
More endless halls with no signs telling you where you were headed, or where you had come from
While on my long, zig-zagging path throughout the building to the audiology department, which I eventually determined is way way below grade, not on the ground floor as one sign stated, I had noticed that most of the long, windowless, door-less, maze-like bunker-like hallways had no signs at all. And when there were signs, they were either for non-existent vending machines or they pointed to a destination straight ahead, when in fact the correct but unmarked way was down the elevator.
The basement is strangely called the “Ground Floor.”
My other favorite sign is the one showing the eventual exact location of the audiology department, where I was headed. As you can see, though you have arrived there, the sign says that you can reach the department by going either left or right. Having wandered aimlessly about there in that basement for a long time, I can report back that this sign is not accurate. You have to go left, like the smaller sign below says.
Since when is the basement designated as the Ground Floor? You enter the building(s) on the ground floor, and work your way to the elevators, which take you down into the basement. The buttons on the elevators are marked B, for Basement.
It is natural to read this large sign overhead when you exit the elevator in the basement. It shows that the Select Hearing Center is both left and right, which I can tell you, is not true. The little eeny weeny sign on the wall beyond tells the truth: Go left, old man.
Let me tell you, if you were not crazy before you entered PolyClinic Psychiatric Hospital, you certainly have a much higher chance of being dazed and confused, if not downright nuts, once you have spent any time in there. Maybe this crazy sign arrangement is meant to keep the inmates from escaping? On my way back out I off-handedly commented about this weird experience to a middle-aged bespectacled worker bee-type lady just then exiting the staff lunch room, which is just above the foyer, invested in the heavy brickwork like a defensive fixture in a medieval castle.
She looked at me briefly, lucidly apprised my appearance, and then without a word in response she smartly walked down the hall to the “other” building on the other side of the foyer at a quick clip, looking down at her smart phone. Maybe she didn’t hear me? I could kind of tell her where the audiology department was, down in the basement, next to the morgue (no lie), if she were interested.
I have never felt so good to leave a building before. It was almost like escaping, and once outside I surreptitiously looked about before entering my vehicle. Had I been seen leaving?
As the old adage goes, truth is stranger than fiction. You couldn’t make these signs up, even if you tried. Ah what the hell, it’s the crazy person building. Who cares.
The Prayer Heard ‘Round the World
About a week ago, a Pennsylvania state representative dared to make a Christian prayer in the Pennsylvania House of Representatives, a building filled with beautiful religious symbols and statements from the Bible writ large upon the walls and the ceilings.
The world then exploded around her, condemnations filling the empty spaces at every corner of her life and space. Her prayer was labeled “Intolerance” by the fake news PennLive/Patriot News (which published a viciously anti-Christian article and then deleted every online pro-Christian comment afterwards, which is going to be our next essay here).
What is strange about all this anti religion sentiment is that mere minutes before Rep. Stephanie Borowicz made her public prayer, in the official time and place allotted to her, a fellow Muslim representative was sworn in. By an Imam using the Koran. No boos or hisses followed that religious event. The negativity only resulted from and surrounded a Christian speaking as a Christian in a building built by Christians in a state founded by Christians in a nation – the world’s freest and most successful- founded by Christians, and based on the Hebrew Torah and the Christian Testament, together or separately otherwise known as the Bible.
Everything about America, from our concept of law and order to our stop signs and street lights to our universal education and safety net for the destitute to free speech and tolerant free religion, are based on the orderly rules laid out in the Bible by God. Simple as that. Without Christianity, there is no America, no freedom, no big opportunity, no tolerance. Yes, Christianity started out as an offshoot of Judaism, but it is its own religion. It is the repository of all of America’s basic, founding principles and values. America has always been about shared values, shared goals, despite different theologies among its citizens.
If you take away Christianity, you no longer have America. No doubt, that anti-America goal is behind most of the negativity surrounding Borowicz etc et al. People complaining about Christianity are essentially declaring war on America. They no longer share values, goals, or a common vision of what it means to be an American.
Today, in the establishment media and its one political party, God is out, the US Constitution is out, the First Amendment freedoms are especially out, Christians are very, very out, and fake victims and even fakier minorities are forced in and falsely elevated and valued above everyone else (how can a group of people 1.3 billion strong be considered a minority anywhere on our planet?). This situation is not right, but it is the fight we find ourselves at this time and place. Freedom is never free, world-wide it is uncommon, and every generation has had to fight to hold onto it. America is still a majority Christian country, and if those Americans wake up, there is still time to save the nation from the physical and cultural onslaught exemplified by the negative response to Rep. Borowicz’s simple prayer.
Whether Christian theology speaks to you, or not, and whether or not a person believes that Christianity will save your soul, or not, is a matter of a particular faith. One thing here is absolutely certain, and that is only Christians and Christianity can save America. Whether America’s Christians are up to the task is the question before us. Our nation’s armed rebellion against British tyranny started quietly in a church pulpit. Rep. Borowicz made a prayer heard ’round the world; pray that it resonates further.
“Red Flag” ERPOs are violent, dangerous, un-American
In the 2002 movie “Minority Report,” police identify and swiftly SWAT-team-style arrest potential criminals before they have committed a crime, even if they are not in the act of committing the crime. That lack of due process, the discarding of the American core value of the presumption of innocence, and the mis-use of quacky, uncertain technology to concretely deprive citizens of their liberties for crimes they did not yet commit, and possibly only imagined, is at the movie’s heart.
Like the 1949 book 1984, in Minority Report an an all-seeing, all-controlling government squashes individuality, individual rights, and free thought by criminalizing “thought crimes,” even thoughts that have not actually been implemented in the physical world. The gist of both the 1949 book and the 2002 movie being that coercive government power can be easily mis-used and that it is at the core of illegitimate governance that justifies civilian resistance and disobedience.
So, welcome to Minority Report and 1984 in your life, right now, in the form of “Red Flag,” “Extreme Risk Prevention Order” and the politically named “Gun Violence Restraining Order” (there is no such thing as ‘gun violence’). These risky programs are being slowly enacted and implemented in states across America in the name of safety.
Theoretically, both ERPOs and GRVOs are designed to get out ahead of a gun owner and send in the SWAT team before that gun owner possibly commits a crime with a gun. Like the ill-fated “No Fly List” bar to gun ownership, both ERPOs and GRVOs are designed to empower police to quickly bypass the natural due process safeguards our federal Constitution explicitly grants to each citizen, behind a screen of secrecy and unaccountable government employees, in the name of immediate if poorly defined security.
The problem with these programs is that they are failing everywhere for reasons that anyone with a shred of common sense had been and would normally employ when assessing the possible risk-benefit value of laws encouraging police to go all cowboy on people who have not actually committed a violent crime. In every place where ERPOs and GRVOs have been implemented, police have aggressively gunned down in cold blood totally innocent citizens, often in their own homes, and always in circumstances where the citizen was either not armed or was only armed because the police had acted like violent, illegal home invaders that an armed citizen would normally resist.
Their results have been exactly the opposite of stopping violence, as ERPOs and GRVOs actually encourage violence; but it’s by the government against the citizen, which ERPO proponents want.
These programs are the anti-gun activist’s dream come true, as the true purpose of ERPOs and GVROs is to generally stigmatize all gun ownership and all individual gun owners by creating an automatic suspect class. Almost all of these programs enable pretty much anyone to call the police and “SWAT” some gun owner the person doesn’t like, doesn’t agree with politically, has a property line dispute with, wants to make an example of etc. “SWATTING” is where someone calls in a bogus threat to a local police department, identifying someone who is actually innocent and unsuspecting that in mere minutes his door is about to come crashing in with a heavily armed SWAT team who thinks he is holding a hostage with a gun to the head.
- ERPOs and GRVOs are the legalization and encouraging of SWATTING.
- ERPOs and GRVOs are dangerous; they promote violence, especially against innocent people.
- ERPOs and purposefully anti-gun-named GVROs are a direct threat to all American citizens, because due process is thrown out the door from the very beginning.
- These are back door channels to criminalizing gun ownership, mass intimidation and big government control over peaceful, law abiding gun owners.
- They are purposefully vague, potentially random, and are more than anything a NAZI Gestapo tactic to bully law abiding gun owners into relinquishing their guns out of fear of being dimed out for some imagined, fake crime.
Why are ERPOs and GRVOs happening? They are becoming popular because due process has gone out the window since Obama was elected in 2008. Obama ran an increasingly abusive government without a shred of respect for the rule of law or due process, and his big government admirers everywhere followed in his step. The result has been that any part of any government anywhere, at any level, that is controlled by Democrats has 360 degree unfettered reach and scope. And on the flip side, any part of government run by Republicans is automatically suspect and subject to endless questioning and investigation and blocking by over-reaching federal judges and bureaucrats.
It is how the Mueller investigation has worked, with its vague accusations of “obstruction” against people who had not and could not have committed any crime in the first place. Without a crime, there can be no obstruction. Roger Stone has been bankrupted for the ‘crime’ of being a political supporter of a president Mueller hates.
This is how the communists took control of Hungary and probably other European nations. They used unproven accusations, which became procedural abuses, to ensnare political opponents, who were then railroaded in the criminal justice system. Just as Mueller has done to his victims.
Democrats today are employing the same exact tactics as the European communists to gain political power the voters would never grant them at the ballot box. These tactics should be illegal and punishable by existing law, but the opposition party, the GOP, is spineless and weak, filled with self-dealing careerists. The culture change following in the wake of Obama’s anti-individual rights big government power grab has shifted in favor of anti-freedom control freaks. They like ERPOs and GVROs, because they suit their tactics, and the Republicans either enable them, empower them, or sit out the fight because there is no money to be made in it.
Do not allow ERPOs, GRVOs, or their derivations into your community or state, because these are undemocratic breaches of the public trust in a government that is supposed to serve its free people.
As a post script, the other big problem is what happens with someone’s legally owned guns when they are confiscated by police. Quite often they are stored under terrible conditions that either badly damage or destroy the firearms. And often the police refuse to honor the law and return the firearms to the citizen after he has been cleared. Moreover, the police often steal or sell confiscated guns, and there is little or no recourse for the citizen to be justly compensated for what has been essentially an unconstitutional taking of private property by government.
America should be going in the direction opposite of ERPOs, GRVOs, and their secret courts where accused people have no right to defend themselves and are presumed guilty. Our founding principles of limited government power, government transparency, and government accountability demand it.
Galileo before the Inquisition’s Secret Court. Is American due process really going backwards to the Dark Ages?