Arizona sues to block Biden’s Vaccine Mandate. Claims President has no authority to mandate vaccines. Also claims Biden and Homeland Security are discriminating against Citizens since foreign nationals (migrant workers, illegal aliens, immigrants) are not required to vaccinate nor test periodically.
Arizona AG statement
For many, Biden was elected for one thing and one thing only: to walk our nation – our democracy – back from the cliff edge where former President Donald Trump and his cronies had led it, and where below waited fascism, demagoguery and totalitarianism. Simply put, Biden’s mandate was to ensure that Trump would never, ever, occupy the White House again – and ideally leave the political stage for good.
Yet we’re not even a year into his first term and Biden’s approval rating has dipped to [42%], thanks to political fumbles that are also creating an opening for a 2024 Trump run. Indeed, GOP insiders have noted that Trump has been [signaling that he is more likely than not] to run again in the next election.
Concise assessment of merits of the US Constitution:
Second, it is democratic. The nation’s elite met in secret to write it — but they then went to the people and asked them to ratify it. Twenty-seven changes since then have been made that way: Congress may propose amendments, but it has to ask the state legislatures, and the time it takes to do that almost invariably means that the people doing the ratifying face an imminent or intervening election.
Third, it is conservative. I do not mean that it advances conservative policy, although it surely does that in a number of ways. I mean that [the very act of writing down the rules the people made] as written law, and deciding that those rules must stay that way forever until the people change them, is inherently small-c conservative. It preserves the wisdom of the past — not unchangeable, but enduring until disturbed for some good and considered reason.
Fourth, it mistrusts power. Power is divided horizontally, between the three branches of government, and vertically, between federal and state authority. The branches are armed with tools, such as the veto and the impeachment power, which they may use to deter and punish overreaching by the others. Power is hard to exercise under our constitution, and that makes it easier for the people to be left alone.
Fifth, it is [deliberative]. The division of power and the staggered forms of election by different electorates means that it takes time and effort to activate the machinery of power, and requires the buy-in of a vast number of people. That helps us avoid rushing into irrevocable decisions.
Seventh, it is liberal, in the classical sense. The Constitution proceeds from the premise of the Declaration of Independence, which runs throughout its original text and is detailed in its amendments, that the protection of liberty and justice for all the people on an equal basis — and the existence of a battery of individual liberties — is fundamental to a legitimate government. That, too, is the point of writing down the rules. There is to be no privileged class with greater rights.
Eighth, it is practical. The Constitution itself was a compromise and a second try, and the men who made it did not start from the idea of constructing an ideal union, but rather a workable one. They had written a number of state constitutions and studied how other nations had succeeded and failed. They even included provisions that would turn out to be useful after lying dormant for many years. The thing is still running because it was built to last.
Huh? Putin horsey orange man. False, Booty truth?
Indictment alleges Democrat lawyer was paid by Clinton campaign to develop documents on alleged Russia collusion computer link to Trump and give it to FBI in final days of election despite concerns it was a ‘red herring’
Progress.
Excerpt.
We have a national crisis of education that most Americans aren’t paying attention to. Our school systems produce a small group of high-achieving students at the top and a massive group of low-achieving students at the bottom.
America has fallen into a multi-generational crisis of illiteracy. In terms of raw numbers, more white students are reading below grade level than Black students. Of the 1.8 million students who took the ACT in 2019, 36 percent did not achieve college readiness in any of the four subjects. That means about 650,000 American students, despite spending thousands of hours in school, were not prepared for college-level work in a single subject. And that number does not include the millions of students who did not take the ACT. Even worse, 19 percent of American high school graduates are functionally illiterate, unable to read well enough to manage daily tasks.
“We have a national crisis of education that most Americans aren’t paying attention to. Our school systems produce a small group of high-achieving students at the top and a massive group of low-achieving students at the bottom.”
I think this is perhaps the greatest crisis of all because an underdeveloped mind isn’t capable of addressing in the most effective way the wicked problems we have today. Also, I think we need to educate people in a more holistic way instead of just indoctrinating them into the job market. More Arts & Humanities, etc.
It’s really sad to see “dumbing” of America under the guise of making kids “feel good”. It’s scary that it’s lead with religious zeal by our own teachers. All of this furthers the Cognitive Divide and ill prepares many of our kids to operate powerfully in a highly complex world.
Funny comedy act if you’re looking for a laugh:
Thanks for the laugh!! 
Great stuff!
I used to be on the Left, in a previous life. I even supported feminism. But inconsistencies kept niggling. And the niggles became nags that compelled me to look more closely. If “victims” of this, that or the other, keep making ridiculous choices, can it really be said that they are truly victims?
That hippy thing, “make love, not war.” We went along with it, it suited our lifestyles, our liberal, fornicating, drug-taking hippy indulgences. In hindsight, some of us might see it for the pure evil that it was.
That was a previous life. In my quest for truth, I got involved in the study of semiotics and began questioning what I was seeing. I see things from a very different perspective now. Every culture is an interconnected web of complicity, a sharing and enforcement of narratives and values. When you live in a culture, earning your living within it and consuming its products, then you are a part of what that culture stands for. You are an accomplice. If you virtue-signal about the environment and you scold others as right-wing nazis, you might have more cred if you also refuse to use the air-conditioning, refuse to drive the cars, refuse to use the infrastructure and refuse to consume the consumables that contribute to carbon emmissions and degrade the environment.
There are good people on the left, as there are on the right. But there are, among them, on both sides, virtue-signalling bigots who are quick to scold those that disagree with them. Anti-white racism is still racism. Anti-male sexism is still sexism. What is it that these shameless bigots don’t understand? They certainly don’t understand projection. Who are the real racists? Who is it that is making assumptions about other people’s motivations based on the color of their skin?
White police officers negligently fail to notice a black man’s failure to breath while one constrains him by kneeling on his neck, and everyone is quick to shout racism. Projection much? Meanwhile in one case, a white officer, obviously revelling in his power, shoots dead an unarmed white guy pleading for his life (Daniel Shaver). In another case, they laugh and banter while a white guy’s life expires before them (Tony Timpa). Videos prove these cases. They are no less significant than the case of George Floyd, but we rarely hear of them. All we hear about is Floyd and racism.
The fatal shooting of Justine Damond by 33-year-old Somali-American Minneapolis Police Department officer Mohamed Noor (who had a record of complaints against him and whom psychiatrists had concerns about, in his fitness to continue police duty), likewise, receives little media attention. Diversity and all that. Diversity is good, so the virtue-signallers keep telling us. They don’t want to spoil a good thing, and so we hear nothing about it, the media fails to do its job. And shouting and hollering indignation over the expiry of a black man at the hands of negligent white officers is all we ever hear about. Nobody cares about the more likely cause, the “police versus community” paradigm of American policing.
Spirituality is a private matter. You try to make sense of a very complex world, live within your moral sphere, and if you believe in a god, you answer to him alone. The virtue-signalling haters, by contrast, have it all wrong. Reality is too complex for them to justify asserting their agendas as truths on other people. Their agendas require them to turn a blind eye to the evil that comes from within. Antifa are the very fascists they claim to be against. Why? Because they assume what all fascists assume… they assume that they are right, they have the truth, and the truth justifies the means. No different to the fascists that went before them. Almost every fascist starts out as a true believer.
Good people need to learn to recognize the haters among them. They need to understand projection. Virtue-signalling provides its own clues. Pay attention to the inconsistencies. The mark of a hypocrite: “Do as I say, not as I do.” Listen to those voices in your head that niggle you. Thread the patterns together, integrate your thoughts into a consistent whole. If something doesn’t make sense, it’s probably because you haven’t integrated all the clues. These times that we live in are no less evil than the times that have preceded us, and we need to learn to recognize the rot.
And we need to learn to recognize projection, the assumptions that people make about those whom they hate. Virtue-signalling haters are easy to spot when you learn to see the world from their perspective, with the evidence provided in projection. Projection assumes: “This is what I would be thinking if I was behaving in a similar way.” When they call you a racist, they are disclosing the racist within themselves. A succinct “shutup bigot”, is all that they deserve.
I guess realizing the sentience of other critters is a part of this topic (cultural revolution) 
Sad that such simple truths are revolutionary, but here we all are.
It is almost paradoxical, in this era of widespread, complex technology and deterministic life sciences, that we have at our fingertips the best opportunity to connect with the sentience of other beings. Like this herd of elephants saying hello to a herd of people. I like to put myself into their bodies, to try to figure out what they’re thinking. No, it’s not in the genes (genocentrism is among the greatest frauds perpetrated on humanity). When we circumvent this because-genes nonsense, we place ourselves in a better position to figure out how other critters experience their worlds. It’s not that difficult. An elephant behaves as a human would behave if a human had an elephant’s body.
Think in terms of Mark Twain’s famous aphorism, “A man whose only tool is a hammer will perceive the world in terms of nails.” By extension, “A man whose only tool is an elephant’s body will perceive the world in terms of savanna grasslands, trees, water-holes, big predators and all the other things that matter to elephants.” Basic semiotic theory (actually, biosemiotic - Jakob von Uexkull).
Here we are in 2021. Western nations including the US have been at the forefront eradicating racism of all forms over the last several centuries but here we have the entirety of the Left demanding legislated destruction of all progress that has been made to this point. Before we move on, let’s always remember what “legislated” means. It means the government can enforce through property seizure or imprisonment of those that “violate” the “legislation”. With the current Woke or those that claim Post/Meta Woke we see attempts to legislate speech, feelings (internal states) and feelings caused (claimed internal states of those “impacted”). This is simply a concerted effort to legislate insanity throughout the population straight out of a dark dystopian Hollywood thriller - Minority Report, 1984, … Terms coined such as “violent speech” are clear indicators of intent police internal states as perceived by, well, the police. Entire industries in academia, “non profits”, and now government agencies are developed in order to implement this insane policing of every humans internal quadrant.
The purpose of this thread was to look potentially at the current waves or trends or momentums around shifting away from codified insanity, totalitarianism, destruction with no replacement. @steljarkos Thank you for taking a deep look into many of these issues and concerns that we are faced with.
In The Coddling of the American Mind, Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff discuss the idea of violent speech, and whether or not speech can be violent.
In a 2017 New York Times essay, Northeastern University professor Lisa Feldman Barrett made the argument that certain forms of speech ought to be considered a form of violence.
The logic of this argument is that inflammatory speech can cause emotional distress. Emotional distress, in turn, can have harmful effects on one’s physical health. Therefore, since some forms of speech can lead to physical harm, such speech ought to be considered the moral equivalent of physical violence.
But this is a deceptively simple formulation. By this logic, almost anything could be considered an act of violence, since anything is likely to be emotionally stressful to at least someone . Anything that causes stress would therefore be considered “violent.” A parent telling their kids to clean their room or to do their homework (either of which might trigger stress) would be violent if one carried the premise of Barrett’s argument to its logical conclusion.
Of course, the authors argue, emotional stress—even if it leads to some level of physical harm—is not the same as violence—and neither is the speech that might cause emotional distress.
The West is currently undergoing a series of political and social upheavals. Attention tends to focus on America, where cancel culture and “woke” corporations are part of a process that’s pulling the country apart. From Sweden this all looks disturbingly familiar.
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Ironically, one of the reasons Sweden is far less polarised today than many other Western countries is probably the belated discovery that these consequences of immigration are in fact very real, and that methods of ”shaping the narrative” cannot really change material reality.
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Today, it is clear that Sweden was simply the canary in the coal mine; just a couple of years later, many other Western countries would noisily be at war with their own homegrown ”deplorables”. Political demonisation against the internal enemy continues to grow. “The unmasked”; “the unvaxxinated”; “chuds”; “magatards”; “Brexiteers”. All of these labels, as it turns out, are incredibly malleable and thus politically useful.
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Ran across this little gem.
Yes, nothing has really developed since September that would place Biden either higher or lower on the scale.
Well all righty then
Some very good points @corey-devos in your discussion with Fischer.
At 14:30ish thought a very good synopsis on possibly opening up spiritual development for children again. Is there anything in Christianity you might consider as enabling “Waking Up”, or solely regression into superstition (anti-Eaking up)?
At around 35:00 loved the discussion on SCOTUS history. (minus Mark’s whining about court activism and not getting what he wants. Lol).
Corey, does look like you (not Fischer, lol) are pivoting / transcending into a Post Cultural Revolution era. Well done!