"The Michigan Problem goes Transatlantic"

 Europe has a big problem, especially England, France Germany and Sweden, and to a lesser extent the other countries of Western Europe.  The unfettered migration from 3rd world crapholes to the 1st world has transformed large swaths of western europe into "No-go" zones for the locals and the transplants run it like an islamic caliphate with sharia laws in place.  Try walking in the major cities like Berlin, London, Koln, Paris, Vienna, and so forth, especially near the train stations and pull out a camera and start filming, you will be attacked, harassed, spit upon and if you have a dog you will have some clown screaming "Haram" at you....Yes I have seen too many of the video's to doubt this anymore.  so many of the churches have been set fire by "Youth" with "fireworks"....that is the official party line.....funny that the fireworks are selective with the damage and they don't describe the "youths".......Yeah right....yank on the other one....it has bells on it...."Mutti Merkel" did irreprible damage to Germany with her immigration policies...

    The pics are from my "Stash"

   The Elites and the legacy media have sold the local population out, whenever there is a conflict with the locals and the migrants, the polizei will take the side of the migrants.  The locals know this and that is why the support for the AFD party grew soo much in the past few years, they are being told one thing by news and their leaders and they are seeing something totally different.  They are seeing the pensioners getting kicked out of their government apartments to house the migrants and they have no recourse.  Their women are being assaulted and they are told to accept it as part of "multiculturalism"...no matter how henius the crime the migrants are not punished....but released.  Yeah the anger is building.   The countries in Eastern Europe are not accepting the edicts of the bureaucrats of Brussels, and are keeping their borders closed much to the chagrin of the elites and the same bureaucrats, who are not affected by the policies that they push on everyone else.   We are having to deal with the same problem here, although not as bad, but we have the same adherents of the "religion of peace" trying to set up enclaves in Texas, and other places and it is about conquest, not assimilation to the host culture.  I use Lebanon as an example, when the PLO were kicked out of Jordan and other countries, they settled in Lebanon, and used the laws against the locals, they swung the elections to candidates that favored the PLO and overtime became a majority and Beirut that used to be called the "Paris of the Middle East" became embroiled in a civil war as the supporters of the PLO tried to overthrow the Christian government of Lebanon.   There are lessons of the past that people are not paying attention to.

   I clipped this from Michael Smith.

The so-called “Michigan Problem” is no longer confined to Dearborn and Hamtramck. What began as a localized electoral headache for American Democrats—Arab and Muslim voters in a pivotal swing state bolting over Gaza and progressive social policies—has become a transatlantic crisis. In the United Kingdom and across the European Union, left-of-center parties confront an identical fracture: once-reliable Muslim blocs, imported through decades of migration and refugee resettlement, are abandoning them and running their own candidates or supporting alternatives.

The trigger is often foreign policy, but the deeper fault line is religious and cultural. Socially conservative Islamic values on sex, gender, family, and speech clash irreconcilably with the modern left’s progressive orthodoxy. As it turns out, conservative Americans are liberal compared to the “conservative values” in Islam. For decades, progressive Democrats conjured straw men to represent conservative Republicans. Now they don’t need to—they imported them.

The result is a coalition trap that neither side of the Atlantic has solved, exposing the failure of multiculturalism when assimilation is optional.

In Michigan, the problem crystallized in 2024. Biden’s staunch support for Israel amid Gaza—framed by many local voters as enabling genocide—ignited protest. The “Abandon Biden” and “Listen to Michigan” campaigns turned the primary into a referendum. Kamala Harris watched Biden’s 2020 margins evaporate. Trump, who visited Dearborn and promised Middle East peace, captured roughly 42 percent in key Arab-American precincts, flipping the state.

But foreign policy was never the sole driver. Pew Research in 2025 revealed U.S. Muslims are far closer to Republicans than Democrats on core social questions: 55 percent believe homosexuality should be discouraged by society versus just 13 percent of Democrats, and 48 percent view growing transgender acceptance as a change for the worse. In Dearborn schools and Hamtramck’s city council—which upheld a ban on Pride flags into 2025—Muslim parents and officials pushed back against LGBTQ curricula and symbols with a rigidity contemporary Christianity rarely matches. Other polls indicate Muslims are significantly more rigidly observant and unforgiving than traditional Republicans, counter to what most Democrats believe. Democrats now face a brutal choice: alienate their progressive base by softening on gender and sexuality, or watch a once-solid demographic swing permanently.

Across the Atlantic, the scale is larger and the stakes existential. British Muslims, numbering about 4 million or 6 percent of the population, delivered Labour landslide margins for decades. In 2024, that loyalty shattered. In seats where Muslims comprise more than a third of voters, Labour’s share plunged 29 points—from 65 percent in 2019 to 36 percent. Pro-Gaza independents and Greens scooped up the difference. By March 2026, British Election Study data showed the 2019-era 80 percent Muslim support for Labour had collapsed entirely. Ongoing Gaza hostilities, combined with domestic flashpoints—UK school protests against LGBTQ lessons mirroring Dearborn’s—have kept the wound open. Labour’s attempt at tighter immigration under a Muslim Home Secretary has only deepened the alienation. The Starmer government now fears the very people they need to keep them in power, as deportation and remigration fever begins to catch hold.

The EU version is more explosive still. In France, Germany, Sweden, the Netherlands, and Belgium, Muslim populations—often 6-10 percent nationally, 20-40 percent in urban enclaves like Seine-Saint-Denis, Malmö, or Molenbeek—were cultivated as multicultural shock troops for the left. The 2015 migrant wave and subsequent chain migration amplified the bloc. Gaza protests in 2023-2025 accelerated defection, but the underlying rupture is cultural. Polling across France, Germany, and the Netherlands shows Muslim respondents significantly more opposed to same-sex adoption and more supportive of traditional gender roles than native majorities.

Sweden now openly declares “Islam must adapt,” revoking residency permits and pushing repatriation after years of no-go zones and gang violence. In the Netherlands, Geert Wilders rode anti-Islam sentiment to power. Germany’s AfD leads national polls in 2026; France’s National Rally under Jordan Bardella remains a presidential threat. Native backlash has produced what analysts call the “center’s collapse”: welfare strains, parallel societies enforcing informal Sharia on speech and sexuality, and grooming scandals that shattered public trust.

The similarities are stark. In both America and Europe, Gaza served as the detonator—exposing how left parties’ reflexive defense of Israel betrayed a demographic they assumed was locked in by welfare and anti-racism rhetoric. More fundamentally, Islamic social conservatism—rigid on premarital sex, homosexuality, gender fluidity, blasphemy, and family hierarchy—collides with progressive dogma far more violently than modern Christianity does. Contemporary Western Christians have largely accommodated or secularized; many Muslim communities, especially first- and second-generation immigrants from conservative regions, have not. Left parties are paralyzed: moderating on Pride education or free speech risks their urban secular base; doubling down risks hemorrhaging the very minorities they championed. The double bind is identical on both continents.

Yet contrasts matter. America’s Michigan Problem remains containable—Muslims are under 2 percent nationally, concentrated in a handful of swing-state precincts. Europe’s crisis is systemic. Higher migrant fertility rates plus continued inflows project Muslim shares doubling or tripling by mid-century in several countries. Enclaves function as de facto parallel societies, multiparty fragmentation splinters the left, and populist right surges on explicit anti-Islam platforms. Native working-class voters, once Labour or Social Democrat stalwarts, have fled to AfD, National Rally, or Sweden Democrats over crime, housing, and cultural erosion. The welfare state magnifies resentment; visible Islamization—halal-only schools, honor violence, blasphemy demands—makes denial impossible.

This is no accident of bad luck. It is the predictable collision of mass, unvetted migration from illiberal societies with a host culture that abandoned assimilation for celebration of difference. Progressives sold multiculturalism as enrichment; reality delivered imported theocracies-lite that reject core liberal tenets on individual liberty and equality.

Democrats may yet paper over Michigan with targeted concessions or new candidates. Europe, however, risks permanent transformation: either endless appeasement that erodes Enlightenment values, or populist revolts that fracture the continent further. The left’s greatest fear is being realized—not that offending Muslim voters will spread, but that pretending the religious and cultural chasm does not exist will doom their entire project.

Ignoring the Michigan Problem did not make it disappear. Importing it at scale has only made the fracture continental.

Monday Music "Junk Food Junkie" By Larry Groce

 

I heard this song on my Sirius/XM on the 70's channel and I thought *Eureka!!!*   Well that is blogspeak for *Aw crap here is another weird idea from the blogger*.  Well anyway I decided to play this on my monday music since I am running 70's songs right now.  Can you feel the shag carpet as you walk to the rabbit ears to adjust the tuning or move the aluminum foil to increase the reception?...Yes Pepperidge Farms Remembers. 

 

I still have this one and a bunch of other "Ronco Records",  I haven't played them in years, because I have them in digital.  One day I will traumatize the kid and break out the records:).  I haven't seen any funny songs released anymore, now all music has to have a message, no more humor I guess.  These songs came from the 60's and 70's, back then we had a sense of humor....now people have thin skins, what does this say about our society.  Well back to the music, I remembered playing these songs and many others over and over again on my little plastic record player until I actually got a decent stereo. 

      Even now if I break out in a lyric, people from my age group and older will sing along...Man what the kids nowadays miss out on. 

"Junk Food Junkie" is a 1976 novelty song by Larry Groce. It spent 15 weeks on the U.S. charts, reaching # 9 on the Billboard Top 100. It was Groce's only song to chart.
The song tells the story of a man leading a double life: during the day he boasts of his natural diet lifestyle, however, at night, he indulges in his secret addiction to junk food. The song is currently released on K-tel International.
"Junk Food Junkie" reached # 48 in Canada.

"The Free Market isn't Greed, Its Service."

 

I saw this when I went into East Germany, the state economy couldn't provide for its citizens and they stood in line for everything, unless you were associated with the party, then you shopped in the special stores where you had access to everything.  It was the same in every communist country.  The elites had plenty, the proles had the leftovers....Funny that, there is a quote" Socialism/Communism is for the people, not the socialist/communist.  Basically the rules are for you not them, you will ride the bus...if it run...you will pick through the store looking for something to feed your family, not them...you will wear nondescript clothing...not them because you are the unnamed masses....not the communist/socialist who pushed the system on you.  They will live well, on your labor...not you.   But hey ain't socialism/communism grand?   It steals your soul, it steals your hope until you became the walking automaton hoping for death to take you, hoping for something better on the other side because you are living in misery here, but hey ain't the party slogans great! "The great Utopia will soon be here, keep working comrades"...but the slogans don't change over generations but the people do...and hope fades away as the older generation sees the slavery that they live under and that their kids are born under and that there is no hope for them.   Until the wall suddenly falls away.......in 1989 when the people finally had enough and the government was powerless to stop the rage and the people realized that the government was toothless even when the apparatus of security, the Army supported the citizens....not the government.   And November 1989 became a reality.

  I blogged a lot about "Berlin" and "East Germany", I was stationed in West Germany from 1986 to 1991, I was there when President Reagan gave his famous speech in 1987 telling Mr Gorbechov" To tear down This Wall".  I was there in 1989 when the wall came down and the "Trabbi's" crossed over.   It was kinda surreal, I almost expected Ron Sterling to appear.

    I clipped this from "The Templar Mind"

        

The Free Market Isn't Greed. It's Service.

---

Capitalism is built on greed. Socialism is built on need.

You've heard this. You've probably repeated it. It sounds right.

It isn't though. It's actually the opposite.

Walk into any small town in America. Count the businesses on Main Street. The diner. The hardware store. The mechanic. The dentist. Every one of them exists because somebody bet their livelihood on solving your problem.

The owner of the diner doesn't cook for himself. He cooks for you. The mechanic doesn't fix his own truck all day. He fixes yours. If they serve you well, they prosper. If they don't, the place closes and something better takes its spot.

That's the free market. Not greed. Service.

Nobody starts a business for themselves. They start a business for you.

---

St. John Chrysostom understood this fifteen centuries before Adam Smith.

In his homilies on 1 Corinthians and Ephesians, he taught that the skill of the craftsman is given not for himself alone but for the sake of others.

God distributes gifts unevenly so that we depend on one another. The cobbler needs the farmer. The farmer needs the blacksmith.

Each serves the other.

Each receives in return.

---

This isn't a theory. I've watched it happen in real time. I spent a decade running a residential construction company in Colorado and Texas. When a contractor in Dallas bids on a kitchen remodel and quotes it too high or cuts corners, the homeowner leaves a one-star review and his phone stops ringing.

Meanwhile, the contractor across town who shows up on time, stays on budget, and does clean work? That guy gets referral after referral.

Nobody forces this outcome. No agency intervenes. The market punishes laziness and rewards excellence all on its own.

Every small business owner in America lives under this discipline. Serve the customer or lose the customer. Adapt or die. The consumer doesn't have to ask for permission. He just goes somewhere else.

The consumer holds all the power. You vote with every dollar. Every transaction is a verdict.

---

In a socialist economy, the government holds the power. A handful of planners decide what you need, how much of it should exist, and what you'll pay. Millions of individual decisions get replaced by a committee. And committees always get it wrong.

No central planner possesses the knowledge that millions of free actors generate through daily exchange. Hayek called it the knowledge problem. The Fathers called it something older.

Pride.

The belief that a few minds can substitute for the wisdom distributed across an entire people.

Have you noticed that late-stage socialist states always run out of the basics? The shelves go empty. They always do.

Not because of sanctions or bad luck. Because the system is structurally incapable of responding to human need. It can only respond to power. And power concentrates.

Those with connections get what they want.

Everyone else gets a line to stand in.

Venezuela is the most recent example of this. Once among the wealthiest countries in South America. From the 1950s through the early 1980s, oil revenue made it the continent's economic powerhouse.

But the prosperity was already eroding before Chávez. By 1998, per capita GDP had fallen to its 1963 level, down a third from its 1978 peak.

Half the country lived in poverty. The foundation was cracking before the socialists ever took the stage.

Then they finished the job.

Hugo Chávez nationalized industries, imposed price controls, and gutted the institutions that kept the economy running. His successor Maduro accelerated the collapse. Leftist activists in the West celebrated Venezuela as the new model of modern socialism.

Right up until people started eating zoo animals.

---

But what about Western Europe? Aren't those socialist countries? Free healthcare. Free college. Strong unions.

No. There are no socialist countries in Western Europe. Denmark, Sweden, Norway. They're capitalist economies with large welfare states. There's a difference. A big one.

In 2015, Denmark's prime minister Lars Løkke Rasmussen corrected this directly at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. Denmark is far from a socialist planned economy, he said. Denmark is a market economy.

Not a planned socialist economy.

When you point to Scandinavia as proof that socialism works, you're actually proving that capitalism works. Because only a free market generates the wealth necessary to fund the programs those countries offer.

Without the engine of free enterprise, there's nothing to redistribute. Without capitalism, you don't get Scandinavia. You get Caracas.

St. Basil the Great taught that wealth itself is not the evil. The evil is hoarding it. "The bread in your cupboard belongs to the hungry," he preached. But notice the order. First you bake the bread. Then you share it. Socialism skips the first step and wonders why the cupboard is bare.

More capitalism means less dependency. Look at the American economy from 2010 to 2019. Over nearly a decade of sustained job growth, unemployment fell steadily across every demographic. By 2019, unemployment had reached historic lows.

Lower taxes and reduced regulation after 2017 contributed significantly, but the broader trajectory was driven by a labor market that kept expanding because the underlying engine was free enterprise.

People moved off welfare and into work. Not because one president or another planned it.

Because the market rewarded it.

---

I grew up in the '90s, and back then this didn't require an economics degree to understand. It was just common sense. Yet today, young people praise socialism and condemn the system that creates their jobs, their wages, and their freedom.

They're working against their own interests. Worse, they're working against the interests of the poor they claim to champion.

Capitalism isn't perfect. No human system is. But it aligns self-interest with service. It channels the craftsman's skill toward the neighbor's need. It does what Chrysostom described. It makes human interdependence productive rather than coercive.

Every Marxist-Leninist state that has attempted a command economy has delivered tyranny. The Soviet Union. Maoist China. Cambodia. Cuba. Venezuela.

The pattern holds without exception.

The further a state drifts from free exchange and toward centralized control, the closer it moves toward coercion. The free market isn't just an economic system. It's a moral guardrail. Remove it, and power has no check but itself.

- Marcus Sterling

"The Right To Be Left Alone"

 I got this post from a guy named Shane Vaughn on farcebook, I went ahead and read the caselaw mentioned in his story.  what it involved was the anti-abortion people being overzealous.  But now you have all these far left groups pushing their pet causes, BLM or no ICE, or what have you and they are doing the same thing.  This is something for us to remember if we get pushed into that situation, our first instinct is to..

   But the police and the courts might get pissy, so you use the courts to sue the crap out of the protestors, sure the lice ridden vermin don't have any money, but the NGO that sponsored the protest that disturbed you is flush with Soros or USAID cash...so you sic a shark of a lawyer on them with a contingency clause.    They like lawfare, use their playbook against them, they are the ones that started the dance, they are the ones that disturbed you with their bullhorns, whistles, signs and any property damage they caused.....just a thought.

Folks, let me teach you something today that your civics teacher never told you — and the courts hope you never find out or else their dockets will fill up with lawsuits.....

You have TWO rights that live in direct tension with each other. Both are real. Both are protected. And most Americans only know about one of them.

The first one everybody knows: the right to speak. The First Amendment. Say what you want. Protest. Preach. Picket. Knock on doors. Shout from the rooftops. America was built on it.

But here's the one nobody talks about.

The Supreme Court — in a case called Rowan v. Post Office back in 1970 — said this, and I want you to read it slowly:

"The right to be left alone is one of the most cherished rights known to man."

One of the most cherished rights known to man.

The Court didn't stop there. They said — and this is the part that should shake you — no one has the right to press even a good idea on an unwilling recipient.

Not a bad idea. Not a dangerous idea. A GOOD idea. If you don't want to hear it, you have the right not to be forced to.

Then came Frisby v. Schultz in 1988. The Court said targeted picketing — showing up at someone's home, their unavoidable space — can be restricted. Why? Because a captive audience has rights too. The Court called it the captive audience doctrine. If you cannot leave, you cannot be forced to receive.

And in Hill v. Colorado in 2000, the Court upheld buffer zones — spaces where people trying to enter a location cannot be cornered into confrontation. The reasoning? You should not have to abandon your right to be somewhere just to escape someone else's speech.

Now here is where Professor Toto connects the dots for you.

We live in an age where everybody thinks their right to speak trumps your right to be left alone. Social media mobs. Protesters at private homes. Activists who will follow you to your car. Ideologues who show up where they know you cannot leave.

They'll scream "First Amendment!" at you while violating your most cherished right — the right to simply be left alone.

The First Amendment protects your right to speak.

It does NOT give you the right to force your speech on someone who cannot escape it.

Most Americans do not know the difference.

Now you do.

And Now You Know... THE BEST of the Story.

"Cleaning Up The Parking Lot"

 

This is a good analogy, and yes I shamelessly cribbed it off farcebook.  Yes I do fall into the first group, I will return the shopping cart plus any other on the way to the shopping cart corral.  The shopping cart corralling is a good analogy for the decay of society, way back in the day, people took civic pride in doing the little things that made the greater society function.  Now it is all about "me-me-me".  Iran is a symptom, nobody wanted to deal with the messy situation, and kept pushing it down the road, and hoped the problem would go away, well President Trump doesn't care, he knows this is his second term, and besides he is a fixer, not a kick the can down the road person, so the can is getting handled.

  Samelessly clipped from Michael Smith.

I’ve posted before about the “shopping cart test.” You know the one. It asks whether we are the kind of people who return the cart to the cart corral in the parking lot, or whether we simply set it free to roam the vast asphalt plains as nature intended.

We have one of those Walmart Express stores about three miles from our house. I had to run down there yesterday and either the cart wranglers had just donned their silver spurs, mounted their electric steeds, and rounded up the herd for delivery to the railhead in Abilene, or the shoppers were all passing the test, because there were no carts milling about unsupervised anywhere.

I also post a lot about history—not because I claim to know everything about it, but because historical patterns reveal something important about human behavior. Humans tend to believe their age is unique, that the problems of their time are unprecedented, and that human nature itself has evolved—but it really hasn’t. The basic impulses that drive human conduct—ambition, fear, pride, self-interest, responsibility—are remarkably constant across centuries. What changes are the tools. Each generation simply invents new and more dangerous toys while repeating the same old mistakes. I just posted about the connection between Botticelli’s final painting, completed more than five hundred years ago, and the strange moment we are living through in America today.

As I was driving home from what we call “Baby Walmart,” I was catching up on some podcasts and thinking about President Trump’s posture toward Iran. Somewhere along the way it occurred to me that the shopping cart test provides a useful analog for how nations approach persistent global problems. For those in Rio Linda, that means I’m about to use examples to explain a larger point—that’s what an analogy is.

Imagine the world as a parking lot. In that global parking lot there appear to be four general schools of thought when it comes to the carts.

The first group believes the carts should be returned to the cart corrals by the people who used them. It is the simplest model of responsibility: if you took it out, you put it back. Order exists because individuals accept small obligations that keep the broader system functioning.

The second group believes the carts are entirely the responsibility of the store employees. After all, someone is paid to deal with it, so why bother? Just unload the groceries, leave the cart wherever it stops rolling, and drive away. From this perspective, maintaining order is always someone else’s job.

The third group sits somewhere between the first two. They intellectually agree that the carts should be organized and returned, but they quietly assume someone else will probably handle it. They support the idea of responsibility in the abstract, just not necessarily the practice of it.

Then there is the fourth group. These are the people who don’t really think about the carts at all. They leave the trolley wherever it happens to land—sometimes squarely in the middle of a parking space—and go on about their day without giving the matter another thought.

When it comes to Iran, much of the world seems to fall into the latter three groups.

Many believe the United Nations should be dealing with the issue, because international institutions were supposedly created to manage such problems. Others assume it is not really their concern as long as they keep enough distance from the situation. And still others simply avoid thinking about it altogether.

In truth, nearly every American president since Jimmy Carter has treated Iran like the far corner of the parking lot where abandoned carts accumulate. Since 1979, leaders of both parties have tried variations of the same approaches. Some argued it was not truly America’s problem. Some handed off the issue to international bodies in the hope that diplomacy would gradually bring the carts back into order. Others simply tried to stay far enough away that the mess would not affect them directly. None of those approaches solved the problem, at best they managed it temporarily. They nudged a few carts out of the way and bought some time. Yet the underlying disorder remained, and over time the number of loose carts in that corner of the lot simply continued to grow.

Eventually a parking lot full of stray carts produces predictable consequences. Cars get dented by runaway trolleys. Parking spaces disappear beneath clusters of metal. Customers start walking halfway across the lot just to find a cart to use. Even if you personally return your cart every time, if enough people do not, the disorder eventually affects everyone. The probability that your brand-new 2026 GMC Sierra 1500 AT4X gets a nice little ding on the door steadily increases. That is how neglected problems work. They rarely stay politely confined to the corner where we left them.

At some point only one thing restores order: someone deciding the problem has gone on long enough. Someone walks out into the lot, looks around at the mess, gathers a team, and begins pushing carts. The broken ones go to the scrap pile. The usable ones go back to the store. Order is restored not through discussion alone, but through the decision to act.

That, for better or worse, is the role Trump appears to be assuming. After more than four decades of presidents from both parties leaving the carts scattered across the Iran section of the parking lot, he has essentially looked at the situation and said the mess is no longer sustainable.

He has told Pete Hegseth to get a crew together and start cleaning up the lot. The rusty fifty-year-old carts that cannot be fixed go into the scrap bin. The serviceable carts get pushed back where they belong.

Reasonable people can debate whether that approach will succeed. Foreign policy is rarely simple, and history has a habit of surprising those who think they have solved it.

One thing is clear: leaving the carts scattered across the parking lot forever was never a solution. Eventually a functioning system requires someone willing to walk into the mess, grab the handle, and start pushing things back into order—because if nobody does, the parking lot eventually belongs to chaos.