I have commented for years about the democrats and their fellow travellers A.K.A. The "Democratic Socialist of America", the rebranding of the communist party USA and other far left fringe groups that seem to attract all these nepo and trust fund babies that are over educated and never worked a day in the private sector, "But they know your struggle, and know the cure of all your needs...YES Socialism...Make all those mean rich people pay, YES Pay so you don't have to work and have a life of leisure...because you deserve it because the deck has been stacked against you, and now they MUST PAY and if you vote for us WE will MAKE IT HAPPEN!!" and once you vote the socialist/communist in, and you lose your freedom, most of the people that will fall for the siren song of free stuff and other enticements of the socialists already hate this country. Something like only 20% of democrats believe in this country according to the latest Rasmussen polls. so the majority would vote to destroy this country after 30 years of continuous agitprop they despise this country. And you tie in the islamist influence....and we have a problem.
This is from Michael Smith.
Way back in 2006, when I was just beginning to publicly share my religious and political views, I wrote an article titled "Lying Down With Dogs" about how Nancy Pelosi and the Democrat leadership were getting pretty cozy with Islamists and Marxists, the implication, as the saying goes, when one lies down with dogs, one frequently gets up with fleas.
It has taken 20 years for it to happen and San Fran Nan's run is almost over, but it has finally happened. Democrats pandered to groups that knew they were being played but instead of hoping for crumbs and a pat on the head like black Democrats did for generations, played their own game, leaning into the Democrat political philandering with a knowing wink and nod.
Now the Dems (and by extension, America) have a problem. In the process of sucking up for political gain, they let the enemy inside the wire - and they let them gain just enough staying power to influence candidate selection and policy.
The same way the Tea Party refocused the GOP on conservative policies, the DSA is going to refocus the Democrats on extreme left wing actions - and the Dem leadership doesn't have enough gonads between them to stop it. The days of UpChuck Schumer and Extreme Hakeem are numbered.
The only use the DSA has for Democrats is ballot access.
This isn't a political problem to be solved.
It is a problem of twisted, incompatible morality that cannot be resolved by a campaign or an election.
When there are radicals calling for the death of Jews and the erasure of a nation and are willing to commit murder of business leaders on a public street and the founder of TPUSA at a public event, this is a party ruled by simple terrorism.
Mr. Frog, meet Mr. Scorpion. He's going to sting you half way across the river but don't worry, it is just his nature.
"Love Is a Battlefield" is a song performed by Pat Benatar, and written by Holly Knight and Mike Chapman. It was released in September 1983 as a single from Benatar's live albumLive from Earth, though the song itself was a studio recording. The song was ranked at number 30 in VH1's list of the 100 Greatest Songs of the 1980s. "Love Is a Battlefield" went on to sell over a million records.
The Bob Giraldi-directed music video features Benatar playing a rebellious teenage girl running away from her home with her father (played by actor Trey Wilson) warning her, "If you leave this house now, you can just forget about coming back!" Her mother looks on helplessly and her brother (played by actor Philip Cruise) watches sadly from an upper-story window. She later becomes a taxi dancer at a seedy club to get by in the city, outwardly New York. She writes to her brother, telling him about her exciting new life, while her father seems to feel guilty about being angry at her. Later in the video, she witnesses the club owner (played by actor Gary Chryst) harassing another dancer. Benatar rounds up the women and leads a rebellion against him. As the club owner is cornered by the women against his will, he tries to seduce Benatar only to have her throw a drink in his face. Angered by this, he tries once again to assault her but Benatar and the women overpower and defeat him, then storm out of the club dancing into the sunrise before bidding goodbye to one another, thanking Benatar for their escape. The women escape and strike out on their own and Benatar walks into the sunrise. The final scene shows Benatar sitting in the back of a bus headed for an unknown destination. The video was choreographed by Michael Peters, who appears briefly in the video.
A special dance club remix of the song was created by Jellybean Benitez. Benitez also created an edited version of his mix specifically for the video. It differs slightly in structure and instrumentation, and aside from appearing in the video, has never been commercially released. The video was the first ever to feature the use of dialogue.The scenes featuring dialogue include the opening scene of Benatar stomping out of the house while being berated by her father and the scene featuring the pimp harassing the female dancer in which she shouts "Leave me alone!" The video was nominated for an MTV Video Music Award for Best Female Video and is contained on the DVD for the movie 13 Going on 30.
I'm working and ran across this on farcebook, the name of the writer is "Liam Out Loud," He had some food for thought.
Here is the "Link" to his substack (Hope it works, LOL)
An insatiable lust for violence and destruction is bubbling up in the collective psyche of the worst among us.
An incel Marxist goes on a shooting spree in Montreal and leaves behind a 104-page manifesto. Charlie Kirk was brutally murdered and a significant number of people celebrated. Luigi Mangione assassinated a CEO and countless people called him a hero. Others will tell you, in supposedly polite company, that they wish the attempts on Trump’s life had succeeded. I open X and a post about a trans person murdering someone for misgendering them has thousands of likes from people insisting it would be justified. Elon Musk becoming a trillionaire launched a wave of calls to eat the rich. On Facebook I find a page called Guillotines for a Better America, with a post claiming “all of your problems are because billionaires have heads,” and commenters debating whether they should execute millionaires too. One says all capitalists — which presumably means everyone who owns a business or a home. Another proposes starting with the wealthiest, waiting seven days, killing the next, and repeating until things improve, as though French Revolution-style slaughter were the surest road to prosperity.
We are told these are all different. And in scale, perhaps they are — some carry lethal consequences, others are only confessions typed into a screen. Most people treat them as unrelated problems, each with its own thing to blame. I believe they are deeply linked. The murderer, the celebrant, and the online daydreamer all hold the same conviction: that blood is the only path to a better world.
In each case, people argue over the cause. With the Montreal killer, one camp calls him an incel, another points to his Marxism, another to his anti-Zionism. Each reading holds some truth. But they share one flaw — they all assume the belief came first and the violent impulse second. That these were ordinary people until an idea entered them, took hold, and drove them to something horrific. Radicalization as infection.
Corrupted people do not stumble into dangerous ideas. They go looking for them.
Ideology can and does corrupt people. But the opposite is the more compelling explanation: that corrupted people seek out ideologies to justify their twisted aims. Centuries before the comment section, Nietzsche diagnosed this in his own time. He called it ressentiment — not ordinary anger, which comes and goes, but the slow poison of those who surrender all hope and autonomy, come to see themselves as perpetual victims, and resent the world for it. And ressentiment is creative. It does not merely sour a person on the inside. It builds values, justifications, entire moral systems designed to make a grudge feel like justice.
Nietzsche wrote that every drive within a person wants to become master, and once it rules, it philosophizes in its own spirit. The feeling takes the throne first. The philosophy is what the feeling dictates. We imagine we reason our way to our convictions and then feel accordingly. More often it runs the other way. The emotion seizes power, then conscripts whatever ideas will make its bloodlust feel virtuous.
These people say they want a better world. The guillotine page talks about co-ops and worker ownership. The killer’s manifesto promises an end to the loneliness that wrecks ordinary men. The activist swears the violence is self-defense for the oppressed. We are told this is idealism that has lost its way. But watch where the energy goes. The guillotine crowd is vivid, specific, and delighted about the killing. The Montreal manifesto spends pages detailing who must be liquidated and how, and offers only a flimsy sketch of the communal society that supposedly justifies it. All of these people — back to Marx himself — spend far more time naming who deserves to be on the receiving end of theft and violence than working out how their ideal society would actually function, let alone building it.
This is the difference between a genuine grievance and a pathological one. Ressentiment only subtracts. It locates the entire source of its suffering outside itself and proposes to remove that source from the face of the earth. Take off the billionaires’ heads. Liquidate the favored men. Cut down the one who said the wrong pronoun. None of these are doctrines aimed at stability or coherence. They are justifications for resentment.
That is why these movements hate the language of self-improvement — why the manifesto sneers at lifting weights, at becoming confident, at building something. It is why all the blame falls on the health insurance CEO and none on the millions living with lifestyle-induced chronic disease. It is why billionaires’ heads become the cause of all your problems. To improve yourself is to admit you have agency over your own life, and agency is surrendered long before ressentiment swallows the soul. That is what the sane are truly up against. Not a single ideology, but the spirit that spawns them all.
As most of my readers know, I have Sirius/XM in my truck, and I listen to the Wilkow Majority in the afternoon on the way home from work. I have something in common with the host, we both are Gen Xers. I am an early Gen Xer born in the mid/late 60's. to those that don't know the Generation X crowd are from 1965 to 1980. We are the last generation to be called the "Latchkey kids" we were free range kids, don't come home before the street lights come on generation. Something that the later generations lost out on. The freedom to explore, to have adventures no structured parenting, no social media ruining er running our lives like the kids of today. We were the generation that had to figure it out with chilton manuals, LOL. We used to take our dads tools and build forts in the woods with scrap woods with our friends, build bike ramps that would make an OSHA inspector have "the willies", and if it crashed and burned, well we would find a garden hose and wash off the carnage so the mom wouldn't find out. and keep playing. crazy stuff like that. Back then we also knew who the good guys and bad guys were, before Hollywood got weird on us and started supporting the latest craze, we were what I call "The Reagan Kids" We were the last "Honor Generation" as a whole Well in my time, I grew up in the Jimmy Carter years, the end of the Vietnam war, the malais the 21% interest the Misery index, Nanny State 1.0 that Carter was rolling in during his term, so Reagan was a breath of fresh air to me and I voted for the first time for Reagan's 2nd term in 1984. We listened to music that was fun and excessive, but the music lead by Grunge in the 90's got preachy, and it was a "debbie Downer", that changed the entire landscape.
I was listening to Andrew Wilkow's show "The Wilkow Majority and he had a guest on "Scott McCay" and he was talking about "Generation X" and political shift. This is where I got the article from. They referenced the article a lot.
I was on A.J. Rice’s Dangerous Laughter podcast recently, and we got into a discussion about Generation X.
Actually, that’s not quite right. I’ll explain in a minute.
What brought on the subject was that “Right Here, Right Now” column I wrote after Callais v. Louisiana was decided at the Supreme Court, and state legislatures across the South started redrawing congressional districts. I opened that column with an aside, part of which was that as a proud member of Generation X, I’m ready to see the boomers and the leftovers of the “Greatest Generation” — as though Mitch McConnell and Bernie Sanders qualify for that — get out of the way and let my people run the country. (RELATED: ‘Right Here, Right Now’)
I didn’t expect that aside to be what generated so much of a reaction. I didn’t mean to insult anybody by saying it, and yet the boomers came out of the woodwork to vocalize their offense. I found that bizarre — most of the baby-boom generation are in their 70s, or at least their late 60s. That means retirement age. It means you aren’t generally running anything in the private sector anymore, though there are exceptions. And if younger, stronger, more stamina, more curiosity work in the real world, it’s not off the wall to think it also works in government.
Particularly when you look at the performance of those old farts in control in D.C., most of whom even the boomers don’t generally have much use for.
I just thought everybody would understand that point. But apparently I was wrong.
And that’s OK, because after I wrote it, I got calls to do a bunch of radio and podcast interviews about that subject. It was perplexing, because the column wasn’t really about the intergenerational conflict piece but rather the fantastic development that Southern Republican state legislators have been freed of the sins of discrimination their Democrat forebears committed all those decades ago.
I dunno. Maybe the generational thing is a bigger story. A.J. apparently thought so. And his was one of the podcasts I did after that column came out.
We started with Generation X, and then, as tends to happen when A.J. is involved, we wandered through Red Dawn, the Cold War, Steve Jobs, social media, helicopter parenting, cultural decline, and a whole host of other topics that all seemed unrelated until you started connecting the dots.
Here’s the whole thing. It’s an hour or so, but I thought it was a pretty fun watch. And A.J.’s guys went crazy with some of the AI imagery, of course. I don’t have a Scottish tartan suit. Though maybe I’ll have to get one soon.
What emerged from that conversation was something I’ve been thinking about for quite a while now: Generation X may be the last generation in American history that grew up before technology became the dominant force shaping everyday life.
We experienced reality before it was filtered through algorithms.
That’s not a complaint about technology. It isn’t nostalgia, either. I’m not interested in pretending the world was perfect in 1985. Of course it wasn’t. We had plenty of problems, plenty of bad ideas, and plenty of dysfunction. But there was one thing we had that has become increasingly rare: we experienced reality before it was filtered through algorithms.
Generation X grew up in a world where technology was present but not omnipresent. We watched television, played video games, listened to music, and eventually got access to computers. But those things occupied a place in life rather than becoming life itself. Nobody spent their teenage years building an online identity. Nobody curated a digital existence for public consumption. Most social interactions took place face-to-face, and if you embarrassed yourself in public, there was a reasonable chance the evidence wouldn’t exist forever.
Parents generally had a different attitude as well. Mine certainly did. If you’re a Gen Xer, most of yours probably did too.
When school ended, the kids went outside. You rode your bike around the neighborhood. You figured things out on your own. You got into trouble occasionally. You learned how to solve problems because there often wasn’t an adult standing three feet away ready to solve them for you. Looking back, some of that freedom probably made our parents nervous. They just didn’t organize their entire lives around that anxiety. And given some of the stuff the boomers were into in the 1970s and 1980s, that wasn’t surprising.
Today, the situation is dramatically different. Children are monitored constantly. Every activity is scheduled. Every risk is managed. Every moment is documented. And at the same time, the culture has become far more comfortable allowing corporations, social media platforms, and digital systems to exert influence over people’s thinking than it ever was when allowing children to ride a bicycle down the street unattended. (RELATED: Who’s Teaching Those AI Machines Your Kids Will Learn From?)
And people wonder how the surveillance state could ever have come about
As I discussed with A.J. on the podcast, technology for Generation X remains a tool. We use it because it’s useful. We appreciate what it can do. But we also remember a world where it wasn’t necessary. That’s a perspective younger generations simply don’t have.
For someone born after the internet became a permanent fixture of American life, social media isn’t an innovation. It’s normal. Smartphones aren’t revolutionary. They’re expected. The constant flow of information, commentary, outrage, entertainment, and manipulation is simply the environment.
That’s not a criticism. It’s an observation.
But it does create a meaningful difference between the generations.
Generation X possesses something increasingly valuable in modern America: a point of comparison.
We know what the country looked like before the digital revolution transformed everything. We remember when friendships were maintained without apps. We remember when news organizations had gatekeepers. We remember when political arguments happened in bars, living rooms, churches, and workplaces rather than being amplified by engagement-driven algorithms designed to maximize conflict.
That doesn’t mean everything was better. But it does mean we’re in a position to recognize what has been gained and what has been lost.
The same thing applies politically.
My generation spent its formative years during the final phase of the Cold War. We grew up with the understanding that there were competing systems in the world and that not all of them deserved equal moral consideration. We watched the Soviet Union collapse. We watched a failed ideology disintegrate under the weight of its own contradictions. And because of that experience, many Gen Xers developed a healthy skepticism toward utopian promises, fashionable political theories, and grand schemes to reinvent human nature.
Reality was always the final judge.
That mindset shaped a lot of people in my generation, whether they realized it or not.
It’s also one reason why Gen X often finds itself politically homeless. We tend to distrust centralized authority, but we also distrust cultural fads. We don’t automatically assume institutions are virtuous, but neither do we assume every institution deserves to be torn down. We generally prefer practical solutions to ideological purity because we’ve spent most of our lives watching ideological purity fail. And that’s why so many of us yawn when the Boomerific Bushie Republican crowd screeches about Donald Trump’s supposed apostasies from conservatism.
Bill Cassidy is a perfect example. Last week, when Trump signed that Memorandum of Understanding to put at least a temporary stop to the Iran war, Cassidy posted on X that “Reagan is turning over in his grave.” What a crock. Cassidy, who’s about as Boomer a Boomer as ever Boomed in politics, is a perfect example of a Bush Republican who tinkled all over Reagan’s legacy and now wants to pretend that’s who he is. Never mind that Reagan didn’t even bother to get a peace deal in Lebanon before pulling the Marines out once Hezbollah blew up the barracks in Beirut. He saw that military action there wasn’t serving his interests anymore, so he dumped out. Back then, Democrats weren’t so interested in making political hay out of the situation. Today, even Republicans are willing to do it. (RELATED: Bye, Bill)
And Cassidy wonders why my generation was so eager to get rid of him.
During my conversation on Dangerous Laughter, A.J. made the case that Generation X may be uniquely positioned for leadership because we’re the bridge generation. I think there’s something to that.
We’re old enough to understand the analog world and young enough to understand the digital one. We built much of the technological infrastructure that transformed modern life, but we weren’t raised by it. We understand innovation, but we also understand limits. We appreciate technology’s benefits because we remember what existed before those benefits arrived.
That’s a useful combination.
And frankly, it may become even more useful in the years ahead.
The biggest challenge facing America isn’t whether technology will continue advancing. That’s inevitable. Artificial intelligence, automation, digital communication, and technologies we haven’t even imagined yet are going to continue reshaping society at a breathtaking pace.
The real challenge is making sure human judgment keeps up.
A country can’t outsource wisdom to a machine. It can’t delegate citizenship to an algorithm. It can’t allow technology to become a substitute for culture, community, family, faith, or common sense. Those things still matter, and they always will.
Generation X doesn’t have all the answers. No generation does.
But we do have something worth contributing to the conversation.
We remember what life looked like before the machine arrived.
At a moment when more and more Americans seem content to let technology tell them what to buy, what to watch, what to think, and even who to be, that memory may turn out to be more valuable than most people realize.
Sorry I couldn't post yesterday, Work got ahead of me.
I snagged this off "Aviation Week"
The U.S. Air Force has officially received the Qatar-gifted Boeing 747-8i and will conduct the final commissioning flights ahead of its entrance into service as the next Air Force One in the coming weeks.
The service announced June 19 that the aircraft, officially called the VC-25B Bridge Aircraft, had arrived at Joint Base Andrews, Maryland, where the Presidential Airlift Group will begin its introduction to the role. The aircraft has the new red, white, blue and gold livery, and “final government modifications.”
According to the Air Force, the new 747 fills an imperative to relieve pressure on the current aging VC-25A fleet, which has seen its heavy maintenance cycles extended.
“The safety and security of the commander in chief is our highest priority,” Air Force Secretary Troy Meink said in an announcement. “From the beginning, we meticulously evaluated every requirement to accelerate delivery while maintaining the high standards expected of the presidential mission. This effort proves that the U.S. Air Force can move fast without sacrificing quality, security or reliability.”
This final stage will allow White House officials to validate that the aircraft can meet the Air Force One mission, along with finalizing protocols for presidential transport, the service said in the announcement. Once completed, it will officially enter service in the executive airlift fleet alongside VC-25As and C-32s.
While many of the specifics have not been disclosed, the Air Force says this aircraft was modified with advanced technologies to meet the requirements of the mission. As Aviation Week first reported in January, the interior of the aircraft will remain largely the same. It is not clear how extensively the 747 has been modified for self-protection, which is a large driver of the work on the Boeing VC-25Bs that have been in development for several years. The Air Force announcement states some of the capabilities have been skipped.
“No risk was taken in security, safety or mission communications, but the collective team made trades on some of the less commonly used mission sets that Boeing must deliver to support the next 40 years,” the service said in the announcement.
As the aircraft was in modification, the Air Force has been training pilots to fly the 747-8i—a significant change from the existing 747-200 training for the current fleet. The service leased an Atlas Air 747-8F last October for training and has purchased two 747-8is from Lufthansa for training. Additionally, the Air Force says it delivered a full mockup of the interior in January for the White House to begin training.
“We are proud to deliver the VC-25B Bridge aircraft to the president,” Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Ken Wilsbach said in the announcement. “Many thought it could not be done, but the United States Air Force was able to execute and provide a secure, reliable airborne command post on an accelerated timeline.”
I remember Venezuela was a Jewel in South America Before Maduro got hold of it and trashed it and the only people that benefited from it was the inner circle and the Russians and cubans who got cheap oil. Everyone else got screwed to the wall. Sure there was the pretty rhetoric from the universities, but the pretty rhetoric and banners didn't feed the kids so the people voted with their feet. The ultimate condemnation.
Before the revolution hollowed it out, Venezuela was the jewel of South America. The nation stood as a powerhouse of free enterprise, fed by the richest oil reserves on earth and a flood of foreign capital, and its skyline rose as a testament to ambition.
Men built businesses. Families secured their futures. The rule of law furnished the scaffolding on which human flourishing is raised.
Income inequality existed. It always does in a dynamic society where free men are permitted to build, to risk, and to reap the reward of their labor. Disparities of wealth are the natural residue of an economy that actually produces value. But alongside that inequality stood something the Marxists can never abide: abundant opportunity.
The ladder of upward mobility was intact and load-bearing. A man could begin with nothing and forge a legacy. That was the reality of Venezuela before the ideologues arrived, promising to heal the imperfections of freedom with the guarantees of utopia.
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The revolutionaries did precisely what they promised. They leveled the mountains of prosperity so that every man might dwell equally in the valley of despair. The dismantling of Venezuelan civilization was a systematic, bureaucratic, and deliberate execution.
The cure began with the 1998 election of Hugo Chávez, who took the reins of the state the following February and turned his wrath upon the engine of the nation's wealth. Abolishing the power to create it.
Under socialist stewardship, oil production collapsed from roughly 3.5 million barrels a day to around 800,000 and in the depths of the regime's mismanagement it sank below half a million.
We must grant the regime its due. They accomplished what every Western environmentalist only dreams of, achieving a breathtaking reduction in carbon emissions by simply crippling their own energy sector entirely.
Progress, we are reminded, demands sacrifice.
Having "fixed" the energy market, the state turned its benevolent gaze toward the grocery aisle. In 2003 the government fixed prices on four hundred basic products.
The law of cause and effect is wholly immune to political rhetoric, and the result was immediate. Farmers and manufacturers discovered that producing food at a state-mandated loss was financial suicide, so they stopped.
The fields went fallow. The shelves went bare. The government outlawed high prices and, in the same stroke, succeeded in outlawing food.
This triumph of central planning reached its apex in what Venezuelans came to call the Maduro Diet. In 2016, a survey conducted by three of Caracas's largest universities found that nearly three-quarters of the population had lost weight over the preceding year at an average of nineteen pounds per person for lack of food.
Western wellness gurus charge thousands for the privilege of a fasting retreat; the socialist state administers starvation free of charge, the ultimate weight-loss program, results guaranteed.
And by 2025, Venezuela had performed a geopolitical miracle. While the United States strained under an unprecedented influx across its southern border, Venezuela boasted virtually no illegal immigration whatsoever.
No one was sneaking in to partake of the socialist paradise.
The catch, of course, is that roughly twenty-three percent of its own population, nearly eight million souls, had fled the other way, abandoning their homes and walking hundreds of miles to escape the utopia they had been promised.
The lesson is written in the direction they were walking. No one breaks into a prison.
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The deepest wound Venezuela suffered was a spiritual one. Socialism is a Christian heresy. It steals the Christian vocabulary of compassion, deposes God and enthrones the State, then exchanges charity for coercion.
The socialist lie promises a top-down, material equality secured through the brutal confiscation of property. It strips the individual of his free will and demands that he surrender his agency to a secular leviathan.
A power that claims the authority of heaven while operating with the malice of hell.
The inevitable result is that everyone shares in the same misery. Everyone, that is, except the ruling elite, who dine on imported steak while the people fight over scraps in the ash.
Set this demonic parody against the Christian concept of sobornost, the spiritual harmony and organic unity of believers, the communion of free men who, in love and faith, choose to bear one another's burdens.
Saint John Chrysostom fiercely thundered against greed and warned the rich of the spiritual peril of hoarded wealth, yet he never once commanded the Roman emperor to seize the grain and redistribute it at sword-point.
He summoned men to give, because a gift compelled is no gift at all, and a virtue extracted by force is no real virtue.
The whole socialist project rests on a single lie: that man can be made good by decree. But goodness is the fruit of grace freely received, and what must be freely received can never be imposed at gunpoint.
This is the chasm the ideologues will never see. Collectivism commands compliance through terror; sobornost invites communion at the foot of the Cross.
"For you, brethren, have been called to liberty; only do not use liberty as an opportunity for the flesh, but through love serve one another" (Galatians 5:13).
One road ends in the gulag. The other ends at the Kingdom.
---
We are now watching the progressive clerics of our own nation peddle the same poison that reduced Caracas to a beggar's colony. They wield the same rhetoric. They stoke the same envy. They promise the same impossible utopia, and they grow indignant when a man points to the ruins and asks them to account for the bodies.
So look upon the wreckage and ask the only question that matters. Why would a free people surrender their liberty, their prosperity, and their faith for a system that has produced nothing in its entire history but breadlines and mass graves?
Why would we trade the inheritance of Western civilization, built upon the bedrock of Christian moral order and the natural law, for the promise of equality in the ashes?
The ruins of Venezuela stand as a monument to the arrogance of men who imagined they could build heaven on earth without God. Let them serve as our warning. We will not be the next casualties of this tired old lie.
Yeah I went rummaging through my record collection.....And since it is kinda a Fathers Day kinda thing.
This song I heard back in the 70's and it was on one of my "K'tel" (I still have it, as you can see, looks kinda beat up, LOL)I had in the late 70's and I remembered it because of the story it told of a father that was always "too busy". I saw similarities between this and the relationship between me and my Dad. I know it was a different time and my dad had to work. he was a CID agent with the U.S Army and his job kept him hopping so he wasn't around much. My dad did try to play catch with me and my brother a few times and do other things like go fishing as "the guys" but he wasn't around much as I would have hoped. We took a back burner to his career and I don't hate him for it, It was the way it was. His devotion to duty is where I got mine and my brother got his so we did learn a lot from our Dad, and even though he reported to Fiddlers Green, I still miss him But also because this song I make sure that I am available for my son and his activities and I spend a lot of time with my son because he is my son and he is a good kid and he turned into a good man. I take pride in that, funny that people say that certain songs make a real impression on them and it follows them through their life. This song reminded me of that time can move quickly and before you know it, you will be attending graduation and wondering "what the hell happened". I try to balance my work and home life as the best I can. My son is my legacy and I tried to "do right" by him. I will play another "Cats" song for next week...y'all can guess on it, LOL
The song's lyrics began as a poem written by Harry's wife, Sandra "Sandy" Gaston; the poem itself was inspired by the awkward relationship between her first husband, James Cashmore, and his father, John, a politician who served as BrooklynBorough President. She was also inspired by a country music song she had heard on the radio.Harry also said the song was about his own relationship with his son, Josh, admitting, "Frankly, this song scares me to death."
The song is told in the first-person by a father who is too busy with work to spend time with his son. Each time the son asks him to join in childhood activities, the father issues vague promises of spending time together in the future. While disappointed, the son accepts his excuses and yearns to "be like you, Dad." The first verse tells of his absence at his son's birth and walking, as "there were planes to catch and bills to pay"; the second verse relates the father buying the son a baseball as a birthday present but likewise declining to play catch. The final two verses reverse the roles. In the third verse, the son returns home from college and his father finally has some time to spend with him. Instead, the son just wants to go out and asks the father for the car keys. The fourth verse advances the story quite some time, when the father is long retired and his son has started his own family some distance away. The father makes a phone call to his son and invites him for a visit, but the son has his own issues with his job and his children are sick with the flu. He tells his father he will visit him if he "can find the time" and says "it's been sure nice talking to you" before he says goodbye. The final two lines of the song reflect the father's observation of what has happened:
“
And as I hung up the phone it occurred to me, he'd grown up just like me. My boy was just like me.
I am at camp, was asked to run a couple of ranges, and stay with the Troop overnight for 2 deep leadership coverage.
Couple things, I believe in the motto of the Boy Scouts " Be Prepared ", well I brought 3 flashlights, put new Duracell batteries in all 3 and tested all three before packing them. Got to camp, tested them whem I got there, tested good. Made sure they were off. Next day I went to grab a light, you betcha deader then a democrats soul....same with the other 2...the hell? Luckily my brother from another mother hooked me up with a couple of spares. What are the odds?
As soon as it was announced that Elon Musk was going to be the world's first Trillionaire, the usual suspects were immediately calling for the government to seize his money in the name of "fairness" because it wasn't "fair" that he had all this money and the "poor, downtrodden,teachers, starving children" or whatever cause de jour the left wanted to insert to score points with the sheep of their base as they bleet" not fair" and demand that the government "do something" as they stamp their feet, not realizing the dangers they are setting or the precedents that will be set, but they don't care. they will have forgotten all about it by the time the damage has taken affect when the confiscation starts, with the California style "assumed value tax" that will be used to target the billionaires and millionaires in the name of fairness, but the tax goes after the assumed value of your house, your 401K, your 65 Mustang in the garage, the signed Jersey from "Larry Csonka" in your mancave and you go broke having to pay the tax that basically breaks the middle class and the people that are bleeting earlier, most of them are on some kind of government assistance anyway and will not be affected in anyway. WHat is being proposed is illegal for the moment via "Eisner V. Macomber", until the donks pack the courts and get it overturned...
Every time Elon Musk’s net worth climbs to some new astronomical figure, the same chorus appears on cue. “No one should have that much money.” “Tax him.” “Seize it.” “Make him pay his fair share.” Now that Musk is officially the world’s first trillionaire, the volume has only increased. On the Bernie Scale of political bitching, this is clearly an 11.5 on a scale of 0-10.
To many on the political left, his fortune is treated as self-evident proof of a broken system. Their conclusion is not merely that Musk has too much money. Their conclusion is that government should take it.
What strikes me is how few people stop to ask a simple question: as compared to what? Compared to what institution? Compared to what steward? Compared to what demonstrated record of competence? The argument assumes that government would somehow produce more value with that money than Musk does. That assumption deserves far more scrutiny than it is getting.
I understand the immediate objection. Government and private enterprise have different missions. SpaceX is not running a military. Tesla does not maintain interstate highways. Starlink is not administering Medicare. Fair enough. Yet all organizations consume resources and produce outcomes, and whether public or private they can still be evaluated on efficiency, innovation, responsiveness, and the value they create for the people they serve.
On that basis, the comparison becomes uncomfortable for the advocates of confiscation.
SpaceX lowered launch costs so dramatically that it effectively rewrote the economics of access to space. The company routinely lands and reuses rockets that government agencies once treated as disposable and accomplished what many experts declared impossible. Tesla drove an entire global automotive industry to accelerate electric vehicle development years ahead of schedule. Starlink has brought high-speed internet to remote areas where traditional providers either could not or would not go while keeping communications operating in disaster zones and war zones. Meanwhile, the Biden administration spent billions on rural broadband initiatives and produced bupkis to show for it and with his purchase of Twitter, he singlehandedly saved free speech while government tried to censor it.
One can dislike Musk personally and criticize his politics, his social media habits, his management style, or his ego. The question remains whether the value created by those enterprises exceeds the value that would have been created had the money remained in government hands.
At this point, critics usually raise what they believe is a devastating counterargument: Musk benefited from government contracts, subsidies, and tax incentives.
That is true. SpaceX has received NASA contracts. Tesla benefited from electric vehicle incentives. Various Musk companies have done business with government agencies.
The interesting thing is that this objection strengthens the pro-Elon argument.
SpaceX was not handed money to do nothing. It was paid to perform services that government had been purchasing for decades from traditional aerospace contractors. The relevant question is whether taxpayers received more value for those dollars. Looking at launch costs, launch frequency, technological innovation, and mission success, the answer appears to be yes. Musk’s companies demonstrate what can happen when private-sector incentives are applied to problems government has struggled to solve efficiently.
Imagine if the federal government had been given the capital that ultimately flowed into Tesla, SpaceX, and Starlink. Does anyone seriously believe Washington would have done better?
The government cannot even maintain a website without spending enough money to buy a small island nation. Remember the Obamacare portal launch? The federal government spent years and hundreds of millions of dollars creating Healthcare.gov only to unveil a spectacular failure. Cost overruns are so routine in federal projects that they barely qualify as news anymore. The Pentagon has failed repeated audits. California’s high-speed rail project has consumed billions while producing little beyond artist renderings, revised timelines, and fresh requests for funding. The federal government currently carries debt measured in tens of trillions of dollars and annual deficits that would have been considered catastrophic only a generation ago.
This is the institution that many people believe should take control of even more resources because Elon Musk has become too wealthy.
Again, compared to what?
The argument ultimately reveals a deeper philosophical divide. Many people view wealth as a fixed pie. If one person has more, someone else must necessarily have less. Wealth, in this framework, is not created but redistributed. The reality is that most modern wealth is generated through value creation.
Musk did not become wealthy because he loaded pallets of cash onto a truck and drove away with them. His wealth exists largely because investors believe his companies are worth enormous sums based on their future earnings and future contributions. If Tesla vanished tomorrow, humanity would still possess factories, vehicles, software, patents, engineering knowledge, and the infrastructure built around them. If SpaceX vanished tomorrow, humanity would still possess launch facilities, rockets, satellites, manufacturing capabilities, and decades of accumulated technical knowledge. The wealth represented by Musk’s fortune is largely a reflection of productive assets and productive capacity.
Government, by contrast, does not create wealth in the same manner. It acquires resources through taxation, borrowing, regulation, and monetary expansion. Some of those resources are used wisely. Many are not. A trillionaire is not necessarily evidence of economic failure. A government that spends trillions it does not have, borrows against future generations, loses track of enormous sums of money, fails audits, and routinely delivers projects years late and billions over budget may be a far better candidate for public concern.
None of this means government serves no purpose. A functioning civilization requires courts, law enforcement, national defense, infrastructure, and the rule of law. The question is not whether government should exist. The question is why so many people instinctively trust government with resources that it did not create while distrusting the entrepreneurs who did.
Since Elon Musk became the world’s first trillionaire, critics have demanded that government take a larger share of his wealth. They call it fairness. To rational people, it looks like punishment.
Musk’s success is an embarrassment to the self-styled contemporary Soviets who insist government can outperform private enterprise if only it is given enough money, authority, and control. Decades of evidence suggest otherwise. Waste, fraud, abuse, and inefficiency are not accidental defects of large bureaucracies. They are recurring features of systems spending other people’s money with limited accountability. That is precisely why the Founders limited government through enumerated powers in the first place. They understood that the public treasury is a temptation that must be restrained.
Before attempting to confiscate Musk’s wealth—or anyone else’s—the advocates of such policies should first demonstrate that government can produce a trillion dollars worth of value with the resources it already controls.
