"Empathy as a weapon "

 Still on the cruise and shamelessly "nicked" another one off farcebook.  We will see if weather will make our return problematic or not

Gad Saad is one of my favorites. His book The Parasitic Mind was excellent, and I pre-ordered his new one, Suicidal Empathy, a while back. Saad has developed compelling theories about why we’re seeing empathy weaponized—and why Western civilization seems willing to let its enemies use that weapon to undermine institutions that have stood for centuries. Watching today’s protests and media performances, I see anger and disgust, along with a striking lack of concern for consequences. But I also see something else in those faces: fear. Not rational fear—the kind you’d expect in war or when facing a wild animal—but fear of imagined conditions, abstract threats, and constructed enemies.

I’m just a layman when it comes to evolutionary psychology, but like any proper amateur pundit, I have a theory nd I do my homework. My theory is far less sophisticated than Professor Saad’s (and you should probably listen to him, not me), but here it is: much of this is sadistic, malevolent manipulation by political sociopaths in pursuit of power. That manipulation works because there are millions of people who have undergone arrested adulthood, and many more who, despite being chronologically adult, lack the ability to recognize or regulate their emotions well enough to engage in reasoned conversation. They retain adolescent emotional reactivity while being granted adult moral authority. This isn’t merely cultural, there is a neurological basis for it.

I think that is why this excess empathy is especially rampant in Hollywood and the desperate housewife segment populated by AWFULs (Affluent White Female Urban Liberals). They spend their waking hours wanting to be someone else, so emotional displacement is already at work.

Modern political persuasion increasingly bypasses deliberation by targeting the emotional circuitry of the brain directly. The strategy is simple: trigger empathic distress first, then insert policy while judgment is impaired. To understand how this works, we have to distinguish between empathy and compassion. They are not the same psychological state, and they do not activate the same neural systems. Empathy is emotional mirroring—internally reproducing another person’s pain. When it’s triggered, stress hormones rise, attention narrows, and executive control drops. The prefrontal cortex—the part of the brain responsible for proportional reasoning and long-term planning—loses influence. In plain terms, the nervous system enters threat-response mode.

Compassion is different. Compassion recognizes suffering while maintaining psychological distance. Instead of activating distress circuits, it engages regulatory systems in the brain. The result is calm focus, preserved judgment, and sustained motivation to help. Empathy floods. Compassion steadies. Modern political messaging overwhelmingly aims for empathy, not compassion, because empathy creates urgency while compassion preserves clarity.

This explains why political narratives are almost always personalized. Complex policy questions, immigration, policing, healthcare, war, are converted into emotionally vivid individual stories: a crying child, a grieving parent, a viral clip. Humans respond far more strongly to one visible person than to statistics involving millions. Our moral intuitions evolved for small tribal groups. They are not designed for civilization-scale problems. One face will always outweigh a spreadsheet.

Once emotional identification occurs, attention shifts away from systems and toward symbolic individuals. Structural analysis gives way to protective instinct. Messaging then collapses emotional boundaries. The language moves from “they are suffering” to “imagine if this were your child.” The listener is no longer observing suffering; they are invited to inhabit it. Healthy empathy requires self–other separation. Political rhetoric deliberately removes that separation, producing emotional flooding.

Flooded minds don’t ask about incentives, second-order effects, or long-term consequences. They ask a single question: how do we stop this feeling right now? That’s when urgency and moral absolutism enter. Action must be immediate. Hesitation becomes cruelty, nuance becomes complicity and deliberation is replaced by moral pressure

Disagreement is reframed as a character defect: if you don’t agree, you lack empathy .

Here’s the critical point: empathy is inherently biased. It favors the visible over the invisible, the similar over the distant, and the immediate over the proportional. It feels virtuous, but when elevated to a governing principle it reliably produces distorted priorities, impulsive decisions, and punitive moralism. Empathy evolved to guide interpersonal care. It did not evolve to manage large societies. That’s why emotionally driven policy so often results in symbolic legislation and cascading unintended consequences. Emotional logic doesn’t scale. Policy does. What begins as a response to one compelling story becomes permanent structural change—usually without recalculating costs or downstream effects.

This is where arrested adulthood becomes politically useful. People who never fully developed emotional regulation respond to distress the way children do: urgently, absolutely, and without proportional reasoning. Their feelings become their facts. When entire movements rest on this foundation, politics becomes emotional theater rather than governance.

Compassion would lead somewhere else. Compassion preserves boundaries. It asks not merely who is suffering, but what actually helps. It allows concern without surrendering judgment. Empathy collapses self and other; compassion maintains separation. Only compassion supports rational action.

The political consequences are profound. A society trained to maximize empathy becomes reactive, manipulable, morally theatrical, and cognitively exhausted. Emotional escalation becomes the currency of public discourse. Every issue is framed as an emergency. Every disagreement becomes a referendum on virtue. Modern politics favors this because emotionally flooded populations are easier to mobilize, easier to shame, and easier to steer.

This isn’t about kindness. It is about control. It is always about control.

Philosophically, the imbalance is clear. A lack of empathy reflects emotional underdevelopment. Excess empathy reflects emotional dysregulation. Civilization depends on something rarer than either: disciplined concern under reason.

Empathy without regulation becomes hysteria and regulation without concern becomes cruelty. The narrow edge between them is where functional societies live. Modern political systems increasingly push people off that edge and toward emotional flooding while claiming moral superiority for doing so.

That is the mechanism. It is cruel but it works. That is why they will keep using it.

Some of my pics from Belize

 Yes It was a nice 76 degree,  and yes I did run around in shorts and tshirts

First thing we saw walking to the beach

Part of the beach.

View while seated on lawn chair sipping a beverage and reading one of my books I brought.

Another view

Would come again:)

Schrodingder's Government

 Tried to post something yesterday but it didn't save.    This I got off Michael Smith from Farcebook.  To me it 'splains exactly what is going on in Minnesota. 

I think we are watching something in Minneapolis that is amazing and terrifying at the same time.

It appears to me that a strange new form of governance is emerging in modern democracies, especially in America where the strongest protection of individual liberty exists. It is a governing system that exists in a state of perpetual contradiction and it has spread to Washington where Democrats recognize there are actual immigration laws they don’t like, but instead of attacking them and changing them, they want to defund the agency charged with the enforcement of the laws and the removal of those who broke them to stop the law from being enforced. They want to play another round of “Defund the Police” with national security and sovereignty in the balance.

So, law exists but it doesn’t exist because it can’t be enforced.

In this new system, the fundamental legitimacy of democratic processes, elections, legislation, and judicial rulings becomes conditional, subject to acceptance by those affected. If you (and an extreme minority composed of other chaos agents) disagree with an electoral outcome or dislike any passed law (whether newly passed or settled), you can simply declare it invalid, at least for yourself. The social contract that binds citizens to respect democratically enacted rules, even those they oppose, becomes entirely situational and voluntary.

This rejection of authority operates parasitically within the very system it denounces. Those who refuse to accept certain laws simultaneously invoke other laws and constitutional protections as absolute shields. They weaponize rights to assembly, speech, and due process—protections they claim are inviolable—while coordinating sustained campaigns of civil disruption designed to make governance impossible.

The asymmetry is deliberate: the system must respect procedural limits and individual rights even as those same individuals work to paralyze it. You can even use the system against itself, tying it in knots by using its own processes to delay judicial outcomes for weeks, months, and in some cases—years.

The result is a kind of legal donut hole, a void where law simultaneously exists and doesn’t exist. Authorities face an impossible dilemma. To enforce laws against coordinated, prolonged disruption, they must often employ measures—curfews, dispersal orders, mass arrests, deployment of the National Guard—that themselves test constitutional boundaries. The chaos is calibrated precisely to this threshold: intense enough to demand response, but conducted under enough legal cover that any forceful reaction can be framed as “fascism” or tyranny.

The protesters/activists/chaos agents become simultaneously lawbreaker and victim, revolutionary and rights-bearer in a scenario where they always carry the presumption of innocence and the stewards of the law always bear the presumption of guilt.

This creates what might be called Schrödinger’s government—a system hovering between legitimacy and illegitimacy, authority and impotence, depending on who’s observing and from what angle. To its defenders, it remains a functioning democracy upholding civil liberties even under pressure. To its detractors, it has lost all moral authority and deserves only resistance. Both states coexist, neither fully collapsing into the other.

What makes this situation particularly unstable is its self-reinforcing nature. When one faction successfully employs this strategy—rejecting laws while exploiting legal protections—it establishes a template others will follow. Each iteration further erodes the shared assumption that democratic processes, however imperfect, produce outcomes all must provisionally accept. The notion of loyal opposition, of respecting institutional legitimacy even when wielded by opponents, gives way to permanent contestation.

This isn’t simple civil disobedience in the traditional sense, where protesters accept legal consequences to dramatize injustice. Nor is it revolutionary politics that openly seeks to overthrow existing structures. Instead, it occupies an ambiguous middle ground: using the system’s own rules and protections to create ungovernable situations, then claiming persecution when authorities respond. The quantum superposition of lawfulness and lawlessness persists until someone observes it—and even then, what they see depends entirely on where they stand.

Maybe it’s not that new. Seems to me that we already fought a national Civil War over this governing concept. The difference is this iteration proposes constant mini-civil wars all over America any time a group decides federal law doesn’t apply to them or their situation.

No matter how the battle inside the donut hole ebbs and flows, the people on the ring of the donut are the ones who pay for the coffee because it is their liberty at risk, not due to who wins or loses, but because the donut hole exists at all.

"Free movement vs Immigration "

 Still OCONUS, saw this on Farcebook, guy named Michael Smith published it. Im using my kinda smart phone.

I was intrigued by a conversation reported on X yesterday between an American and an American citizen living in Germany. The American in Germany complained he just couldn’t return to America due to the rise of Fascism here. When asked why he just didn’t stay in Germany indefinitely, he replied that “You can’t just stay, that is illegal. They will kick you out, there are requirements to immigrate here!”

I’m not sure if that was a real exchange, but the irony of it sure is. Even if it was made up, it is unfortunately illustrative of the red-hot debate raging in America right now over immigration and illegal immigration.

A familiar argument appears whenever immigration enforcement becomes politically contentious: Human beings have a right to movement. From this premise, some conclude that borders themselves are immoral, and that any nation which limits entry is acting unjustly—if not outright cruel. But this argument quietly collapses two very different ideas into one: the right of movement is a human right, while immigration is not.

Every modern nation recognizes this distinction in practice, even if activists prefer not to. Canada does not prohibit its citizens from leaving. Mexico does not bar its people from traveling abroad. Neither does the United States. Freedom of exit is widely acknowledged as a basic human liberty, enshrined in international law and reflected in most democratic constitutions. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights affirms that everyone has the right to leave any country, including their own.

Yet Canada tightly regulates who may enter, and so does Mexico. Virtually every sovereign state on earth does the same. Are these countries evil? Of course not, they are doing what all legitimate governments do: they are exercising sovereignty.

Movement refers to the ability of individuals to travel, relocate, and seek opportunities. Immigration refers to the legal process by which a sovereign state grants permission to non-citizens to enter, reside, and participate in its civic and economic life —and to have the opportunity to become a citizen and fully participate in the duties and responsibilities as an assimilated citizen. The first is rooted in human dignity, while the second is rooted in political authority and conflating the two is a category error that all too many people make.

A person may have every moral right to leave Honduras, Haiti, or Venezuela, but that does not automatically generate a corresponding right to enter the United States. Those are separate claims governed by different principles.

This distinction is not controversial historically, it is embedded in philosophy, religion, and law. John Locke argued that governments exist to secure the rights of their people through consent. Thomas Aquinas recognized the legitimacy of political communities organizing themselves for the common good. Even biblical traditions distinguish between welcoming the stranger and dissolving national boundaries entirely. Hospitality is praised, but anarchy is not.

The modern international system is built on this understanding. Nations recognize one another’s sovereignty precisely because borders matter. A state without the ability to regulate entry is not fully sovereign. It cannot plan infrastructure, manage labor markets, provide social services, or maintain public order. It cannot meaningfully represent its citizens. To deny this is to deny the concept of self-government itself.

Yet in contemporary American discourse, immigration enforcement is often illegitimately framed as uniquely immoral. The United States is portrayed as exceptional in asserting border control, while activists speak as though open borders are the moral baseline and enforcement is some kind of deviation. This framing collapses under even casual scrutiny.

For example, Mexico deports hundreds of thousands of migrants annually. Canada maintains a points-based system that prioritizes skills, language ability, and economic contribution. European nations increasingly restrict asylum claims and reinstate internal controls. Japan remains famously selective. Australia intercepts boats at sea. America is not an outlier—it is the norm.

What is unusual is the insistence that only Americans are morally obligated to surrender sovereignty in the name of abstract universalism. Rights exist within political communities. They are secured by institutions. They require enforcement. Without borders, laws become optional and citizenship becomes meaningless. That does not mean compassion disappears. Nations can, and should, offer asylum, humanitarian aid, and legal pathways for immigration, but compassion does not require abandoning the rule of law, and charity does not require dissolving the social contract.

Movement may well be a human right—but immigration is not a right, it is a legal construct, it is admission granted by sovereign states. It is like a ticket to a movie; it comes at the behest of the authority issuing it and it is specific and time limited. Confusing or conflating the two doesn’t make us more humane, it makes us less honest, and it makes it far more difficult to have a productive conversation about the issue.

A country that controls its borders is not cruel; it is functioning by living up to its duties and responsibilities to its own citizens, upon whom its power and authority depend.

"Why Trump Was Elected"

     I also clipped this from farcebook and preloaded this by my scheduler thingie

Senator Chris McDaniel 

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On social media, I keep hearing a question from the Left, usually asked with a kind of contrived confusion: How did Americans elect Donald Trump?

Truth is, it’s not complicated.

For years, a political and cultural class decided regular Americans were the problem. Not by accident. On purpose.

They mocked American traditions like they were embarrassments. Treated faith as something outdated or foolish. Raised taxes while lecturing folks that it was for their own good. Turned white, working-class men into a punchline, then acted stunned when those men stopped listening.

They went even further. They argued America itself was rotten. That its institutions were inherently racist. And if you dared disagree, even calmly, even respectfully, you weren’t just wrong. You were a racist. A sexist. A bigot. Before long, the words got uglier. Nazi. Traitor. Enemy.

Disagreement wasn’t answered. It was condemned. People weren’t debated anymore. Instead, they were simply dehumanized.

They didn’t do it alone. They had lots of help. The press nodded along. Universities eagerly enforced the rules. And before long, those ideas were pushed straight into classrooms. Kids barely old enough to read were being told what to think about their country, their history, and even their own parents.

All the while, the sneer never went away. Folks in coastal cities looking down their noses at anyone from a flyover state. Calling whole regions a landmass. Acting like places like Mississippi were something to apologize for rather than call home.

They scoffed at the country’s founding as if it were an old mistake. Talked openly about tearing down America’s basic structures and rebuilding something new. Then they flirted with socialism like it was progress, acting confused when people who value independence recoiled.

They pushed social experiments into schools, workplaces, and private spaces without asking. Bathrooms. Locker rooms. The idea that biology doesn’t matter anymore. And not just acceptance, but celebration. Go along, or be branded hateful.

And always, there was the tone. Forever the tone. The lectures. The scolding. The moral superiority. The message that disagreement wasn’t just incorrect, it was immoral.

Eventually, Americans had enough. Not in some revolutionary way. Just worn down. Tired of the never-ending drama. Tired of being told they were evil for believing what they’d believed their whole lives. Tired of being told to change just for the sake of change.

I’m from Ellisville, Mississippi. Just another small town dotting the landscape. But down here, folks know what that feels like. Like anyone, we are flawed people. But we work. We raise families. We go to church. We mind our business. And we don’t take kindly to being called names by people who’ve never set foot in our towns but somehow think they know better.

Trump wasn’t a philosophy. He wasn’t a manifesto.

He was a correction.

A blunt response to a ruling class that refused to listen. A way of saying enough is enough. Not because Americans wanted chaos, but because they wanted respect. And maybe to be left alone.

That’s it. No mystery. No hysteria.

Just cause and effect.

So you wanted drama, and boy, did you get it. You pushed. You scolded. You sneered. And in the end, the rest of us should probably be thankful.

Because nothing opened the eyes of average Americans like being lectured to by unemployed twenty-something-year-old hipsters and perpetually disgruntled liberal women. And nothing could have done it faster than watching them do it in real time. You liberals didn’t persuade people. You woke them up.

You didn’t win hearts. You hardened them.

And without ever meaning to, you became your own undoing.

"What is going on in Minneapolis "

This I am trying to post off my kinda smart phone.

I also believe that this was kicked off to cover the billions of dollars stolen by fraud and the people involved funnel a lot of money to the donks.

 This is going to be long and I know most people only have a 30 second attention span, but if you will read it thoroughly, it will make sense. 

What is unfolding in Minneapolis is not protest activity.

It is the deliberate construction of a coordinated, low-level resistance infrastructure designed to interfere with federal law enforcement operations. The organization, discipline, and operational security being observed are not consistent with spontaneous civil unrest.

Multiple indicators point to structured command-and-control, segmented communication cells capped for scale control; assigned operational roles including surveillance, vehicle tracking, dispatch coordination, and rapid mobilization; standardized intelligence reporting formats; vetting procedures; timed message deletions to frustrate forensic recovery; and decentralized coordination nodes to avoid a single point of failure.

These are not accidental behaviors. They reflect study, rehearsal, and intent.

When civilian networks conduct real-time surveillance of federal officers, compile and share vehicle and personal data, coordinate pursuit and obstruction, and escalate from observation to direct interference, this surpasses civil disobedience. It constitutes organized resistance activity operating below the threshold of overt violence while still producing real-world harm.

The structure closely mirrors early-stage urban insurgent models observed in foreign conflict zones like we saw in Iraq.  Such as cells, redundant communications, narrative shielding, and the avoidance of identifiable leadership. The objective is not immediate confrontation, but sustained pressure, intimidation, and operational paralysis.

The most serious element is that this activity is domestic and enabled by individuals and institutions within the same society the targeted law enforcement agencies serve. That normalization creates strategic risk. Once such infrastructure is established and validated through perceived success, it does not dissolve organically. It certainly doesn’t help when you have a lieutenant governor and other politicians involved in this dangerous activity. 

History shows that failure to identify and address this insurgency phase early allows the network to mature, expand, and entrench. Right now just like you saw with Cam Higby, their command station appears to be on signal. 

This is not a call for escalation.

It is a warning grounded in precedent.

If this continues to be mischaracterized as mere activism, the structures will harden, replicate, and spread, making eventual containment far more difficult and far more costly.

What is often missed is that this kind of network can be countered, but only if it is correctly identified and treated as organized interference rather than protest activity. We are well beyond the protest phase. We’re in the military phase. 

Law enforcement already has lawful tools for this phase, but they must be used deliberately and early.

First, disrupt the infrastructure, not the crowd.

The center of gravity here is communications, coordination, and logistics, not mass participation. Court-authorized investigations and arrests focused on individuals coordinating surveillance, doxxing, obstruction, vehicle tracking, and harassment are lawful and effective. When those nodes are removed, the network degrades quickly.

Second, treat coordinated interference as conspiracy, not speech.

Speech is protected. Organized efforts to surveil, track, obstruct, intimidate, or interfere with federal officers are not. Existing statutes already cover conspiracy, obstruction of justice, interference with federal operations, stalking, and the use of interstate communications to facilitate criminal conduct. These cases must be built carefully and prosecuted visibly to restore deterrence.

Third, restore information dominance.

These movements rely on narrative control to maintain public tolerance. Silence creates space for misinformation. Law enforcement leadership must clearly explain what is happening, what laws are being violated, and why enforcement actions are necessary. Transparency preserves legitimacy.

Fourth, reassert jurisdictional clarity.

Federal operations cannot function under political ambiguity. Clear coordination between federal agencies, state authorities, and compliant local departments is essential. Where local institutions obstruct or enable interference, that failure must be documented and addressed through lawful oversight and accountability mechanisms.

Fifth, protect officers and their families.

Doxxing and vehicle tracking are not protest tactics, they are intimidation. Dedicated counter-doxxing resources, rapid response to threats, and protective measures for affected personnel are necessary. Allowing this behavior to persist signals vulnerability.

As for the military. The armed forces are not a crowd-control tool. However, military intelligence, training, and advisory capabilities exist precisely to analyze and counter organized, sub-threshold threats. Within legal boundaries, supporting civil authorities with pattern analysis, infrastructure assessment, and threat modeling is appropriate when domestic actors adopt foreign-style resistance structures.

None of this requires escalation.

It requires clarity, resolve, and early action.

History is consistent on this point, once these networks believe they can operate with impunitonce, hesitation is interpreted as weakness and the cost of restoring order rises exponentially.

Recognizing what this is does not make it worse.

Failing to recognize it does.

Tori Branum 

Marine Veteran

Republican candidate for George’s congressional district 12