"We live in a time with fictitious election results that elect fictitious presidents." - Michael Moore during his acceptance speech after winning an Academy Award for Best Documentary in 2003, referring to George W. Bush.
Can you really be called a whistleblower if your actions carry little risk and result in an elevation of your social and professional status? Edward Snowden, who risked his life in 2013 to reveal the staggering extent of the US surveillance apparatus and its use on Americans, is still living in exile in Russia. Where’s his fawning coverage in the legacy media?
We live in an era where everything’s fake. Fake news, fake peaceful protests, fake insurrections, fake unity, fake whistleblowers, and fake education. More than ever it is on us as parents to provide the guiding light of truth to our children, lest the purveyors of fake-everything get a hold of them while we collectively shrug our shoulders.
The workplace was never meant to be more than a place where work gets done. Don't turn it into your family because its an inferior replacement for a real family.
The encryption debate is the computer version of the second amendment debate. Those that support robust second amendment rights should also support encryption rights.
Last year, activists all over California marched and rioted in the streets in support of BLM following the murder of George Floyd in police custody. Last month California had the chance to elect its first black governor and rejected him by a wide margin. I guess black lives only matter if they're the right kind of black lives.
In that election, California said yes to lockdowns, yes to business closures, yes to school closures, yes to forced masking, yes to forced vaccinations (even for children as young as five), and yes to unrestrained one-man rule with a passive legislature and his finger on an economic "dimmer switch" with no end in sight. And they called it a victory for democracy.
Podcasts are a right-leaning technology. In their purest form they are just audio files that a creator makes available and the consumer downloads to his device. The left-leaning parts are layered on top. Podcasts players can surveil your listening habits, noting where you start, stop, pause, skip and which parts you play over again. Podcast aggregators can collect data on which podcasts you subscribe to, download, or stream. This data can be valuable to the creator, but it also trades discoverability for ideological conformity.
The last time a Republican candidate for President won the popular vote was 2004. Before that, 1988.
The children's movie, Antz, released by DreamWorks in 1998, was one of those movies that critics loved but audiences didn't. Rotten Tomatoes shows a critic score of 92% and an audience score of 52%. The protagonist, a talking ant named Z, is unhappy with his role as a common worker ant and longs to make his own decisions in opposition to the widespread conformity he sees in the colony. Marxist language abounds including another worker ant that proclaims, right before a worker uprising, "Hey, we own the means of production!" No doubt intended as a critique of capitalism, in 2021 it feels more like life in a blue state in which perfect conformity is required in order to "defeat COVID." If you have that movie in your collection for your kids or grandkids, delete it.
When engaging with left-leaning colleagues on the subject of COVID, I sometimes ask when it will all be over. What conditions need to be met before we can declare an end to the pandemic and discard the overzealous response. The printable answers include, "when we reach herd immunity," "when our leaders or health officials say so," or "only when its safe." The county were I live is already at herd immunity and I still see pedestrians outside alone wearing a mask. For those that supposedly believe in science (as if science was something that could be "believed in"), they are notably unscientific when it comes to actually declaring an end to the pandemic.
An acoustic guitar and the human voice can't be disabled or censored remotely by the Big Tech cartel. The freedom to play and sing what you want cannot be algorithmically served a copyright takedown.
Both the BLM riots and the capitol protests consisted of mostly white Americans, yet that only seemed to be a problem in one case.
The CDC changed the definition of "vaccination" sometime between August 26th and September 2nd, 2021. In August, the definition on their site read, "The act of introducing a vaccine into the body to produce immunity to a specific disease." By September a single word had been changed, "The act of introducing a vaccine into the body to produce protection from a specific disease." "Immunity" became "protection." Does the COVID vaccine produce immunity? Did enough time go by since the vaccine became widely available to conclude that it doesn’t perform as well as expected? Did the torrent of breakthrough cases of vaccinated people cause the CDC to change the language?
If you can censor a fascist then he’s not a fascist.
Learn about "upspeak" and work to remove it from your speech.
Being on the leading edge of consumer technology usually just means you're the first one exploited for your data.
As a father if you don't set an example for your children of what it means to be a man, the feminists will gladly do it for you.
Your email client has an option to disable the automatic rendering of pictures in your email. Use it. It prevents the tracking which is jam packed into just about all email messages you receive. For example, if you receive a Substack newsletter and disallow the loading of images, Substack cannot tell if you read it or not (even if you did), and subsequently the author cannot tell either.
If you want to throw me a bone, allow images to load when my newsletter appears so I know if you're interested in my writing. Or you can click the link so it loads in the browser, which you can just immediately close if you don't want to read my work that way. Either way, it sends me a signal that you're out there and enjoying my work.
Don't forget to like this post, share it with your friends, and bookmark my censorship-resistant backup site in case I get deplatformed (Tor network access required).