The Clone War
Indivisible clones are baaack. The electorate spoke loudly and clearly, however, the woke indivisibles didn’t get the memo. In their updated publication [see below] not a sentence was spared from misrepresentation, misunderstanding, propaganda, hyperbolic emotion, false context, and toxic empathy. The layers of their cult onion effectively shielded them from perceiving the 2024 election outcome that sane people witnessed. This is an f’d-up tribe, apparently quite intent on remaining so.
Michael Shellenberger dissects the woke
[also see: Eric Kaufmann’s “The Third Awokening”]
Many Democrats say they want to understand what happened. Few genuinely do. That's because, at some level, they know they're guilty of having participated in a witch hunt in which they falsely accused their fellow Americans, and even their friends & family, of fascism & racism. https://t.co/LDyQcRHolB pic.twitter.com/c88WMOeOqs
— Michael Shellenberger (@shellenberger) November 7, 2024
also see: ConservativeOpinion.com – The word “narcissist” is among the most overused, but is nevertheless used properly when describing these insufferable people who feel impelled to angrily and self-righteously announce their intention to unfriend people who voted for the other side. Like that’s some kind of threat! What reaction is being sought, exactly? “Oh no, I’ve failed you! But to withhold from me that which is most precious — your approval — is a fate too great to bear! Have mercy on my soul, and restore me to your favor, oh blessed redeemer!” The arrogance of these people! Who do they think they are, the Old Testament God of Social Media, declaring to a fallen world their intention to cast all unrighteous into outer darkness? Like these are comparable consequences? What next, cleanse the land by flood? Who cares about you and your sad act? Unfriend someone if you are that insecure and egotistical. Please! You’ll be doing them a favor. But to broadcast it just proves you to be an attention-whore who wants applause for doing nothing because you have no real contribution to make. God forbid you recognize that maybe you haven’t achieved perfect knowledge and that maybe other people don’t disagree with you because they’re evil or stupid, but because different life experiences cause different perspectives, and that real evil and real stupidity is slandering them because you’re too lazy and feeble-minded and weak to challenge your own assumptions, and too arrogant, and your ego too fragile, to entertain the possibility that they might too have a point.
Javier Milei, President of Argentina
Social justice sociopaths?
Revolution
The nobility of the American Revolution is humbling – see the closing paragraph of the Declaration of Independence below:
“We, therefore, the Representatives of the united States of America, in General Congress, Assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the Name, and by Authority of the good People of these Colonies, solemnly publish and declare, That these United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States; that they are Absolved from all Allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain, is and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as Free and Independent States, they have full Power to levy War, conclude Peace, contract Alliances, establish Commerce, and to do all other Acts and Things which Independent States may of right do. And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.”
Having “candidly” itemized the facts of the tyranny under which they lived, the Founders announced a new relationship with the sovereign, and how they would proceed to establish it.
In the next decade, the Founders would studiously consider and publicly debate all recorded historical relationships between citizens and their governors from ancient times through their present. They would construct a Constitution to codify their conclusions about the best governmental structures to preserve the enumerated fundamental rights in the Declaration of Independence.
The deteriorated relationship between man and state provided legitimate justification for their bloody revolution. The Founders constructed a process that led through revolution to a sustainable better form of government.
Today, we’re not faced with a challenge anywhere near that quality.
This summer, the degree that citizens respect or disrespect the self-identifications of other citizens led to mass tantrums in the streets, not to a government-changing revolution, despite the sociological claims of the activists.
The woke-hokum, Marxist-derivative, pseudo-scientific sociology that excused the destruction, rioting, looting, arson, and thuggery in American cities, has no noble foundation. Self-identification is the personal issue that turned into a public cause celebre after selected police events were misrepresented to instigate the mob.
City centers morphed into dangerous adult playgrounds filled with spoiled brats acting stupidly. How do you fix generations of mal-educated, probably stoned, acting-out man-children, coincidentally under the enabling leadership of Leftist mayors and governors?
We have an incredible history in America. The man-children shouting little bromides in the streets today, expressing rabid hormonal outrage, seem oblivious to their lowered standard of ideation. They’re missing out on the great American story, and they couldn’t care less.
They have no better ideas to offer America, and they’re hopelessly lost, bound up in a complex philosophical hell with no desire to escape. From killing babies to killing businesses and cities, all they have is a terrible consistency.
Brands
The Left call their endless criticism and negative prejudgment of non-Leftist people and policies “social justice.” Get woke to their hypocrisy of labeling prejudgments as any form of justice because justice cannot be prejudged. Prejudgment is merely prejudice in practice.
The Left’s power dynamic consists of an antisocial oppression that elevates their voting constituents to advantageous legal status over non-constituents. To create constituents, the Left amplify virtually all human differences into good and evil identity proxies. Conveniently, their constituents are the good identities; non-believers are the bad.
So, the Left’s activist believers can have no compunction about committing offenses against the Left’s enemies who are – de facto – bad. Moreover, such demonstrations signal to the rest of the world that resistance is futile and will incur the Left’s unbridled wrath. The Left’s enemies are subhuman resource consumers who will ultimately be purged from the planet. They deserve contempt, ridicule, and legal subjugation.
Note well: None of the Left’s identification proxies refer back to any objective measures of value or human accomplishment. The Left’s human classification system says nothing about what individuals have personally done. And because many of their identity proxies can be assumed ad hoc, there are low barriers to entry into many of their protected classes.
The Left’s constituent identities are brands, not unlike the labels burned into the hides of cattle to signify ownership – only in this case the Left dictate the terms of ownership, a deal they glorify as social justice.
There is no equality at the end of the Left’s utopian rainbow. There is only submission.
Everyone should get woke to this scam.
Wake up to the wokesters
The Constitution was written and ratified in the context of Christian state governance and culture. To this day, it provides successful mechanisms for the governance and growth of America.
Constitutional language succeeded in curing the country from the Civil War because both Northerners and Southerners shared Christian religious foundations and a common understanding of the origins of God-given liberties memorialized in the Declaration of Independence. Their fight over slavery was subordinate to a common Christian foundation.
Now come the Left who have rejected our Christian religious foundation, and consequentially, rejected the principle of God-given liberties. The Left think the state is the grantor of liberty.
A grantor of liberty and a guarantor of liberty have fundamentally different powers. A grantor can withdraw their grant and thereby eliminate liberty altogether, whereas a guarantor can merely fail to guarantee liberty, but the right continues to exist.
This fundamental division between the Left and Constitutional adherents cannot be compromised. There is no middle ground between the two positions.
A similar irreconcilable division exists between Islamic and Judeo-Christian fundamental beliefs. There is no middle ground for compromise between the Common Law and Sharia Law.
Now that American Democrats have turned hard Left, their fundamentally irreconcilable positions have ripened to a relevant concern.
Previously, the Christian approaches to constitutional confrontations with deviant political and religious beliefs have emphasized tolerance – based on a Christian value of forgiveness and a belief in the strength of our constitutional system to provide resolution mechanisms – just as it did during and after the Civil War. But a common foundation no longer exists with the hard Left.
It’s become clear that the Left give no credence to Christian sensibilities, and, moreover, actually intend to dismantle the Constitution and all of its related fundamental liberties in favor of omnipotent governance.
Do you remember the scene in the movie Independence Day where the President shares a telepathic connection with the Alien, and the Alien says, “No Peace.” The President asks what the Alien expects us to do, and the Alien says, “Die.”
That about sums up the Left’s intentions for constitutional conservatives. Today, tolerance is a fool’s errand.
One does not require metaphysical certainty about religion – Christianity in this case – to appreciate the fundamental principles that make America possible and successful. The Left have nothing to offer that remotely compares to our constitutional framework grounded in the DOI and the Common Law in their systemic capacity to provide an orderly framework for American success.
It’s time every American awoke to the wokesters and considered what should be tolerated, and what should be intolerable. Dismantling our successful constitutional system is intolerable.
The Rule of Men
The Left’s devices for supporting their various agenda items share a common theme. They all have the effect of removing personal responsibility from their chosen [i.e. politically correct] behaviors.
You want to be gay? No problem. Consider yourself pre-destined to be that way through mysterious mechanisms. Anyone who disagrees with your position is a de-facto bigoted homophobic racist.
You want to abort babies? No problem. Define them as not babies, but inhuman fetuses, and sell their body parts to baby body part brokers.
You want to get stoned? No problem. Recreational drugs can be legalized and taxed. Don’t worry about health consequences, job consequences, impacts to families and children, etc. It’s all legal.
You don’t like a law? No problem. Just ignore it and wait for someone to sue you. You’ll probably get away with it. But if you’re caught, legions of lawyers looking to make names for themselves, write books, and get on the commentariat circuit will step up to defend you. And then you’ll probably get away with it.
Your guy loses an election? No problem. The 1st Am. protects the right to demonstrate to your heart’s content. Assemble a few like-minded friends and attempt to de-legitimize every possible aspect, feature, behavior, decision, family member, and characteristic of the guy who beat your guy, until the next election. Occupy all public spaces and keep doing it ad infinitum until your chosen [i.e. politically correct] result is achieved.
You don’t like the content of somebody else’s speech? No problem. Threaten violence at every venue that person attempts to speak at and make it too expensive for the host to risk allowing the speaker to be heard.
You don’t like what your neighbor does with his property? No problem. Go to your local government and instigate proceedings under any number of thousands of laws that will tie him up in court for the next century.
Talk about cultural misappropriation . . . The Left are masters at it. They issue non-revocable guilt-free licenses to themselves to do whatever they want. And in so doing they fracture and balkanize America into a set of contentious sects who will never get along with each other.
Diversity, as a flag of convenience for excusing the Left’s agenda, is nonsense. It makes a chaotic mess of the orderly society our Founders attempted to legalize with the Constitution.
The best response is no response
The best response to Leftist violence is to starve it of attention. Theater only works with an audience present. Don’t attend, only publish the conflicts on social media alongside critical analysis. Don’t give the barbarians meme space. Leave the angry Left alone to demonstrate and yell at itself.
What possible reason exists to confront it in the streets anyway? Few arguments, however reasonably delivered, could be sufficiently compelling to change a zealots mind during a mob event. Confrontation sustains the mob, and that’s exactly what the mob is there to generate.
Philosophical arguments aren’t settled in the streets. They require cool heads to even be heard.
The Left knows this. That’s why they keep their people in a constant state of agitation. Don’t help them.
advocacy politics
Advocacy – post electoral bureaucratic politics
Presenting facts in the light most favorable to your position, and most harmful to the position of your adversary, is expected of trial lawyers in the zealous pursuit of their clients’ case, or prosecution thereof. The jury decides which facts presented by the advocates to accept as persuasive, and the judge moderates the procedure to keep the process fair. Since the trial forum is balanced and moderated, advocates can go to any lengths in their representations of reality that they think they can get away with.
Political advocacy, also largely conducted by lawyers, has no jury for vetting facts and no judge to moderate a fair process. Political advocates are presumed to be tempered by the ethics of statesmanship.
It only takes a few minutes observation of the C-Span coverage of Congress to refute that myth and see how the throttle on advocacy of adherence to the ethics of statesmanship gets abused and ignored.
Locally in Elbert County, hard Left writers routinely build cases using all the devices a lawyer might employ in trial advocacy. And after one of them presents such an analysis, an applauding cadre of supporters dependably, relentlessly, repeat and elevate the case ad nauseam to drown out any questions of fact.
The longer they can keep the attention of the media, the thicker their patina of legitimacy becomes, and the more insistent the accolades get. The media rarely fail to cooperate.
Periodically the voters get a chance to reset the players after an extended clock numbered in years has expired, but the vote really only checks the most egregious offenders. Meanwhile, in the middle of the clock where untold thousands of bureaucratic actions play out, the ebbs and flows of advocacy politics do the most damage.
Democrats & media : an “unholy alliance”
Jill Duvall echoes national Democrat behavior => morphs electoral defeat into media spokesperson for the majority vote she didn’t get…
militancy without end
![tumblr_nj79yhsGur1s2wio8o1_500[1]](http://elbertcounty.net/blog/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/tumblr_nj79yhsGur1s2wio8o1_5001.gif)
Leftists and political Muslims share a successful strategy of umbrage politics – “Agree with me or I’ll get upset.” Each day news reports come in about the riots, demonstrations, occupations, marches, boycotts, and class actions underway by upset beneficiaries. You’d think that’s all that ever happened in America.
Leftist reporters saturate the media with reports about the struggles. The struggles never end as the numbers of beneficiaries and Muslims continue to grow. No degree of social justice, religious obedience, or equality can satisfy them, as if these things could even be quantified. No fixed amount of entitlement benefits can sustain an enlarging population. The struggles are designed to be unsatisfiable, unsolvable, unwinnable, and unending.
Liberal politicians keep putting more money on the table and unscrupulous beneficiaries keep lining up to collect. You can’t legitimately call either the politicians or the beneficiaries citizens because citizenship implies duties that neither one cares much about. They are gamers – gaming the system for personal benefit, be it preferential law or public money – and gaming the system for votes.
Who even discusses economic and political theories, reasoning, science, education, or even metaphysical foundations anymore? Why bother with intellectual baggage when numbers in the streets will get favorable laws written, favorable court cases decided, entitlement money allocated, criminal prosecutions foregone, constitutional protections denied, the power of the Leftist state and Muslim Sharia increased, and votes?
Conservatives are chasing their tails with volumes of sound and persuasive analysis about these social pathologies, but the groups who trade in power demographics don’t care about what conquered people have to say, except to the extent it identifies more opportunities to exploit.
Pure democracy is literally devouring America. Leftists and Muslims are leading the short walk to the end of our constitutional society. The tyrannies of the minorities are on the march while liberal vote-buying politicians eagerly fund and enable them.
The overwhelming majority of Americans who provide the real value to America that predatory Leftists and political Muslims feed on, are apparently too busy to stop it.
Elbert County endorses “fractivist” lawyer
From: The Campaign Goes On: ‘Ban Fracking’ Groups Target New Colorado Task Force
“An activist lawyer
For 12 years – from 1996 to 2008 – Boulder attorney Matt Sura worked for the WCC as a community organizer and, ultimately, the group’s executive director. Now in private practice, Sura has applied for a seat on the new oil and gas task force, and says he’s no longer an anti-energy activist. In March, Sura told The Colorado Observer: “[F]ar from being a fracktivist, I actually work on oil and gas development.”
Sura’s work came under close scrutiny when he was hired by local officials in Brighton, Colo., to help update the city’s oil and gas regulations. He then advised the city to impose a temporary drilling ban. The ban was overturned less than a month later after Brighton residents – many of whom work in the oil and gas industry – learned of Sura’s background in anti-energy activism.
Besides working for the WCC for more than a decade, Sura collaborated with activist groups during last year’s local “ban fracking” campaigns in Northern Colorado. He helped organize an event titled “Tools for Activism on Oil and Gas Development,” which was co-hosted by Frack Free Colorado, Food & Water Watch and several other anti-energy groups. And in November 2013, National Journal reported that Sura was working with activists in Greeley who wanted to impose a moratorium on drilling projects inside the city limits.”
http://www.elbertcounty-co.gov/current_county_permit_applications.php#.VAIu1GP4RzU
http://www.oilandgasbmps.org/landowners-guide/
Could Elbert County’s inability to get Agave to perform thus far on all of the elements specified in the standard MOU + Schedule A have something to do with this? Has Elbert County’s CDS gone down another primrose path of over zealous regulation that effectively precludes – or interminably delays – O&G development?
Fracking Outrage Management
Fracking Risk Communication
by Peter M. Sandman
This paper by Peter Sandman breaks down the message mechanics of both the pro and anti fracking interests. By doing so Sandman outlines a paradigm whereby we can navigate – manage – the confrontations and polarized rhetoric heard in Elbert Country for the past 3 years, and impacted communities all over the world.
It is most refreshing to discover that the terms of the debate are not limited by, or adequately defined by, the extremists – and that solution vectors exist that can satisfy all stakeholders.
delay, confuse, obfuscate
Several of the below issues have already been effectively adjudicated negatively in the first round of failed regs that conflicted with COGCC rules. Persistence in their inclusion reveals a purpose to delay oil & gas development by any means until leases run out on operators.
Enough with the oil & gas zoning edit committee sideshow.
RE:
Elbert County Oil and Gas Regulations/MOUs Update
September 14, 2013
The county commissioners continue to undermine public input. The commissioners and the Director of Community and Development Services have held meetings to rewrite the regulations in secret venues; public participation was denied. There is supposed to be an ‘editing committee’ meeting at the administrative building this Tuesday, the 17th, at 6:30 pm. The CDC director is going to present her rewritten regulations and ask to send them to the Planning Commission (their meeting will be held on the 26th).
If you can attend, stress the importance of:
1. No open pits should be used for fluid storage in the county. Only closed loop systems can be used in the county.
2. No flow back or produced water should be spread on open land or roads.
3. All residents, and other resources, should be used to determine if there are abandoned wells in the vicinity of new exploration.
4. Vapor recovery systems, to minimize escaping gas, must be required.
5. Increased setbacks from homes and public places must be required.
6. Extensive baseline water well testing (and continued testing) is imperative.
7. Elbert County should allow green frack fluid only. (This may be a ‘sore point’ and ultimately against State regulations (but will certainly help protect our water, for which the County does have a right to ask.))
Commissioner Schlegel has told us that he does not have to rule by ‘committee’; he wants to run us over for his own personal gain. Commissioner Rowland follows suit
Standing before the BOCC
By definition, complaints not grounded in an injury, an injustice, or a wrong, are groundless. [Read more…]
winners and losers
When the Democrat-controlled Colorado Legislature gets through imposing restrictive gun laws upon law-abiding citizens, will we be any safer? No, we won’t, because none of the prescriptions contained in any of these new bills address any element of the crimes committed with guns that will have motivated the bills’ passage.
In the instant case, losers will be law-abiding citizens. Winners will be Democrat politicians, their adoring liberal media, their captive voters, and the criminals who will have an easier time of it going up against a less-armed law abiding citizenry. But that’s only in the instant case. There’s also winners and losers in the larger scheme of things.
The country’s Founders designed a system they hoped would protect minority rights under the governance of a majority. They contemplated that with all the checks and balances between the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of government, the 4th estate of the press, and the people, that enough pauses to consider would exist in the public discourse over new law, that the best argument, the best philosophy, the best solution, the mostly soundly reasoned answer, would tend to carry the day.
They did not anticipate ruthless progressivism with its will to win at all costs, and notwithstanding the soundness of their argument. They did not expect that all of the checks and balances in our country would fail in their primary function and become the captive organs of a single cult mythology.
Wherever progressives get a political majority, they ram through their agenda. Sound arguments to the contrary are not rebutted, nor debated. Opposed parties are procedurally silenced, crowded out, shouted down, ridiculed, overwhelmed, and ignored.
Sure, we have instant winners and losers as each issue comes up under the progressive agenda. But the bigger loser is our system, the one that brought us to this point of social evolution, the one responsible for our success.
And perhaps the biggest losers of all are the progressives themselves. The ones who have no idea what they’ve lost by damaging their fellow American minorities, whom they take such joy in suppressing. The ones dancing in the streets after each victory, the ones shouting in the streets when they’re not dancing.
They’ve lost their minds.
B_Imperial
Katy bar the door
Enviros fool themselves over the purported dangers to the environment from oil and gas fracturing. The only thing this technology puts at risk is their ability to control society through fear. Environmentalism requires that man pose a continuing threat to the earth. For them, man is essentially evil, destructive and polluting. He damages everything he touches. Enviros built a trillion dollar industry on this myth, and any evidence to the contrary must be ruthlessly suppressed. No tactics are off limits in this final battle for our very survival—and the protection of their rice bowl.
Oil and gas fracturing pops the balloon of environmental mythology with a pin of proven technology. Rather than merely promising betterment, fracturing delivers, and this genuinely threatens environmentalists. In Jonas Nightingale’s words in the movie Leap of Faith, “I know the real thing when I see it.” When enviros look out above their denial, they know it too.
Meanwhile, science, causation, the direction of time, basic physics, language definitions, human nature–these building blocks of civilization must all bow to the higher objectives of the mission. Reality must give way to the higher purposes of gaia lovers, busy replacing God with a new supreme being. They practice new ritual sacrifices in new church buildings full of think tanks and symposiums attended by enviro high priests and their legal staffs. They sanctify their objectives in fervent reliance on metaphysical constructs much like those held in traditional religions.
These modern gnostic practitioners, possessors of true knowledge—not the stuff most people hold as commonly true—lead the Church of Environmentalism. Most hold high office in the adjunct Church of Social Justice, as well as the Perpetual Church of Totalitarian Light, the Church for Reconstructed Sexuality, the Church for Cultural Equivocation, the Church for Economic Liberation from Capital, the Church for Recreational Mental Adjustment Through Chemistry, the Church for Aliens Spawned Earthly Life, as well as numerous smaller ad hoc conclaves. Go fishing with one of these worms and you’ll tip over the whole can.
Due to the fluid notions of deterministic causation that all these churches share, symposiums begun under the auspices of one church usually develop into general sessions for the advancement of all related modalities. Practitioners find this a real benefit—like getting something for nothing—except in these cases it’s getting nothing for nothing. But that’s okay, inside their klatches they remain a cheerful bunch who practice abundant love and happiness among each other.
Non-initiated skeptics only see the prickly shell that new age cults present to outsiders. This shell protects insider believers from the intrusion of information that could lead to schisms and defections from the ranks. An unfortunate side effect of their self-referential domain is a growing disconnection from reality feedback that, over time, might help them improve the efficacy of their belief systems. But this begs a larger question, already answered through their modifications to many of the informing constructs that normally lead to provable objective knowledge.
In the long run, and not withstanding the fervency of environmentalists’ beliefs, their willful dodges will play out and the rules that govern the universe will hold sway. In the short run, Katy bar the door because this party is just getting started. Again.
But let’s not lose sight of the forest for the trees. It is the enforcement of beliefs through intimidation, coercion and legal compunction to achieve pre-ordained secular outcomes that offends far more than the substance of their conclusions. A conservative might have no problem arriving at some point in the Left’s universe of acceptable ends, provided they got there from substantiated, proven evidence.
Ironically, while professing unfathomable degrees of faith in their objectives, on the issues the Left have claimed dominion over they grant no faith to mankind. They do not allow people to voluntarily make up their own minds. And this is quite odd for a group of people who call themselves humanist.
B_Imperial
condolences
Critics painted me as a defender of the old guard. Ha! The only things I defended in this election cycle were competence, sound management, realistic thinking, and the rule of law. Tragically, these bedrock principles did not win today in the Elbert County Republican Party primary. Well, the principles still exist, and it appears I will have plenty more opportunities to defend them in the future.
Come November, commissioner choices will be between agenda driven liberals and, um, agenda driven liberals. I’m sure this prospect has the New-Plains democrats, populists, and leftists, dancing in their switch grass patches tonight, however, consequences for the county will be grim.
We’ll see ubiquitous zoning and higher taxes. We’ll see environmentalism and its basket of unfounded mythologies unleashed in a flurry of ersatz relevancy as they consume the public discourse. We’ll experience these mythologies fail in an expensive protracted drama full of denial and blame. We’ll see none of these agenda progenitors take responsibility when their no-growth, anti-industrial, country-in-county ideas further impoverish Elbert County. We’ll see the few of us who use their 1st Am. right to dissent from these prevailing insanities called more names, if that’s even possible at this point.
I never wrote for the sake of the old guard. I wrote for the sake of limited sound government. A voting minority of Elbert County voted for bigger more intrusive government. They made a big mistake, and the county government they’ve chosen for all of us will make us pay dearly for it. That’s what unbridled government does to people and these people are all about the unbridling of government power.
The left has won. You’re not going to like these new-strange bedfellows when they start implementing their plans for you.
B_Imperial