All the Secrets of the Universe and Some Really Important Stuff Too!
“Freedom is a fragile thing and is never more than one generation away from extinction. It is not ours by inheritance; it must be fought for and defended constantly by each generation, for it comes only once to a people. Those who have known freedom, and then lost it, have never known it again.”
Ronald Reagan
The biggest story this week was the story and then the story about the story of the Covington students. I waited a few days to let most of the big names have their say. Now that they have, I figured I’d say my piece about it and make any overarching observations about what the event says about where we are.
Based on the information available, it looks like the Leftists coordinated to attack soft targets on their turf in D.C. They taunted the kids but didn’t get any violence that way so they sent the Indian to manufacture outrage based on the optics they created by having him stand in front of the kids and yell in that poor kid’s face. So they put this together and alerted their ally in the Media and of course all the other outlets piled on and then the squishy right virtue-signaled their horror at the make believe MAGA hat madness.
So far, this follows the same pattern as the past show pieces. They get in front of the truth surfacing and then walk away once the truth does break through and move onto the next outrage. But something went wrong. The real video clip surfaced too quickly and everyone could see that it was a con-job. Even the Left had to grudgingly admit it was a fake. And the squishy right were exposed for the cowards they really are.
Worse still, the kids have a lawyer who is threatening to sue some of these people for libel and other things like incitement and threats. Now, it’s possible this doesn’t move forward and every one backs away from this. But maybe it does. And it may even start dawning on the networks that there are repercussions when you take character assassination as standard operating procedure. Peter Thiel showed that you can fight back against these people if you have money and some smart lawyers. Maybe it wouldn’t take too much effort to get some hungry lawyers excited about monetizing the abusive behavior of the Main Stream Media. After all, CNN and MSNBC have plenty of cash (or at least their parent corporations have) that could be turned into legal awards and the concomitant legal fees that these lawyers prize so highly. What would stop these smart young lawyers from representing individuals slandered by these media outlets and either forcing them to settle cases out of court or bringing them to court to defend their behavior? Seems like a winning strategy to me. And I’m sure the Justice Department, if headed up by non-leftists could lend their prestige to a class action suit if it looked like some kind of collusion occurred between the Media and the characters inciting them. After all Fake news has become a rallying cry and RICO legislation is loose enough to cover conspiracy in most industries to commit crime.
Will it happen? Who knows. Should it? I think definitely. The time seems right to start pushing back and changing the way the Media abuses private individuals. Hopefully this is the beginning of something positive.
“It’s not that liberals aren’t smart, it’s just that so much of what they know isn’t so.”
Ronald Reagan
The good news is there isn’t anyone screaming and crying for the world to hear him in this episode. The bad news is this is one of those fantasy episodes where someone can see into the future. But the good news is it’s the first one so I give it a pass. And actually, the story is pretty good. The characters you’re supposed to like are likable enough and the bad guy is dislikable enough so let’s give it a whirl.
Pedott is a peddler who sells matches and shoelaces out of his suitcase. He’s a harmless looking little old man with a quiet voice and a faint smile. But every now and then he looks at a customer and he tells him, “What you need is this.” And then he’ll give the customer a small bottle of cleaning fluid or a bus ticket to Scranton PA. And then the customer will discover that what’s been offered is exactly what he needs.
The scene is a bar where a few customers are sitting around and a surly tough guy named Fred Renard has watched Pedott magically give two people exactly what they need. When Pedott leaves the bar, Renard confronts him in a threatening way and demands to be given exactly what he needs. Pedott gives him a pair of scissors. Later on, Renard catches his scarf in an elevator door and only the scissors save him from asphyxiating. When Pedott returns to his hotel room he finds Renard lying in wait for him. Renard demands that Pedott provide him with something to make him some money. Pedott gives him a leaky fountain pen that spills a drop of ink onto a newspaper directly in front of the name of a horse running in a race the next day. Renard wins several hundred dollars and immediately comes looking for Pedott to cash in on some other item.
Renard makes Pedott understand that he will never be rid of Renard and that he will risk violence if he doesn’t keep furnishing Renard with miracles. Pedott lets him know that he can’t produce these things without wearing himself out. But Renard forces him to produce something right away or risk a beating. Renard takes a pair of shoes from the suitcase and asks Pedott if they are what is needed and he is noncommittal.
Renard puts on the shoes and says they’re too tight and have leather soles which makes them slippery to walk on. When he demands to know how the shoes will benefit him Pedott hurries away and Renard chases him through the street. But a fast-moving car come up behind him and the shoes are too slippery to let him sidestep the car. Renard is struck and killed. Pedott speaks to Renard’s inert form on the ground. He explains that in the bar the first night he saw a vision of Renard trying to kill him. And finally, he knew that the shoes were what he really needed to escape Renard.
So, this kind of story becomes another predictable staple of the Twilight Zone stock in trade. But this is the first one and I actually enjoyed watching this one. In fact, I don’t remember seeing this one before. I’ll give it a B.
This one is painful. Rod Taylor is astronaut Col. Clegg Forbes. Along with Col. Ed Harrington and Major William Gart (played by actors I’ve never heard of) he has returned from Earth orbit to crash land in the desert. And the major mystery of the flight is that they were out of radio contact with Earth for twenty-four-hours (dah, dah, daaah!). Gart is the only one of the three to require more than a short-term hospital stay. I think he broke a collar bone. Forbes and Harrington are in a bar together when Harrington starts to feel strange. He describes it as if he doesn’t belong on Earth and if he doesn’t resist, he will just disappear. He calls home and his parents claim to have never known him. He tells Forbes from the phone booth what happened and disappears as Forbes goes back to the bar to get a drink for Harrington. Worse still no one else remembers Harrington being there and even a newspaper story about the space mission now only includes Forbes and Gart. Forbes tells his girlfriend and the commanding officer of their outfit and of course no one has ever heard of Harrington. He goes to the hospital and even Gart thinks it was just the two of them on the mission. Next Forbes looks in a mirror and can’t see himself and runs out of the room screaming. When Gart gets to the doorway Forbes has vanished and nobody but Gart knows who Forbes was and now the newspaper says Gart was on a solo mission. Next day the hospital room is completely empty and the space craft that was in a hangar under a tarp is just a tarp on the cement floor.
This is another Twilight Zone where a guy runs around screaming, shouting and crying because no one believes him. Last night it happened in Episode 10 where the U-Boat Commander tried to warn the occupants of the British freighter that his alter ego would sink them in a few minutes. That was bad enough but now poor Rod Taylor is running around like an hysterical adolescent girl screaming and crying because no one understands him. Rod had a pretty good career in Hollywood. He was in The Time Machine and stuff. He was a decent actor and not bad with decent dialog. People liked him. But this is not science fiction. It’s primal scream therapy. There was a pretty girl in the bar and that could have added some interest to the show but they just neglected her. I mean, why couldn’t she have been consulted about the problem. Maybe she could have consoled him on his last day on Earth. This is exactly the kind of episode that makes me cynical about television.
Well, I’m sorry this is a D or maybe even a D-.
“A nation that cannot control its borders is not a nation.”
Ronald Reagan
It’s a remarkable thing. The world is noticeably shifting into a new shape. Indisputably the middle ground is disappearing. People are being forced by their circumstances to pick one side or the other. The tactics are becoming uglier and more damaging. Everyone wants to know where this is going and what is the end point.
I’ll add another question. What will Donald Trump achieve? This I think is the lynchpin for the Right’s desperate effort to stop the Progressives from repealing the Bill of Rights. Although many on the Right say that a revolt against the Left is inevitable I am skeptical. Even a gasoline soaked room needs a spark to explode and up till now the Left has kept the matches under lock and key. Donald Trump is the match. He has withstood all of their supposedly irresistible forces and is still standing. The questions that remains are what will he achieve and what will come after him?
If he breaks the Left’s stranglehold on the levers of power in the judiciary and executive branches and renders the gatekeepers in the Media and Social Media docile then he will have levelled the playing field sufficiently to allow the right to break free from the shackles we are currently in. And if he can select a successor who has even a tenth of his skills at sparring with the Left then we have a chance of keeping the momentum we have to finally get the upper hand against these terrible people.
The Dissident Right (or whatever you call them) says it’s a foregone conclusion that the process will continue irrespective of whether Trump succeeds or not. I wish I had their confidence (or seeming confidence). They say that the Left’s unmasking will drive everyone in the middle either left or right. They say the normies will be red pilled and it will be game on. Until recently I was very skeptical of this. But two recent occurrences have given me reason to reconsider.
The first is the definite shift to the right of a formerly mainstream journalist. Tucker Carlson was never on the Left. He has always been a conservative but of late he has sounded a lot like someone on the dissident side. Granted he isn’t as extreme as self-described dissident writers out there but he is daring to say that the Democrats and Republicans are gaming the system against the middle class. He’s skirting the edge of actual revolt. That is an exciting situation coming from someone in the mainstream.
The second occurrence happened today. American Greatness is a very mainstream right outlet. There are some angrier voices there and some calmer but I wouldn’t call any of them dissident right. Today I saw a post that quoted the Z-Man. The Z-Man is a very polished voice on the Dissident Right but no one would claim he is in the mainstream. He himself often talks about the river that separates the dissidents from the normies. I think he says it is narrow but it is deep and the only way to cross it is by consciously swimming. So, never the twain shall meet. When the mainstream begins quoting the Dissident Right there seems to be a step change happening.
So all that said, I’m waiting for one more step. I’m waiting for the true moderates to cross the line. When the mainstream women start deserting the GOP establishment and get red-pilled I’ll know it’s done. I’ll know we’ve passed the point of no return.