Category: Guest Contributors
Guest Contributor – ArthurinCali – 30APR2025 – American Media Bubble
I think the biggest reason that the narratives were so jarring and caused such a sense of cognitive dissonance comes down to the fact that I had spent so much time overseas. Outside of America, the media landscape stops being a constant funnel of US-centric news. This sounds obvious, but one must personally see the difference to truly understand the constant bombardment of information and narratives versus how others receive news on world events. I still chuckle to this day when an Op-Ed or headline declares how “the world is watching” what the US is doing with baited breath, as if there are villagers in far-flung East Timor or a town in Norway huddled around the TV or computer awaiting the next headline from CNN or NYT. Yes, many around the globe pay attention to current events, but not to the extent that MSM implies. The Legacy media kabuki theater is mostly for the US audience. I used to believe that finding 5-10 sources on a story was enough to put together a mostly accurate picture of what machinations were happening. Now, I try to find 2-3X that many because of the rampant misinformation displayed. It’s even worse now than it was two decades ago.
Guest Contributor – ArthurinCali – 29APR2025 – American Miasma
Arthur has written an essay describing the cognitive dissonance and other symptoms that set in after the 9/11 attacks were the excuse for creating the surveillance state that made Americans the bad guys that our government was trying to control.
https://www.arthurincali.com/p/american-miasma
Arthur was in the service when the attacks occurred so he saw firsthand the change when he returned afterward. I guess he was more perceptive than I was. It took until halfway through the Iraq War before I finally realized that protecting Americans was very low down on the priority list for the Bush administration.
A very nostalgic reading experience. In retrospective, I wonder now how I could have been so naive about the clearly anti-American nature of the policies of the Republicans and Democrats alike. But those were innocent times. I still believed some politicians were there to help us. Silly me.
Good read.
Guest Contributor -Chemist – 28APR2025 – Military Women
I have had two friends with daughters who went into the military.
(Small sample size, I know.)
Both young women were stronger than I am and may well have been physically stronger and in better health than I was at 18.
Neither woman saw combat.
Both washed out within a year of graduating basic training for “Medical” reasons.
Whatever medical issue they had was not obvious nor did it affect their ability to work post service. Both were able to carry to term and deliver healthy baby’s. They both get full VA benefits.
IMHO, for these women, military service was a scam to get benefits that will last them the rest of their lives without really earning them.
Guest Contributor -ArthurinCali – 28APR2025 – Military Women
There are many well-qualified women in the military.
Alright, now with that said, in almost 30 years of active, reserve, and now civilian DoD experience, the parable of “The Emperor Has No Clothes” is probably the best metaphor regarding women in the armed forces. Every reasonable person who has looked at the requirements and conditions sees that it is not an enhancement to try and put women into every role performed in the armed services. Not one single deployment was enhanced with having females around. In fact, it usually presented unnecessary hindrances and complications to the mission at hand. Military service has one purpose — defense of the country and its national interests. To treat the institution as a grand laboratory for social sciences has been a complete detriment overall.
ArthurinCali Reviews Sweden’s Changing Views on Immigration
Formerly one of the most welcoming and tolerant of all European countries toward migrants, Sweden has soured on their guests and now will even pay them to leave.
Sweden’s Changing Views on Immigration
Arthur presents the latest changes to the Swedish saga of violent invaders overstaying their welcome.
Guest Contributor – Milo Mindbender – 06APR2025 – Trade, Tariffs and Time
Whatever the agenda is it must be cast before January 27. If it delays, it dies. After the next swearing in of Congress any progress not completed will probably be smothered in it’s afterbirth.
The usual suspects are screaming for blood, and don’t understand the way tariffs should work.
If you penalize products coming from my country to yours, I should do the same to your goods in order to keep a balance of trade. We are bit by tariffs, excise taxes, and down right bans on our exports, but are expected to forget that on their exports. Some actually make sense, like the ban on beef since we turn cattle into unwilling cannibals by reprocessing animal offal into cattle feed, some are just a protectionism by the other countries.
We need to either play reciprocally or refuse to play at all. Rumour has it mothballed cardboard plants in Maine are being looked into as a consequence of the tariffs with Canada.
European social practices have been indirectly supported by our bearing their defense burdens freeing up their Treasury for bribing the masses with healthcare, work breaks, and other bennies. Let them sort their own issues in their home since we are only uncultured upstarts according to them.
Asian economies get the same bribery, Japan was able to direct the monies that would have been used for defense into industries post WWII, and allowed them to specialize in electronics, Korea directly benefits by having our tripwire troops in place permitting them to focus on commerce instead of having to secure their borders. Post Kim rule in NK might collapse and actually allow for reunification of the two societies, but not under the one family rule it has had for 75 years.
If we did what the world is asking and tended to our own interest and business, because power hates a vacuum some entity would club to the top of the dung heap and declare themselves king of the pile.
It would be interesting to see as a thought experiment whether it would be an eastern invasion into the power vacuum, or another global jihad. Time may tell.
Guest Contributor – ArthurinCali – 04APR2025 – Is Americans
What makes America great is Americans, not some global economic think tank idea about “Cosmopolitanism.”
We’re not a group of backwoods rubes crouching in fear of the outside world. What we are, and should always be, are people who care more about the well-being of each other and not the stock portfolio of a multinational corporation that will pull the rug at the first chance of increasing profit shares. This nation’s initials are USA not GDP. The overly misused phrase of collectivism when describing Marxist-style ideologies has woefully made it a dirty word for those of us on the Right-wing to employ. It needs to be reclaimed and utilized often. It is the proper attitude to have for our fellow Americans’ living conditions. We are all in the same boat, whether some are in first-class cabins or third-class.
Are protectionist tariff policies the silver bullet solution that will restore American labor and wage loss woes? Will the Rust Belt be revitalized with a glut of new manufacturing jobs by next year? Of course not. But it’s a start. Prepare for pain and embrace the understanding that it is needed and long overdue. The medicine that cures does not always go down easily. To go down fighting is better than to simply accept the current state of affairs.
Legacy media reporting tries to lead one to believe that tariffs will be the only strategy Trump will use. That is folly and only propaganda for the low-information citizen as they like to call most of us. Stronger tariffs are only one piece of the equation that (might) correct the dismal path we are on.
Things are very wrong with how the game is set up. Many of us know this. The promised results of NAFTA, free trade (Ha!) and WTO platitudes were a siren song that mainly enriched a select few. Brave voices spoke out on this such as Pat Buchanan and Ross Perot. They were right.
It is time for something different and if it takes burning my 401K to the ground so that my kids do not have to be serfs to the worship of an almighty GDP Excel spreadsheet God of Globohomo, then I say burn it to the ground.
Tom’s World – 30MAR2025 – Human Nature
Even if we had a total rebirth, and somehow had a new constitutional convention attended by intelligent and principled patriots who would write a new constitution correcting the fault lines that allowed to corruption to enter and begin the rot, how long would it last before constitution 2 was also brought to the brink of collapse?
I’m pretty sure that the founders would have become violently ill at the thought of lifelong congressmen becoming fabulously wealthy and self important and totally divorced from the wishes, needs and physical and moral well being of their constituents.
It seems to me that any enduring political structure must be built around just how self serving and corruptible humans can be. But any system created by humans can and will be corrupted by humans. There has to be some robust self centering feedback system built at the absolute core where it will be hard to get to and corrupt. Maybe, that was supposed to have been the function of the Supreme Court but we all see the result that political appointment has had.
Elections can certainly and are easily subverted.
Guest Contributor – Milo Mindbender – 28MAR2025 – Logic of Empire
As noted regarding the internal collapse of the Roman empire, when taxes became burdensome, expansion was required to maintain population growth to support the original areas, farming and manual labor became scorned, and there was no longer a tradition of service either military or political by the upper echelons the rot had become total, and it was just waiting for a small disturbance to drop the whole structure.
We are doing the same glide path and have been for most of my life. Farming, self sufficient people, manual or blue collar labor are flat out despised, military service is considered an option for the lower classes, but not the elites, fly over or red state country is spoken of as if it was a forgiegn enemy, and if it doesn’t be legit the “elites” it isn’t worthy of any attention or effort. This will come to a bitter and difficult fruition eventually if we don’t step back from the edge. Defunding the people who hate us more than our actual enemies, put us below the invaders and economic migrate who drain our coffers and the self serving politicians who are only concerned with their own plunder is a good start, highlighting the hypocrisy in burning swasticars in protest of a movement you don’t support us putting it all out there for everyone to see.