[American Thinker] Anyone who is ignorant of intellectual history is doomed to repeat intellectual errors. So with the Problem of Evil, which is: "If God exists and is All-Good, why does He permit evil to exist?" Someone always raises the Problem of Evil whenever a natural disaster kills the innocent, like the girls drowned in the recent Texas Flood. The Problem of Evil is obviously connected to the idea of Providence, the claim that whatever happens is the Will of God. Trump turning his head at the precise instant required to dodge the bullet is cited as an act of Providence. But if God can cause Trump to turn his head, then surely, He could have saved those Texas girls.
What was Plato’s solution?
God, being all Good, must actualize all possibilities, all possible worlds. In one world, ours, Trump turned his head, and the Texas girls died. In another world, Trump died, and the Texas girls lived.
Plato claimed goodness required all possibilities be created because goodness requires maximum diversity. Nine hundred years ago, the Christian theologian Peter Abelard expanded on Plato’s explanation by arguing that existence itself is a good. Therefore, God, being All-Good, wishing to maximize goodness, maximizes the size of reality by actualizing all possible worlds. The Texas girls who died in this world still had eight years of existence, and this is better than not existing at all. Further, the same girls will live their full lives in another world.
Arthur Lovejoy, in his book The Great Chain of Being, based on lectures he gave at Harvard a century ago, after discussing Plato’s and Abelard’s solution, pointed out (p. 74) that St. Thomas Aquinas, who wrote 800 years ago, and is the greatest Roman Catholic theologian ever, agreed with this solution to the Problem of Evil.
This solution to the Problem of Evil was presented by four of the greatest minds in history 2,300, 900, 800, and 100 years ago. Since everyone at some point in their lives wonders about the Problem of Evil, there is no excuse for educated people to be unaware of this solution, whether they accept it or not.
#3
If we cannot choose evil, we are not choosing. The problem does not lie with God. One man, for instance, recently funded the creation of an Old Testament plague that killed millions of people. Satan gave him the same selling script as he gave Christ in the desert. Anthony chose poorly. He still has a limited number of remaining choices he can make to avoid the eternal lava hot tub. It’s the same system for all of us. We get to choose. There our consequences for our choices to us and to those around us. We need to choose wisely.
#8
I understand Plato was also a decorated military veteran, earning accommodation, IIRC, one instance participating in a fighting withdrawal, saving many fellow soldiers.
#9
one major problem w the 'maximizing the universe to maximize goodness' (as advocated by Plato, Abelard, etc.) is that maximizing the universe also maximizes evil
pointed out by numerous commentators
Posted by: Lord Garth ||
08/20/2025 20:25 Comments ||
Top||
Direct Translation via Google Translate. Edited. by Mikhail Moshkin and Daniil Pelymov
[REGNUM] 105 years ago, on August 19, 1920, the Tambov Provincial Cheka, party and Soviet organs of the province received alarming reports from the Borisoglebsk district. In the villages of Tugolukovo and Kamenka, a clash between peasants and a food detachment was supported by 50 armed deserters from the Red Army.
The commander of the food detachment and two food detachments were killed. On the same day, in Afanasyevka, Tambov district, several "gangs" united for a joint action against Soviet power.
The Tambov Uprising began - one of the last, largest and bloodiest episodes of the Civil War, which took the lives of more than 30,000 Russian people, Reds and rebels.
The peasant war, which almost overturned all the achievements of the Bolsheviks, broke out in the deep rear of the Red Army.
By that time, the fronts were far to the west (where the Red Army counteroffensive against Poland was underway), to the east - in Transbaikalia and the Amur region and in the steppes of Northern Taurida, where the Russian army of Pyotr Wrangel was advancing. The largest "third force" in Novorossiya - the anarchist freebooters of Nestor Makhno at that time were once again considered enemies of Soviet power.
But soon, in October 1920, the Council of People's Commissars of the Ukrainian SSR would propose to the father an alliance with Baron Wrangel. In general, the Civil War was shifting to the outskirts of the former Russian Empire. But in the Russian Black Earth Region it smoldered latently.
In 1918–1919, the policy of war communism had already led to local skirmishes between food detachments and peasants in the Tambov province. More than once, weapons that ended up in the hands of the “kulak underground” after Denikin’s General Konstantin Mamontov’s raid on Tambov region made themselves known.
But local bodies of the RCP(b) on the "bayonets" of the CHONs - special purpose units (analogous to the internal troops) - achieved that one of the granaries of Russia would give the planned volume of grain to the cities. Thus, at the peak of the Civil War, in 1919, the required 12.3 million poods were taken out of the province.
For the 1920 harvest, the Bolsheviks set a seemingly more lenient norm of 11.5 million poods. Nature dealt a fatal blow: at the beginning of the summer, a drought hit the Tambov region. But the provincial food committee stood its ground: 11.5 million poods of grain had to be given, given that only 12 million had been collected, God willing.
Plus, penalties were imposed on that part of the province that in the past, 1919, was temporarily under the control of the White Volunteer Army (and did not submit the required food tax quota).
The highest levy rates fell on the districts most affected by the drought - Kirsanovsky, Borisoglebsky and Tambovsky. It is not surprising that it was the last two that became the centers of the rebellion.
Telegrams were sent from the particularly affected volosts to Tambov and the center: after the food detachments had delivered their quotas, the peasants were left with only quinoa, bark, and nettles.
The Bolshevik experiments in creating agricultural communes, the first experience of forced collectivization with the total socialization of inventory and property, right down to small livestock, also proved ineffective.
In the summer of 1920, the Tambov organization of the Socialist Revolutionaries (which found itself in a strange, semi-prohibited position, like the entire Socialist Revolutionary Party) reported to its Central Committee: “The state farms were completely unable to cope with the seized land. Thus, in the Aleksandrovsky state farm of the Tambov province, out of 820 dessiatines of arable land, only 140 dessiatines of winter crops were sown, but even these results were achieved exclusively by forcibly attracting peasants to work…”
The local Soviet authorities relied exclusively on the "stick", clearly forgetting about the "carrot". The head of the provincial executive committee, the old Bolshevik Alexander Shlikhter, reported on August 8 at a food conference:
“I consider it necessary to note precisely this feature of the work of the Tambov Provincial Food Committee - to take into one’s fist the kulak element that predominates in the Tambov province, to squeeze it in a vice to such an extent that the kulak would take into account the orders of the Provincial Food Committee as something that is inevitable, unavoidable in itself…”
On August 15, the first lightning flashed: in the village of Khitrovo in Tambov district, peasants disarmed the food detachment. And on the 19th, the uprising, like a forest fire, engulfed several districts at once. It is characteristic that one of the first targets was the state agricultural commune - the Ivanovo state farm. Here, a group of about 40 deserters stole previously "collectivized" horses, killing two worker activists.
It is not surprising that recent Red Army soldiers appeared in the first reports about the Tambov Rebellion. This was an "echo" of the mass mobilizations in the province in 1919 - the Red Army compensated for the losses at the fronts with reinforcements, and the command was forced to ignore the motivation of the new recruits (often from the prosperous peasantry with an anti-Bolshevik attitude).
It is not surprising that those mobilized often left the Reds for the "Greens". Thus, in May 1919, the Borisoglebsk Uyezd Committee - the district committee of the RCP (b) - received reports that the number of deserters in the entrusted territory "amounts to 3 thousand people, they are armed with rifles, machine guns, and cannons."
Nature, which "contributed" to the incitement of the uprising, also gave it a base. In the Borisoglebsk district, along the Khoper River, there is the Tellermanovsky forest, which provided shelter to the "rebellious" Cossacks of Kondraty Bulavin.
The war began - which Soviet historians would have included in the same row with the speeches of Razin, Bulavin and Pugachev - if not for the anti-Soviet direction of this rebellion.
COMRADE SCHLICHTER'S FIASCO
On August 21, the Tambov Provincial Committee of the RCP (b) created an emergency operational headquarters and declared a state of siege. Nine days later, a telegram was sent to Moscow: "the situation is serious," the Bolshevik activists of the provincial center were transferred to barracks. On August 31, Comrade Shlikhter personally led a punitive detachment of mobilized party members, but the detachment was defeated in a skirmish with the rebels.
For this failure, Schlichter was removed from his post, and in Moscow they realized that a large-scale rebellion was unfolding in the rear of the Red Army.
In a matter of weeks, the Bolsheviks lost control over the countryside in the Tambov, Kirsanovsky, Borisoglebsky, and Kozlovsky districts of the Tambov province. The insurgent movement spread to the neighboring districts of the Voronezh and Saratov provinces.
In November, at a congress of commanders of partisan detachments (or, as they were called in the party documents of the RCP(b), “raging counter-revolutionary White Socialist Revolutionary gangs”), it was decided to proclaim a United Partisan Army.
The Union of Working Peasants, the political wing of the uprising, was also formed. The STC proclaimed itself an organization close to the Socialist Revolutionaries. True, the Socialist Revolutionaries themselves, right and left, were in no hurry to recognize the Tambov peasants as "their own", partly fearing the close interest of the Cheka.
The program of the "United Army" and the STC was not particularly new - restoration of rights and freedoms of the February 1917 model, "all power to the Constituent Assembly", establishment of a temporary democratic republic in Tambov region with councils without communists, etc. The real agenda "on the ground" was simpler: down with the food tax, commissars and poor committees, give freedom to use land and dispose of grain.
POLICEMAN FROM VLADIMIR CENTRAL
At the same time, the name “in whose honor” the uprising would be named began to appear in the reports: Alexander Antonov.
The man whom Soviet historians would call the leader of the Antonov movement was a seasoned revolutionary. Born in Moscow (though to a family of native Tambovites), Antonov joined the Socialist Revolutionary Party during the First Russian Revolution. He drew his brother Dmitry along with him, who became his closest comrade-in-arms.
He took part in expropriations, which the Bolsheviks, led by the "legendary Kamo ", did not disdain. He was sentenced to death by a military court, which was replaced by life imprisonment by order of Prime Minister Pyotr Stolypin. He sat in Vladimir Central, where the future army commander and then RSDLP(b) activist Mikhail Frunze also served his sentence.
The "victim of tsarism" was liberated by the February Revolution. After October 1917, during the short period when the Left Socialist Revolutionaries were, along with the Bolsheviks, the ruling party, Comrade Antonov headed the militia of the Kirsanovsky district. One of his subordinates was the former lieutenant of the imperial army Pyotr Tokmakov, who was to play a decisive role in the Tambov uprising.
The "independent Socialist Revolutionary" Antonov remained in the police post even after the demonstration of his fellow party members in Moscow in June 1918. But already at the end of the summer he went underground, having formed, according to the old Socialist Revolutionary habit, a combat organization with expropriations and individual terror - now no longer against the "tsarist satraps", but against the Bolsheviks.
In the summer of 1919, Antonov’s detachment numbered 150 bayonets from among the deserters and a large “support base” among the Kirsanov peasants.
But despite the fact that the great uprising that broke out in the summer of 1920 was called "Antonovshchina" in Soviet monographs and textbooks, Alexander Stepanovich was not its sole leader. However, he was not a "screen" called upon to give the Socialist Revolutionary legitimacy to the peasant rebellion. Antonov commanded the 2nd Partisan Army, and then headed the Main Operational Headquarters of the United Army. His brother Dmitry, commander of the 4th Nizhne-Spassky Regiment of the Insurgent Forces, also served under him.
The Antonovs also influenced the ideological agenda of the STK and the United Army, for example, the compilation of leaflets addressed to the Red Army soldiers: "Brothers, Red Army soldiers! Come to your senses, who are you fighting? This is not a gang, but a peasant uprising - we have risen up in order to free citizens from the commune," etc.
The general command of the rebels was carried out by a retired lieutenant, ex-policeman Tokmakov - unlike the Antonov politicians, a man with experience of the First World War. Tokmakov's authority was such that the lieutenant was subordinated to Colonel of the Imperial Army Alexander Boguslavsky, who became the commander of one of the three rebel armies, the 1st.
"TAKE HOSTAGES FROM CITIZENS AGED 18 YEARS AND OLDER"
Soviet historiography emphasized the cruelty of the "kulaks and white bandits" who terrorized not only the poor peasants and communists, but also the poorest peasants loyal to the Soviet government. Post-Soviet sources focused on the Red Army's punitive raids against the rebels. In fact, in the third year of the fratricidal Civil War, both sides were cruel.
The report of the Kirsanov district committee of the RCP (b) reported on what was happening in the small homeland of the rebel “commander-in-chief” Pyotr Tokmakov, in the village of Inokovka:
"On August 29, bandits raided the Inokovsky party organization, brutally killing 17 people. Since the bandits' action, eleven volost organizations have been completely destroyed, in which seventy-eight communists have been slaughtered, including a visiting session of the GubChK with 19 employees. In total, up to one hundred and fifty communists have been recorded as dead by March 1, that is, half of the members of the village organizations."
The rebels did not spare those who were suspected of collaborating with the "Bolsheviks". Thus, in the village of Kalugino, the chairman of the VolkomPart (the volost party committee) Golomazov was demonstratively executed - "they heated the wire until it was red hot and pulled it through his nostrils, ears and mouth. Then they cut off the limbs of the body and tied the mutilated corpse to the tail of a horse and dragged it around the village."
On the other hand, the very first order of the operational headquarters of the Tambov Provincial Cheka, dated August 31, 1920, stated:
"In relation to villages in which citizens are noticed participating in bandit actions or harboring bandits, conduct a merciless red terror." Red Army soldiers and Chekists were ordered to take hostages "members of families from those families whose members joined the bandits or helped them; take hostages citizens from 18 years of age, regardless of their gender."
THE "GREEN" THREAT
Already in October 1920, Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars Vladimir Lenin ordered the head of the Cheka Felix Dzerzhinsky to "speed up the defeat of the Antonov rebels." But even after the mobilization of the VOKhR and ChON forces against the rebels, the Reds could deploy less than 4.5 thousand fighters with 22 machine guns and five artillery pieces. At the same time, the "United Partisan Army of the Tambov Region" had 20 thousand "bayonets" and 44 machine guns at its disposal.
At the peak of the uprising, by the turn of 1920-21, the troops of Tokmakov and Antonov reached 50 thousand fighters, the rebels operated on a territory larger than the Benelux countries. True, the "green" area was exclusively rural - like the Makhnovist movement, the Tambov rebels relied only on peasants, but not on workers. Nevertheless, the peasant war raged 350-400 kilometers from the capital of the RSFSR.
In the Insurgent Army, Batko Makhno looked at the Tambovites as possible allies in the fight against the "counterrevolutionaries in the revolution" - the Bolsheviks. Especially since the Red Army forces were distracted by the fight against Wrangel and the campaign in Poland.
But the evacuation of Wrangel’s Russian army from Crimea in November 1920 and the Riga Peace Treaty concluded with Poland on March 18, 1921, predetermined the fate of the Tambov uprising.
NEP AND PHOSGENE
We must give credit to the Moscow leadership - unlike their Tambov comrades, they used not only the stick, but also the carrot, knocking the social base out from under the army of Tokmakov and Antonov. From February 1921, the food tax was reduced and then abolished.
It was replaced by a more lenient food tax - a natural food tax, the rates of which were half the requirements of the food tax. This was the first sign of the new economic policy. The NEP, we recall, was announced in March 1921 by decree of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee based on the decision of the 10th Congress of the RCP (b) and under the obvious impression of the Tambov experience.
Nature also made its "bite". With the beginning of spring field work, the number of the rebel army decreased by half. The peasants returned to the allotments that were supposedly guaranteed to them by the Bolshevik Decree on Land of 1917. Moreover, in the spring of 1921, the Bolsheviks declared an amnesty for ordinary rebels - on the condition that they surrender their weapons and inform the Cheka of the location of the "gang leaders".
At the same time, the "whip" was also at work. After the "Antonovites" ignored the ultimatum of commander Vladimir Antonov-Ovseenko and did not surrender by April 12, Moscow assigned the liquidation of the rebellion to Mikhail Tukhachevsky. The recent failed conqueror of Warsaw was given the task of suppressing the "White Socialist Revolutionary rebellion" within a month.
In May, the Red Army launched a massive offensive. The Reds had a point in their favor, since the commander of the United Army, Tokmakov, had died in battle back in February 1921. In April, the head of the Voronezh rebels, the commander of the 3rd Antonov Army, Ivan Kolesnikov, was killed.
The Red Cavalry Brigades, the 15th Siberian Cavalry Brigade and other units under the overall command of Ieronim Uborevich defeated Colonel Boguslavsky's 2nd Army and other large rebel units in late May and early June. Completing the operation, Grigory Kotovsky's rear troops dispersed the remaining rebel regiments.
On June 12, 1921, Commander Tukhachevsky issued an order classified as “secret,” which read:
"The forests where the bandits are hiding must be cleared with poisonous gases, precisely calculated so that the cloud of suffocating gases spreads completely throughout the entire forest, destroying everything that was hiding in it."
The Red Army used artillery with chlorine and its mixture with phosgene and drove the rebels out of their shelters several times (although lethal gas weapons were still used only occasionally).
THE FATE OF THE LOSERS AND THE WINNERS
At the same time, mass repressions were carried out against the families of the rebels: for refusing to report the location of the partisans, people were arrested and shot as “outcasts”, and hostages were taken into custody in the villages.
"Nothing works without executions, " Tukhachevsky openly admitted at headquarters. By mid-June, more than 5,000 people had been taken hostage, dozens of villages were considered "special regime zones" - the entire male population was rounded up, and unscheduled executions of villagers found sympathetic to the rebels were carried out.
In total, during the operations in the summer of 1921, the state deployed up to 55 thousand Red Army soldiers, armed with armored trains and aircraft. By the end of the summer, the uprising was practically suppressed. The remnants of the 1st rebel army went to the Don (where they were soon caught), and even Aleksandr Antonov with several close associates hid in the forests until June 1922, but was eventually discovered by the Chekists and died in a shootout.
The defeat of the uprising was achieved with great bloodshed: the irretrievable losses of peasant families in the Tambov province amounted to tens of thousands of souls. The combat losses of the Red Army exceeded 5 thousand, with 15 thousand rebels killed in battle.
The number of people convicted at various times on suspicion of participating in or supporting the “kulak rebellion” reaches 250 thousand.
That’s not a few…
The leaders of the uprising perished, but history did not spare the victors either. In 1925, Kotovsky was killed under mysterious circumstances. In 1937, Tukhachevsky and his closest comrade Uborevich were convicted and shot under the fabricated "case of the anti-Soviet Trotskyist military organization", and in 1938, one of the key participants in the October Revolution, Antonov-Ovseenko.
Nevertheless, it was precisely after the Tambov rebellion (to which one can add the Kronstadt mutiny of the “peasants in sailor’s pea jackets”) that the Russian “sower and keeper” was given a short respite and the opportunity to work on his land – until collectivization.
[HumanEvents] Mental health diagnoses will spread like wildfire through schools, not because kids are sicker, but because being “special” has become a badge of belonging.
On July 31, 2025, the Governor of Illinois signed into law SB1560, which requires all public schools to provide mental health screenings to students in grades 3-12. According to Gov. Pritzker, this law is meant to “…provide early identification and intervention so those who are struggling get the help that they need as soon as possible. They improve academic and social outcomes. They help us break down the stigma that too often is a barrier to seeking help” (remarks at a news conference July 31, 2025, at an Evanston middle school).
Beginning in the 2027-2028 school year, school districts must offer screenings to students in grades 3-12 at least once per year. The Illinois State Board of Education (ISBE) has until September 1, 2026, to develop model procedures and guidance.
As of now, there are no guidelines on who will perform these screenings – that decision is left to ISBE. The screenings are not designed to diagnose, but instead will rely on self-report tools to detect markers for anxiety, depression, abuse, or trauma.
What could possibly go wrong?
I’ll explain.
Kids and adolescents are masters of adaptation. The need to belong, to fit in, and to gain the attention of peers is especially strong in grades 3-12. We’ve already seen trends like “neurodivergent” identities and trans labels explode since the COVID lockdowns pushed kids onto screens. Now kids brag about being “on the spectrum” – because almost anyone can claim to be “neurodivergent” when they’re simply quirky or different. Even some autistic youth have gravitated toward trans identities because that community offers acceptance for being odd or unconventional.
The same pattern will happen with these screenings. Students will be thrilled to walk away with a label because it feels cool, unique, and validating. Mental health diagnoses will spread like wildfire through schools, not because kids are sicker, but because being “special” has become a badge of belonging.
In Bad Therapy, Abigail Shrier explains that instead of easing distress, therapy often traps kids in cycles of obsessively examining their feelings, amplifying anxiety rather than offering relief. This danger only grows with self-reported screenings, especially when results are logged by non-clinical staff who can’t distinguish between genuine struggles, trend-following, or attention-seeking. Shrier also warns that diagnoses are now handed out liberally, medications are prescribed too quickly, and therapy is offered for issues that don’t warrant medical intervention – creating a cycle of dependency.
Then there’s the digital net.
In 2022, Gov. Pritzker launched the Children’s Behavioral Health Transformation Initiative (CBHTI) to address long waitlists, fragmented systems, and overwhelmed families. The answer was BEACON – the Behavioral Health Evaluation and Coordination Online Network – a statewide portal meant to serve as a “front door” to care. Families, schools, or hospitals fill out an intake questionnaire, and BEACON spits out a “service navigator” plan with referrals to therapy, crisis intervention, Medicaid programs, or support groups.
The State contracted with Google Public Sector to build BEACON on Google’s cloud, powered by AI. Under SB1560, psychiatric hospitals are now required to funnel discharged children into BEACON to ensure “continuity of care.” Which means children’s most sensitive data will be processed through an AI-driven system owned and operated by Google. Not only does this open the door to hacking and data sales, it cements the State’s partnership with Big Tech to monitor and control families.
Industry lobbyists often grease legislation like this. It’s the same playbook used with the DSM, where more than 60% of DSM-5 task force members had financial ties to pharmaceutical companies – over $14 million in total.
But children aren’t wards of the State. They are the responsibility of their parents – to be nurtured, raised, and supported at home, not handed over to bureaucrats and corporations.
And to the final, most important point – the parent trap.
Family structure is one of the strongest predictors of child well-being, right alongside socioeconomic status. A nationally representative study of Korean adolescents found: “Adolescents from single-mother, single-father, and restructured families were associated with lower perceived academic achievement compared to adolescents from two-parent families” (Park & Lee, 2020). So why not invest in strengthening marriages and families, instead of building policies that drive them apart?
It’s simple: the nuclear family is under attack. The State believes it has the right to raise your children. Don’t just take my word for it – here’s MSNBC host Melissa Harris-Perry spelling it out herself:
“We haven’t had a very collective notion of - these are our children. So part of it is we have to break through our kind of private idea that kids belong to their parents, or kids belong to their families, and recognize that kids belong to whole communities.”
We need to keep families intact. Study after study proves what common sense already knows: children do best when their parents – not the State – raise them with love and stability.
SB1560 isn’t about helping kids. It’s about expanding a system that thrives on labeling them, funneling them into programs they don’t need, and handing their most private information over to bureaucrats and corporations. It’s about normalizing dependency on the State while sidelining parents – the very people who should be guiding their children through life’s challenges.
Illinois just gave us a blueprint for how to grow government at the expense of parents. The only real antidote is stronger families and the courage to say no to a system that insists it knows our children better than we do.
[TH] It's Kurt
This is Gavin Newsom’s time to shine, and by "shine," I mean, make a damn fool of himself. The Patrick Bateman-channeling goof — you just know he listens to a lot of Phil Collins — is an idiot, sure, but he does possess a kind of animal cunning, and he’s got endless money from the rich libs who pull his strings. This makes him potentially dangerous in the sense that anyone at the head of a political party’s ticket could conceivably win an election. Sure, he’s gunning for 2028 — though his views on guns are notoriously negative — and he thinks he’s going to ride his gerrymandering crusade into the nomination. He wants to be the Democrat who fights, except he hits and pulls hair like a girl.
His latest flex is trying to mimic Trump’s unique vibe, right down to the all-cap tweets. To call it "cringe" is to be kind; remember when President Rubio tried that in 2016? But he has a whole social media team crafting this crap; in the meantime, so many of us are abandoning the Golden-Brown State — Gavin inspired the Poo Map — for new lives in America. The latest is to compare a pic of him as a slick rich kid high schooler with one of poor kid J.D. Vance looking awkward — Gavin’s savvy political instincts have him playing James Spader in every 80s movie and thinking that’s going to score him points with the normies.
I don’t know if his gerrymandering scheme is going to work or not. California’s independent redistricting commission (sic) has already thoroughly gerrymandered the state such that it’s even worse now than Texas will now that its Democrats have crawled home and surrendered even as they declare victory. After all, that’s the new thing. Declare victory regardless of how humiliating your defeat. Remember how Trump had the National Guard come out and finally made Los Angeles peaceful? A couple of months later, those National Guardsmen were released from active duty, and Governor Hairstyle took to X to proclaim that Trump had somehow backed down. I wonder if this actually works on anyone. Normal people look at this kind of obvious nonsense, shake their heads, and go about their business. Do Democrats chalk this up as a big win? "Hey, Trump fought Newsom for three months, got done what he wanted done, and then let the guys doing it go home. Way to go, Gavin!"
Gavin isn’t really a politician. He’s pure appetite, the wanting being the entirety of his being. There’s nothing else there. It’s not that he’s an empty suit. He’s less than that. He’s a black hole of pure unfocused ambition, which is to say, he sucks hard. And the people of California know that, not least of all his own voters. If you look at what happened in Pacific Palisades, where about 90 percent of the people burned out of their houses cast to vote for the human hairdo, you see that those folks are being royally screwed. There have barely been any permits to rebuild seven months later, and the local bureaucrats are already getting turgid at the thought of all the new requirements they’re going to place on people to rebuild their homes, requirements that are going to cost a fortune and price many of these Democrat voters out of ever returning to their property. If they ever do return, their new neighbors in high-density housing are going to be the kind of Section 8 losers who make up so much of the Democrat constituency. Well done, liberals, you’ve played yourselves.
I wish I could say these people will go to the ballot box and make the Democrats pay next time, but they won’t. They will eagerly and obediently cast their vote for the same people making their lives a living hell. They’ve been told, and chose to believe, that Donald Trump is Hitler reborn and that it is much, much more important to keep Donald Trump from doing things like cutting taxes, establishing law and order, restoring America’s reputation around the globe, and expelling the huge chunk of the Third World that’s decided to infest our country than to protect their own interests. Oh well. As I often say, I’m not capable of caring more about people than they care about themselves.
This gerrymandering scheme, which is going to be his marquee achievement when he goes to the Democrats in search of their nomination in two years, is not a done deal. There are some inconvenient things in the way, obstacles like the California Constitution and state law. Now, he’s got the Supreme Court in his pocket, and it will rule however he wants. The law stuff is not going to stop him. There is a requirement that the independent commission pushed by ex-Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, infamous for his maid-tapping, be negated by a vote of the people in order to have a redistricting between censuses. That’s why they’re going to have to have a referendum in November, and there’s no guarantee that the Democrats will win it. Schwarzenegger himself is opposed to the referendum, and he’s going to campaign against it. It’s nice to see him finally standing up to a Democrat forthrightly instead of passive aggressively, you know, like by hitting the help to spite his skeletal Kennedy former wife.
Will it be enough? Who knows? There are a lot of Republicans in California — in fact, there are more Republicans in California than in any other state, a function of California being our largest state. These off-year special elections are notably poorly attended. That is, regular people probably won’t show up unless they’re motivated to do so. Maybe the Republicans will be motivated to turn out. A lot of Democrats won’t, despite many of them not having a job because they are welfare cheats. There’s a possibility that this referendum will fail; polls today show majority opposition to it. But there are going to be hundreds of millions of dollars spent by all the leftist money groups to try to convince people to turn out to gerrymander the state further. It may work, but if it doesn’t work, Gavin Newsom’s going to be completely shafted. He’s going to look even more impotent than he does already, especially after losing his ex-wife to Donald Trump Jr. Maybe that’s why he hates Trump, having been so thoroughly humiliated by his son.
In the meantime, Gavin Newsom is continuing with his ridiculous and juvenile social media war against Trump. What’s funny about it is not the content — it’s pedestrian and stupid, the kind of thing that doesn’t make you laugh, but if you agree with him, you politely clap like you’re watching Colbert from the audience.
What’s funny about it is that Trump doesn’t care. It’s like Newsom is not even on his radar. How lame do you have to be for Trump not to bother to tweet about you even to mock you? That makes you lower than Rosie O’Donnell, as if that’s possible. If Trump were worried about him, you’d be hearing about him. And I trust Trump’s instincts.
Although somebody, and it may have been Trump or one of his people, did do something hilarious that caused Newsom to spaz out in public. Somebody sent Newsom a red Trump 2028 hat. That’s perfect. It’s the distillation of the utter contempt we should all have for California’s ridiculous governor.
Posted by: Frank G ||
08/20/2025 08:35 ||
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Direct Translation via Google Translate. Edited. by Malek Dudakov
[REGNUM] An educational moment in the White House: this is how one can describe the events of the past day in Washington with the arrival of Volodymyr Zelensky and representatives of the European establishment to a reception with Donald Trump.
The key role was played not even by the negotiations themselves, during which little new was mentioned, but by the symbolism of the meeting itself, which was supposed to cement the primacy of Trump's agenda and the need for Europeans and Ukrainians to accept it as a given.
Kyiv lobbyists and European hawks were left in a state of complete confusion after the Russia-US summit in Alaska. They did not really understand what to expect from the American president.
They encountered sharp pressure from the United States, which began to quite openly impose its conditions for a peaceful settlement on Kyiv and European capitals. This was clearly demonstrated in the results of the meetings in the White House.
So the European establishment was clearly afraid to send Zelensky alone to meet with Trump, expecting that the Ukrainian delegation would simply be crushed.
However, it was not possible to agree on a consensus figure among the EU representatives. Therefore, almost everyone went with Zelensky in droves - from Emmanuel Macron and Georgie Meloni to Alexander Stubb and Ursula von der Leyen.
This resulted in a real clown show, where European leaders had to wait their turn in the corridor of the White House like naughty schoolchildren for an audience with Trump, who was a kind of school principal.
A separate negotiating track was held with Zelensky, during which Trump was able to achieve, if not all, then many concessions from the Ukrainian side.
To begin with, Kyiv showed its readiness to discuss the actual, if not legal, recognition of its territorial losses. Everyone has already safely forgotten about the 1991 borders.
So far, there is no talk of withdrawing the Ukrainian Armed Forces from the territory of the DPR, but here too, in the future, it is theoretically possible to adjust the position of the Ukrainian President's office. The White House is dissatisfied with Bankova's inability to negotiate and would like to resolve these territorial issues as quickly as possible, taking into account Russia's position.
At the same time, Trump, at the official and highest level, abandoned plans to include Ukraine in NATO.
Instead, Kyiv's lobbyists are asking the US to provide them with some kind of security guarantees similar to Article 5 of the North Atlantic Alliance Charter.
Although it is worth keeping in mind that this article does not guarantee a military response to aggression against NATO members. It gives members of the alliance the right, but not the obligation, to use various measures, including military ones.
The US does have agreements with some countries that commit Washington to defending them in the event of a conflict, such as Cold War-era agreements with Japan and South Korea. However, it is unlikely that the Trump team will make such commitments in the context of Ukraine.
There are also alternative options, such as security agreements with Israel or Taiwan.
Contrary to popular belief, the United States has never promised to defend Israel in the event of any military conflict.
Although in fact the Pentagon very often comes to the aid of the Jewish state. But this happens largely due to the activity of the Israeli lobby. The situation is similar with Taiwan - there are very vague formulations that can be interpreted in any way.
Perhaps a similar scenario will await Ukraine.
By the way, Kyiv has already signed many security agreements - with the US during Joe Biden's term, and with Britain, Germany, France, Poland and others. However, none of them imposed any obligations on Western countries to come to Kyiv's aid in the future.
The notorious “coalition of the willing” from among the European hawks also ended its existence rather sadly.
Convincing the US to provide them with military, air and intelligence support has been impossible. Forming their own peacekeeping corps is too expensive and technically extremely difficult. Especially in conditions when Britain and France are in the throes of a severe budget crisis.
Trump has once again publicly promised to sell American weapons to Europeans, which they can then use at their own discretion. Including sending them to Ukraine.
However, for Kyiv lobbyists, this is a very negative scenario overall. After all, they will have to stand in the general queue to receive scarce weapons, which takes many years. And compete for the same air defense systems with Israel, Taiwan and other US allies.
For the White House, this way of posing the question is an opportunity to remove responsibility for the future of Ukraine and shift it onto Europe.
The European elites who have arrived in the White House are being given a very transparent hint that they can wage a standoff with Russia for as long as they like. If, of course, they have the strength and resources.
The US will continue to reduce its participation in the affairs of the Old World. There is a possibility that some US troops will begin to withdraw from Europe this fall.
The question of the need to hold elections in Ukraine was raised separately.
Zelensky was forced to publicly confirm the possibility of organizing elections for the first time. Washington is discussing a variety of options for reformatting Ukrainian politics.
Among them are the elections to the Rada, in which the Servants of the People lose their majority. Then, through various parties in opposition to Zelensky, it will be possible to approve a new composition of the Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine, which will recruit apparatchiks according to the American quota. In this case, it will be possible to govern Ukraine directly from the United States and bypass Bankova and Zelensky.
But this is a scenario for the future after possible progress in the framework of the negotiating track with Russia.
For the White House, the obvious priority in the near future is to try to find a common denominator and reach firm agreements. And then the conversation will turn to reconfiguring Ukraine's political system.
Trump's team is clearly in a hurry, and there are objective reasons for that. Congress returns from vacation in September, after which a difficult period of budget approval awaits.
If this is not done before the beginning of October, the US government will be threatened with a "shutdown" or suspension of work. This has happened often in modern American history and is not a catastrophe, but it is still not an optimal scenario.
Therefore, the White House will in any case have to be distracted by the budget process, which is very important to it.
And then, in October and November, there will be local elections in the United States, including some significant electoral battles, such as the mayoral race in New York. And immediately after that, preparations will begin for the upcoming midterm congressional elections in November 2026.
Trump, J.D. Vance, and many other members of the current administration will go into election mode. They will travel around the states, give speeches, and mobilize the electorate. Foreign policy issues will slowly begin to fade into the background.
So Trump's window of opportunity will start closing in the next few months. He needs to get as many international agreements concluded as possible in a short time, because it will be much more difficult to work later.
Whether Trump will succeed or not, time will tell. But one thing is clear - the pressure on Ukraine and Europe in the near future promises to be colossal.
[Zero] We are living in a point in history where so many, if not all, of the foundational pillars of our society are being questioned. In some cases, those pillars are almost wholly being cast aside. Once the cornerstones of our American backbone, we are finding ourselves doubting it all as we ask ourselves and one another... Can the government truly be that corrupt? Are the courts actually compromised? Are major media outlets really just mouthpieces for propaganda? Is modern medicine a sham?
It is difficult for people to question what they have known all their life to be something that is "good" or "honest" or "reliable". Why would you doubt the things that everyone around you (including your trusted friends and beloved family members) are telling you are true, and pure, and good? Of course the government is there to protect us. Of course the legal system is designed to uphold our righteous laws and defend liberty. Of course the newscaster on the TV is telling us the truth. Of course the drugs our doctors prescribe to us are there to help us get well.
As hard as it is to question societal norms, it is even more difficult to do something about it. Indian author, Arundhati Roy, has said:
"The trouble is that once you see it, you can’t unsee it. And once you’ve seen it, keeping quiet, saying nothing, becomes as political an act as speaking out. There’s no innocence. Either way, you’re accountable."
In questioning traditional, stalwart institutions, we find ourselves standing on the precipice of a rabbit hole so large and deep, it is better likened to a meteoric crater than simply a hole. There are so many craters all around us now - the government crater, the legal crater, the medical crater, the media crater, and so on. These craters are appearing one after the next, in parallel formation, and like Dominos, if one begins to fall, the chain reaction of full scale collapse is undeniable.
Let us, for a moment here, peer over the ridge of one of these craters as we ask ourselves...
Is modern medicine a sham?
Let’s first look at the learned, societal norm... When most people hear the word "medicine", their mind immediately forms a positive opinion and thinks, "This will help me feel better and get well". Like Pavlov’s dog, we have been trained to correlate medicine with the thing that cures your sickness when you are ailing. You have a malady, you go to the doctor, they give you medicine, and it will fix the malady from which you are suffering and restore your health. Right? Ehhhh, well, ummmm, not exactly. Sadly, in today’s world, "health" has become synonymous with "medicine", and medicine has become an industry - and not just any industry. It is behemoth!
Did you know that the largest lobby we have in the United States is the pharmaceutical industry? It is the largest, by a long shot, as it solidly towers over all of the others. Let me share some numbers with you. Pharma spends approximately $380,000,000 (three hundred eighty million) every year lobbying Congress. To give you some perspective, the second largest lobby industry in our nation is the electronics manufacturing industry, and it spends about $250,000,000 million a year lobbying Congress. The third largest is the insurance industry which spends about $150,000,000 million a year lobbying Congress. All the other industries that lobby simply pale in comparison. These statistics alone reveal so much.
#2
Indeed! That whole Germ Theory of Disease thing is rather preposterous. Sure, diseases are caused by tiny invisible creatures attacking us. Seriously, tiny invisible creatures? One might as well believe in demons and fairies as so-called 'microbes'.
#3
My wife and I (both closer to 80 than any other number) were talking about this today. Neither of us has seen a real doctor (an MD) in more than three years. It's all PAs and NPs. The only way to see a real doctor is to go to the emergency room with something life-threatening, and even then it's a "maybe". And just TRY to get a prescription for pain medicine. Or get a prescription refilled without visiting the "doctor's" office. Thermonuclear weapons aren't destructive enough.
Posted by: Old Patriot ||
08/20/2025 13:08 Comments ||
Top||
#4
It’s not medicine, per se, but too many of the practitioners and researchers either put on PC blinders or are not honest in their work:
Lol, what the hell is going on at Nature?
"Dominant science (sometimes referred to as Western science) is rooted in colonization, racism and white supremacy: it has been an active participant in the assimilation, marginalization and genocide of Indigenous people." pic.twitter.com/CjaZMaSlIo
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
[Zero] We are living in a point in history where so many, if not all, of the foundational pillars of our society are being questioned. In some cases, those pillars are almost wholly being cast aside. Once the cornerstones of our American backbone, we are finding ourselves doubting it all as we ask ourselves and one another... Can the government truly be that corrupt? Are the courts actually compromised? Are major media outlets really just mouthpieces for propaganda? Is modern medicine a sham?
