Isiah 1:17- Learn to do well. Seek justice, Relieve the oppressed, Judge the fatherless, Plead for the widow.
In a recent clip from the Dad Saves America podcast, host John Papola sits down with Wilfred Reilly — a Chicago native and political scientist at Kentucky State University — to explore striking parallels between America’s growth and the rise (and potential pitfalls) of ancient Rome.
Watch the clip here [VIDEO]
America is approaching its 250th birthday in 2026, and the conversation around what that means for our national story is heating up.
It's not often that I get particularly personal on this blog, however, these holidays are going to be very different this year. My situation change with the lost of a dear loved one.
The family home will be very different and quiet without them. An illness took a toll on them and it was quite a while before knowing what was really going on - they really wouldn't tell anyone it was a shock to most that they made their transition.
Regardless, I still believe in the idea of holiday cheer and perhaps for many of you now I have this eyar to know what it means to essentially celebrate the holidays alone. I do have a large family to rely on so the holidays won't be me totally alone. At the same time, a quiet home during holidays is very appreciated.
Regardless I always enjoy the festiveness of the holidays and certainly to be able to cook meals that I don't normally eat during the year. Though this year it's just me cooking and eating the food.
Sorry to gross you out but it's time to defrost the chitlins that I had bought from the Dixmoor Meat Market out in Chicago's south suburbs. Chitlins is something I do enjoy eating during the holidays and this dear loved one showed me how to prepare and cook them.
Regardless I don't want reveal too much about who this person was to me as this isn't that kind of blog. I miss her in the worst way and even if she wasn't at home, my only wish is to be able to call her and talk to her one more time.
To be honest in the past I had offered "easter eggs" of close people who I had lost over the years. And given that this blog has been around almost 20 years, I'll leave it up to you to find those two random names mentioned over the years.
I hope if you're enjoy a quite home that you take this holiday season as a time of self-reflection. Hopefully, the next holiday season you take the timeout to celebrate with the people you care about.
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| Credit: USA Today |
[VIDEO] How many of you saw a similar most recent video featuring Ben Shapiro facing off against a variety of liberals in a debate.
To see a cop defend his profession to those who have ran afoul of the law at some point in their lives is something I like to see more of. It's definitely a good thing to see two side of the law & order coin engage in a discussion with regards to policing.
[VIDEO] Ami Horowitz is very entertaining. Its seems as if a lot of people don't know about this holiday Black or white. Some feel guilty about not knowing much about it.
Juneteenth officially became a holiday in 2021 and some in this video thinks the creation of this holiday is divisive. It might surprise you who might agree that the creation of this holiday is divisive...
[VIDEO] A number of topics I saw when watching this interview.
Vince Everett Ellison discusses manhood, the need for fathers, and even the origins and benefactors of Civil Rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King. I didn't see the whole 2 hour + interview but it was very interesting.
Ellison had appeared several times on Tucker's former FOX News program. Now we see a long form interview now that he's started his own platform.
[VIDEO] Filmmaker Van Neistat had already done two other videos discussing books which describes an 80 year cycle of conflict, crisis and then peace. Every 80 years the cycle will repeat itself. It causes me to think about these current times we're living in.
Let's think about the last decade-plus. The housing bubble, the pandemic, the so-called racial reckoning and right now the war in Ukraine. Once we get past the crisis and usually that crisis results in a war - OH NO - then we get peace and prosperity.
It's best to let Van further explain.
The books he had referenced with regards to these cycles are - thankfully Van lists them in the description
[VIDEO] If you can catch up to his manner of speaking, what he says is interesting.
He tackles a lot of social and cultural issues affecting the world today. He might say the matrix wants all the buildings of the world to look the same. The reasoning, they don't want people to have an attachment to a place.
He tackles the issue of beauty. What's beautiful if anything is beautiful? Beauty is something that is difficult to attain. And again a beautiful building an architect worked to make that building something for people to want to look at or visit. Also a beautiful woman works out to maintain her body, though ideally one should maintain their body for their own health.
And certainly parents raising children. How much time do parents spend speaking with their children? Do parents instill their own values to their children? Do they even know what's going on at school anymore? And who actually raises the children now?
If you have an hour of Patrick Bet David speaking with men's right activist Andrew Tate who is currently under house arrest in the Eastern European Republic of Romania having been indicted by the court system there.
[VIDEO] Think about this stat, 7% of all Americans are either far left or far right and yet they dominate the political discussion in America via social media. A very small number are the loudest and most vocal and most of us who aren't far left or far right say nothing. It could be that once we say anything that goes against the more vocal elements of our society we could be silenced by them.
I could say that could be very true for the far left in this nation. I find the far left more willing to engage in the censorship that you might find on social media than the far right. The far right aren't really found on these platforms and may well be the ones who are often censored. This is just what I've observed on the surface.
One thing I will not dispute is the extreme polarization. You see examples of how college students who don't mind asserting "trauma" will call for the removal of someone who induces trauma as explained here with a Harvard University dean. All he did was join in the defense of Harvey Weinstein and sadly the idea of due process and even if you know they did it they still deserve a rigorous defense can be trauma inducing for someone and problematic.
One professor in this story even states now he avoids controversial discussions because of course someone will have a problem with the discussion and will escalate it.
See these are the kind of stories that I like seeing from CBS' 60 Minutes...
[VIDEO] Interesting discussion if I believe some of these conspiracy theories and see what's going on in the news those who want to mess with the world's food supply and fall in with the green new dal take for granted the society we have today. If this only causes a "less secure society" then what did these progressives create.
Another part of the title I stole for this post from Tim Pool's podcast: "loss of luxuries WILL mean death of leftism". Be careful what you wish for abolish prisons, defund police, or even encourage certain forms of vagrancy.....
[VIDEO] Well we took a detour into the wacky world of sports entertainment the last couple of days, now we have a look at marxism.
Critical race theory or even radical gender idelology (which is for example why people list their preferred pronouns even if it is obvious in many cases) are said to be marxist. What exactly is marxism?
Author C. Bradley Thompson discusses in the above video.
[VIDEO] I've been hearing a lot about this from those on the right in the past two years, especially during this pandemic. I don't have a great concept of it other than this is the plan to remake our society and economic systems with the added component of a Green New Deal. Do you think Mike Slater of The First explains it very well?
[VIDEO] Joe Rogan is discussing this with Dr. Robert Malone a virologist/immunologist discussing society's response to the pandemic. From Dr. Malone's substack article:
As many of you know, I have spent time researching and speaking about mass psychosis theory. Most of what I have learned has come from Dr. Mattias Desmet, who realized that this form of mass hypnosis, of the madness of crowds, can account for the strange phenomenon of about 20-30% of the population in the western world becoming entranced with the Noble Lies and dominant narrative concerning the safety and effectiveness of the genetic vaccines, and both propagated and enforced by politicians, science bureaucrats, pharmaceutical companies and legacy media.
What one observes with the mass hypnosis is that a large fraction of the population is completely unable to process new scientific data and facts demonstrating that they have been misled about the effectiveness and adverse impacts of mandatory mask use, lockdowns, and genetic vaccines that cause people’s bodies to make large amounts of biologically active coronavirus Spike protein.
These hypnotized by this process are unable to recognize the lies and misrepresentations they are being bombarded with on a daily basis, and actively attack anyone who has the temerity to share information with them which contradicts the propaganda that they have come to embrace. And for those whose families and social networks have been torn apart by this process, and who find that close relatives and friends have ghosted them because they question the officially endorsed “truth” and are actually following the scientific literature, this can be a source of deep anguish, sorrow and psychological pain.
h/t Instapundit
[VIDEO] Mark Dice doing man on the street segment asking people about literary classics. Moby Dick, 1984, Huckleberry Finn, Tom Sawyer, Mein Kampf (let me save you the trouble with that one Adolf Hitler, Nazis, fascism, evil, etc.) to name a few. A lot of people don't know about these various books they couldn't name a plot or a character from these books. Some of them were adapted into major motion pictures...
And now these are books I want to read aside from that evil book named above I'm not touching that with a 10-foot pole. At the very least I want to see the adaptation of 1984 and if you're an Apple fan there was a MacIntosh ad back in the 1980s that was themes after the George Orwell 1984 novel.
Another quick fact George Orwell is also known for the novel Animal Farm which I vaguely remember reading years ago. Ehhh, while I'm not a huge reader like some people Dice spoke with in the video I can be a bit of a history buff whether politics, social history, or even believe it or not pop-culture or even scientific history. I like to see more about the space program for example.
Anyway, perhaps for a lot of those people who knows if they're readers or if they've even been educated about these books in school. Most of the books I listed were probably something I heard of in school from K-12 to even college. I could believe it's also a matter of interest.
BTW, I feel so bad for the young lady who didn't know that Dr. Seuss is NOT a non-fiction author. Hopefully she was momentarily confused which happens...
[VIDEO] Van Neistat is the brother of one Casey Neistat. Before I ever discovered Casey, there was a documentary show called The Neistat Brothers which aired for one season on HBO. Basically they were doing YouTube videos on premium cable long before Casey made a name for himself on YouTube. Casey and Van are longtime filmmakers and both have taken the YouTube plunge.
Van is a more recent phenomenon and I should've shared this video with you when it was first posted. Van was talking about this book which is called The Fourth Turning. Basically it asserts that what we're experience or have experienced occurs in 80 year cycles. We go through calm periods and then suddenly we're in periods of conflict. And it seems we're in a period of conflict right now.
I really like the idea of Gen X being the nomad generation of fixers. The other descriptions of younger generations as artists or heroes could also be apt for those generations. Time will tell if they will live up to that, right now we need the fixers and of course as time goes on the hero and artist generation will hopefully leave a more peaceful society.
Regardless I need to do more of what Van - The Spirited Man - does which is read. This book seems up my alley for sure.
Enjoy.
BTW, I haven't posted a lot because life happens. Often when I go to my job I carry a laptop for my own personal use and unfortunately it's been acting up on me. Goal is to get it fixed and get back onto my irregular schedule for this blog.
[VIDEO] Chinese scholar Helen Raleigh discusses how China has become one of the world's richest nations. Indeed we go from the Chinese Civil War where the Chinese Communist Party gained control of mainland China to Mao Zedong and his policies and then China's loosening of control over their people. Raleigh sees a trend by the regime of Xi Jinping tightening control over their people.
As you can tell I love Instapundit. I got an "instalanche" from them once. And I try not to over link to them but this time around I can't help it. Found another article from there to share with you. For those of you who don't understand history you might not get the references to the Hapsburgs or the Weimar Republic.
The Hapsburg were a royal family over the nations of Austria-Hungary and ruled over most of central Europe until the 1st World War. And the Weimar Republic ruled Germany after the 1st World War when the German Emperor abdicated when they lost that same war. The Weimar Republic enabled the eventual rise of Adolf Hitler who started the 2nd World War.
So this article I want to share with you asks are we emulating the fates of two former empires. Are we emulating the fall of the Hapsburgs or are we emulating the weaknesses of the Weimar Republic of Germany?
The author Domic Green makes the comparison considering America's current predicament:
Aaron Sibarium has written a fascinating article for American Purpose on the parallels between the current American republic and the Weimar republic. It’s worth reading on its own merits as a history lesson, as a reminder that no people is immune to time and tide, as a reflection on how democracy can turn into disaster. It’s worth reading even if you disagree, as I do.
Sibarium rightly identifies the Weimar-esque tendencies in modern American life: radicalization of once-centrist parties, demonization of the other side, a willingness to overturn founding principles in the same of restoring or repairing them, a rise in street violence — all reflecting an elite ‘inchoate radicalism’, a ‘vague, burn-it-down impulse increasingly common across the political spectrum’.
As Sibarium says, America isn’t Weimar. The Freikorps who tried to overthrow the Weimar republic would eat the cosplay protesters of Portland for breakfast. And, above all, the American constitution has proven durability. The Weimar constitution demonstrated its weaknesses soon after its creation in 1919, and those weaknesses are why Weimar still overshadows us, because they made possible the democratic rise and parliamentary victory of Nazism.
Weimar society was born fissiparous in the aftermath of military defeat. The new constitution, rather than healing those differences, contained a powerful incentive for exacerbating them: proportional representation. While this made Weimar democracy unstable, Article 48 of the constitution rendered democracy dispensable, but on nebulous terms. Article 48 gave the president emergency powers to override the Reichstag, but without defining the emergency.
The American system remains a two-horse race, regardless of the knackered quality of the ponies. The president’s powers are extensive and, as Walter Bagehot smirkingly pointed out, almost monarchical, but they are also tightly defined in law. So while we see Weimar symptoms in American society, the deeper condition isn’t Weimaritis. Rather, the framework of the current American crisis is an inflammation of the Hapsburgs.
The emperor in the White House rules a colossal terrain. In this, the American president has more in common with an Ottoman sultan or a Hapsburg emperor than a British monarch or even a French president. Like the sultan and the emperor, he is the ever-present provincial symbol of the distant metropolitan power that prints the money and maintains the army.
The American emperor’s subjects have sorted themselves into two kingdoms, Democratic and Republican. The urban-rural aspect of this split has similarities to Georgian England, and the divisions that Trevor-Roper called ‘court and country’. But the political geography of America is closer to that of the Hapsburg empire after it had sorted itself into two kingdoms, the Dual Monarchy, in the Austro-Hungarian Compromise of 1867.
The Hungarians wanted their rights and rebelled in 1848. The Austrians refused to grant them and installed military rule, then struck a deal. The result was a two-headed beast in which neither head trusted the other, and a condominium that, instead of calming nationalism, intensified it by leaving its strongest passions unsatisfied. The Austrians compromised in 1867, but not enough to satisfy the Hungarians, and all the other nations under Austrian control saw what the Hungarians had won, and wanted it for themselves. Fast-forward to Franz Ferdinand’s day trip to Sarajevo.
This article is eye-opening, however, what is America's future?
I studied political science so this is of interest surely in that field and certainly if you're a student of history.
Researchers found societies with governments that were reasonably responsive to their people -- governments that met the definition of good governance -- tended to last a bit longer than autocratic governments.
However, researchers found that when good governments turned rotten, the breakup was often uglier than the collapse of autocratic governments.
According to the study, good governments fail more dramatically because the bureaucracy is more intimately integrated with society at large.
"Social networks and institutions become highly connected, economically, socially, and politically," Feinman said. "Whereas if an autocratic regime collapses, you might see a different leader or you might see a different capital, but it doesn't permeate all the way down into people's lives, as such rulers generally monopolize resources and fund their regimes in ways less dependent on local production or broad-based taxation."
Researchers also looked at why exactly good governments fail. They found the collapse of good governments was often triggered by the rise to power of amoral leaders -- leaders who ignored the social contract and abandoned their society's ideals.
Such betrayals often precipitated or accompanied rising inequality, concentration of political power, tax evasion, crumbling infrastructure and the decline of bureaucratic institutions -- a pattern researchers suggest can be observed in modern societies.
What societies did they study you might want to know:
To better understand the role of government on the success and longevity of ancient societies, researchers took an in-depth look at principles that guided the governments of four societies: the Roman Empire, China's Ming Dynasty, India's Mughal Empire and the Venetian Republic.
While I hope not in my lifetime, however, the fall of the American Republic if it ever happens will be very ugly!
h/t Instapundit
[VIDEO] A clip of the video that I shared with you on Tuesday morning. Just over 8 mins of Prof. Glenn Loury talking about "systemic racism" and bullying. Another argument to be made here is how eliminating disparities between different identity groups can only lead to some form of totalitarianism. I would say this is the second half of this video.
I suppose if you want to be against "systemic racism" you have to be against those groups with their "inherent" advantages in the society.
RELATED: Time to hit the education beat for a moment - How Yale University discriminates on admissions based on race
[VIDEO] This video is almost an hour long of Prof. Loury with former deputy prime minister of Australia John Anderson. I was a bit worried that this would become a more slanted discussion of how bad America is, and it started off very well.
We go through Loury's background. He got sidetracked, he got married young and had children young. However, he just got to work went back to school got his undergrad done at Northwestern University (Go Wildcats and no I never went to school there). Then got his doctorate in economics at M.I.T. He's currently an economics professor at Brown University.
This is a pretty good and honest discussion about what's going on in America right now. They recognize the situation with police right now as many politicians don't have the back of officers. Demoralized by calls for not only defunding, but abolition. And certainly just outright villified by those who are very much into the narrative of racist police.
Another thing that's part of this discussion is how, Loury has spent his time in academia looking at the issues within the Black community. He may not be dismissive of "systemic racism", however, it's just one part of the disparities he's looking at within Black communities.
