[I’m planning to pin this post to the top of the page for at least a few days, so scroll down for newer posts.]
I’ve turned on the new comments system and I hope it goes smoothly. I’ve already tested it out in various ways and it appears to be operating pretty well, as far as I can tell. But if you have any problems with it, please let me know in an email. You can find my email address underneath the photo at the top of the blog (the apple, books, and pointe shoes on the table). Click where it says “Email.”
If you’ve been commenting here already you shouldn’t experience any changes when you try to comment. As long as you use the username you’ve been using right along, and the email address you’ve been using right along (even if it’s not a real one), your comments should post without any problems and you wouldn’t even notice anything new if I hadn’t posted this announcement.
However, new commenters – that is, people with new usernames and/or new email addresses – will find that their first comment goes into moderation. It will not appear until I approve it. When I see it – which would be the next time I check the moderated comments, so there might be a time lag of a few hours – I will either approve it or disapprove it. If I approve it, you become a regular commenter and your future comments should post smoothly without going into moderation again.
So, in summary: old commenters no problem. New commenters, the first comment is moderated and after that no problem.
Sen. Mitch McConnell on Sunday broke his silence on his hospital stay with a statement issued by his office claiming he fell but didn’t suffer a stroke or heart attack — and it included a photo of the politician smiling for extra measure. …
The Kentucky pol suffered “minor injuries” in his fall but then contracted pneumonia, which complicated his health situation, the statement said.
“My doctors have confirmed that I didn’t break any bones or suffer a concussion. I didn’t have a heart attack or a stroke. I don’t have any tumors or hemorrhages,” McConnell said in the statement.
“But I was briefly unconscious and was taken to the hospital. While receiving excellent care over the past several weeks, I’ve also had to deal with a mild case of pneumonia.”
McConnell’s doctors attributed his fall to his post-polio condition. At the age of 2, he contracted polio, and since then, his upper left leg has suffered from paralysis.
The Office of the Attending Physician for the senator added, “Early in his hospitalization, he developed pneumonia, which responded rapidly to antibiotic treatment.
“The remainder of his hospital stay focused on physical therapy and strategies to reduce his risk of future falls. He has been medically cleared to continue fully participating in his intensive physical therapy program.”
This all makes a certain amount of sense except for a couple of things. The first is that, if he never had a concussion, why was he “briefly unconscious”? That hasn’t been explained at all. Second, his physical condition is probably worse than the statement indicates if he’s still in inpatient rehab and deemed unable to go to the Senate even to vote.
Another conundrum trying to understand the mind of leftists. I know…an impossible task. But someone explain to me why the ones I know enthusiastically cheer every drone strike the Ukrainians make on Russia? Why is that such a just war? I’m not saying it isn’t, but their hypocrisy in not supporting the US getting rid of the 50 year threat of Iran having a nuke. Ukraine good, US bad.
The answer has several elements to it. The first is that the Ukraine War, and our position of helping Ukraine, began during the Biden administration. Had Trump been president and done the exact same thing as the Biden crew in taking Ukraine’s side, the reaction from the left probably would have been much less supportive of Ukraine. In fact, the left might have been against it. On the other hand, Trump’s war against Iran obviously must be condemned by the left, much like everything Trump does.
That’s not all, though. Another factor is that Putin is still connected in their minds to Trump, either by a continuing belief in Russiagate, or just by the idea that they’re both dictators and birds of a feather. Therefore of course the left will support Ukraine rather than Putin in the war (and by the way, I also support Ukraine, but for reasons which I’ve aired before).
Then there’s Israel. The left has come to uniformly hate and demonize Israel, and Israel is a major beneficiary of and military partner in the current war against Iran. Therefore the majority of the left must be on Iran’s side, just as it is mostly on Hamas’ side and on the Palestinians’ side.
So the whole thing is not hypocrisy or even inconsistency if you understand that the left’s guiding principles go like this: Trump bad, Israel bad.
I was shocked when I saw that Lindsey Graham had died. He wasn’t all that old, and he hadn’t been ill. But there was the headline, and it couldn’t be denied:
Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), the most prominent and powerful foreign policy hawk in Congress, died suddenly Saturday following reported chest pains and cardiac arrest. He was 71.
For more than two decades, Graham championed the peace through American strength abroad, advocating for military interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq — and Iran.
Graham had a lot of enemies, including some on the right, and he had a lot of friends. He even had some enemies turned friends, such as President Trump, who grew close to him. Many tributes poured in, and of course much online hatred as well, in the manner of our present age.
I didn’t always agree with Graham, although I often did. I think his finest hour – certainly his most intense hour – was at the Kavanaugh hearings:
Recently, Graham had been busy flying to Ukraine, working on bringing Saudi Arabia into the Abraham Accords, and promoting the SAVE Act. I also just learned, from this article, that he hadn’t taken advantage of his position to amass enormous wealth, comparatively speaking:
The late Sen. Lindsey Graham ranked among the bottom half of Congress’ big earners despite more than three decades in office and a top role leading the GOP.
Graham, 71, died Saturday night with a net worth of nearly $1.5 million, leaving the senator, who had a modest upbringing in South Carolina, ranked at 294th in wealth among the 535 voting members of Congress, according to data from the Quiver Quantitative tracker. …
Despite a 31-year career in Congress that catapulted Graham to the center of power in the Senate, the South Carolina native has never strayed too far from his humble roots.
Graham grew up in a blue-collar family in the small town of Central, where his parents ran a restaurant and pool hall known as the Sanitary Cafe. A young Graham lived in the room right behind the family business.
The late senator previously credited his working-class upbringing — in which he helped his parents run their restaurant — with pushing him to be the first person in his family to go to college.
But while he was attending the University of South Carolina, both his parents died of illness just 15 months apart from each other, leaving Graham to legally adopt his then-13-year-old sister and get her through her education.
After earning his law degree, Graham joined the Air Force …
I saw Graham in person once, and I was extremely impressed, but not by what you’d imagine. It was at a large outdoor gathering during the 2015-2016 primary season, and he was running for president. He dropped out early in the game, but this was before that. There was a big crowd but not an enormous one, it was a beautiful day, and there were about ten speakers – all of them GOP candidates for the presidency. When it came Graham’s turn he spoke for about fifteen minutes.
I of course knew who he was, but he surprised me by being incredibly humorous. I mean really zany quips, one after the other, all of them sounding like ad libs, all of them incredibly witty. I hadn’t ever seen that side of him, and he was in rare form. Afterwards I somehow found myself speaking to a volunteer for his campaign, and I asked if this was unusual. She said he was constantly cracking them up with his humor.
A hospital in Colorado had ended medical transitions of children – that is, it stopped giving puberty blockers and hormones to children (it never gave surgical treatment to children). But then parents of trans-identified children sued the hospital, and demanded it continue treatment. A Colorado court decided, in early July, that the hospital must provide it:
The Colorado Supreme Court ruled 5-2 on May 18 that Children’s should resume providing gender-affirming care to transgender youth, deciding in favor of transgender patients who had sued the hospital.
The state’s highest court returned the case to a lower court, saying a judge should issue an injunction requiring the hospital to resume care. That lower court judge, Denver District Judge Ericka F.E. Englert, issued the injunction Thursday, and Children’s confirmed Monday that care would resume, at least as an offering in the hospital’s array of services.
In an emailed statement, Children’s said the hospital had “reinstated medical gender-affirming care into our scope of services” — and then added that every medical doctor in the gender-affirming care clinic “has independently decided they will not prescribe or renew gender-affirming medications for patients under age 18.”
That was written nearly a month ago.
The hospital initially had suspended these services because the feds had threatened to cut off Medicaid funding, which is a huge source of the hospital’s income. After the lawsuit from the parents, the doctors are still refusing to provide the drugs because they say they are afraid of being held criminally liable.
The hospital continues to provide “mental health care” for such children. That is very appropriate; the medications are not. I’ve written extensively on that subject and am not going into it again here.
… [T]he mullahs have had the ability for some time to put a dirty bomb on the Temple Mount or Tel Aviv . Dirty bomb would actually be more worser than a true nuclear device because of the isotopes involved . 1000 years without the wailing wall.
They have not done so. Maybe we should have just left the crazies alone. We could always kill them later.
While it remains doubtful that Iran has developed a nuclear weapons capability, it is widely believed to have access to sufficient radioactive material for use in dirty bombs, particularly from civilian nuclear and industrial sources.
Unlike nuclear weapons that require fissile materials such as uranium or plutonium, dirty bombs can be assembled using radioactive isotopes from civilian sources such as cesium?137, cobalt?60, or americium?241, paired with conventional explosives. Though not designed for mass lethality, a well-placed dirty bomb can cause localized surface contamination, psychological trauma, and economic disruption, as well as significant cleanup costs …
Depending on their size, most dirty bombs and similar devices can only impact an area the size of 1-2 city blocks, but winds can disperse the radioactive particles over a few square miles …
This potential form of asymmetric escalation fits within Iran’s doctrine of warfare and long-standing reliance on proxy actors, offering a plausible but risky retaliatory tool, should Tehran perceive that it faces an existential threat …
The article mentions that Iran could use Hezbollah or the Houthis as the conduit. It also states what is rather obvious, which is that fear of massive retaliation – perhaps nuclear retaliation – could also discourage a dirty bomb’s use. In my opinion, that’s one reason why Iran has been so eager to pursue its own conventional nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles – to finesse such retaliation.
In addition, the article points out that a dirty bomb could end up hurting Israel’s Muslim neighbors, because the radiation is difficult to control and unpredictable.
Therefore, I don’t think it’s at all surprising that Iran has never used a dirty bomb. I also think – as I’ve written before – that Iran’s leaders are somewhat unpredictable because they display a mix of pragmatism and of extreme apocalyptic fanaticism. Which tendency will win out, and when? We can’t afford to risk finding out if it’s the apocalyptic fanaticism, but does the current war increase or decrease that danger? Iran is also not just a self-contained tyranny only affecting the Iranian people, but has ambitions (some of which have already been carried out) of takeover of other countries and the spread of worldwide Islamic terrorist jihadism against other Muslim counties and the West.
[Trump’s] methods [of deal-making] have produced impressive results in all sorts of unexpected areas, but for them to work, his counterparts need to be rational actors capable of understanding and acting in their own self interest.
The Islamic Republic of Iran is not a rational actor.
From its very earliest inception, the Islamic Republic of Iran has mirrored founder Ayatollah Khomeini’s belief that the United States (“the Great Satan”) and Israel (“the Little Satan”) are affronts to Islam that must be fought and destroyed. Catspaws Hezbollah and Hamas believe that the founding of Israel (“the Zionist entity”) was a literal affront to God that must be expunged through violent jihad. …
And don’t forget that Iran’s fundamentalist Twelver Shiia regime has devout apocalyptic eschatological beliefs about the return of the occulted Mahdi, one in which the Islamic Republic will create the conditions to hasten his return and reign before the Day of Judgment. Asking them to stop supporting terrorism in the wake of bombing and hyperinflation is like asking an Evangelical to give up their belief in the Rapture and the Second Coming in order to lower their gasoline bill. By the standards of economics, traditional geopolitics and game theory, they cannot be considered “rational actors.”
Some observers have argued that the U.S. has already “won” the war against Iran by shattering its nuclear program, decapitating its leadership and destroying numerous military assets while taking extremely few casualties. But the United States won just about every battle it fought in Afghanistan and Vietnam, but still lost those wars by letting its adversaries survive.
We’re not going to be putting boots on the ground in Iran. It’s a big country with a deeply entrenched (and somewhat decentralized) military, and ruthlessly devoted to putting down dissent in a violent manner. Regine change is probably necessary for victory, but at this point I don’t see how it can be achieved, or how regime change for the better could be guaranteed. But leaving the regime in place just kicks the can down the road.
Alarming new satellite images show signs that the Iranian regime appears to be rebuilding its suspected nuclear facilities at Pickaxe Mountain and Parchin.
Footage of both areas – which sustained extensive damage during US and Israeli-led bombing campaigns that began in late February – reveal “major signs” of activity …
The regime puts these efforts very high on its “must do” list.
This book by Buck Sexton sounds worth reading: Manufacturing Delusion: How the Left Uses Brainwashing, Indoctrination, and Propaganda Against You. From the Amazon blurb:
Some of history’s greatest empires have devolved into genocidal lunacy—often with shocking compliance from their own people. What methods can create this madness?
In Manufacturing Delusion, acclaimed conservative commentator and former CIA officer Buck Sexton offers answers. Drawing on his intelligence experience, expertise in crowd psychology, knowledge of propaganda, and research into some of history’s darkest totalitarian chapters, he equips you to identify mind control tactics used to form compliant citizens. He explores the eight tactics of mass delusion through examining:
— How Stalin used Pavlovian mind games to establish absolute control
— How Chinese thought reform transformed opposition into terrorized pawns
— How Jihadist preachers replace shared humanity with weaponized fear
Using these examples and others, Sexton walks you through a history of controlling regimes and the methods they used to create passive citizens. More importantly, he shows you how some of the early stages of mass delusion have already occurred right here in the United States of America, on issues of public health, gender, and racial justice.
I heard about the book through this interview with the author. Although the book’s title only mentions the left, he says in the interview that he also sees it on the right (or the former right, or the pretend right – aka Carlson and Owens). However, that is still a fringe group on the right, whereas it’s a widespread and mainstreamed tool of the left.
Here’s the interview:
In the interview, Sexton also mentions a much older book, The Rape of the Mind: The Psychology of Thought Control, Menticide, and Brainwashing by Joost A. M. Meerloo. It was first published in 1956 and this is from Amazon’s description:
In 1933 Meerloo began to study the methods by which systematic mental pressure brings people to abject submission, and by which totalitarians imprint their subjective “truth” on their victims’ minds. In “The Rape of the Mind” he goes far beyond the direct military implications of mental torture to describing how our own culture unobtrusively shows symptoms of pressurizing people’s minds. He presents a systematic analysis of the methods of brainwashing and mental torture and coercion, and shows how totalitarian strategy, with its use of mass psychology, leads to systematized “rape of the mind.” He describes the new age of cold war with its mental terror, verbocracy, and semantic fog, the use of fear as a tool of mass submission and the problem of treason and loyalty, so loaded with dangerous confusion. The “Rape of the Mind” is written for the interested layman, not only for experts and scientists. Contents: Part One: The Techniques of Individual Submission. 1. You Too Would Confess. 2. Pavlov’s Students as Circus Tamers. 3. Medication into Submission. 4. Why Do They Yield? The Psychodynamics of False Confession. Part Two: The Techniques of Mass Submission. 5. The Cold War against the Mind. 6. Totalitaria and its Dictatorship. 7. The Intrusion by Totalitarian Thinking. 8. Trial by Trial. 9. Fear as a Tool of Terror. Part Three: Unobtrusive Coercion. 10. The Child is Father to the Man. 11. Mental Contagion and Mass Delusion. 12. Technology Invades Our Minds. 13. Intrusion by the Administrative Mind. 14. The Turncoat in Each of Us. Part Four: In Search of Defenses. 15. Training Against Mental Torture. 16. Education for Discipline or Higher Morale. 17. From Old to New Courage. 18. Freedom — Our Mental Backbone
I think “our mental backbone” has gone rather squishy lately.
The reason I have highlighted the Meerloo book, though, is that – strangely enough – I read it when I was about ten years old. Did I understand it? Certainly not deeply. But the topic already interested me so much that I plowed through it.
How did it fall into my hands? My family had received a free and unsolicited catalogue in the mail from Marboro Books, which was (according to Google AI) “a notable discount book retailer and publisher founded in 1947, famous for selling remainders and overstock books at steep discounts through retail stores and mail-order catalogs, the chain was acquired by Barnes & Noble in 1979.” When the catalogue came, I pored over it, fascinated. It was the first time it occurred to me that I could order an adult book – and by “adult” I certainly don’t mean anything to do with sex.
The subjects of Mackay’s debunking include alchemy, crusades, duels, economic bubbles, fortune-telling, haunted houses, the Drummer of Tedworth, the influence of politics and religion on the shapes of beards and hair, magnetisers (influence of imagination in curing disease), murder through poisoning, prophecies, popular admiration of great thieves, popular follies of great cities, and relics.
I think I’m going to order the Sexton book. I seem to have lost the others along the way, although I had them for a long long time.
My freshman year in college I took an art history survey course that focused quite a bit on the art of very ancient civilizations, by which I mean pre-Roman and even pre-Greek art. For me, the work shown in these videos was most memorable. I could hardly believe how sophisticated it was. In particular the dying lioness, with her paralyzed hindquarters, was powerful, frightening, and yet sensitive and touching, all at the same time:
— Graham Platner for Senate (@grahamformaine) July 10, 2026
Note the sign-off. After all the more formal jargon, we have this:
F*ck ICE. Free Palestine. Up the hearts.
Solidarity forever,
Graham Platner
I think one of his motives with the sign-off was to embarrass the Democrat politicians who initially supported him and then abandoned him. Then again, he could have done a lot worse there at the end, this being Platner.
So we have those two big progressive causes – anti-ICE and pro-Palestinian. What does “up the hearts” mean? It seems to be a reference to the Portland (Maine), soccer team, the Portland Hearts of Pine. And “Solidarity Forever” is an old labor movement song:
The iconic labor song “Solidarity Forever” turns 109 years old today. Written in defiance of early 20th-century oppression, it railed against the forces that “would lash us into serfdom” with the abiding counsel that the “union makes us strong.”
Will Platner manage to keep himself in the spotlight somehow? I think he’d certainly like to.
Many people are pointing out that the current preliminary hearing in Utah in preparation for Tyler Robinson’s trial in the murder of Charlie Kirk is revealing how bankrupt the “theories” of conspiracy theorists such as Candace Owens are. But actually, almost all the facts being presented in the hearing were already known to anyone paying much attention at all to the case. Thing is, most people don’t do their homework, and that helps make them easy prey for someone like Owens and the others.
The case against Robinson is about as strong as a case can be. It’s not just that there isn’t a reasonable doubt, there is simply no doubt. And that’s been obvious for quite some time. But that doesn’t stop the conspiracy theorists. They thrive on something about human nature: cynicism, suspicion, the urge to doubt authorities (an impulse which, unfortunately, is sometimes quite justified), and the need to feel superior to the common gullible masses.
It’s also a kind of club thing: we are the cognoscenti and you are not. Or maybe a sorority, because people who study such things say that Owens’ followers tend to be women. Although it’s certainly possible that a great many are bots, I have little doubt that a significant number are real people. There is a big market for such things – including and perhaps especially the virulent Jew-hatred that Candace spreads.
It’s certainly not limited to Jew-hatred, either, although that’s a large part of it. Owens also has been viciously attacking Ericka Kirk, whom she’s painted not only as being in on her husband’s murder, but as having never been what she says she is but rather is – among other things – a child trafficker. Owens acolytes (and/or bots) roam around the internet, commenting on videos featuring Kirk and casting her as a villainess extraordinaire. It is actually a sickening thing to behold.
As a result of the overwhelming evidence against Robinson in the legal proceedings, will conspiracy theorists abandon the murky webs they’ve spun regarding Kirk’s death? There might be a couple of people here and there who do so, but not the major players and not the bulk of their followers. They will simply wiggle out of it or change the focus slightly. Not only is it a money-making endeavor for people like Owens, but for her followers it has become a deep belief.
[NOTE: Over the years, I’ve written many posts about the Kennedy assassination conspiracy theorists. The majority of Americans still do not think that Oswald killed Kennedy or that he acted alone (see this). However, the evidence that he did is totally overwhelming, as I’ve explained in many previous posts.
I’m not going to rehash it here, having already spent so much time doing so. Suffice to say that I recommend the book Reclaiming History to anyone interested. You can find the text (or at least most of it) online here. As I said, I’ve written many posts on the subject, but here’s one of my posts that’s an overview.]
