The nightmare continued: “Dealer claimed to have updated the software. My car was delivered to my home and nothing was fixed. In fact, my software reverted to 4.2.1. Now my service manager has no idea what to do. I can’t change drive modes, open trunk or frunk, and pre-collision warning turns on all the time. I can still drive but with limited capability. Feels like a car with a sprained ankle.”
The more things change, the more they stay the same. Gone are the days of Windows 95; heading into the year 2024, there’s an entirely new “blue screen of death” people apparently need to be watching out for – in their cars.
This week a photo went viral on social media purporting to show a Ford vehicle displaying a “your vehicle cannot be driven” message after a failed software update. “Please call customer support,” the screen urges.
A post on one car enthusiast forum questioned the authenticity of the screenshot, stating: “This is going around on Twitter, but I couldn’t find any mentions of it here. Is this even real? The phone number, when Googled doesn’t turn up anything official.”
One person responded: “That’s the message you will see on the rare occasion that an OTA fails. It’s a special customer service phone number for dealing with failed OTAs. It’s from a user on Reddit, his car has since been fixed and is back to normal FYI.”
“If an OTA update fails in such a way that this screen would be necessary, they should automatically revert to the last working state and notify the user,” another user posted in response.
“Bin Laden was, though, a product of a monumental miscalculation by Western security agencies. Throughout the 80s he was armed by the CIA and funded by the Saudis to wage jihad against the Russian occupation of Afghanistan.
Stated differently, the trauma of the 1930s was not the result of the inherent flaws or purported cyclical instabilities of free market capitalism; it was, instead, the delayed legacy of the financial carnage of the Great War and the failed 1920s efforts to restore the liberal order of sound money, open trade and unimpeded money and capital flows.
Another Christmas and there is still no peace on earth. And the proximate cause of that vexing reality is the $1.3 trillion Warfare State planted on the banks of the Potomac—along with its web of war-making capabilities, bases, alliances and vassals stretching to the four corners of the planet. So positioned, it stands in stark mockery of John Qunicy Adam’s sage advice to his new nation 200-years ago:
Wherever the standard of freedom and Independence has been or shall be unfurled, there will her heart, her benedictions and her prayers be.
But she goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy.
She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all.
She is the champion and vindicator only of her own.
She will commend the general cause by the countenance of her voice, and the benignant sympathy of her example.
She well knows that by once enlisting under other banners than her own, were they even the banners of foreign independence, she would involve herself beyond the power of extrication, in all the wars of interest and intrigue, of individual avarice, envy, and ambition, which assume the colors and usurp the standard of freedom.
The last bolded sentence pretty much sums up the foolish, destructive, unnecessary and fiscally calamitous Forever Wars hatched in Washington all the way back to 1950. Nearly without exception they were waged against alleged foreign monsters of the very kind which John Quincy Adams urged his countrymen not to pursue: Kim Il-Sung, Mohammad Mosaddegh, Fidel Castro, Patrice Lumumba, Ho Chi Minh, Sukarno, Salvador Allende, Ayatollah Khomeini, Daniel Ortega, Saddam Hussein, Muammar Gaddafi, Bashar al-Assad, Nicolas Maduro, Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin are but the most prominent among these targets of Washington’s relentless global-spanning search for “monsters to destroy”.
Yet without exception not one of these assorted authoritarians, dictators, tyrants, thugs and revolutionists, along with the nation’s they ruled, posed a direct threat to the American homeland. Not even Putin or Xi could actually dream of mounting the massive armada of land, air and sea-forces needed to transit the great ocean moats and lay waste to the security and liberty of 335 million Americans domiciled from “sea to shining sea”.
To the contrary, the claim always and everywhere has been that these foreign devils amount to incipient totalitarian monsters—the next Hitler or Stalin in the making. The presumption is that the likes of these two twentieth-century mutants are somehow embedded in the DNA of humankind. And unless resolutely and timely thwarted, each new tinpot tyrant who comes along will gobble up their neighbors in falling domino fashion until the economic and military might of their accumulated conquests threatens the security of the entire planet, including the fair lands in faraway North America.
Accordingly, the War Party claims that deterrence of incipient foreign monsters needs be accomplished through robust international arrangements for “collective security” and continuous preventive interventions, led by the peace-loving politicians and apparatchiks of Washington. The latter have finally learned the lessons of WWII and the Cold War, or so it goes, that eternal vigilance is imperative and that incipient monsters must be crushed in the cradle before they metastasize into the next Hitler or Stalin.
That’s always the syllogism whenever a new rascal, tyrant or local belligerent appears on the scene, and it always leads to hideously flawed claims of universal peril, as embodied in the current proxy war with Putin in Ukraine. That particular outbreak of mindless insanity has so far cost the lives of upwards of 400,000 Ukrainian soldiers and the displacement of 10 million civilians across Europe. Nearly $200 billion in Western public money has been wasted to date. And now “Joe Biden” and the European Union want to donate another $100 billion to prolong this futile slaughter.
Yet a passing familiarity with the last few centuries of history makes it obvious that what is happening in Ukraine is not an unprovoked invasion of its neighbor by Russia but a civil and territorial war in what had been the shape-shifting “borderlands” (viz. “ukraine”) and vassals of Imperial Russia, and which became a defined state only upon the bloody edicts of Lenin, Stalin and Khrushchev. So allowing this aberrant communist state of 1922-1991 to join its Soviet sire in the dustbin of history amounts to a no brainer.
And by all the evidence that is what had been inchoately wanting to materialize on the political ground in Ukraine after the iron fist of communist rule ended in 1991. As we have documented elsewhere, the Russian-speaking inhabitants of the Donbass and southern rim along the Black Sea had voted 80-20 against the Ukrainian nationalist candidates, who in reciprocation had garnered 80-20 pluralities in the central and western regions including historic Galicia and remnants of Poland. Thus, this communist artifact of a broader 20th century history that needn’t have happened either (per below) could have been partitioned with dispatch ala Czechoslovakia and that would have been the end it. The dead, maimed and disabled in their tens of thousands need not have been victims, nor would the hideous waste of economic resources and military material in its hundreds of billions have ever transpired.
But it happened because the interested parties permanently bivouacked on the Potomac need an endless parade of “monsters to destroy” in order to justify the great enterprise of global hegemony and the opportunity for glory and globe-trotting importance that it confers upon Washington’s self-appointed proconsuls. And that’s to say nothing of the trillion dollars per year of fiscal largesse that it pumps into the insatiable maw of the military-industrial-security-foreign aid-think tank-NGO complex—an arrangement that coincidently has set the greater Washington metropolis aglow with prosperity.
In the current case of Ukraine, however, they have literally thrown rationality to the winds. Sleepy Joe himself in last week’s address to the nation trotted out the hoary canard that Putin means to resurrect the old Soviet Empire and that Poland, the Baltics and the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin are next on his game plan of conquest, if he is not stopped well east of the Dnieper River. And, of course, Russian tanks in Poland would mean, under NATO Article 5, American troops being mustered into battle and the commencement of WWIII for all practical purposes.
Of course, this whole scenario is utter poppycock, hogwash, humbug and malarky all rolled into one malefic lie. There is not a shred of evidence that Putin has anything in mind other than the preventing the implantation of a NATO advance guard on his doorstep and cruise missiles within 30 minutes of Moscow. The whole Ukraine War saga, in fact, amounts to a Cuban Missile Crisis in reverse.
In turn, the fact that official Washington does not even remotely see the irony is due to the fact that the War Machine on the banks of the Potomac has so thoroughly polluted the intellectual waters and ethers alike with the incipient Hitler/Stalin canard that it has just robotically slotted “Putin” into the latest incarnation of this hoary formula without even a tinge of embarrassment.
To be sure, Vlad Putin is no prince of men, and he does have his contemporary gulags to show for it. But he is way, way too smart and historically educated to wish to fall on his sword in Poland or anywhere else west of the Dnieper where Russians are distinctly unwelcome. Indeed, the very thought that this canard is a valid argument for the mayhem Washington is now conducting in Ukraine is a veritable affront to adult reasoning.
So let us turn to the predicate. How in the world did the notion that the planet is teeming with incipient monsters that can only be tamed by the global presence and continuous vigilance of a Washington-led and -kitted planetary gendarme ever take such deep roots and persevere for so long?
Alas, the answer lies in the truth that much of the 20th Century was an unforced error—a giant mistake that reaches back to Woodrow Wilson’s utter folly in bringing America into World War I, thereby ignominiously extinguishing the wisdom of John Quincy Adams in the mud and blood of northern France.
Wilson’s unforgiveable error was to put the United States into the Great War for utterly no good reason of homeland security, which is the only valid basis for foreign policy in a peaceful Republic. The European war posed not an iota of threat to the safety and security of the citizens of Lincoln NE, or Worcester MA or Sacramento CA. In that respect, Wilson’s putative defense of “freedom of the seas” and the rights of neutrals was an empty shibboleth; his call to make the world safe for democracy, a preposterous pipe dream.
Actually, his thinly veiled reason for plunging the US into the cauldron of the Great War was none of the above. Instead, what he really sought was a big seat at the peace conference table——so that he could remake the world in response to god’s calling.
But this was a world about which he was blatantly ignorant; a task for which he was temperamentally unsuited; and an utter chimera based on 14 points that were so abstractly devoid of substance as to constitute mental play dough.
Or, as his alter-ego and sycophant, Colonel House, put it: Intervention positioned Wilson to play—
“The noblest part that has ever come to the son of man”.
America thus plunged into Europe’s carnage, and forevermore shed its century-long Republican tradition of anti-militarism and non-intervention in the quarrels of the Old World. John Quincy Adam’s wisdom got shit-canned in one fell swoop.
Israeli officials have asked their American counterparts for additional Apache attack helicopters. The White House has not given Tel Aviv a response, leading Israel to step up pressure on the US. The Israeli Defense Forces is heavily using the Apaches across multiple fronts.
Ynet, an Israeli outlet, reports the Israeli Defense Minister requested the attack helicopters but the White House has not yet reached a decision. “The IDF has requested Apache attack helicopters from the United States but has been denied so far,” Ynet explains.
“The request was made to the Pentagon in recent weeks and was also raised by Defense Minister Yoav Gallant during his meetings with US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin during his visit to Israel last week.” The report continues, “Security sources suggest that a final decision on the potential acquisition has not been made, and Jerusalem is continuing to apply pressure.”
The backlash against woke education has led to parents showing up at school board meetings and/or running for school boards themselves to fight the woke agenda. The combination of lockdowns and wokeness are also causing many parents to explore alternatives to government schools, including homeschooling.
The Program for International Assessment (PSA) recently released its 2022 assessment of the math and reading skills of students from over 200 countries. This is the first assessment since 2018 and it provides more evidence that schoolchildren were damaged by the COVID hysteria. American students’ math scores were lower than 27 of the 38 members of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). The other OECD countries do not have any reason to celebrate, as the average math scores of students in all OECD countries declined by 17 points.
American students’ reading scores “only” declined by one point since 2017 – as compared to an 18-point average decline amongst all OECD countries. However, the National Assessment of Education Progress national report card recently reported a historic decline in reading among 18 years old.
While the drastic reductions in reading and math across the globe can be attributed to the COVID panic, Americans’ scores have been declining for years. The lockdowns are a symptom of the problems with the American education system. The real problem is that progressives have seized control over government schools. These progressives are more concerned with indoctrinating children than providing them with a quality education.
Progressives seek to control education because they understand that those who are indoctrinated as children will likely support progressivism as adults. It is no coincidence that progressive control of education and the decline of quality of the nation’s schools coincide with increased federal control.
Progressive federal bureaucrats used the promise of funding to entice states and local governments to surrender control of schools to federal educators. Wokeness is just the latest iteration of the progressivism that has been undermining America’s free-market economy, constitutional government, and all sources of authority — including parents and churches — outside of the federal government for over a century.
Ironically, the lockdowns may have set back the woke progressives by giving parents an opportunity to see how wokeness had infiltrated their children’s education. Wokeness is also suffering a backlash because of the claim that the only reason anyone could object to allowing a biological male to compete in athletic events with biological females is bigotry.
The backlash against woke education has led to parents showing up at school board meetings and/or running for school boards themselves to fight the woke agenda. The combination of lockdowns and wokeness are also causing many parents to explore alternatives to government schools, including homeschooling.
Parents looking to provide their children with a quality home-based education that promotes real learning and does not push a political agenda – but does instruct in the history and philosophy of liberty – should look into my homeschooling curriculum. My curriculum provides students with a well-rounded education that includes rigorous programs in history, mathematics, and the physical and natural sciences. The curriculum also provides instruction in personal finance. Students can develop superior communication skills via intensive writing and public speaking courses. Another feature of my curriculum is that it provides students the opportunity to create and run their own businesses.
The government and history sections of the curriculum emphasize free-market economics, libertarian political theory, and the history of liberty. I encourage all parents looking at alternatives to government schools — alternatives that provide children with a well-rounded education that introduces them to the history and ideas of liberty without sacrificing education for indoctrination — to go to RonPaulCurriculum.com for more information about my homeschooling program.
A month ago in the Washington Post, not long before the Colorado mess, neoconservative icon Robert Kagan wrote, “A Trump dictatorship is increasingly inevitable. We should stop pretending.” We may accuse Kagan — husband of Victoria Nuland, co-founder of the Project for a New American Century, and co-author (with Bill Kristol) of the “benevolent hegemony” theory of world conquest that was the real reason for America’s Iraq invasion — of much. We can’t accuse him of not knowing history. The graphic was a bust of Caesar, perfect for a six thousand word opus on stopping Donald Trump at all costs, whose sniper-scope subtext was as subtle as the Bullwinkle float at the Thanksgiving Day parade. It could have been headlined, “Where’s Hinckley When You Need Him?”
Kagan kept trying to suggest a biological solution to the Trump problem without actually saying it. The word count can get hot quickly when you’re trapped in that kind of mind-loop. Here he tries to express the idea, “We gotta stop Trump before the election”:
Indicting Trump for trying to overthrow the government will prove akin to indicting Caesar for crossing the Rubicon, and just as effective… What limits [his] powers? The most obvious answer is the institutions of justice — all of which Trump, by his very election, will have defied and revealed as impotent.
If elected, Kagan went on, it would mean:
Democrats and anti-Trump Republicans threw every legitimate weapon against Trump and still failed. Will they turn instead to illegitimate, extralegal action?
What’s the irony level of a clarion call for a Caesarian “intervention” appearing in the “Democracy Dies in Darkness” Washington Post? Can that level of hypocrisy be quantified?
This is the paper that re-branded itself as America’s living bulwark against authoritarianism after Trump’s election, covering its new slogan like the naming of a Pope. They ran multiple self-referentialstories about the significance of their decision, and paid CBS $5.25 million to introduce football fans to “Democracy Dies in Darkness” via a preposterous Super Bowl spot, which was narrated by Tom Hanks with the leaden gravitas of the U/North ad in Michael Clayton. It showed scenes of Normandy, Selma, and Apollo 11, then a montage of journalists who died for truth, before declaring, “Because knowing makes us better”:
This was after Trump’s inauguration, and right after his conniption-fit inspiring “The FAKE NEWS media… is the enemy of the people” tweet. The Post’s message couldn’t have been clearer: we’re willing to die for the truth, and under Trump, we may have to. (After Kagan’s piece, the message seems to have been reversed, but who’s counting?)
Poor Bob Woodward was dispatched to tell the slogan’s origin story on Face the Nation. It’s revealing in hindsight. We learned from Jeff Gerth’s epic Columbia Journalism Review story on Trump-Russia coverage that Woodward tried to warn Post reporters away from the “garbage” Steele Dossier, only to discover a “lack of curiosity” on the subject from staff. It’s therefore an eyebrow-raiser that Woodward took this early moment to note that “Trump is right” that “some of these stories have been out of bounds,” but “the key is to get the big things right.” It was a muted plea, but at a time when it was heresy to suggest Trump could be right about anything, even partially, Woodward was showing a measure of the courage the Post was bragging about. No one caught it.
The clearest misinformation campaign from the White House was in May, when Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorka declared: “I want to be very clear, our borders are not open.”
Had the Biden administration prioritized southern border security, significant efforts to resolve the crisis would likely have been completed by now instead of peddling blatant lies and half-truths to deflect the blame for their disastrous open border policies that have flooded the nation with millions of illegals (and individuals on the FBI’s terror watch list) ahead the 2024 presidential election cycle.
A large chunk of corporate progressive media outlets have been spoonfed propaganda from the White House this year to distract Americans with southern border misinformation.
The clearest misinformation campaign from the White House was in May, when Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorka declared: “I want to be very clear, our borders are not open.”
“I want to be very clear, our borders are not open” – @SecMayorkas, May 11th, 2023
“This might be the biggest lie of the year from the Biden regime,” X user Libs of TikTok wrote in a post.
Responding to Libs of TikTok’s post, X user RedWave Press said:
“This is a massive lie. The southern border is wide open and the Biden administration is funding the whole thing. Our country is going to be run into the ground by illegal immigrants if something doesn’t change.”
This is a massive lie. The southern border is wide open and the Biden administration is funding the whole thing. Our country is going to be run into the ground by illegal immigrants if something doesn’t change. Follow if you agree. — RedWave Press (@RedWave_Press) December 27, 2023
But the border lies don’t stop with Mayorka. White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre has been on the frontlines of spreading misinformation, saying President Biden has done “everything that he can” to secure the border.
KARINE JEAN-PIERRE: “The president has done everything that he can on his own to try to figure out how do we deal with what’s going on at the border” pic.twitter.com/lwHEdgnaZq — RNC Research (@RNCResearch) November 8, 2023
“It’s just a blind spot for this entire White House, this entire administration, that would really prefer that they didn’t have to deal with any of the ramifications of the policy choices that they’ve made when it comes to the border and that Alexander Mayorkas has been so terrible at and actually implementing when it comes to the DHS policy involved,” Ben Domenech, the publisher and co-founder of The Federalist, recently told Fox Business’ Ashley Webster.
Living as we are under the collective inferiority of the West, and humbled as we are when faced with the cultural achievements of tribal Africans, primitive Amazonian tribesmen, Saudi Arabian witch doctors, and savages in general, I was relieved to see that Hollywood is hard at work in maintaining the myth that everything that the West has achieved since the Greeks was due to the white man’s cruelty and ability to steal from the Dark Continent.
Now, please don’t get me wrong. I don’t watch the drivel that Tinseltown puts out nowadays, but a bad case of bronchitis had me in bed high up in the Alps, with a cough of a Volga boatman and a high temperature. There was nothing to do but watch TV, as I could not focus on the written word. And what I saw only made my temperature go up—actually, it made me so angry I got better. I will not mention the serial except that it’s been very successful. It takes place out west and the cowboys are all bad, bullies, criminals, sadists, and worst of all, white. The few black cowhands are wise, introspective, and very perceptive with their advice. The victims are the red Indians, sorry, Native tribesmen. One pretty Indian girl teaches history class, and her opening remarks to a new class are what a major criminal Christopher Columbus was. But the best part is the utter awfulness of the whites. They’re greedy, cowardly, murderous, bullying, dishonest, and I’m talking only of the men. The white women are drunks, sleep with everything that walks but the horses, and are very greedy and vengeful. My only thought was thank God I’m watching this in my own bed. In a movie house I’d probably be lynched once the lights went on. Mind you, I only watched less than a segment, and I’m told the characters improve later on.
Hollywood is at present doing the work UFA films did for Hitler in the ’30s. Back then, in film after film, the “International Jew” was portrayed as conspiring against Western interests, institutions, and Christian mores. By the time war broke out, there were few Germans who weren’t convinced that the Jews had conspired against them. Now our Jews in Hollywood are doing something along the same lines against the white man, white males having replaced on screen at least the “International Jew” as figures of hate.
Is America going the way of Weimar? Our Jews in Hollywood are not Hitlers, some of them are even nice guys. But they lack talent and courage, they love money, and the easiest way to get it is to follow the woke agenda, it’s as simple as that. Their grandfathers were Mittel-European Jews, uneducated and unsophisticated, but they learned quickly, could spot talent, used it well, and, when war broke out, turned Hollywood into a PR firm for Uncle Sam. These new Harvard guys are smart, well educated, but greedy, cowardly, and willing to debase themselves for woke ideology.
MCViewPoint 
