RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/thats-not-funny/

Left-wing comedy, especially late-night shows, took another hit recently when Paramount’s CBS canceled the Late Show and its host Stephen Colbert, whose pathetic ratings were nowhere near worth the millions of dollars the show has been burning through for years. The Dems’ press-agent media, of course, have been parroting Colbert’s claim that Paramount is carrying water for President Trump, the prime target of Colbert’s juvenile, humorless insults.

In reality, the show had a staff of 200, cost $100 million annually to produce, and lost $40 million a year. You don’t have to be Adam Smith to figure out why the show was cancelled. Once again, terminal Trump Derangement Syndrome has added another lefty Democrat comic to its growing casualty list.

More important, however, is why lefty comics and leftists in general are so unfunny? The answer is suggested by my title. Readers of a certain age, i.e. old, may remember where it comes from. Back in the Sixties and Seventies, there was a popular gag called “lightbulb jokes,” based on the question, “How many [fill in ethnic group, sex, profession etc.] does it take to screw in a lightbulb?” The punchline was something humorous, insulting, and satiric.

The feminist version started circulating about the same time, just when equity feminism had shifted from a movement for equal opportunity and rights, to its current Nurse Ratched version––a humorless, bossy, whiny, arrogant, leftwing, alpha-male-hating iteration of identity politics based on perpetual grievance and victimhood marinated in aggressive ressentiment. The joke goes like this: “How many feminists does it take to screw in a lightbulb?” The feminists’ punchline was always “That’s not funny!”

This tagline captures well the left’s humor deficit, which worsened with smug, self-righteous identity politics that flourished with “wokeism” and reflects the nature of Marxism––which is not just a political ideology, but a totalizing, deadly serious, messianic world view and way of life.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2025/07/how_far_will_the_deep_state_go.html

Once upon a time, there was a rock-ribbed conservative U.S. senator who tried mightily to get an über-conservative law passed but was met with great resistance by his liberal colleagues.  This went on not for months, but for almost two years.

But he was so persistent and determined that those same resistant colleagues — and their lapdogs in the left-wing media — started to call him “bulldog” — even, at times, Senator Bulldog!

Then, one beautiful spring day, he was both astounded and delighted to learn that he had enough votes to pass his proposed law.  The vote was to be taken shortly after the Senate came back from lunch.

As the senator walked along Constitution Avenue to his favorite lunch spot, The Capitol Hill Club, enjoying the gorgeous sight of the wisteria and magnolias and cherry blossoms in bloom, he felt ebullient and redeemed and also proud that his persistence, and the righteousness of his cause, would finally see the light.

There he was, Central Casting, walking tall in his blue suit, white shirt (with cuff links!), red tie… the perfect symbolic colors, he thought, for this milestone day in his life.

Hello, Senator!

As he strode along, another Central Casting figure came up to his side — tall, handsome, also dressed to the nines.

“Hello, Senator.  How are you today?”

The senator, long in public service, was accustomed to people he had never met greeting him, saying hello, wishing him well, or advising him on political matters.  And, of course, insulting him.

“Very well.  It’s a beautiful day.”

https://amgreatness.com/2025/07/28/the-graveyard-of-progressive-misadventures/

Sometime after the election of Barack Obama in 2008, the American Left began exploring, then embracing, and finally enacting agendas that proved not only unhinged and unworkable but also fatal to the left-wing project itself.
How did the party so alienate the middle classes when it once professed it was the sole party and protector of those in-between? How did the Democratic Congress sink to a 16 percent approval rating in a current liberal Quinnipiac University poll? How could 63 percent of registered voters view the Democrats unfavorably in a recent Wall Street Journal poll?
In sum: despise the middle class, then lose elections.
At the turn of the millennium, globalization generated massive wealth by opening a 6-billion-person consumer market to the rising global powers of Silicon Valley, media, academia, law, finance, and transnational corporations. The result was a Democrat Party increasingly dominated by a new and different sort of “committed” left-wing billionaire.
The Democrat Party, by the turn of the century, had become a home for the ultra-rich, the upscale professional classes, and the subsidized poor. And its new initiatives reflected the values, ideas—and pretensions—of the globalized bicoastal elites, from reimagining a sustainable green economy to “diversity” and apologetics for America’s culpability abroad.
In the ancient days of the 1990s, Bill Clinton ensured that the Democrat party was for strong borders, legal-only immigration, and protection of union jobs from cheap imported labor. Abortion was to be safe, legal—and “rare.” Now, abortion is often praised and worshipped by the left, as if it is integral to saving a warming planet.

https://www.aol.com/ocasio-cortezs-office-vandalized-amid-171238588.html

WASHINGTON — New York Democrat Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s campaign office in the Bronx was vandalized on July 20 amid “multiple threats on the Congresswoman’s life” in recent days, according to her campaign manager Oliver Hidalgo-Wohlleben.

Multiple images on social media show her New York campaign office splattered with red paint and a sign that says, “AOC funds genocide in Gaza.”

“Our office is a hub in the community and we want it to be a safe space for all of our neighbors,” Hidalgo-Wohlleben wrote in a July 21 tweet.

He added that, “In the past few days, we also have received multiple threats on the Congresswoman’s life and we are treating this seriously with our security partners to make sure she, our staff, and volunteers are safe.”

It wasn’t immediately clear who threatened the progressive lawmaker or vandalized her office.

Ocasio-Cortez recently voted against against an amendment to a defense bill that would have cut off $500 million for Israel’s missile defense programs. She faced backlash over the decision from some fellow figures on the left.

The lawmaker has defended herself on the vote, saying on X that the amendment, authored by conservative Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, “does nothing to cut off offensive aid to Israel nor end the flow of US munitions being used in Gaza.”

https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/07/22/fascism-has-not-come-to-america/

Endless jeremiads from the mainstream media, academia and a large chunk of the political class warn that Americans are on the precipice of a fascist hell, presided over by our own orange-haired Il Duce. Some prominent progressive scholars, like Yale’s Timothy Snyder, a historian of fascism, claim to have read the Weimar-like tea leaves and have now relocated to Canada.

Trump’s vengeful actions against his well-entrenched enemies certainly invite parallels to the kind of behaviour exhibited by fascist leaders, as well as their Communist analogues like Stalin or Mao Zedong. But we are far from a Fourth Reich. Somewhere between 3.3million and 5.6million protesters attended the anti-Trump ‘No Kings’ protests last month and were met with no pushback from the authorities. This clearly would not happen in a truly fascist country. Nor would Trump’s political enemies still control most of the media, academia and the vast non-profit world. In Hitler’s Germany or Mussolini’s Italy, they would have been supplanted, jailed or even executed.

Critically, MAGA is hardly the Nazi Party or Mussolini’s Fascists or, for that matter, the Bolsheviks. It represents, rather, an ad hoc and fundamentally unstable alliance. It spans career GOP political hacks, rogue billionaire executives, rabid Evangelicals, radical populists and media screamers – including some who espouse racist themes, as well as the equally awful Tucker Carlson.

As the fallout over the so-called Epstein files suggests, MAGA’s prime chatterers are less focussed on coherent policy than on conspiratorial hysteria. It is hardly a mass movement across a broad spectrum of the population, but essentially a rebellion of the middle orders and mostly older voters – 60 per cent of the Trump base was aged over 50 in 2024. Trump himself is a blimpish 79-year-old who seems ready for serious decline, while Mussolini and Hitler were in their late 30s and early 40s respectively when they took power.

Furthermore, both Hitler and Mussolini expressed a horrific, but coherent worldview with broad appeal. Italian fascism ‘drew in all class levels, from workers to the aristocracy’, notes art historian Martina Caruso, who is writing a book about her grandfather, Pietro Caruso, who was executed for crimes committed as Rome’s chief of police under Mussolini.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2025/07/buttigieg_blew_more_than_half_the_dot_budget_on_dei_failed_to_make_critical_air_traffic_upgrades.html

Democrat frontrunner for 2028 Pete Buttigieg, is the kind of guy who could give California’s Gov. Gavin Newsom or Los Angeles’s mayor, Karen Bass, a run for the money.

Amid news of an aircraft near collision over North Dakota, following a disastrous similar military-civilian crash in Washington, D.C. in January, we learn this about how he ran the cabinet office he headed, the U.S. Department of Transportation.

Steve Guest @SteveGuest

MUST READ: “Former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg failed to replace outdated air-traffic-control systems while in office — with his agency instead shelling out tens of billions of dollars on a DEI agenda, according to federal spending records and airline-industry insiders.”

So while he was ‘breast-feeding’ his twins and telling us about his ‘husband,’ what with the move to Traverse City, he was not only not showing up for work during critical supply chain crises (remember that?) when ships backed up to enter ports, or berating airlines for ‘price gouging’ and inefficiencies, he had billions of dollars to play around with and decided to spend it on DEI, not air traffic safety upgrades.

https://swtotd.blogspot.com

“But what do we mean by the American Revolution? Do we mean the American war? The Revolution was effected before the war commenced. The Revolution was in the minds and hearts of the people; a change in their religious sentiments of their duties and obligations… This radical change in the principles, opinions, sentiments, and affections of the people, was the real American Revolution.”

Letter from John Adams to Hezekiah Niles February 13, 1818

                                                                                                             In this year of the semiquincentennial of our Declaration of Independence, have we swapped individual independence for dependence on government paternalism?

Threats to democracy, a current rallying cry of the Left, have been a constant since our founding. They have come from both the right and the left. They fade, however, when exposed to unfettered free debate, and an unbiased study of the classics and our history. Today, supported by main-stream media, the Left puts the blame for such threats square on Republicans, especially those of the MAGA variety. Disallowing dissension, they wave their hands, and with crocodile tears flowing and with Republicans in control of both Houses of Congress they cite the deportation of illegal migrants, including those with criminal records, piggish billionaires, corrupt corporations and cuts to government services. It is ironic that Mr. Trump is accused of being authoritarian, when his attempts to reduce the size of government are at odds with Democrats who prefer a larger, more paternal government.

Beginning with Franklin Roosevelt’s ‘New Deal’ ninety years ago, through Lyndon Johnson’s ‘Great Society’ in the 1960s, to Barack Obama’s ‘Cradle to Grave Care’ thirteen years ago, the United States has moved irrevocably toward a more paternalistic state. My point is not to argue that all federal welfare programs are wrong and should be abolished, but to point out that major entitlement programs consumed about 50% of the 2023 federal budget and are growing faster than all other programs. With total federal debt at $36.6 trillion and rising, interest expense already consumes over 13% of the federal budget, entitlement programs will be unaffordable for future generations. As well, some programs discourage aspiration, hard work, self-sufficiency and independence. Welfare reform is badly needed.   

While I keep a skeptical eye on MAGA Republicans, Democrats should look in the mirror as regards threats to democracy. Their demand for conformity can be seen in the expanding interest in Socialism, the ultimate in paternalism. From Bernie Sanders in the Senate to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in the House, Democrat Socialists of America (DSA) has risen from the ashes of the early 20th Century Socialist Party of America. Nine years ago the DSA was formed with a small number of adherents. Today it has 90,000 members, including an aspiring candidate for mayor of New York City, a young man who followed a privileged path to power. Socialists oppose capitalism and the personal freedom that allowed the talented and aspirant, regardless of economic and social class, to rise in our country – the magnets that attract so many to our shores.

https://goudsmit.pundicity.com/28730/use-it-or-lose-it

 goudsmit.pundicity.com  and website: lindagoudsmit.com 

Use it or lose it is the colloquial definition of neuroplasticity, defined in more technical terms by BetterHelp online in its, February 19, 2025, article “What ‘Use It Or Lose It’ Means in Neuropsychology”:

Neuroplasticity is the ability of the central nervous system to form and reorganize neural connections in response to injury or a learning event. This trait allows the human brain to adapt and change depending on events or experiences. Human brains can adapt through learning when an individual practices a task repeatedly. However, if they do not follow through with this repetition, this adaptive ability is lost, and they lose these possible new neural pathways until they return to the practice. This phenomenon is often referred to as the central nervous system’s “use it or lose it” insurance policy.

Why is neuroplasticity so important? Because neuroplasticity is the process that establishes agency in human beings, and because neurological processes can be used constructively or exploited for destruction. In my 2024 book, Space Is No Longer the Final Frontier—Reality Is, Chapter 5: America Requires an Education Revolution explains the concept of agency, and how agency is required for freedom in a constitutional republic.

Reading is the essential foundational skill individual citizens use to access information and make informed decisions. Together, reading, writing, and arithmetic are the communication tools that equip children with agency. Understanding the psychological concept of agency is extremely important to our discussion. Encyclopedia.com[i] defines and discusses agency:

The concept of agency as a psychological dimension refers to the process of behaving with intentionality. Human beings exercise agency when they intentionally influence their own functioning, environments, life circumstances, and destiny. To posit that human beings have agency is to contend that they are self-organizing, proactive, self-regulating, and self-reflecting rather than reactively shaped by environmental forces or driven by concealed inner impulses.

Reading provides agency for learning because textbooks, including math and science textbooks, require the ability to read. Reading provides a sense of independence, accomplishment, and self-sufficiency. Competence is the mother of self-esteem, and learning to read is a seismic shift in a child’s perception of self. The child begins to feel his or her power.