Quotes of the week

“Science is nothing more than the process by which fallible people attempt to understand infallible reality. As thus understood, saying one follows ‘science’ is a statement void of meaning.” – Buddy Saunders

“When government takes your freedom, it will not reward you with something better.” – Buddy Saunders

Many people, regardless of their perspective, fear they might be cancelled in some way should they post comments to a blog. If you feel so, simply comment under a “secret identity.” Super heroes have such. You can, too. And all perspectives are welcome here.

Any Soap Box material written by Buddy may be copied and forwarded to family and friends. Material from other sources is usually copyrighted but can be shared so long as it is not changed or abridged and the publisher is properly credited, including a link to their site.

Buddy’s Soap Box

And now patriotic Texas howdy from Buddy,

 “How much fraud is okay? None. How much suppression is okay? None. That’s why this bill makes it easy to vote and hard to cheat.” – Texas State Sen. Hughes

Two factors certain to play out very much to the woke left’s dismay and disadvantage are both grounded in inflation—the making more of something than is credible.

The first chicken coming home to roost: Voter inflation

In the presidential election, the Democrat Party, aided by China and others, inflated Big Guy Biden’s vote count.  By how much will soon be revealed in Arizona, where a forensic audit is nearly completed. Honest elected officials (some still do exist) from other states, most notably Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, have visited Maricopa County in Arizona, have been impressed with what they saw, and are considering similar audits in their states, a process that will become much easier to advance once the breadth and depth of the Maricopa County fraud is exposed. There will be no question that the election was stolen. The big question will be, how will the nation deal with it?

Are you unaware of the progression of these events?

They are major events and you should know.

But unless your cable channel offers OAN (One America News), or you subscribe to The Epoch Times, you are wholly in the dark.

No other news outlet, not even Fox News and the Wall Street Journal are covering this soon-to-be-inescapable story. Why not? Soap Box wonders. China has a long reach, cash in one hand, blackmail notes in the other. Biden isn’t the only one that’s been bought. He’s not the only one manipulated by fear. More names will follow.

The second chicken coming home to roost: Monetary inflation

Old-fashioned inflation, while having with it a taint of criminality (always present where large sums of cash are involved), is more a product of simple political stupidity and cupidity. Many modern economists dismiss the law of supply and demand, and similar economic truisms. Little wonder then that many politicians don’t grasp the idea that printing (or digitizing) money in the absence of a proportionate growth of goods and services results in inflation, and that the more money printed the greater the inflation.

Consider this simple example. In an economy that produces 10 hamburgers and $10 in wages per week, a hamburger costs $1, all else being equal. Go to 20 hamburgers and $20 in wages and a hamburger still costs $1. But 10 hamburgers and $20 produces $2 hamburgers and 100% inflation. Even morons understand this, which leaves us at a loss for a word to describe Congress.

To be fair, Biden isn’t the first guy to seek to spend like the proverbial drunken sailor (and in the sailor’s defense, at least he was spending real money and his own). Before Biden, Presidents Trump and Obama overspent as, to a lesser degree, has every past president and congress going back for years. Money real and imagined, spent and spent and spent. Even the Social Security “Trust Fund,” the “lock box,” was pilfered—any surplus spent then and not saved for future SS benefits. And so now Social Security borders on bankruptcy.

Contrary to anything anyone says, we are in for serious inflation. It has started. It will get worse, and its cause has little to do with the effects of the Chinese virus on our economy. With this inflation will come shortages. Businesses, including my own business, are already experiencing both. Businesses will be forced to increase prices. Workers will get pay increases but inflation will cancel those increases. The little guy will hurt. The elites will chug right along. They don’t notice when the price of a meal doubles or triples or worse. They won’t care if the cost of filling a limo’s gas tank goes from $50 to $200.

But you and I will care.

Those of us with jobs will do better than those relying on savings, fixed incomes, and Social Security.

Who do we have to blame for what’s coming? Mostly ourselves. Apart from those politicians who came to us via stolen elections, we are stuck with our choices.

The time has come for us to begin making better choices.

Other Items of Interest

A recent AMAC survey asked the following, “With so much corporate attention to “wokeness” and trying to appease the Far Left on issues, has this impacted the products and services you buy or stores you patronize?”

20,486  Yes. I’m much more cognizant of how and where I spend my dollars.

2,753  No. I like what I like and don’t pay attention to all the “woke” noise.

9,821  Somewhat. I try to be mindful of who gets my dollars, but it’s getting difficult to keep up with it all.

137 Not Sure.

President Trump was right about everything the wokies LIED about before the election:

• Hydroxychloroquine works.
• The China Virus came from a Chinese lab.
• Hunter Biden’s laptop was real.
• Lafayette Square was not cleared for a photo op.
• The “Russian bounties” story was fake.
• Vaccines were produced in record time before the end of 2020.
• Blue state lockdowns don’t work.
• Schools should be opened.
• Critical Race Theory is a disaster for our schools and our country.
• His southern border security program was unprecedentedly successful.

Along with thousands of illegals, Big Guy Biden has thrown open the door to enormous amounts of deadly drugs, including drugs from China. What, pray tell, is this man trying to accomplish and for whom? Let’s keep an eye on Hunter’s “art” sales.

Missouri Rep. Cori Bush, who supports defunding the police, spent nearly $70,000—about a third of her total campaign expenditures—on private security over just the past three months, as reported by Fox News. This from a lady who wants her constituents to have neither guns nor the police when hoodlums break in the door. Most of the money went to a now nowhere-to-be-found security company, RS&T. Clearly, Hunter Biden isn’t the only one that understands that when it comes to playing fast and loose with money, there are plenty of ways to skin the cat. Someone needs to look into Ms. Bush’s pocket where, we imagine, will be found a few boomeranged bucks! Either that or the poor dear needs to put her next security job out for reasonable bids.

In a report from Fox News, “The Pentagon is reportedly working with an extremism analysis company that considers the web search ‘The Truth about Black Lives Matter’ and others to be signs of interest in or engagement with white supremacism. According to Defense One, the contractor, Moonshot CVE, which has ties to the Obama Foundation, is working on data that would identify which military bases and branches have the most troops searching for domestic extremism content.”

Here, yet again, is an example of Biden’s nascent police state’s agenda laid bare. Question a communist front organization like Black Lives Matter and you are a white supremist. Praise the Communist Parties of Cuba and China and you are a good American. That’s OK. In the next election, we’ll send these idiots packing.

Big Guy Biden has nominated President Trump hater Jeff Flake to be our new ambassador to Turkey. Soap Box approves. Nominating a turkey to serve in Turkey is about the brightest idea Big Guy has yet hatched!

No political party should win an election. The winner should always be the citizen voter who is voting in elections where it is easy to vote but hard to cheat. We, the people, and no party or power, should select those who govern us. If the party we select governs well and in accordance with the public will, that party will continue to enjoy support. If not, new candidates will be elected in the next election. For all that to happen, election integrity is essential. Most voters grasp this simple reality. For example, in a recent Fox News poll, 77% of respondents said they want voter I.D. Even a moron understands that no crime, including voter fraud, can be prosecuted if there is no way to identify the person who committed the crime.

Horrified at the prospect of election reform, Democrat politicians fled Texas on a chartered jet to Washington, D.C. where, as they hobnobbed with Nancy Pelosi and a fawning media, six of them—thus far—came down with the Chinese virus. Not the first nor the last time we’ll see plague-infested rats fleeing a ship of state.

Uncle Joe has identified a virus more dangerous than the Chinese Virus, that virus being the Virus of Public Knowledge. To counter this thought virus, Biden’s nascent Cheka will partner with Facebook and other powers to de-platform citizens whenever our thoughts or opinions run counter to Dr. Anthony Fauci’s “science” of the day pronouncements.

This week’s Aesop’s Fable: The Bat, the Birds and the Beasts

A great conflict was about to come off between the Birds and the Beasts.  When the two armies were collected together the Bat hesitated which to join.  The Birds that passed his perch said:

“Come with us”; but he said: “I am a Beast.”  Later on, some Beasts who were passing underneath him looked up and said: “Come with us”; but he said: “I am a Bird.”  Luckily at the last moment peace was made, and no battle took place, so the Bat came to the Birds and wished to join in the rejoicings, but they all turned against him and he had to fly away.  He then went to the Beasts, but soon had to beat a retreat, or else they would have torn him to pieces.  “Ah,” said the Bat, “I see now.”

Moral of the story: He that is neither one thing nor the other has no friends.

Furthering the Moral via Soap Box: The time to pick a side is at hand. While the Birds and the Beasts found cause for compromise and avoided war, we unfortunately, have no such option. The communist woke agenda brooks no compromise. Nor should we. Communist totalitarianism cannot be squared with free market individualism. Free speech and the suppression of free speech, they cannot coexist. Insanity and sanity mingle poorly. You, me, each of us, must decide which side we are on and fight for the ideals of that side in every way we can, beginning with our vote and our voice. Let’s not be like the Bat.

Highly Recommended

The following are excellent resources for those of us (way more than 75 million strong) who want full and honest news reporting. We’ll be adding to this list as we go along. Those who prefer filtered news—only the news deemed safe for them to know—can stay with the legacy media, such as it is.

Need a free nonpartisan site that can make you a well-informed voter in elections at the local level as well as state and national? We recommend Ballotpedia.

Here’s a great way to join thousands—and eventually millions—of others who are letting their government representatives know their thoughts on pending legislation.  Heritage Action for America from the Heritage Foundation makes doing so super EASY! They do the research. They inform you. Then in almost the blink of an eye, you contact your federal or state representatives regarding pending legislation expressing your support or opposition.

Association of Mature American Citizens (AMAC) AARP is a shill for big government, AMAC isn’t.

Fox News and One America News (OAN) Cable channel

The Epoch Times print newspaper and web site/email updates

Dennis Prager  This man will help you find the mainstream conservative hiding inside you.

President Donald Trump’s Great America PAC is now up and running.  Give to this PAC or to individual candidates you know to be truly conservative. Money given to the Republican Party is money down a RINO hole. https://texasscorecard.com/state/legislative-priorities-tracker/

Texas Score Card https://texasscorecard.com/state/legislative-priorities-tracker/

Morton Blackwell’s Leadership Institute.

Project Veritas, Fun and informative hidden camera videos exposing the secret agendas of the left in their own words.

Columns worth reading

Each week under this heading, Soap Box will feature columns or intros to columns you can read in full elsewhere on the internet. Each of these columns pretty much express Soap Box’s views, else we’d not be sharing them with you.

GUEST COLUMN #1: Frederick Douglass Versus the 1619 Project: Critical Race Theory’s big lie about American history. by Dinesh D’Souza, Fri Jul 16, 2021.

Last week Soap Box ran a different column relating to Frederick Douglas’ thoughts on our nation’s founding in relation to slavery. This second column shows us how this great man might have viewed critical race theory and other absurdities of wokie wisdom. For emphasis, Soap Box has underlined a portion of the text.

GUEST COLUMN #2: Now Is Our Last Best Chance to Confront the Climate Crisis

While Soap Box finds much to disagree with in this column, we also understand that the author, Jeff Goodell, and those who agree share his perspective are as sincere and concerned about the future as we are. We hope you’ll take the time to read Jeff’s column and draw your own conclusions. His basic premise, a premise shared by many on the left, including Joe Biden, is that by 2050 the world will end if fossil fuel emissions aren’t brought down to zero. That is neither true nor necessary in our view. More to the point, it is impossible.  Such a drastic reduction in energy availability would result in famine, the collapse of governments into brutal feudalism and, ultimately, a resumption a return to fossil fuels.

Easier to make the sun rise each day in the west than to end our reliance on oil, gas and coal by 2050.

Again, that will not happen. But what will? Soap Box’s view is that the real problem is population growth. As we humans increase in number, and especially as a higher percentage become prosperous, we crowd out every other species. That’s not good for mankind or the planet. But how do we end population growth consensually, free of the heavy hand of government? That is the real dilemma.

GUEST COLUMN #1: Frederick Douglass Versus the 1619 Project: Critical Race Theory’s big lie about American history.

by Dinesh D’Souza, Fri Jul 16, 2021. 

Dinesh D’Souza is an author, filmmaker, and daily host of the Dinesh D’Souza podcast. This article first appeared in TheEpochTimes.com.

How amusing it is to see the advocates of critical race theory (CRT) and the 1619 Project vehemently deny that their philosophy is even being taught in elementary and secondary schools.

Most recently, teachers’ union president Randi Weingarten insisted that CRT is merely a subject of discussion in law schools and the legal community, not in the public-school system.

Hogwash! Parents wouldn’t be mobilizing against CRT if they didn’t witness its divisive propaganda being dumped on their children. Ironically, we have the COVID lockdowns to thank for this. Ordinarily, parents aren’t exposed to what their children are being taught in school. But with online instruction, they can pop into their kid’s room and go, “They’re teaching him WHAT?”

If CRT and its ideological cousin the 1619 Project really aren’t being taught in schools, why would the teachers unions and the left worry about them being banned by state legislators? That would be like states banning unicorns. This is absolutely no problem, since there are no unicorns.

Of course, the reason the unions and the left are up in arms is because CRT and the 1619 Project are being widely taught, and the state laws would curb these forms of indoctrination.

Taking a somewhat different approach, Gillian Brockell wrote a recent article in The Washington Post implying that CRT and the 1619 Project represent the very mainstream of American history, and that the great abolitionist leader Frederick Douglass would have been on board with their core premises. “Frederick Douglass had nothing but scorn for July Fourth,” her headline reads. “The Black abolitionist spoke for the enslaved.”

The article, however, like CRT and the 1619 Project, tells only half of the story. Let’s follow its narrative in some detail. Brockell recalls Douglass’s famous July 4 address (pdf), delivered in Rochester, New York, to the Rochester Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Society. The first part of the speech does indeed support Brockell’s account, because Douglass gives a savage indictment of how American independence looks to a black man.

“This Fourth [of] July is yours, not mine,” Douglass says. “You may rejoice, I must mourn. To drag a man in fetters into the grand illuminated temple of liberty, and call upon him to join you in joyous anthems, were inhuman mockery and sacrilegious irony. Do you mean, citizens, to mock me by asking me to speak today?” Douglass here is not speaking for himself. After all, he had escaped slavery in Maryland 14 years earlier. He was not “a man in fetters.” Douglass, however, was speaking from the point of view of the slave, his former self.

“What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July?” Douglass continues. “I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all the other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciations of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade and solemnity are, to him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety and hypocrisy—a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages.”

Already one can see Douglass’s speech as a masterpiece of rhetoric, each phrase building on the previous one, almost like a wave gathering force before crashing down on the audience. Yet as the speech moves on, Douglass makes a sharp and surprising turn. Far from denouncing the Fourth of July, far from scorning the Declaration of Independence as a charter of hypocrisy, far from blaming the Constitution for making an unholy pact with slavery—this is precisely what the critical race theorists do today—Douglass roundly affirms the founding as a “glorious liberty document” that launched “forces in operation” that “must inevitably work the downfall of slavery.”

Brockell has read Douglass’s speech. She knows about this “turn” in Douglass’s rhetoric. But she downplays it, quoting only a small part and suppressing the rest, and presenting even this tidbit as a sort of postscript, rather than the central point which Douglass was making. Why? Because the tidbit and its larger context completely undercuts her argument. Let’s probe deeper into what Douglass said.

Douglass argued in the tradition of Abraham Lincoln, who famously argued that in affirming the equality clause of the Declaration of Independence, the founders “meant simply to declare the right, so that the enforcement of it might follow as fast as circumstances should permit.” Lincoln and Douglass were both instruments of that enforcement. They helped realize the principles of 1776 and 1789.

Douglass’s point—and Lincoln’s too—is that there are two traditions in America, a tradition of enslavement and oppression, but also a tradition of emancipation and freedom. Both men regarded the Declaration of Independence and even the Constitution as part of the latter tradition. They also identified the Democratic Party with oppression and the Republican Party with freedom. Here’s a later remark by Douglass: “The Republican Party is the ship; all else is the sea.”

By contrast, CRT holds that there’s a single tradition, only enslavement and oppression, no genuine emancipation or freedom. That’s why the 1619 Project says virtually nothing about Douglass, and even Martin Luther King Jr. is barely mentioned. Its credo is that racism is built into the DNA of America not just from the founding but also from the country’s very beginning in 1619. So, the deceit of the 1619 Project and CRT is that both exaggerate one tradition, conceal its association with the Democratic Party, and suppress the emancipation tradition and its inevitable association with the Republican Party.

Douglass ended his speech on a patriotic note that vividly contrasts with the way he began, and shows why he had no problem, in the end, with celebrating the Fourth of July and what it represented. Of the Constitution, Douglass later said, “Abolish slavery tomorrow, and not a sentence or syllable of the Constitution needs to be altered.” That’s because the document gives no support, no sanction, to slavery.

Douglass of course knew that the founders who approved the Constitution allowed slavery to continue beyond 1789, but his argument is that this compromise was necessary to get a union—the very union that would have the power to bring about the end of slavery. Slavery, Douglass concluded, is merely the “scaffolding to the magnificent structure, to be removed as soon as the building was completed.” Indeed, the founders delivered “the deadliest blow upon slavery” that could be practically “given at a particular time.”

GUEST COLUMN #2: Now Is Our Last Best Chance to Confront the Climate Crisis

With Joe Biden in office, a serious plan to combat climate change is finally in our sights — but the clock is ticking, and there is no more room for error

By Jeff Goodell April 14,2021 The Rolling Stone

This story is part of Covering Climate Now, a global journalism collaboration strengthening coverage of the climate story.

The Earth’s climate has always been a work in progress. In the 4.5 billion years the planet has been spinning around the sun, ice ages have come and gone, interrupted by epochs of intense heat. The highest mountain range in Texas was once an underwater reef. Camels wandered in evergreen forests in the Arctic. Then a few million years later, 400 feet of ice formed over what is now New York City. But amid this geologic mayhem, humans have gotten lucky. For the past 10,000 years, virtually the entire stretch of human civilization, people have lived in what scientists call “a Goldilocks climate” — not too hot, not too cold, just right.

Now, our luck is running out. The industrialized nations of the world are dumping 34 billion tons or so of carbon into the atmosphere every year, which is roughly 10 times faster than Mother Nature ever did on her own, even during past mass extinction events. As a result, global temperatures have risen 1.2 C since we began burning coal, and the past seven years have been the warmest seven years on record. The Earth’s temperature is rising faster today than at any time since the end of the last ice age, 11,300 years ago. We are pushing ourselves out of a Goldilocks climate and into something entirely different — quite literally, a different world than humans have ever lived in before.

How hot will the summers get in India and Pakistan, and how will tens of thousands of deaths from extreme heat impact the stability of the region (both nations have nuclear weapons)? How close is the West Antarctic ice sheet to collapse, and what does the risk of five or six feet of sea-level rise mean for people living in mobile homes on the Gulf Coast? The truth is, no one knows for sure. We are in uncharted terrain. “We’re now in a world where the past is no longer a good guide to the future,” said Jesse Jenkins, an assistant professor of engineering at Princeton University. “We have to get much better at preparing for the unexpected.”

By all indications, President Biden and his team understand all this. And it’s hard not to feel that after 30 years of dithering and denial and hypocrisy, the fight to save the climate has finally begun in earnest. In the 2020 election, nearly 70 percent of Biden’s voters said climate change was a top issue for them. Biden has staffed his administration with the climate A-team, from Gina McCarthy as domestic climate czar to John Kerry as international climate envoy. He has made racial and environmental justice a top priority. And perhaps most important of all, he sees the climate crisis as an opportunity to reinvent the U.S. economy and create millions of new jobs.

To read the rest of this article, you may go to Now Is Our Last Best Chance to Confront the Climate Crisis.