insurrection | The Direction of Intention

Cleansed By Gaslight Fire [David’s blog on saturday morning smack-dab]

Posted on April 12, 2025 by davidrobinsoncreative

I understand that over in fox-news-land they barely mention the stock-market-free-fall due to the tariffs calculated with kindergarten math. Instead, the are chatting about Kid Rock’s tailor. Important stuff and definitely bolstering their claim to be the champions of truth. In other news, The New York Times managed to bury the Hands Off protests on page 18. Evidently, millions of citizens protesting the intentional collapse of their government by the executive branch is not worthy of front page news. By the way, whatever became of the free press, the fourth pillar of democracy?

Do you recall that one of the methods used to detect if a witch-was-a-witch was to tie the woman (or man) to a large rock and throw them into the river. If they drowned, they were not a witch. If they didn’t drown, they were proven to be a witch, dried off and summarily burned at the stake. Either way, the authorities confiscated the witches’ property. They divided-up the spoils as payment for their time.

This is the same mentality driving the madness of the current administration.* The executive cries that he is the victim of a “Witch Hunt”. He and his party tied our democracy to a rock and chucked it into the river to test whether or not it is a democracy. Lady Liberty survived their January 6th insurrection so is now being tied to the stake. She’s a democracy for sure and must be cleansed by hot gaslight fire.

By the way, whatever became of those pillars of democracy? The Legislative, the Judicial and the Free Press? I suppose they are waiting until the fire burns Lady Liberty to ashes so they, too, might enjoy the confiscation of democracy’s property.

Don’t worry. You’ll never hear the gory details on fox news or, apparently, any other purveyor of polished entertainment once known as the free press. Truth has no meaningful role to play in an authoritarian state.

*This is also the same mentality driving the DOGE: 1) Level the accusation of waste, abuse and fraud. 2) Decimate the agency. 3) When it no longer functions properly or at all, proudly proclaim it wasteful, abusive, and fraudulent. 4) Confiscate the secure data, privatize the agency in order pass the savings and profits onto the billionaire class.

read Kerri’s blog about ASHES

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Discern [on Flawed Wednesday]

Posted on August 11, 2021 by davidrobinsoncreative

“For in the end, he [Aldous Huxley] was trying to tell us what afflicted the people in ‘Brave New World’ was not that they were laughing instead of thinking, but that they did not know what they were laughing about and why they had stopped thinking.” Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves To Death: Public Discourse In The Age Of Show Business

Neil Postman wrote Amusing Ourselves To Death in 1985. Cassandra, sounding the alarm to a community too distracted to listen. Were he alive today, he’d think – but would not say – “I told you so.” All the quotes in this post are his.

I read in my daily-news-horror-trawl a quote from a Wyoming man who believes he’s protected from the pandemic because of the color of his hair. It might sound wacky until you consider that his staunch belief in the virus’ preference for hair color is just one of the many misinformation narratives currently being fed to the angry and easily led. He is, without question or thought, breathing the gas of a political party that wants to keep him distracted, fearful and high.

If you are not choking on the fumes of excessive gaslighting, then you are among those whose eyes are burning from the corrosive air it produces. Are you as tired as I am of reading accounts of deathbed appeals for the vaccine? It is too late, in your final moments of life, to realize you’ve been duped. It’s a tragedy. Are you as disgusted as I am, having been witness to the undeniable violence of the insurrection, of listening to the blatant denials? Despite what your eyes saw, it was just another day of tourists wandering through the Capitol. Gaslight tears.

During the first year of the pandemic an acquaintance latched onto a comorbidity table lifted from the CDC website and circulated as “proof” that COVID was less dangerous than the common cold. It was, of course, taken out of context. A quick visit to the CDC website (seriously, less than 30 seconds), viewed in context and with an understanding of the meaning of the word “comorbidity,” easily debunked the claim. Our acquaintance, enraged, doubled down on his claim of “proof” – though he could not be bothered to spend 30 seconds to check the poison gas that he was gulping.

“When a population becomes distracted by trivia, when cultural life is redefined as a perpetual round of entertainments, when serious public conversation becomes a form of baby-talk, when, in short, a people become an audience, and their public business a vaudeville act, then a nation finds itself at risk; culture-death is a clear possibility.”

The legal defense has been successfully used to defend both Tucker Carlson and Rachel Maddow: the courts ruled that reasonable viewers should know the difference between news and opinion. This is news. This is not.

Do we have the ability to differentiate between public business and a vaudeville act? The evidence is not hopeful.

The court’s ruling, then, is likely based on a faulty premise: that people are able to differentiate. That the audience is reason-able or values reason. Able-To-Reason. Reason is the power to think, understand and form judgments through a process of logic. In order to be reasonable one must value reason. One must want it.

Logic and reason, both assume the inclination and capacity to question. Curiosity, real curiosity, does not seek agreement or group think. It seeks to step into the gap between what is espoused and what is lived. It seeks solid ground to build upon so must recognize sand when it sees it.

And, what if “reason” long ago fled the coop? Or, what if “reason,” has never been a dominant trait in the coop in the first place? What if discernment dies in the presence of so much gas?

“Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance.”

read Kerri’s blog post about IT DOESN’T KNOW