Amerika-in-Exile (the Tulio Baars Homepage)

When Donald Trump accused the media of being "fake news," it set off a paroxysm of rage among news outlets and their collaborators in the "new media" of social media and internet sites. They retaliated by cracking down on conservative blogspam being posted to social media, usually from hysterical sites and sometimes from outright untrue clickbait, calling all of that "fake news" and appointing fake news sites like Snopes, Politifact, and Wikipedia in charge of determining true from fake. For most of us, however, his words resonated because we have become increasingly suspicious of what is reported in media. After the JournoList scandal , we know that a deep state style cabal in media is coordinating its message so to present the same idea in every place at once, which signals to most people that it is true. It was a corrupt and collusive activity that, for whatever reason, seemed ethically acceptable to its 100% Leftist audience. At that point, w...

We live in a time of invisible insanity . On the surface, we have wealth, power, and technology; underneath, we see how a lack of social order has made people revert to the cruder ways of existence and become manipulative. There is very little trust because people do not share values in common, an identity, or even a sense of purpose; everyone exists for himself alone and denies any order larger than the human individual. Individualists hate social order because as soon as you have standards, you have a hierarchy based on who meets those standards. This means that social order tells people NO! in response to some actions they might contemplate, and they hate that, because the individualist in humanity resents any order -- even nature, logic, and fact -- above that of their own intentions. People have an inbuilt backdoor to their minds. We are self-pitying because we are aware of mortality and the smallness of our existence, including the limited amount of effect that we can have...

The Left whines about "increasing inequality" and the disappearance of the middle class but as always, it is subterfuge. They simply want an excuse to increase equality, which is a process like entropy that involves taking from the productive and giving to the less productive so that everyone feels "safe" because there are no standards anymore. As usual, for the Left, no separation between cause and effect exists: inequality is the cause of inequality, and the solution, equality, is created by enforcing equality. They do not understand how conditions lead to responses and how what we see of reality is in fact the results of a cause somewhere else. Not surprisingly, their solutions are unrealistic as a result. If we look to the causes of inequality, we realize there can be only two: either the top group gained all the power, or the bottom group gave away power, for example by becoming less competent. We can see some evidence for this in the increasing inequalit...

We know a lot about Stephen Paddock, the gunman who killed fifty-eight people at a Las Vegas concert with bump stocks and semiautomatic rifles, but the pattern makes so little sense that we know nothing at all of the man himself. In fact, it seems as if he went out of his way to obfuscate his own life before going on what he surely knew was a suicide mission. And now, the media narrative emerges in its final form : A jailed man who gave a statement to authorities in November said he encountered a man he believed was Stephen Paddock and who told him that Federal Emergency Management Agency “camps” setup after Hurricane Katrina in 2005 were “a dry run for law enforcement and military to start kickin' down doors and...confiscating guns.” “Somebody has to wake up the American public and get them to arm themselves,” the man said Paddock told him less than a month before the deadliest mass shooting in modern U.S. history. “Sometimes sacrifices have to be made.” These statemen...

This Memorial Day weekend, it seems everyone is staying at home. The sales at the stores are not great, nor does there seem to be much excitement, but a fair number of people seem to be buying alcohol. The cookouts that made this such an odd holiday are gone as well; no more groups of neighbors, watery overpriced beer in hand, standing around a smoking grille and talking as if they knew each other. We cannot claim to be surprised by this, really, since national holidays have sort of faded away over the past couple years. It started with Halloween, when the people from outside the neighborhood drove so many kids to get candy that our subdivision basically just turned on the sprinklers and turned off the lights. Then other holidays faded too. We had nothing in common, so why celebrate them? To your average "American" at this point, Memorial Day means a four-day weekend and nothing more. Soldiers who died fighting for -- well, what, really? Abstractions like freedom and de...

Long ago, Asia wanted to conquer the West. Its first foray, through Mongols, had gone well until it became clear that resistance would be too strong and thus, the invasion too costly. In the grand tradition of plotting over tea and chess, the overlords of Asia met with clasped hands and faintly glowing dark eyes. "We cannot challenge them directly, so instead we will follow the most devious of strategies: we will turn them against themselves," said one Minister from deep in the rolling hills. "How can this be done?" asked another. The Minister from the city spoke up: "We will use two strokes of the axe: first, we will spread the worst of our own society to them, and then, we will turn them against themselves by making them compete against us to be more like us." As he explained his plans, the others agreed: this was indeed a subterfuge of many subtle layers, misdirections, deceptions, deflections, camouflage, and obfuscation! It made them feel in...

Tonight many keyboards are firing away at full speed about how a court's ruling that Donald Trump's Twitter messages are First Amendment protected means that Twitter will have to finally be an open and free speech zone. While this sounds like a nice idea, in fact the opposite is true. The court found that Trump's tweets are special because they are a communication from government . This is what gives us First Amendment protections in our replies to them. U.S. District Judge Naomi Reice Buchwald in Manhattan ruled that comments on the president’s account, and those of other government officials, were public forums, and that blocking Twitter users for their views violated their right to free speech under the First Amendment of Constitution. Eugene Volokh, a University of California Los Angeles School of Law professor who specializes in First Amendment issues, said the decision’s effect would reach beyond Trump. “It would end up applying to a wide range of governmen...