It’s been quite awhile since one of Balladeer’s Blog’s “Liberals and Conservatives and …” items, largely because of how increasingly outdated and irrelevant the labels Liberal and Conservative have become in recent years.
Regular readers know that I get attacked by both left-wingers and right-wingers since I refuse to play along with their silly “shirts versus skins” thinking which dictates you MUST declare yourself part of either the left or the right even though we can all see what a monumental mess that divisive thinking has resulted in.
More and more of us adults have accepted that a combination of supposedly “left-wing” and supposedly “right-wing” approaches to life is far more constructive than the shrill, “strictly one or the other” partisanship practiced in the past.
The people who still pretend to be “Liberals” though their worldview has NOTHING to do with liberty and EVERYTHING to do with imposing taboos have run rings around the people who still pretend to be “Conservatives.” One of the false notions pushed by the left-wing Archie Bunkers of the 1960s generation is that fascism is purely a product of right-wing fanaticism when it is really a product of fanaticism from either end of the political spectrum.
Even the meaning of the word fascism comes from fasces, the ancient symbol involving a bundle of rods or sticks with an axe-head protruding from them. From there the axe-head was largely dropped and fascii (plural) from then on referred to the bundle of rods or sticks.
The sticks gave way to arrows in some imagery, like the infamous “Yoke and the Arrows” of the Falangists in the Spanish Civil War. The overall message of the clump or bundle of sticks remained the same as it had been for centuries: one stick (or for more dramatic impact, one arrow) could be easily broken. Together in a bundle the multiple sticks could NOT be easily broken.
This has always been the grotesque appeal and the message of fascism no matter which side of the political spectrum practices its ugliness: one lone, otherwise insignificant person can be easily broken, but TOGETHER, many otherwise insignificant people cannot be easily broken. That description applies to fascist groups all the way up through the present-day gang which is ironically called Antifa (the biggest fascists of the moment). Continue reading
The NAIA’s Mid-South Conference announced that it will add three more teams for the 2020-2021 season, bringing the league’s total number of teams to twelve. 
GET MEAN (1975)- One of the weirdest Spaghetti Westerns ever made and that’s saying something! Get Mean stars Tony Anthony and was also released under the title The Stranger Gets Mean, making it the final movie in Anthony’s series of Italo-Westerns as the enigmatic gunslinger known only as the Stranger. 
PRETTY PIERRE – Created by Canadian author Gilbert Parker, Pretty Pierre was a Canadian version of fictional American Western Pulp Heroes like Deadwood Dick and many others. Pierre was a smuggler and gambler/gunslinger whose adventures took place in Canada and Alaska in the late 1800s. 
WICHITA – For the second time in the Rion Rhoades’ era, the Hutchinson College Blue Dragons football team is the preseason favorite to win the Jayhawk Conference championship.
SJW’s: LOSERS OR JUST FOOLS? – SJW’s are the modern-day equivalent of those primly disapproving religious nuts who spent their lives trying to impose their own uptight notions of right and wrong on other people. Except SJW’s are even more sad and pathetic. 
Robert Mueller has replaced Richard Nixon as the National Cockroach. Even among notoriously sleazy American Prosecutors, Mueller has a name that’s synonymous with sludge. Just search under “Robert Mueller Scandals” and take your pick from all of the left-wing and right-wing news outlets. Mueller’s infamous involvement in abetting gangster Whitey Bulger by keeping innocent people in prison for years is just ONE of this greaseball’s many scandals. 
I joked recently that next the Democrats will beg Mueller to write a fictionalized account of what he thinks happened in the nonexistent “Russian Collusion” (LMAO) fantasy. Then they can call him back AGAIN and ask hypothetical questions about what each line in the fictional account might mean, all the while pretending that their obsession with trying to revive Murky Mueller’s failed Witch Hunt means there’s smoke there. 
The Frontierado Holiday, coming up Friday, August 2nd is about celebrating the myth of the Old West, not the grinding reality. 
Sites like theirs will also sell plenty of other supplies that will suit your needs for making your deck or party room look like a Wild West saloon or casino. Clothing, saloon chairs, era-appropriate whiskey glasses, you name it. 
