Quote of the Day
Make no mistake; we have a year before this country becomes a full-on autocracy, and democracy completely leaves us. And we’re looking at the election in 2026, and Donald Trump knows that in a free and fair election, he will lose. He will lose the House, the House will flip and will become in Democratic hands. There will be committee chairs who will be able to hold meetings, and this is the last thing he wants.
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Don’t be surprised when polling booths are surrounded by American military in the guise of making sure that the elections are fair and that nobody is tampering with anything.
And when you see violence breaking out, which there’ll be protests, there’ll be inciting violence, there’ll be some violence, and they’ll keep that. Then you’ll see the commandeering of voting machines, ballot boxes to make sure that that election is secure. Well, what that means is that he will then commandeer the election.
Rob Reiner
October 5, 2025
Rob Reiner warns US has one year before becoming ‘full-on autocracy’ | Fox News
If Reiner were sharing his opinion on directing or acting someone might be able to learn something from him. But if he is offering his opinion on engineering, heart surgery, or politics you can be certain his prophecy is of zero, or negative, value.
In a perverse sort of way I find the psychology interesting.
It was in high school someone I knew told me something I thought was unlikely to be true. In attempted to convince me they pointed out how popular her source for the information was. This was incredibly confusing to me. How did the popularity of someone affect the truthfulness of something?
Later I saw it all around me. Adults with no hint of sarcasm or insincerity believed things based on the popularity of the person making an actual or implied claim of truth. If a politician said the cause of some bad situation was corporate greed, racism, or government regulation, people would believe it without evidence. If a sports figure had their picture on a cereal package, people would believe the contents of the box were empowered with special characteristics they would not have claimed the day before the picture was featured on the box. Toothpaste quality was judged by the teeth of the actress holding the box rather than the contents of the tube. In reality, the opinion of the next-door neighbors was probably just as valid.
People apparently have a hardwired propensity to believe a well-known figure. Evidence tends to be a hard sell in their struggle to discern reality. I get it that reality is hard. But wow! The substitute/shortcut methods used to determine truth from falsity are mind boggling messed up.
Archie Bunker (if not Carrol O’Conner) had his number.
Excellent observations. Fact versus emotion. And most go with emotion.
“People apparently have a hardwired propensity to believe a well-known figure.”
Hence the plethora of washed-up Hollywoodies hawking crap on late night infomercials.
I wouldn’t know. I have not owned a TV since sometime in the late 1990s.
So, we should start a Go-Fund-Me for Joe so he can afford a TV?
No. I have no interest or time to watch TV.
A Go-Fund-Me for an underground bunker in Idaho would be appreciated, though.
I wasn’t serious about the TV.
Sorry, my Go-Fund-Me fund already went to Bayou Renaissance Man.
I didn’t think so. But I wanted to communicate my reasons for not having a TV.
I’m always amazed at all the warmists who continue to claim “consensus” as the justification for their views. Galileo wasn’t right because of the consensus of his peers. And as I like to point out, if consensus were the measure of truth, we would not be here, because Columbus would have sailed right off the edge of the flat earth.
“Fifteen hundred years ago, everybody knew the Earth was the center of the universe. Five hundred years ago, everybody knew the Earth was flat, and fifteen minutes ago, you knew that people were alone on this planet. Imagine what you’ll know tomorrow.” — Agent K, Men in Black
And just like Galileo, we’re sometimes persecuted and ridiculed for not following “consensus,” even when we can objectively demonstrate that it’s wrong.
Also, fun fact: The above quote isn’t quite correct. The Greeks knew — via observational evidence — that the Earth was round nearly 2,500 years ago. 2,200 years ago, they calculated a guess on the circumference of the planet, which as I recall was only off by a few hundred miles.
Yep. If the consensus had been correct, Columbus would have either died from running out of potable water or by mutiny, in the middle of the one big ocean.
Which, admittedly, from his point of view isn’t all that different from falling off the edge of the world.
He still almost died, since his calculations put Asia closer than the Americas actually are.
I think it’s a sort of perversion of a hardwired human instinct.
If your friend gives you advice, especially if it’s a good friend of long standing, you can almost always take it to the bank that when they recommend something it’s probably good info and well-intentioned. If it isn’t, there are potentially major social consequences for that — if someone follows your recommendation & gets screwed over in the process, they might reconsider the friendship.
Now, enter TV. People see these faces & hear these voices right gut up close & personal, in their living rooms, at home, day after day, time after time. It’s like those TV people are your friends. They’re not, but I’d bet it’s probably very hard for a person’s brain to know the difference, especially without putting in some thought & effort.
The result? People listening to celebrities when they probably shouldn’t. Now add in the kind of person who has figured out how to weaponize that for their own purposes (ad agencies etc.) and the cake is baked.
I believe it’s an extension and perversion of the “argument from authority” logical fallacy.
For example, when a doctor tells you something medical in nature, you want to believe him/her. It’s supposed to be their area of expertise. But that doesn’t automatically make everything they say 100% correct (hence the fallacy); if it did, there would be no need for malpractice insurance.
But now let that fallacy bleed over into doctors speaking on topics that have nothing to do with medicine (e.g., “gun safety” or “road/vehicle safety”). Here they have no special education or qualifications beyond what normal folks might have, but people still listen to them because their “authority” is established elsewhere.
I’m not sure how that jumps to celebrity status becoming a stand-in for authority, but it’s basically the same: Someone “more important” or “more experienced” than I am says it is so, therefore it must be so. It’s not true, but the human brain is wired to believe it anyway.
The book we were using in a high school religion class argued that since millions of people believe something, then it is certainly true because that many people can’t be wrong. I believe that idiotic statement was the beginning of my disillusionment with The Church.
The absolutely terrifying thing about progressive socialists like Reiner and his ilk is that they are projecting all the time. Everything they accuse conservative of doing is what they intend to do or have already done in their abuse of authority in the pursuit of power no matter the cost. I also love how he poisons the well by claiming any effective anti fraud efforts are an attempt to steal the election. It makes me long for zombie General Augusto Pinochet to appear and clean the Augean stables, his way
Just when you thought truth and falsity could be pure in computing… https://youtu.be/QSVqWxkv23A
That was a mind twister.