Most of us know what it's like to get a song stuck in your head, but how many of us spend most of our day with song after song playing in our brains, triggered by the things we or other people say? Quite a few of us, apparently. Social media creator Chrissy Allen shared a video on Instagram that is resonating with thousands who "can't have a single conversation without your brain thinking of a song." Watch and see if this is you: See on Instagram "My mind is a literal jukebox," Allen wrote. Same, friend. Same. Over 18,000 people commented on the video commiserating about being walking karaoke machines."I am a teacher and the other day I said, 'Okay everyone stop what you’re doing' and then without thinking said'Cause I’m about to ruin the image and the style that you’re use to' and the entire class stared at me confused and not knowing what just happened. I then realized I am 50 and my head is filled with old lyrics.""All the neurodivergent peeps having a mental karaoke session in the middle of conversations ? and we will inevitably say 'could you repeat that?'""Her: he was cheating on me, but you know what's really bananas?Me: ...B-a-n-a-n-a-s... I'm so sorry""Why am I like this! ? The willpower it takes to not sing out loud in professional settings. The struggle is real."via GIPHY"I can't distinguish an original thought from a verse in a song anymore. Send help.""Very fluent in song lyrics and movie scenes ?""Yes. I too have this problem. Lyrics and movie quotes are my language.""This is me and my husband. We can't have a conversation without being reminded of a song then singing... We were in a harsh disagreement once and I couldn't help but start laughing, it annoyed him until I started singing the song, then he laughed, then we got over the disagreement and went on with our day ?""My kids 'OH my god!!' Me 'Becky look at her butt!'Then the kids just look at me like something is wrong with me. ?"Apparently, some of us just have the entire catalog of every song we've ever heard just sitting there on standby until a word or phrase triggers the player to kick on. And yes, it can be a challenge to stop yourself from singing out loud at random times mid-conversation. via GIPHYThere's actually a scientific term for this phenomenon (and the super-related "earworm" phenomenon of having a song playing in your head on repeat). It's called involuntary musical imagery, or INMI, which refers to a "conscious mental experience of music that occurs without deliberate efforts to initiate or sustain it." A study in 2020 found that INMI appears to be a universal phenomenon and that songs with certain characteristics are more likely to be played and replayed in our brains. “Earworms are an extremely common phenomenon and an example of spontaneous cognition,” the lead study author, Kelly Jakubowski, PhD, told CBS News. “Psychologists know that humans spend up to 40 percent of our days engaging in spontaneous cognition and are starting to try to understand why our brains spend so much time thinking thoughts unrelated to our present task and how such thoughts might be useful.”While an earworm isn't quite the same thing as having songs on shuffle in your head, there are definitely some song that tend to pop into people's heads and refuse to leave more than others. According to the study, the top earworm songs are:1. “Bad Romance” by Lady Gaga2. “Can’t Get You Out Of My Head” by Kylie Minogue3. “Don’t Stop Believing” by Journey4. “Somebody That I Used To Know” by Gotye5. “Moves Like Jagger” by Maroon 56. “California Gurls” by Katy Perry7. “Bohemian Rhapsody” by Queen8. “Alejandro” by Lady Gaga9. “Poker Face” by Lady GagaTerribly sorry for putting those into your brain. (Apparently, Lady Gaga has a special knack for writing songs that stick in the ol' gray matter. Thanks, Gaga.)via GIPHYThe question is, are some of us more prone to INMI than others? Perhaps. According to CBS News, research has shown that being constantly exposed to music and having certain personality traits, such as obsessive-compulsive or neurotic tendencies, can make people more susceptible to earworms. And a small 2015 study found that the size and shape of a person's brain—specifically, the thickness of certain brain regions—affected the frequency with which people got songs stuck in their head. So those with jukebox brains might just be somewhat special, though judging from the responses to Allen's video there are quite a few of us out there bopping along to the soundtracks in our heads.

If you haven’t seen this video making the rounds on the internet of Vivek Ramaswamy noting that Donald Trump’s opponent isn’t Kamala Harris or even the Democrat Party but rather the machine that controls her, you really should. In fact, here it is. This is only about three minutes, so have a look, and then we’ll talk about this below: WATCH: Vivek Ramaswamy Delivers The Greatest Breakdown of the 2024 Election in Under Three Minutes — ‘We Are Running to Dismantle a System’ | @VivekGRamaswamy This is mastery. The perfect articulation of what is currently transpiring in America. Vivek Ramaswamy just delivered… pic.twitter.com/LsPHttvnZM — Overton (@overton_news) September 14, 2024 Ramaswamy has been talking about this for a good six weeks or so. He’s especially kicked the “machine” narrative into high gear in the wake of the Democrats’ coup, or shift, to Kamala Harris as their candidate. And “machine” is a very good word. It’s a good word because today’s Democrat Party is a collection of urban political machines controlling almost all of the major cities in America. They’re all alike, they’re funded in all the same ways, they’re all pushing the same atrocious, soul-and-body-killing policies, and they all generate the same failed results in a manner highly suggestive of purposeful action rather than mere incompetence. This column talks often about weaponized governmental failure, which is a modern explanation of the old Curley Effect: urban Democrat political machines intentionally refuse to adequately perform the basics of municipal governance because by neglecting potholes, proper law enforcement, fiscal sanity, constitutional governance, drainage, and education, they run off all the middle-class voters who would hold them accountable for that poor performance, and the electorate that is left is either rich, in which case they have a propensity for embracing radical socialism as a decadent penance for the economic sins of their forebears (and can pay a la carte, as in private neighborhood security or private schools for their kids, for city services that are no longer adequate), or desperately poor and thus easy to govern with offerings of crumbs and midnight-basketball-style idiocies. It’s a villainous blueprint, but those machines are all built on it. But the Democrat Party that is attempting to foist Kamala Harris on the American public isn’t just a collection of local machines. It’s also a cog in an overarching national, political, cultural, and economic machine that transposes itself over our national life. Call it the managerial class as Ramaswamy does. Call it the ruling elite. Call it the Deep State. It’s the organization, or guiding spirit, that has captured most of those people living their lives close to power in this country. Consider Dana Bash’s atrocious interview with JD Vance on Sunday, in which halfway through, Vance was forced to ask her if she’d rather ask him questions and he give her answers than to have a debate. The answer, of course, was the latter — because Bash isn’t an objective journalist but instead a cog in the Rube Goldberg propaganda contraption that is the legacy corporate media. Dana Bash doesn’t have any independent or objective thoughts; those were squeezed out of her long ago. Her job is to spew the machine’s narratives, filtered through whatever directives everyone else in the legacy corporate media has also received. There’s a reason these people sound so eerily alike. And there’s a reason why reason and accountability are so foreign to them. Take Lester Holt, for example, who in reporting on the second assassination attempt on Donald Trump in only 64 days took pains to claim that it’s Trump’s overheated rhetoric about Haitian cat-eaters that somehow is the cause of him enduring more assassination attempts than Harris has endured media interviews. Nobody with an unbiased, objective mind comes to such a conclusion. But propagandists do. And that’s what Holt is — and why he’s gone as far in media as he has. Ramaswamy notes that the machine isn’t just in control of legacy media. It’s in control of social media, minus Elon Musk’s X and a few minor platforms. It’s in control of corporate boardrooms, put under the thumb of the regulatory state by multiple means during Barack Obama’s eight years in office while America’s small and mid-size firms were gutted and now held in stasis by woke institutional capital outfits like BlackRock, State Street, and Vanguard. Certainly the machine controls the administrative state. The machine has little feeling, but that isn’t to say it has none. In fact, it has one: it hates. The machine hates you. It hates your individuality and your capacity for rational, critical thought. It hates the idea that you might come to conclusions different than the one the machine has decided for you. That’s why the machine calls you racist for objecting to the mass migration of Haitians to America. Haiti isn’t a race, of course; it’s a nationality, but more importantly, it’s a culture and a failed one. There is a reason why Nigerian-Americans perform better economically on average than “white” Americans do but Haitians do disastrously badly by comparison. In America, almost every single narrative spread by the credentialed elite falls apart upon the slightest scrutiny. And these are the stakes of this election: whether we ordinary Americans, those of us not being given aid, comfort, and status by the elite machine, are up to the task of ruling ourselves, or are we satisfied to devolve from citizens to subjects. I wish Trump had begun defining the race in those terms, as Ramaswamy has. Dan Proft says the same thing, and notes that Vance perceives this binary with clarity and has an opportunity to drive it home during the vice presidential debate with the villainous reprobate Tim Walz: He’s right, of course, and there is reason to expect that Vance will do just that. But if Trump would do it, and note that this fight against the elite machine is the reason he’s managed to attract Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Tulsi Gabbard across the aisle while Harris is embracing the endorsements of such loathsome machine-adjacent Republicans as Adam Kinzinger, the Lincoln Project pedophile enablers, warmongering neocons like Bill Kristol, and Liz and Dick Cheney, we could reshape America’s understanding of its current politics. In a way that is clear and objectively accurate. This shouldn’t even be controversial. The machine should be forced to defend itself on terms everyone can understand. Instead, it hides behind Trump Derangement Syndrome while assassins chase Trump with rifles, or behind identity politics as race relations and mental health decline. The machine is killing us, because we’re letting it. Flawed though Trump might be, he is our only possible antidote to the machine. That is the chief reason he must win in November. It’s time he began making that clear. READ MORE: The Debate Was Fixed The Real Reason Democrats Fear Losing in November The post Trump and Vance Need to Articulate the Stakes of the 2024 Race appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

Kamala Harris claims that, although she’s reversed her positions, her “values” remain unchanged. The epitome of hypocrisy in the interest of political expediency, Harris’ claim is also an insight into the subjective reality that she and America’s Left share. In her first (and long-delayed) media appearance since her nomination, Kamala Harris and her running mate Tim Walz were interviewed by CNN’s Dana Bash on Aug. 30. Bash asked about two of Harris’ claimed position reversals; Harris assiduously avoided responding directly. (READ MORE: Kamala Harris Has a Plan — To Take, Take, Take) “When you were in Congress, you supported the Green New Deal. And in 2019 you said, quote, ‘There is no question I’m in favor of banning fracking.’” Harris replied “No, and I made that clear on the debate stage in 2020, that I would not ban fracking. As vice president, I did not ban fracking. As president, I will not ban fracking.” Interestingly, Harris never made it to a 2020 debate stage, because she dropped out in December of 2019. Without noting the discrepancy, Bash returned to the question: “In 2019, I believe in a town hall you said — you were asked, ‘Would you commit to implementing a federal ban on fracking on your first day in office?’ and you said, ‘There’s no question I’m in favor of banning fracking. So yes.’ So it changed in — in that campaign?” Harris again attempted to claim that she changed her position on fracking in 2020: “In 2020 I made very clear where I stand. We are in 2024, and I have not changed that position, nor will I going forward. I kept my word, and I will keep my word.” (READ MORE: Who Won the Debate? AI Says Kamala Did.) Moving past whether Harris had reversed her position, Bash asked Harris why she had: “What made you change that position at the time?” This time, Harris tried to elevate herself out of answering the question entirely by switching her focus from her reversed position to her “values.”  Harris responded “Well, let’s be clear. My values have not changed.” Moving to illegal immigration, another Harris flip-flop, Bash recounted “Just one other question about something that you said in 2019 when you first ran. There was a debate. You raised your hand when asked whether or not the border should be decriminalized. Do you still believe that?” Harris again attempted a transparent dodge: “I believe there should be consequences. We have laws that have to be followed and enforced that address and deal with people who cross our border illegally. And there should be consequences… And I would enforce our laws as president going forward. I recognize the problem.” What Harris did not respond to was whether she still believed that illegal immigration “should be decriminalized” as she had in 2019. Instead, Harris acknowledged that “we have laws” (which is obvious) and that she “would enforce our laws as president” (as she would be constitutionally required to do), but she did not say whether she would push to repeal laws that make illegal immigration “illegal” — which was what Bash’s question raised and what Harris supported in 2019. Concluding, Bash stated: “Generally speaking, how should voters look at some of the changes that you’ve made — that you explained some of here — in your policy?” Harris again sought to evade by “elevating” her response away from mere positions and onto higher “values”: “Dana, I think the — the — the most important and most significant aspect of my policy perspective and decisions is my values have not changed.” The distinction that Harris was seemingly attempting to make is that despite her claims of having diametrically reversed two key positions, her “values” somehow remain steadfast. Harris and the Left Don’t Have What Most People Call ‘Values’ For most Americans, this is a confusing contrast. To most people, “values” are a lodestar for action. A route that diverges from the lodestar is either off course, or the lodestar is not, in fact, a lodestar. The same applies to personal values. Values are, by definition, “universals,” applying to everything all of the time. They should guide us consistently through the vagaries of day-to-day life. If instead, our actions merely mirror life’s vagaries — as Harris claims hers do on fracking and illegal immigration — then we are hardly following values. (READ MORE: The Most Important Question Harris Can’t Answer) Harris is, of course, caught in a bind — her extremist left positions are extremely unpopular — and now a lie. However, Harris is unintentionally also perfectly demonstrating the application of the American Left’s subjective reality. For America’s Left, what it propounds is the moment’s reality. Of course, the moment can change, as Kamala so ineloquently demonstrates, but that is the whole point: Reality is whatever America’s Left needs it to be at a particular moment. Understanding the Left’s subjective reality is what allows us to understand America’s Left. To Kamala, it is not alarming to claim that her “values” have not changed, even as she claims her fundamental positions on important issues have completely reversed. For Kamala and America’s Left, there can be no permanent, objective definitions. Words mean whatever they want them to mean. Ditto, the Constitution: it is not to be interpreted in the way words were used at the time they were written, but as they can be reapplied to the Left’s momentary desires. All are examples of the Left’s subjective reality. And all demonstrate the danger this subjective reality holds for America. Without objective standards, there is no constraint on America’s Left, which is just what America’s Left wants. And America’s Left will accept no constraint because there is only one constant for America’s Left: the accrual of power. Power is the Left’s only objective value; all else is merely a means to this goal. While the rest of America stands scratching its collective head at the Left’s ever-changing subjective reasonings, the Left moves inexorably after its objective: more power. Similarly, as Bash and the rest of America stand mystified that Harris would not answer basic questions about her reasons for reversing fundamental positions, Harris blithely moves on in her quest for the presidency. There is a temptation to write off Kamala Harris as simply a phony: another do-anything, say-anything politician in pursuit of office. Yes, she is all these things. But she is also more. Kamala Harris is the embodiment of the Left’s subjective reality: a series of ever-mutable means in an immutable pursuit of power. J.T. Young was a professional staffer in the House and Senate from 1987-2000, served in the Department of Treasury and Office of Management and Budget from 2001-2004, and was director of government relations for a Fortune 20 company from 2004-2023. The post Kamala Harris Embodies the Subjective Reality of America’s Left appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

The leader of the Roman Catholic Church, Pope Francis, when advising Catholics to “choose the lesser evil” between Vice President Kamala Harris, who supports unrestricted abortion, and former President Donald Trump, who supports the deportation of illegal aliens and stronger border control, effectively equated the killing of unborn babies with the deportation of illegal aliens. The pope said that he did not know which is the greater evil, and advised American Catholics to consult their “conscience” when making their choice. This is a far cry from Pope John Paul II’s words in Evangelium Vitae where he recognized and affirmed that “the right to life” is that “upon which all other inalienable rights of individuals are founded and from which they develop.” George Weigel noted that John Paul II understood that the right to live is the “first human right.” Pope Francis has therefore downgraded the first human right. When Pope Francis described these two “evils,” he rightly called abortion an “assassination,” while characterizing not giving welcome to migrants a grave sin. The greater evil here (though in most instances deporting illegal aliens is not evil) is clear, yet Pope Francis refused to say that abortion was the greater evil. The deportation of illegal aliens does not deprive those aliens of their life. It means that those persons must return to the country of their origin, which may mean a harder life and a poorer life — but it does not kill them. Abortion deprives an unborn baby of its life. John Paul II equated abortion with genocide. The teaching of the Church is clear and has been affirmed throughout centuries — abortion is a crime against humanity; it is the slaughter of innocents. To equate abortion with the legal deportation of illegal aliens is to effectively undermine that teaching. Perhaps Pope Francis is merely continuing his verbal attacks on conservative American Catholics. In the recent past, Pope Francis criticized the “backwardness” of conservatives in the American church. He called conservative Catholics in America “reactionary,” accusing them of replacing faith with ideology. But based on his equation of deportation of illegal aliens with abortion, it is the pope who has replaced faith with ideology. It is the pope who is downgrading the church’s faith-based teaching on abortion in support of the ideology of “social justice” in the form of the uncontrolled migration of peoples. In his past criticism of conservative Catholics, the pope urged them to “understand that there’s a correct evolution in the understanding of questions of faith and morals.” This is the same pope who not long ago stated that people are “fundamentally good,” a position that is at odds with the church’s teaching of original sin and humanity’s need for a Savior. This is also the same pope who said when he sees the Gospels in a “sociological way,” he is a “communist” and “so too is Jesus.” That is not faith; it is ideology. The pope’s ideological foray into U.S. politics will undoubtedly cheer the pro-abortion movement in this country. And it will cheer the Democratic Party, which has made abortion its religion. Why should any American Catholic make such a big deal about a candidate’s support for abortion when, according to the pope, it is no different and no more serious than being opposed to illegal immigration. Pope Benedict XVI in 2007 warned Catholic politicians that they risked excommunication from the church if they supported abortion. Pope Francis tells the faithful that abortion is no graver sin than opposing illegal immigration. Which makes one wonder: Is the pope Catholic? The post Pope Francis Equates Opposition to Illegal Immigration to Abortion appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

President Joe Biden is embarking on a national campaign to persuade Americans that his economic policies are successful. On this episode of The Spectator P.M. Podcast, hosts Ellie Gardey Holmes, Aubrey Gulick, and Lyrah Margo discuss Bidenomics’ unpopularity among Americans and Kamala Harris’ efforts to distance herself from Biden’s economic policies. Tune in to hear their discussion! The post Biden Begs Americans to Like Bidenomics appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

Now Is the Time to Reject Political Censorship and the Violence That Comes With It

QUESTION: Why was MSNBC filming Trump on his golf course moments before he was shot? How did they know to be there? Who told them? Remember, CNN hadn't covered a Trump rally live until the Butler Rally. Is it weird left-wing media seems to be there every time? h/t @foundring1 pic.twitter.com/ycAaEzoaYX — @amuse (@amuse) September […]

by Joel B. Pollak, Breitbart: ABC News’ Linsey Davis, one of two moderators for last week’s presidential debate, admitted to the Los Angeles Times that the plan was only to fact-check former President Donald Trump, and not Vice President Kamala Harris. As Breitbart News noted, Davis and co-moderator David Muir fact-checked Trump seven times — often incorrectly — […]

by Mac Slavo, SHTF Plan: In what can only be called an escalation toward a wider conflict in the Middle East, the Houthis have attacked central Israel. A missile fired from Yemen struck central Israel on Sunday morning, according to the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). The Houthis are an armed group that controls much of […]

Breaking: Florida Governor Ron DeSantis REFUSES to hand Trump shooting suspect Ryan Routh over to the Feds Routh was arrested by local Florida PD while fleeing on I-95. The FBI has DEMANDED custody of him but DeSantis refused, saying Florida will conduct its own investigation. — Retro Coast (@RetroCoast) September 16, 2024