Good morning, dear digital neighbors, and happy Monday! Greetings and salutations to all you fine souls at The Rubin Report, over at Phetasy, and milling around at Padre’s. May this week of Thanksgiving give you reason to reflect on—and be truly thankful for—all the blessings in your life. If there seems little to be thankful for as you read this, know that at least you have the freedom to venture forth on the internet and connect with people of similar interests or shared desires. Heck, some of them might even care to know you and perhaps form a friendship. Time will tell, but connecting with good people is a blessing, and as we get older, it seems to happen less and less often.

Aging should not be an experience of only losing old friends and becoming increasingly lonely or solitary. Solitude is good—we need to befriend silence and the gift of being alone from time to time—but living a solitary life rarely brings out the best in us. Without at least a couple of treasured friends to keep us balanced and call out our bullshit, we are likely to start believing all our own opinions are undisputed facts.

Sadly, there are many who gather for groupthink and herd-feel on a regular basis, where there is little questioning of opinions, variance of thought, or wondering if there might be more. Churches were guilty of collecting those types for centuries, but since the abandonment of religion after World War II, it has been replaced by the Cabal. The Cabal collects these mindsets like Beanie Babies in the ’90s. Don’t worry—one day they’ll be worth BIG BUCKS!!!

I don’t get the test-pattern people—those with no interior dialogue, no reflection, no wondering or questioning what they know, and no humble acknowledgment of how much they don’t know. I don’t think the test-pattern people are inherently evil, just easily led and manipulated. Their sense of belonging is always group-oriented and security-minded. Those aren’t bad tendencies, but one can do a whole lot of evil in the name of the group and for the sake of security. I don’t give religion a pass for exploiting this trend among humanity, but for all the evil it has done over the last thousand years, Leftist communal thinking passed it on the outside lane in just a century of murder and cultural destruction—and they aren’t finished. Friends and experiences that make you think and laugh, ponder and wrestle with ideas, are among the best friends and experiences to have.