This is how you respond to communist tyrants who demand you apologize for telling the truth about them:
The Daily Telegraph this week received a letter from the Australian Consulate General of the People’s Republic of China, who took gentle issue with our excellent coverage of the coronavirus crisis.
Following is a point-by-point response to the Consulate General and China’s communist dictatorship:
Recently the Daily Telegraph has published a number of reports and opinions about China’s response to COVID-19 that are full of ignorance, prejudice and arrogance.
If a state-owned newspaper in China received this kind of complaint, subsequent days would involve journalists waking up in prison with their organs harvested.
Tracing the origin of the virus is a scientific issue that requires professional, science-based assessment.
Sure it does. How professional and science-based was the claim published on March 12 by China’s foreign ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian that “it might be US Army who brought the epidemic to Wuhan”?
The origin of the virus is still undetermined, and the World Health Organization has named the novel coronavirus “COVID-19”.
The World Health Organisation also appointed Zimbabwean murderer Robert Mugabe as its Goodwill Ambassador and declared on March 2 that the “stigma” of the coronavirus “is more dangerous than the virus itself”.
The World Health Organisation does a lot of stupid stuff.
So what is the real motive behind your attempt to repeatedly link the virus to China and even stating that the novel coronavirus was “made in China”?
Our motive is accuracy. That’s why we don’t link the virus to Bognor Regis or state that it was “made in Panama”.
Snip.
The effectiveness of China’s epidemic prevention and control has fully underlined the people-centred philosophy of the Communist Party of China and the strong advantages of the Chinese system.
In 2018, Amnesty International reported that China executed more citizens than the rest of the world combined.
Please tell us more about your “people-centred philosophy” and how many bullets it requires.
Instead of admitting and facing facts, the articles in your newspaper have wantonly attacked and smeared the CPC and the Chinese government with vicious language.
And yet we haven’t been jailed or shot! Where’s the justice in that?
Is your judgement based on the well-being of the people or do you have an ideological prejudice?
We will admit to an ideological prejudice against deadly tyranny. It’s a tragic failing on our part.
China has concealed the extent of the coronavirus outbreak in its country, under-reporting both total cases and deaths it’s suffered from the disease, the U.S. intelligence community concluded in a classified report to the White House, according to three U.S. officials.
The officials asked not to be identified because the report is secret, and they declined to detail its contents. But the thrust, they said, is that China’s public reporting on cases and deaths is intentionally incomplete. Two of the officials said the report concludes that China’s numbers are fake.
British Prime Minister Boris Johnson thinks that Chinese coronavirus cases may be 40 times higher than stated.
China is waging a propaganda war against the coronavirus on several fronts. In addition to its well-documented efforts to deflect attention from its early suppression of information about the disease and to claim that it has among all nations now halted the scourge, it is also pushing an alternative explanation of its origins—namely that it didn’t start in Wuhan after all, but was a creation of a military biochemical lab in the United States and was brought to China by an American team that competed in the Military World Games in Wuhan last October.
While that conspiracy theory was quickly noted and dismissed in much of the West, it is continuing and broadening all over social media in China – a country that strictly monitors what appears on its online platforms, regularly scrubbing it of what the authorities call “rumors.” But a lot of it, put on platforms that are banned in China, seems aimed outward, part of a concerted effort to convince the world that China, once the villain of the coronavirus story, is actually its hero, and that the real villain is America.
The Chinese Communist Party, led by Chairman Xi Jinping, has a membership of 90 million out of a country of 1.4 billion. Not all may be doctrinaire Marxists or Maoists, but they form a ruling elite for a regime that has managed to bring wealth and prestige to a once-poor people. They have overseen the building of a modern industrial base, and the creation of a first-world military complete with an advanced nuclear arsenal. Their intelligence services are larger and more sophisticated than those of any other nation on earth.
At the heart of China’s communist ideology is a deep-seated resentment against the world. After the Century of Humiliation where China was exploited by the Western powers, Russia, and Japan, they are committed to never letting that happen again.
If one doubts the CCP’s resolve, one need look no further than the fact that they have killed, through famine and other means, almost 100 million of their own countrymen in a series of communist social and economic reforms they believed necessary to modernize their country. In other words, these are not a people to be taken lightly. The presidency of Donald Trump presents the greatest strategic threat to their desire to establish themselves as the world’s preeminent economic and military power.
Although it is not the position of our government that the CCP was behind the creation and weaponization of the Chinese virus, we need to at least entertain the notion that a nation that has, in the recent past, killed tens of millions of its own people would not think twice about killing thousands or even millions of other peoples from other countries if it meant putting them in a greater strategic position and helping them fulfill their objective of a communist world order.
Speaking of filthy: “Chinese markets again selling bats.” Ain’t that a kick in the head?
I’ve seen a lot of experts debunking the idea that the current coronavirus pandemic originated at the Wuhan virology lab. But here’s one expert that thinks it might well have. “Richard H. Ebright, a professor of chemical biology at Rutgers University, told the Daily Caller News Foundation on Thursday that there is a real possibility that the virus entered the human population due to a laboratory accident.”
The 15-days Guidelines allowed the nation to prepare to get the equipment and resources needed in-place before a wave of hospitalizations would be required. The 15-days also provided time to garner information possible treatment options for those experiencing symptoms. These include lopinavir-ritonavir, interferon-1β, the RNA polymerase inhibitor remdesivir, chloroquine, a variety of traditional Chinese medicine products, and intravenous hyperimmune globulin from recovered patients.
Based on Task Force briefing discussions with Fauci and fellow member Dr. Deborah Birx, it appears that the team projects that the coronavirus will disappear during the summer, and return in the fall. They are working with the President and the rest of his team to expedite testing, find and produce vaccines, and identify effective treatments while keeping the mortality rate as low as can be achieved in this first wave of infections….
If the curve flattens to around 33,000 deaths, then that is approximately the same as a moderately bad flu year, and far short of the 100,000 the media was presenting this weekend.
President Donald Trump is working hard to reduce the number to as low as can be achieved, based on the advice of Fauci and other team members. They may have access to additional information that indicates the extension of guidelines to the end of April is warranted.
Fauci and his team continue to gather data, and adjustments will be made in the models as speculation is replaced by hard information and results. For now, it appears that Fauci and his team’s original roadmap for the pandemic was good.
More analysis of the numbers. “Germany and the United States have significantly better coronavirus death rates per capita than Italy, Spain, Iran and France. A lot better. This is why the media avoids per capita measurements for confirmed cases, but conveniently remembered when it wanted to fact-check Trump’s testing numbers.”
Scary story about a Washington state choir rehearsal of 60 people, none of whom exhibited any symptoms of illness. “Nearly three weeks later, 45 have been diagnosed with COVID-19 or ill with the symptoms, at least three have been hospitalized, and two are dead.” (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
Funny how all the leftist sorts are insisting you can’t call it the Chinese coronavirus or the Wuhan coronavirus. Almost as though they all received the same marching orders from…somewhere. But no, that would be silly. All the useful idiots can’t be on China’s payroll…
Last week’s unemployment numbers were horrible. This week’s are worse. “US jobless claims skyrocket to 6.6 million.” We knew this was coming. We just need to get to the other side of the “V”…
Know what other numbers are hugely up? NCIS firearms checks run. 3,740,688 checks were run in March, easily a new record.
“Italy Risks Losing Grip in South With Fear of Looting, Riots.”
As Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte fights to hold Italian society together through a crippling nationwide lockdown, the depressed south is turning into a powder keg.
Police have been deployed on the streets of Sicily’s capital, Palermo, amid reports gangs are using social media to plot attacks on stores. A bankrupt ferry company halted service to the island, including vital supplies of food and medicines. As the state creaks under the strain of the coronavirus pandemic, officials worry the mafia may be preparing to step in.
Preventing unrest in the so-called Mezzogiorno, the underdeveloped southern region that’s long lagged behind the wealthy north, has become the government’s top priority, according to Italian officials who asked not to be named discussing the administration’s strategy.
With the European Union’s most dangerously indebted state already fighting the Germans over the terms of the financial aid it needs, the fallout may reach far beyond Rome if Conte fails.
Keep in mind that any postwar Italian government’s grip on power is tenuous in the best of times…(Hat tip: Borepatch.)
Panama is fighting the coronavirus by segregating shipping days by gender. What, are Panamanians so randy they can’t see a member of the opposite sex without wanting to get jiggy with them?
Does anyone not on the payroll of the Chinese Communist Party trust Beijing’s dictatorship with the power to pervasively monitor communications (spy locally as well as globally), interrupt, deny or corrupt digital services, and possibly take surreptitious control of digital devices, say, the air traffic control computers at Los Angeles International Airport?
Outrageous scenario? No, given Huawei’s baggage is a legitimate worry exacerbated by the regime’s criminal dishonesty (e.g., lying about COVID-19/Wuhan virus). For all practical purposes, Huawei is a Chinese Communist Party tool. In spy lingo, a cutout company can hide an espionage operation. Abundant evidence suggests Huawei serves as a cutout.
Alexandria Ocasio Cortez encourages Amazon workers to strike, because Unions. “AOC is so devoted to the commie common good that she wants some of the only people in America who are guaranteed work to voluntarily give that work up for some union talking point.”
What the hell, Vermont? “State officials in Vermont are ordering large retailers that sell critical items such as food and prescription drugs to stop the in-person sale of nonessential products such as clothing and electronics.” An emergency doesn’t give you the excuse to be Shopping Basket Dictator.
Venezuelan patrol ship sinks after ramming cruise ship with reinforced hull. The only way this story could be any better is if the cruise ship was labeled “Donald Trump” and the Venezuelan patrol boat was labelled “The Media.” (Hat tip: Dwight.)
Here’s a double-shot of Tucker Carlson on two different lies being bandied about but our media (and parts of our various governments) on effective tools to fight the Wuhan coronavirus.
Hydroxychloroquine given in combination with antibiotics looks like an effective combination. So why do so many Democrats insist it doesn’t work, going so far that a douple of Democratic governor’s have tried to ban it’s use for treating coronavirus? “If Trump is for it, they’re against it, even if it might save American lives.”
In the wee hours of Wednesday evening, the U.S. Senate finally passed the $2 trillion coronavirus stimulus bill after a great deal of Democrat stalling and a futile effort by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to put forward a separate bill jam-packed with liberal Christmas wish-list items. The bill provides crucial relief to businesses struggling with the social distancing strategy of stopping the spread of the coronavirus. It now heads to the House.
The stimulus bill is far from perfect, but its passage unmasked Pelosi’s tactics as a disgraceful waste of time during this crisis. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) slammed the speaker for her attempt to jam her liberal pipe dreams down Americans’ throats in the midst of a crisis.
“Democrats wanted to use the coronavirus response package to change election law & implement parts of their Green New Deal. The Senate just passed strong bipartisan legislation that scraps those items, & it’s clear. ⇨ Their delay achieved nothing but more pain for Americans,” McCarthy tweeted.
And far from perfect means it was stuffed with egregious special interest pork. Pelosi, of course, tried to block it because it just didn’t have nearly as much special interest pork as she would like.
Nevada’s governor has signed an emergency order barring the use of anti-malaria drugs for someone who has the coronavirus.
Democratic Gov. Steve Sisolak’s order Tuesday restricting chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine comes after President Donald Trump touted the medication as a treatment for the virus.
December 6: According to a study in The Lancet, the symptom onset date of the first patient identified was “Dec 1, 2019 . . . 5 days after illness onset, his wife, a 53-year-old woman who had no known history of exposure to the market, also presented with pneumonia and was hospitalized in the isolation ward.” In other words, as early as the second week of December, Wuhan doctors were finding cases that indicated the virus was spreading from one human to another.
December 21: Wuhan doctors begin to notice a “cluster of pneumonia cases with an unknown cause.”
Snip.
January 15: The Wuhan Municipal Health Commission begins to change its statements, now declaring, “Existing survey results show that clear human-to-human evidence has not been found, and the possibility of limited human-to-human transmission cannot be ruled out, but the risk of continued human-to-human transmission is low.” Recall Wuhan hospitals concluded human-to-human transmission was occurring three weeks earlier. A statement the next day backtracks on the possibility of human transmission, saying only, “Among the close contacts, no related cases were found.”
The Chinese Communist Party is using the pandemic to achieve its goal of supplanting the United States as the world’s leading economic, diplomatic, and military power.
Sounds unbelievable?
A new report from Horizon Advisory consultants details Beijing’s post-virus strategy—already operational—to leverage the pandemic to seize global market share in key industries, further global dependence on Chinese manufacturing, and reverse efforts in the United States and elsewhere to decouple from the People’s Republic.
“Beijing intends to use the global dislocation and downturn to attract foreign investment, to seize strategic market share and resources—especially those that force dependence, and to proliferate global information systems; to as Chinese sources put it, ‘leap-frog’ industrially, ‘overtake around the corner’ strategically, capture the ‘commanding heights’ globally. Beijing intends to reverse recent U.S. efforts to counteract China’s subversive international presence; at the same time to chip away at U.S.-Europe relations. In other words, Beijing will use COVID-19 to accelerate its long-standing, strategic offensive,” the Horizon report states.
We’re witnessing Beijing’s attempt to scrub its culpability for the pandemic from the world’s memory. Chinese Communist propagandists declare, “China is owed a thank you for buying the world time” and the New York Times dutifully repeats it.
After covering up the novel infection and unleashing it on the world, Beijing’s rulers bought up the world’s supply of protective gear and respirators.
Then they sell these critical goods to Italy while portraying themselves as the heroic humanitarian savior of the world, not unlike a pyromaniac who takes credit for calling the fire department.
To the degree that we are suffering death and economic hurt from COVID-19, we can also attribute the toll to the Chinese Communist Party. Had it just called in the international medical community in late November, instituted early quarantines, and allowed its own citizens to use email and social media to apprise and warn others of the new disease, then the world and the U.S. would probably not have found themselves in the current panic. The reasons China did not act more responsibly may be inherent in communist governments, or they may involve more Byzantine causes left to be disclosed.
Add in the proximity of a Level 4 virology lab nearby Ground Zero of COVID-19, which fueled Internet conspiracy theories; the weird rumors about quite strange animals such as snakes and pangolins birthing the infection in primeval open meat markets stocked with live animals in filthy conditions in cages; and pirated videos of supposed patients dropping comatose in crowded hospital hallways. With all of that, we had the ingredients of a Hollywood zombie movie, adding to the frenzy.
Plus, 2020 is an election year — echoing how the 1976 swine flu was politicized. The Left and its media appendages saw COVID-19 as able to do what John Brennan, James Clapper, James Comey, and Andrew McCabe, the Mueller team, and impeachment could not: destroy the hated Trump presidency.
China will rue what it begat.
That is, it will come to appreciate fully that the supposed efficiency, ruthlessness, and autocracy of the Communist Party — what had so impressed foolish American journalists who once marveled at Beijing’s ability to enact by fiat liberal pet projects such as high-speed rail and solar industries — were China’s worst enemies, ensuring that the virus would spread and that China’s international reputation would be ruined.
It is only since the outbreak of the pandemic that Americans have come to learn that China is the major supplier for U.S. medicines. The first drug shortages, due to dependence on China, have already occurred. Eighty percent of America’s “active pharmaceutical ingredients” comes from abroad, primarily from China (and India); 45% of the penicillin used in the country is Chinese-made; as is nearly 100% of the ibuprofen. Rosemary Gibson, author of “China Rx,” testified last year to the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission about this critical dependence, but nothing has changed in this most vital of supply chains.
The medicine story is repeated throughout the U.S. economy and the world. The unparalleled economic growth of China over the past generation has hollowed out domestic industries around the globe and also prevented other nations, such as Vietnam, from moving up the value-added chain. Many industries are quite frankly stuck with Chinese companies as their only or primary suppliers. Thus, the costs of finding producers other than China, what is known as “decoupling,” are exorbitant, and few countries currently can replicate China’s infrastructure and workforce.
The world never should have been put at risk by the coronavirus. Equally, it never should have let itself become so economically dependent on China. The uniqueness of the coronavirus epidemic is to bring the two seemingly separate issues together. That is why Beijing is desperate to evade blame, not merely for its initial incompetence, but because the costs of the system it has built since 1980 are now coming into long-delayed focus. Coronavirus is a diabolus ex machina that threatens the bases of China’s modern interaction with foreign nations, from tourism to trade, and from cultural exchange to scientific collaboration.
Xi can best avoid this fate by adopting the very transparency that he and the party have assiduously avoided. Yet openness is a mortal threat to the continued rule of the CCP. The virus thus exposes the CCP’s mortal paradox, one which shows the paralysis at the heart of modern China. For this reason alone, the world’s dependence on China should be responsibly reduced.
ere are some people who are useless, especially now: Performance artists, diversity consultants, magic crystal healers, sociology TAs, members of the mainstream media, and gender-unspecified entities who brew kale kombucha.
Here are some people who matter, especially now: Soldiers, nurses, truckers, cops, the guy who stocks the shelves at Ralphs, farmers, and that dude rebuilding your roof.
The Chinese Bat Soup Flu has certainly clarified some of the blurred lines between what is important and what is frivolous garbage. Yet, in a time when millions of Americans are at risk of dying as a direct result of ChiCom conspiracies and the bizarre need of its serfs to eat any weird thing that crawls or slithers within reach of their chopsticks, our useless elite is fixated on making sure we don’t hurt the feelz of the very people who stuck us in this predicament.
Our elite is full of self-important morons who contribute nothing but more dumb in a time when the only thing we have a surplus of is dumb. The real hero is the guy who trucks in a load of whole wheat bread, ribeyes, and low-priced cabernet to the Trader Joe’s, not the Prius-piloting sissy with a Maddow fetish who shops there. The people our elite laughed at, scoffed at, poked at, are the very people who are going to rescue us from the mess that same elite helped make.
Hmm: “Fun facts about Covid Act Now, the org that is mobilizing press, politicians, & citizens to rally behind mass quarantine/lockdown: 1) They were founded by Dem activists. 1 of them, Igor Kofman, works full time to defeat Trump in 2020. Another is a Dem legislator.”
Ferguson’s model projected 2.2 million dead people in the United States and 500,000 in the U.K. from COVID-19 if no action were taken to slow the virus and blunt its curve. The model predicted far fewer deaths if lockdown measures — measures such as those taken by the British and American governments — were undertaken.
After just one day of ordered lockdowns in the U.K., Ferguson is presenting drastically downgraded estimates, crediting lockdown measures, but also revealing that far more people likely have the virus than his team figured.
“After the H1N1 influenza outbreak in 2009, which triggered a nationwide shortage of masks and caused a 2- to 3-year backlog orders for the N95 variety, the stockpile distributed about three-quarters of its inventory and didn’t build back the supply.”
That’s right, the shortage of N95 masks can be traced back to the H1N1 (swine flu) pandemic of 2009… when Barack Obama was president.
A different story from the Los Angeles Times published last week goes into more detail about what happened after the swine flu pandemic depleted the supply. According to their story, “After the swine flu epidemic in 2009, a safety-equipment industry association and a federally sponsored task force both recommended that depleted supplies of N95 respirator masks […] be replenished by the stockpile.” The problem is that didn’t happen. According to Charles Johnson, president of the International Safety Equipment Association, about 100 million N95 respirator masks were used up during the swine flu pandemic of 2009-2010, but, he said was unaware of any “major effort to restore the stockpile to cover that drawdown.”
A place that once gave Democratic native sons Hubert Humphrey and Walter Mondale 4-1 voting wins and considers the late Sen. Paul Wellstone a local hero has begun to embrace a president who bears little resemblance to them, except that he reversed the “injustice” of an Obama-era order that would have brought the nickel-copper project to a 20-year standstill. On top of that were the 25 percent tariffs Trump imposed on most foreign steel, which provided an initial boost to the 5,000 miners still employed in the region’s numerous iron-ore mines that have served as the backbone to the region’s economy.
All of that put Ely in the middle of a political transformation that makes Minnesota the president’s top target among states he lost in 2016 — and potentially a pivot point in the 2020 presidential race. Trump lost the state by 45,000 votes in 2016, a remarkable feat considering how entrenched Democrats have been in the state.
Remember Hershel “Woody” Williams, the Medal of Honor winner I highlighted last Veterans Day? The Navy just commissioned a ship named after him. “The Medal of Honor presented to Williams by President Harry S. Truman two months after the end of World War II is now enshrined in the galley of the ship named in his honor…The Williams, built at a cost of about $500 million, is the second of three Expeditionary Sea Base ships.” ESB ships are interesting multi-use ships built on oil tanker hulls:
The ESD and ESB ships were originally called the Mobile Landing Platform (MLP) and the MLP Afloat Forward Staging Base (AFSB), respectively. In September 2015, the Secretary of the Navy re-designated these hulls to conform to traditional three-letter ship designations.
The design of these ships is based on the Alaska class crude oil carrier, which was built by General Dynamics National Steel and Shipbuilding Company (NASSCO). Leveraging commercial designs ensures design stability and lower development costs
The USNS Montford Point (T-ESD 1) and USNS John Glenn (T-ESD 2) are configured with the Core Capability Set (CCS), which consists of a vehicle staging area, vehicle transfer ramp, large mooring fenders and up to three Landing Craft Air Cushion (LCAC) vessel lanes to support its core equipment transfer requirements. With a 9,500 nautical mile range at a sustained speed of 15 knots, these approximately 80,000 tons, 785-foot ships leverage float-on/float-off technology and a reconfigurable mission deck to maximize capability. Additionally, the ships’ size allows for 25,000 square feet of vehicle and equipment stowage space and 380,000 gallons of JP-5 fuel storage.
USS Lewis B. Puller (ESB 3), the first ESB delivered, along with follow ships Hershel “Woody” Williams (ESB 4) and Miguel Keith (ESB 5), are being optimized to support a variety of maritime based missions including Special Operations Force (SOF) and Airborne Mine Counter Measures (AMCM). The ESBs include a four spot flight deck, mission deck and hangar, are designed around four core capabilities: aviation facilities, berthing, equipment staging support, and command and control assets.
I would think this little tidbit would get more play, since the media repeatedly assured us that Wokescold Moppet was The Most Important Person In The World.
Still more efficient and straightforward than ObamaCare:
Thanks everybody for their entries and nominations…..but there’s one clear winner of the internet today…..round of applause please people…#WINternetpic.twitter.com/ToNA7bitpQ
Once again, it appears that Social Justice Warriors have gotten Twitter to suspend a conservative account, this time (yet again) @GayPatriotTM, AKA @GayPatriot, AKA @BruceTheGay, AKA @AmericanHomocon
From the outset of Donald Trump’s entry into the world of politics he espoused a series of key tenets around what he called his “America-First” objectives:
The U.S. needed to have control over our borders, and a greater ability to control who was migrating to the United States. A shift toward stopping ‘illegal’ migration.
The U.S. needed to stop the manufacture of goods overseas and return critical manufacturing back to the United States. A return to economic independence.
The U.S. needed to decouple from an over-reliance on Chinese industrial and consumer products. China viewed as a geopolitical and economic risk.
Donald Trump was alone on these issues. No-one else was raising them; no-one else was so urgently pushing that discussion. In 2015, 2016 and even 2017, no-one other than Trump was talking about how close we were to the dependence point of no return.
Given the status of very consequential issues stemming from the Chinese Coronavirus threat; and the myriad of serious issues with critical supply chain dependencies; wasn’t President Trump correct in his warnings and proposals?
The idea driving this is not to stop all transmission of coronavirus (nice though that would be), but to flatten the curve so that American health care resources are not overwhelmed.
In Italy, you can say goodbye to Grandma. “Doctors are being told that they’ll likely need to deny care to senior citizens and those with other health conditions as the virus explodes across the nation.” (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
The Chinese Communist Party has gone into overdrive pushing the lie that the #Wuhanvirus started in the US. It started in #China, and it was spread around the world thanks to Chinese government negligence and lies. They are 100% responsible for every death. #Coronavirus#CCPvirus
Before the coronavirus epidemic, U.S. companies were heading for record-low profitability in China as business conditions deteriorated and China’s economy slowed to its lowest rate in decades, according to a new survey of U.S. companies with operations in China…
American companies surveyed by AmCham reported their lowest levels of profitability since the Chamber first began asking the question 18 years ago: 61% of members described their 2019 financial performance as profitable or very profitable, an eight-percentage point drop from the year before.
He is charged with embezzling more than $1 million in union funds and properties to buy “luxury condos” in California, “lavish” dinners with “premium liquor,” five sets of custom-made golf clubs, horseback riding on a beach, and other non-union expenses that prosecutors allege the UAW covered up by mislabeling them as payments to vendors or meals for UAW officials, according to Matthew Schneider, U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Michigan.
Sadly, Troy Hurtubise is no longer around to design a monkey-proof suit…
Woof, woof, woof, woof, woof:
The World Health Organization has announced that dogs cannot contract Covid-19. Dogs previously held in quarantine can now be released. To be clear, WHO let the dogs out.
Young Turks host Cenk Uygur is having a very bad week.
Last week’s uproar over him fighting unionization hadn’t even died down before Ungyer lost his carpetbagger bid for the 25th Congressional District that Democratic incumbent Katie “Naked Bong Hits” Hill resigned from.
In fact, Uygur came in fourth in the jungle primary, behind not only Democrat Christy Smith and Republican Mike Garcia (who are in a runoff May 12), but also behind Republican Steve Knight (who had previously represented the district before losing to Hill in 2018). Ungyer didn’t just lose, he lost badly, garnering just 5.4% of the vote and coming in at one fifth of Smith’s vote total.
Then, on top of that, he had his flight delayed for four hours. How did he take that?
Not. Well.
In case you didn’t know, Cenk is a dick. You see someone’s character when they’re inconvenienced. (Or when they deny the Armenian genocide) https://t.co/4kVWXl70V8
I can understand being upset over a plane being delayed four hours. However, taking it out over service personnel isn’t going to make the plane magically appear. Moreover, filming yourself being a complete dick to those same service personnel isn’t going to help the plane appear either, or encourage normal, non-crazy people to watch your show.
Still another problem with the Social Justice Warrior left is how overt outbursts of anger are always seen as righteous and validating rather than a dangerous lack of self-control.
And the kicker is that Uygur uploaded this video himself, as though he would be the one who came off well for yelling at random employees. Oh, you get angry when you get hungry? Then pack some food, idiot!
The entitlement mentality of our left-wing media elites seems infinite.
“Rebecca Long Bailey and Lisa Nandy have backed a 12-point plan put forward by the Labour Campaign for Trans Rights group that calls for sex-based rights campaigners to be expelled from Labour. Angela Rayner and Dawn Butler, who are in the running for deputy leader, also backed the group’s pledges. The trans rights group is calling for long debated changes to the Gender Recognition Act that would allow people to formally self identify as the opposite sex without paying for a certificate or demonstrating that they have accessed transitioning services. It also vows to ‘organise and fight against transphobic organisations such as Woman’s Place UK, LGB Alliance, and other trans exclusionist hate groups.’”
People were then asked whether they agreed with the pledge. Then they also answered the question about how likely they were to vote Labour.
The results show that being exposed to even this small snippet of news about the pledge seems to reduce support for Labour. As figure one reveals, the share of survey respondents who said they would likely vote Labour was 42.6 percent among those who read nothing and just 32.7 percent among those who read the paragraph about the Labour trans pledge.
One reason for the drop was the limited popularity of the trans pledge among many survey respondents. For instance, less than a third of this mainly left-leaning sample who read about the pledge agreed with it. Among Labour voters, agreement rose to 40 percent, with 18 percent opposed and the rest undecided. However, Green, Liberal Democrat and Scottish National Party (SNP) voters split fairly evenly between opposing and supporting the pledge, with many undecided.
It seems that most opposed the pledge or were undecided. Among the 40 people who agreed with the pledge, 70 percent said they planned to vote Labour. Among the 99 who either disagreed or were unsure about the pledge, just 20 percent planned to do so.
A Hawaii councilman pleaded not guilty Friday to multiple charges accusing him of leading a methamphetamine-trafficking ring, supplying weapons and conspiring with a gang leader while serving as an elected official, investigators said.
Arthur Brun, 48, operated the major drug-trafficking conspiracy involving 11 other defendants since at least June 2019, while serving as an elected member of the Kauai County Council and vice chairman of its Public Safety and Human Services Committee, the U.S. Attorney’s Office alleged in a news release.
First there is the yeomanry or the traditional middle class, which consists of small business owners, minor landowners, craftspeople, and artisans, or what we would define historically as the bourgeoisie, or the old French Third Estate, deeply embedded in the private economy. The other middle class, now in ascendency, is the clerisy, a group that makes its living largely in quasi-public institutions, notably universities, media, the non-profit world, and the upper bureaucracy.
Snip.
The yeomanry’s distress can be seen in everything from falling rates of business formation as well as declining homeownership, particularly among the young, most notably in the United States, Canada, and Australia. Even in the United States, a country that never experienced feudalism, the proportion of land owned by the nation’s 100 largest private landowners grew by nearly 50 percent between 2007 and 2017.
Land ownership in Europe is also increasingly concentrated in smaller hands; in Great Britain, where land prices have risen dramatically over the past decade, less than one percent of the population owns half of all the land. On the continent, farmland is increasingly concentrated while urban real estate has fallen into the hands of a small cadre of corporate owners and the mega-wealthy.
Growing corporate concentration, in both the US and Europe, has now seeped into the once dynamic tech economy. In Silicon Valley, the renowned garage culture is being supplanted by a gargantua of giant firms that have achieved market power unprecedented in modern times, controlling in some cases 80 – 90 percent of their key niches like search, social media, cellular, and computer operating systems. One online publisher uses a Star Trek analogy to describe his firm’s status with Google: “It’s a bit like being assimilated by the Borg. You get cool new powers. But having been assimilated, if your implants were ever removed, you’d certainly die. That basically captures our relationship to Google.”
The decline of the yeomanry threatens the future of democracy as we have known it. Faced with growing assaults on their businesses, and in some cases, their communities, they have begun to fight back against many of the policies, notably climate policy, that are widely supported by the oligarchs and the clerisy. A policy to force the rapid replacement of fossil fuels with heavily subsidized renewables requires the development of the kind of largely unaccountable bureaucracies that both employ and empower the clerisy while providing the oligarchs both in the US and Europe with a unique opportunity to cash in on energy “transitions.”
In contrast, for large parts of the yeomanry, a call for a rapid, radical shift towards renewables imposes much higher energy prices. It also threatens to diminish industries in which many of them work and undercut the sustenance to the Main Street merchants in smaller cities and the countryside. Already attempts to impose such policies have led to yeoman rebellions in a number of countries.
Math is hard:
Now you can understand why NYT editors and MSNBC hosts were such fans of Warren’s plans and believe the math works on M4A. https://t.co/yU7HVIpT2D
This, right here, is why so many left-leaning Americans think that “the billionaires” can pay for everything. It’s why Elizabeth Warren was enthusiastically boosted by the media despite her ridiculous pretense that she could pay for a series of gargantuan initiatives without raising taxes on anyone but the extremely rich. It’s why Democrat after Democrat promises not to raise “middle class taxes” while promising programs that require the raising of middle class taxes. How did this bad tweet make it onto TV to be endorsed? Why did Mara Gay agree with it? Why didn’t Brian Williams notice? Because the people involved in this clip thought it was true. This is how they see the world.
But it’s not true. Not even close. Forget the million for a moment and make it Andrew Yang’s thousand instead. Would that be possible? Nope! If Michael Bloomberg were to try to achieve what Andrew Yang promised ($1,000 per American per month, forever), he would be able to give every American about $183 in the first month before he’d have $0 left. To make it through a single month, he would have to be five times richer than he is. And, after that single month, even at five times his current wealth, his fortune would be completely and permanently depleted. Elizabeth Warren’s unconstitutional wealth tax topped out at six percent. Filter Bloomberg’s money through that tax and you get $11 per American per year.
There is still no such thing as a free lunch. If Americans want expanded services — or a monthly stipend — they are going to have to pay for them themselves. There is no billionaire out there who can do it for them.
Are we so “desperate” for more bodies to “fuel economic growth?” Let’s recap the demographic math: We live in a nation of 330 million, 44 million of whom are foreign-born. Upward of 30 million immigrants are currently living, working and going to school here illegally. One million new legal immigrants are granted green cards every year. An estimated 600,000 temporary worker visas are issued annually, including the H-1B, H-2A, H-2B and H-4 programs. That doesn’t include spousal visas or the more than half a million foreign “students” now working through the stealth guest worker plan known as the Optional Practical Training program, which allows foreign students to work with little monitoring, no wage protections, no payment of Social Security payroll taxes and no requirement for employers to demonstrate labor market shortages.
“We” ordinary Americans don’t need more immigrants. Corporations (and their trusty house organ, the Wall Street Journal) want higher profits, lower wages, and endless pipelines of cheap foreign labor. They’ve been cooking up manufactured worker shortage crises since World War II and crying apocalypse since the 1980s, when the National Science Foundation’s Erich Bloch hyped a STEM shortage based on groundless projections to crusade for agency budget increases.
I don’t agree 100%; I think it behooves us to get the very best in some fields, people with PhDs in science and technology, and masters of various arts. But that’s a far cry from “Hey, my cousin Sanjay knows Sharepoint. Let’s write an H1B rec so we can get him over here.”
A billionaire Republican megadonor has purchased a “sizable” stake in Twitter and “plans to push” to oust CEO Jack Dorsey among other changes, according to new reports, raising the prospect of a shocking election-year shakeup of the social media platform that conservatives have long accused of overt left-wing political bias.
Paul Singer’s Elliott Management Corp. has already nominated four directors to Twitter’s board, Bloomberg News reported, citing several sources familiar with the arrangement. The outlet noted that unlike other prominent tech CEOs, Dorsey didn’t have voting control over Twitter because the company had just one class of stock; and he has long been a target for removal given Twitter’s struggling user growth numbers and stock performance.
Singer, who opposed President Trump’s campaign in 2016, has since changed his tune, raising the prospect that some of the changes to Twitter could make the platform a friendlier place for pro-Trump users. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, Singer donated $24 million to Republican and right-leaning groups in the 2016 election.
Defense contractor accused of passing classified human intelligence information to a Hezbollah-connected lover. “Mariam Taha Thompson, 61, formerly of Rochester, Minn., was arrested by FBI agents on Feb. 27.” Other reports have noted she herself was born in Lebanon. Who gave a foreign born contractor Top Secret clearance?
It’s 2020. By now you should recognize the characteristics of media fraud. There are various incarnations, endlessly redeployed:
There’s the “sources say” fraud, AKA “Just trust me, bro.”
There’s the “Even Republican X says,” where “Republican X” is some #NeverTrump fossil that’s been openly calling for the destruction of the Republican Party for years for daring to ignore their vast inside-the-beltway wisdom.
There’s the “ignore the forest to focus on one tiny tree” play, like ignore record job numbers to spend endless hours talking about a porn star lawsuit.
Etc. This is far from an exhaustive list.
Then there’s the classic “out of context quote” that Democrats and media operatives (but I repeat myself) use to say “Look, Trump just said something stupid!” The difficulty here is that sometimes Trump does sometimes say something stupid, a side-effect of his shit-talking/persuasion bracketing style of speech. (Once again, see Scott Adams’ extensive discussion of Trumps’ persuasive techniques, as well as “seriously not literally.”) But nine times out of ten, it’s because the Democratic Media Complex has twisted something he said or omitted something from the quote. (Remember the whole “Trump called all illegal aliens rapists” controversy when it was clear that he was talking about MS-13?)
The example de jure from the most recent media spin cycle is the “calling coronavirus a hoax” hoax:
Remember this moment: Trump, in South Carolina, just called the coronavirus a "hoax."
Trump is clearly not calling the virus a hoax. What he’s calling a hoax is the political talking point that Trump has been failing to protect the country from the virus!
Now, Politico is pushing a hoax hoax — it’s putting out a false story about what Trump called a hoax.
Trump is certainly not “rall[ying] his base to treat coronavirus as a ‘hoax.'” Trump is rallying his base to believe that he’s doing an excellent job of handling the problem and to see the criticism of his work as a hoax. He’s not saying they should “treat” the virus as a hoax!
AND: Here’s my transcription, with boldface for what Politico left out:
“Now, the Democrats are politicizing the coronavirus. You know that, right? Coronavirus. They’re politicizing it. We did one of the great jobs. You say: ‘How’s President Trump doing?’ They’re going: ‘Oh, nothing, nothing.’ They have no clue. They don’t have any clue. They can’t even count their votes in Iowa. The can’t even count. No, they can’t. They can’t count their votes. One of my people came up to me and said, ‘Mr. President, they tried to beat you on Russia, Russia, Russia.’ That didn’t work out too well. They couldn’t do it. They tried the impeachment hoax. That was on a perfect conversation. They tried anything. They tried it over and over. They’ve been doing it since you got in. It’s all turning. They lost. It’s all turning. Think of it. Think of it. And this is their new hoax. But you know, we did something that’s been pretty amazing. There’s 15 people in this massive country, and because of the fact that we went early. We went early. We could’ve had a lot more than that. We’re doing great. Our country is doing so great. We are so unified. We are so unified. The Republican Party has never been more unified than it is now.“
So once again, we have a “bombshell” manufactured to hurt President Trump that turns out to be a giant dud. You would think they would get tired of repeatedly punching themselves in the dick, but they never seem to…
As I did in previous months, here’s an update on the number of Twitter followers of the Democratic presidential candidates, updated since last month’s update.
Six months ago I started using a tool that gives me precise Twitter follower counts.
I do this Twitter Primary update the last Tuesday of each month, following Monday’s Clown Car Update.
The following are all the declared Democratic Presidential candidates ranked in order of Twitter followers:
Removed from the last update: Andrew Yang, Deval Patrick, Michael Bennet, John Delaney
For reference, President Donald Trump’s personal account has 72,989,096 followers, up 1,258,269 since the last roundup, so once again Trump gained more Twitter followers this month than all the Democratic presidential contenders combined. The official presidential @POTUS account has 28,262,527 followers, which I’m sure includes a great deal of overlap with Trump’s personal followers.
A few notes:
As expected for a frontrunner, Sanders gained the most followers this month.
Bloomberg also did very well. We’re finally seeing twitter results for all the megabucks he’s been throwing around.
Biden only gained about 1/7th what Sanders gained. Super Tuesday will tell us whether he has enough non-Twitter using voters to overcome his apparent lack of momentum.
