So what did it take to turn spineless lefty Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler into a law-and-order guy? Trying to create an “autonomous zone” on his own street. “By 1 a.m., elaborate barricades had been erected. But in the early hours of Thursday morning, police moved into the area, declaring it an unlawful assembly. Portland Police estimated about 50 people were in the area when they dispersed the autonomous zone.”
It’s certainly frustrating to watch a pack of reeking leftist scumbags declare a portion of an American city an “autonomous zone” – what is it with Democrats and their secession fetish? – but do not get frustrated because Donald Trump has not sent the 101st Airborne in to powerwash the human grunge from Seattle’s feces-bedecked streets.
That’s what the Democrats want. And Trump – a better strategic thinker than all the media geniuses, hack politicians, and Afghan War-losing generals who cry about him – is not only not going to give them the victory they crave. He’s going to jam their cheesy plan down their throats.
The libs’ plan to win in November corresponds to Trump’s plan to crush them yet again. Skeptical? Consider this. In the five years since he rode down that escalator bringin’ hell with him, how many times have they come at Trump and won? Zero. He’s spent half a decade on the edge of doom and he’s still here. Why would you think that the walls are suddenly closing in now? You shouldn’t.
Let’s understand the strategic scenario. The long-term strategic objective of the leftists is to turn the United States into Venezuela, and they want to be Maduro. The major strategic objective that will put them in position to do so is victory in the November elections. Everything happening right now is part of their overall strategy to achieve that objective. But what kind of operation are they using to achieve that objective? There are two types of operations relevant here – kinetic and information. A kinetic operation is actual warfare. It’s violence designed to defeat the enemy and cause his surrender by either physically destroying him or occupying his territory and compelling surrender. An information operation is designed to affect the perceptions, and thereby the actions, of the target. Kinetic ops tend to do something to the enemy; and info op tends to get the target to do something to himself.
Elections are usually information operations. They attempt to build a narrative and play on perceptions and cause the target to take the action that will lead to victory. That is, get the target (the electorate) vote for the candidate the info operator wants elected.
Okay, so what is the 2020 elections, with the rioting, vandalism, violence and occupations?
This still an information operation, not a kinetic one.
They want to convince us we are powerless, that everyone else supports their commie agenda, that we cannot win. Their tactics are designed to create that impression and crush our morale. These include the 24/7 media hype, the outright media lies, the movie stars with their dumb PSAs, the staged statue attacks, the corporate solidarity proclamations, the social media cancellations, and the craven kneeling by people who are supposed to stand up for us. But another tactic, familiar to any student of insurgencies, is to provoke an overreaction by those in power in order to undermine its moral authority. They want is to make us (including the president) think this is a kinetic operation, and get our side to make fundamental strategic errors by failing to recognize the true nature of the threat. They hope that such a mismatch between perception and reality will then lead to gravely damaging blunders. One of those would be Trump succumbing to his legit frustration and sending in a bunch of federal troops to crack skulls in Seattle.
Defining this insurgency as a kinetic operation supports the leftists’ information operation goal of making Americans perceive the situation as out of control, of there being chaos, and of making the election of Grandpa Badfinger being the only thing that will resolve the situation. But there is no kinetic situation to resolve – at least none that is strategically significant in a kinetic sense. Despite the hype, the protests may have involved a peak of 2 million people across the country – out of 330 million. That’s nothing kinetically; it’s significant informationally because it is pushed by so many cultural influencers. The scurvy scumbags of Antifa hold essentially no ground except the turf they are physically standing on at the moment, and that is minuscule. Even the hilarious Road Warrior Republic of Seattle is not even a rounding error of a rounding error in terms of US territory. It’s significant only in the context of an information operation.
Many of us cons are furious that Trump is “doing nothing.” This is the wrong thing to think. Trump is only doing nothing if this is a kinetic operation; because this is an information operation, not going kinetic (sending in the troops) is doing something. And in fact, Trump is employing the law enforcement component of his kinetic assets by having the feds wait and arrest Antifa types after the protests end, and hitting them with hardcore federal rioting-related charges. Previously, they would get ticketed and released; now, looking at a five-to-ten stretch, the lawyers their daddies hired to get these sunshine anarchists out of their beefs are going to be advising them to roll over so they can start back up at Cornell in September and not at Leavenworth.
Who benefits then from our national nervous breakdown that never seems to end?
It is the globalist elites who still govern most of our society today, despite the invasion of Donald Trump.
And those elites wish to continue that rule through what they fervently hope will come as the outcome of these demonstrations—more government control, particularly government control that helps them.
They have seen it done elsewhere with results they might want to emulate, at least until recently.
Call it China Envy.
The Chinese Communist Party has, over the years, found a way to regulate their society to an extraordinary degree via a form of communism that maximizes profits and power for those (party) elites while holding the masses largely at bay.
No wonder our elites are jealous.
People call ours “globalists” but they’re not really global. They’re selectively global, but actually just greedy and power-hungry, like the ChiComs.
Whether planned or not, or partially planned, the current confluence of catastrophes has offered them an opportunity to advance their cause against their natural adversary, Mr. Trump.
In macro, that is the landscape of election 2020—the globalist elites represented, for the moment anyway, by Joe Biden versus the American people, represented by Donald Trump.
Many of those American people, heavily influenced by the media and repelled by the president’s rhetoric, do not realize that he is representing them, but he is. Ignorant, often willfully, they oppose him tooth and nail.
An equal number, or possibly larger, as the one million plus requesting tickets to his Tulsa rally indicates, supports Mr. Trump.
We are in the midst of a Battle Royale for the soul of our nation, whether it remains more or less the democratic republic the Founders envisioned or becomes an Americanized version of what has been evolved by the CCP.
If the latter, ironically, then such groups as Black Lives Matter (BLM) and Antifa will be kicked to the curb once victory has been achieved and secured.
It’s always the same thing: Our newspapers are full of intense interest in Harvard’s admissions standards but have very little to say about New York City’s dropout rate. People can’t help being fascinated with themselves and their peers. If you want to know what is on the minds of the leaders of the American ruling class, it’s no secret. They’ll tell you, if you ask — and if you don’t.
George Floyd is still dead. Jacob Frey is still mayor of Minneapolis. Medaria Arradondo is still the chief of police. More than a third of black students will drop out of high school in Milwaukee. But Forbes has announced a change in its in-house stylebook and will henceforth honor the woke convention of uppercase Black vs. lowercase white. And George Floyd is still dead. Jacob Frey is still mayor of Minneapolis. Medaria Arradondo is still the chief of police.
Oh, but they got James Bennet, the opinion editor at the New York Times. And surely that is something? It is, indeed, a very useful illustration of the E-Class vs. S-Class divide. Bennet was fired after purportedly endangering the lives of black Times staffers — a charge no mentally normal adult actually takes seriously — by publishing a guest column about the riots and the Insurrection Act by Senator Tom Cotton. The campaign to end Bennet did not come from America’s poor black communities as the workers of the world looked up, stunned, from page A24 of the New York Times — the venom came straight and undiluted from 620 Eighth Avenue, New York, N.Y., with Bennet’s underlings and juniors more or less putting him on an ice floe and pushing him out to sea.
Bennet was pushed out on behalf of marginalized black Americans, which necessitated that Bennet immediately be replaced by . . . a well-off white woman who went to Georgetown and Columbia and won a Pulitzer Prize for writing about that great loathsome theater of American middle-class anxiety: restaurants. (“The real price of inexpensive menu items,” the Pulitzer people summarized.) Well-off white women from elite colleges run the diversity-and-sensitivity racket like the 17th-century Dutch ran the tulip racket, like the De Beers cartel used to run diamonds. Big Caitlyn is getting paid. Affluent white women are the main E-Class beneficiaries of the current headhunting project to clear a little room at the top, just as they have historically been the primary beneficiaries of affirmative-action programs, contracting set-asides, and other programs to help out the poor disenfranchised Georgetown alumni out there in the cold and dark.
“Police, Fire Reportedly Refused to Respond to Crime in Progress in Seattle’s Breakaway CHOP.” “This is where ‘defund the police’ will lead not just in Seattle, but wherever it’s thoughtlessly implemented. Probably not all the way to the segregationist, secessionist CHOP, but to crime-ridden streets into which police and fire are more circumspect about intervening.”
these riots and their associated melodrama might most accurately be called the Nov. 3 riots. It’s the prospect of the election, especially the possibility that President Donald Trump will be reelected, which provides the fuel for the current hysteria.
But Simon is right. A solid majority of voters are disgusted by what they see. There is a large overdraft on the country’s budget of white guilt. Expect a foreclosure on the account Nov. 3. Yes, yes, the situation is fluid and a week, as Harold Wilson once observed, is a long time in politics. But a biopsy of the body politic in mid-June 2020 doesn’t bode well for the old man in the basement or scriptwriters Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer.
The longer this madness continues, the more likely it is that the president will enjoy a victory of historic proportions.
Another caveat about all those “Oh my God, Wuhan coronavirus cases are spiking in Florida,” etc. stories, take a look at these statistics. Assuming they’re accurate (a big assumption), new cases are going up (not spiking per se), but deaths are going down. It really looks like cases aren’t spiking, we’re just detecting milder and milder cases of it thanks to widespread testing.
Instead of #BlackLivesMatters, how about actually defending black lives? “National African American Gun Association (NAAGA) Membership Grows as Members Purchase Ammo in Record Numbers.” Good. (Hat tip: Say Uncle.)
Good news in a sea of bad: Austin Police Chief Brian Manley is not getting the axe. Finally, a scalp the radical left didn’t take.
Antifa members arrested in Austin for looting. “Lisa Hogan, Samuel Miller, and Skye Elder were arrested last week and charged with various state jail felonies after they smashed into a boarded-up Target, destroyed and ripped out surveillance cameras, and looted the store, stealing and damaging over $20,000 in property.” The mugshot:
Exactly the sort of Antifa winners you would expect to loot a Target
Chuck-E-Cheese files for bankruptcy. When they had to make it on the quality of their food, they were doomed…
Also filing for bankruptcy: 24 Hour Fitness. Hard to make a living when the government outlaws your business model. (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
Rocket fuel storage facility explosion in #China, the air catches fire before the explosion, the orange smoke is a clear indication of rocket fuel. The Shockwave shatters the glass of the nearby textile mill. You will not find this story on Chinese "news"
This has been a long time coming. At least a generation, maybe two. The left methodically has taken control of key institutions to implement an anti-American, anti-Capitalist agenda.
You send your kids to public schools and college, where they are taught from their earliest years that America and capitalism are the sources of evil in the world, that we are a systemically racist society that consumes ‘black and brown bodies,’ while socialist and communist systems are more equal and fair. It’s all a lie, but it’s a lie told by the teachers, professors, and administrators with power. The real racists are the people who obsess about race, and who judge people based on the color of their skin.
When your kids emerge from the social justice warfare meat grinder, you don’t recognize them anymore. Oh well, you shrug.
There is a concerted effort funded by leftist billionaires and high tech companies to control what you can say, and to silence you through mob action or social media throttling if you get out of line. The large corporate media, with only a couple of exceptions, is thoroughly corrupt and works every day to elect their preferred candidates, always Democrats.
The law enforcement system is being undermined by district attorneys funded by George Soros whose agenda is to prevent enforcement of laws, and politicians whose goal is to see those arrested released immediately without bail. We’re seeing that right now with rioters and looters almost immediately released. The next push is to defund the police.
Hollywood, The music industry. Television. Gone.
We still have the vote and can win elections, despite the disadvantage. But it’s not a guarantee. Which is why the left wants to subvert voting integrity.
All this time, you have seen bits and pieces, and figured that while you might not agree, it wasn’t a threat to our existence.
The wilding and looting should be your wake up call. When seconds counted, the police were pulled back by the policitians.
Reminder: The #BlackLivesMatter chant “Hands Up Don’t Shoot” is founded on a lie.
Let us know Biden and his party by what they have done for black people in all the decades Dems have enjoyed a firm hold on their vote.
If they really cared about black lives, they would have tried to address the real reasons for black disadvantage. They would worry about fatherlessness, the 70 percent of black children born to single mothers, the illiteracy that holds down black achievement, and drugs that blight black lives.
They would champion school choice, which Attorney General Bill Barr calls the “civil rights issue of our era.”
They would wonder why black disadvantage and violence is entrenched in cities they have controlled for decades.
But instead, Democrats blather about “systemic racism” and blame cops and President Trump.
Texas hit a new daily high in COVID-19 cases Tuesday with 2,504 new cases reported, according to data released Wednesday by the Texas Department of State Health Services. That topped the previous daily high of 1,949 cases May 31.
Just over 21% of the new cases were reported in Jefferson County, which reported 537 new cases Tuesday, nearly doubling its previous total.
Asked about the cause of the increase, DSHS spokesperson Chris Van Deusen pointed to Jefferson County’s three state prison units.
Most of the new cases were “due to a change in how the local health department is reporting” cases from the prisons, he said.
Hot spots like prisons have recently started to do mass testing, and the data is not always reported daily.
To the growing list of opinions that could cause you to be cast out of public life we can now add: thinking white privilege is a bullshit idea and thinking that staging a protest in Wales against police brutality in Minneapolis is a bit stupid.
For over the past 24 hours it has been revealed that two British men have been sacked and suspended respectively for the crime of gently criticising the tactics and rhetoric of the Black Lives Matter movement.
Stu Peters, a presenter on the Isle of Man’s Manx Radio station, has been suspended and put under investigation following an on-air clash with a black caller. In the exchange, Peters criticised the concept of white privilege (‘I’ve had no more privilege in my life than you have’) and questioned the point of BLM protests on the Isle (‘You can demonstrate anywhere you like, but it doesn’t make any sense to me’). The case has even been referred to the Isle of Man’s Communications Commission.
We just had the biggest spike of new gun buyers in recorded history — and then did it again one month later
The NSSF (the gun industry’s main trade group) just released their report on gun sales in the first four months of 2020. Record-breaking spikes in guns sales actually happen relatively frequently, and that’s certainly been the case in 2020. But the unique thing this year is how many of those gun sales were to first-time owners. The NSSF estimates that 40 percent of sales were to newbies, two-thirds higher than the typical level of 24 percent. Combined with 6.5 million background checks in the first four months of the year, NSSF estimates that the January–April 2020 period created 2.6 million new gun owners in the US.
There are 209 million adults in the US. Thirty percent of them personally own a gun. So 2.6 million new gun owners means a 4.1 percent increase in the total number of gun owners. In four months, driven by COVID. That’s before the second wave of new buyers from all the May–June upheaval — which wave, judging by the images of 2-hour lines outside gun shops, could be just as big as the first one.
Much bigger, I would guess, if demand can keep up.
West Palm Beach Mayor Keith James announced a ban on gun and ammunition sales. So Democrats not only want to encourage rioters, refuse to prosecute them, and defund the police, they want to take away the means to defend yourself as well…
Know whose views the media wants to supress? Yours:
The left is seeking to define the scope of acceptable thought, and they do it by marginalizing the mainstream and mainstreaming the marginal.
They do it by lying both directly and by omission of normal views the leftists disapprove of. I talk about it in detail (and brutally) in my new non-fiction book The 21 Biggest Lies About Donald Trump (and You!). Even as my tome prepares to drop on 7/7, new examples of this crap keep popping up.
Look at the “defund the police” idiocy. This sinister power grab – it’s not crazy, but rather a calculated effort to centralize force within left-wing power structures and leave you disarmed and defenseless – gets the support of only a rounding error of American citizens, but it’s the only view you hear on the commie cable shows. Some try to gaslight it so not to freak out the whiny white wine women of suburbia who know their Ken-doll feminized and gunless husbands won’t be able to protect them. The sugar coaters assert that only a stupid conservative dummy would think “defund the police” actually means “defund the police,” just like “believe all women” could never be reasonably interpreted as meaning that people should “believe all women.”
For more privileged individuals such as [Catherine] Tait, as Glenn Loury told the Quillette podcast recently, the anti-racism movement is now more akin to a performative religion, presenting garment-rending adherents with concepts analogous to original sin (whiteness) and excommunication (cancelation). America and its white inhabitants are presented as having permanently cursed souls, a defect that can be addressed only through elaborate rites of penance, as in recent scenes of white people washing the feet of black community leaders. And it’s notable that the above-described art-house and newsroom controversies always seem to originate in some supposedly sacrilegious text or monologue, whose heretical nature is taken as proof of a contaminated character.
Snip.
The reason the Times has lost its editorial moorings isn’t that social media is crazy and tribalistic. Social media has always been crazy and tribalistic. What’s changed is that the firewall between social media and real life has now broken down completely thanks to the pandemic lockdown. Since we’re all working from home, and dealing with co-workers only through digital means, the line between colleague and troll has blurred to nothingness.
It was one thing when Times staffers had to co-exist in a world of cubicles, water fountains, lunchrooms, and elevator chit chat. We all say we’re exasperated by office life, but the annoying rituals of communal work help remind us that our colleagues are actual human beings who tell stories about their dogs and put stick-it notes on their Tupperware. Canceling James Bennet, Real Human Being, would have been a lot harder than canceling @James_Bennet, the Slack-channel avatar. Certainly, it’s no coincidence that the Times’ descent into full-blown progressive cancel-culture social panic happened to coincide with the only period in the newspaper’s history when people who once rubbed elbows daily suddenly never saw each other for many months.
Speaking of the Times, Senate Majority leader Mitch McConnell is not impressed with their intestinal fortitude:
“One of our nation’s most storied newspapers just had its intellectual independence challenged by an angry mob, and they folded like a house of cards,” McConnell said Wednesday on the Senate floor. “A jury of people on Twitter indicted them as accessories to a thought crime, and instead of telling them to go take a hike, the paper pleaded guilty and begged for mercy.”
Important questions:
100 million dollar question that leftists are refusing to answer:
To what organization do the funds raised on the Black Lives Matter website go?
BLM raised 40 million dollars in 48 hours because of George Floyd’s death. But WHO did Act Blue direct that funding to?
Rioters in Philly deface a statue of Matthias Baldwin, an early abolitionist who fought against slavery 30 years before it ended. pic.twitter.com/1HKrDusPBh
President Donald Trump’s plan to pull troops from Germany irks Angela Merkel. Well duh. People hate it when you end their free ride.
President Donald Trump’s decision to cut the number of U.S. troops in Germany has irked Chancellor Angela Merkel’s government and German media.
The White House plans to withdraw 9,500 out of 35,000 U.S. troops stationed in Germany by September, The Wall Street Journal reported on Friday.
The move came after Germany ignored President Trump’s repeated warnings and kept defaulting on the agreed defense spending, leaving the U.S. to pick up the hefty NATO bill.
“The United States is spending far more on NATO than any other country. This is not fair, nor is it acceptable,” President Trump said at the 2018 NATO summit. The U.S. shoulders more than 70 percent of the NATO defense budget.
Peter Beyer, a German politician and a key Merkel ally, called the planned U.S. troop withdrawal “completely unacceptable” to Germany. “It’s not just about 9,500 soldiers, but also their families, an estimated 20,000 Americans,” he added.
What’s the last year Germany met it’s 2% funding target?
The Austin City Council, which turned the city into bumsville and wants to reduce funding for police by $100 million, wants to hike property taxes 25% to pay for a giant mass transportation boondoggle. Evidently the opportunities for graft there are far more extensive. The good news is that it requires voter approval, and I’m hoping that (for once) Austin voters will show a modicum of sanity.
Owner of Minneapolis manufacturing plant burned down by rioters has seen enough. “Kris Wyrobek thought he could rely on the city to protect his manufacturing business. In the wake of the city’s paralysis in the rioting — which the Star Tribune helpfully notes “sometimes overshadowed peaceful protests” — Wyrobek has had enough. He’s packing up his 7-Sigma plant to rebuild elsewhere after the city let it burn down, and he’s taking 50 jobs with him.”
Follow-up: Remember that “George Floyd and Derek Chauvin butted heads working at the same club” story? Yeah, not so much.
Wokeness comes for kid’s show Paw Patrol, which dares to feature a police dog as one of the characters.
Speaking of which, the Babylon Bee nails it again: “Paw Patrol Replaces Chase The Cop With Karl The Antifa Rioter.”
Related: “McGruff The Crime Dog Put Down.” You would not believe how long a I’ve been waiting to reuse the “McGruff the Crime Dog” tag…
Congratulations on surviving a week of Antifa/#BlackLivesMatter rioting. The riots themselves seem to have mostly petered out, but it looks like the federal prosecutions are just getting started. But we interrupt our regularly scheduled riot ruminations to bring a deeply unexpected bit of good news:
The U.S. economy added 2.5 million jobs in May. “Unexpectedly!” as job gains under Republican Presidents (and job losses under Democratic ones) always seem to be. We still have a huge self-inflicted hole to climb out out, but these numbers suggest that not only are we in a V-shaped recession, we’re already on the other side of the V.
To set the reality in which Antifa plans to prosecute the Democrats’ promised “revolution,” it needs to attack all the pillars of society. Throughout the country, they burned post offices, police precincts, banks, gas stations. city halls, and courts — they hit the CNN Center, and now churches.
Barack Obama started the “fundamental transformation of the United States of America.” Yet, this is not Obama’s Antifa. A failure as president, he did manage to accomplish one important prerequisite for this rebellion. He instilled in the left the understanding that “change” must be forced upon an unwilling electorate.
With this insight, Antifa has transitioned from pajama-boy blobs of perpetually offended miscreants, mostly drawn from misanthropes who were picked last in high school, into a trained guerilla force with cool uniforms. Fascists like cool uniforms.
Antifa, the paramilitary arm of the Democratic Party, has spent the last three years recruiting, and organizing. They have mobilized and learned tactics. They have a plan and are working hard to cover all the bases. Starting slow, they probed to find what government would allow, media would trumpet, and the public would endure.
When they burned the 3rd Precinct in Minneapolis, they knew they could get away with anything.
And, as we have seen, they can adapt. This was evident Monday night in New York City. Instead of massing together in one place to confront police, they executed lightning-fast blitzkrieg attacks in small groups. Hitting commercial properties, they ripped down plywood and broke windows. They didn’t loot or dilly dally, they moved quickly to the next target before police could respond.
This “hit and run” tactic is perfect for their organization because spreading the destruction over larger areas negates the numerical advantage of police and national guard. They will surely take this nationwide — it is what guerillas do.
Savagery is spreading with lightning speed across the United States, with murderous assaults on police officers and civilians and the ecstatic annihilation of businesses and symbols of the state. Welcome to a real civilization-destroying pandemic, one that makes the recent saccharine exhortations to “stay safe” and the deployment of police officers to enforce outdoor mask-wearing seem like decadent bagatelles.
This particular form of viral chaos was inevitable, given the failure of Minneapolis’s leaders to quell the city’s growing mayhem. The violence began on Tuesday, May 26, the day after the horrifying arrest and subsequent death of George Floyd. On the night of Thursday, May 28, Minneapolis mayor Jacob Frey ordered the city’s Third Police Precinct evacuated as the forces of hatred, distinct from legitimate forms of protest, descended upon it for a third day in a row. The building was promptly torched, sending a powerful sign that society would not defend its most fundamental institutions of law and order.
Snip.
The great philosophers and poets of the West—from Aeschylus and Euripides, to Shakespeare, Hobbes, and the American Founders—understood the chaos and lust for power that lurk beneath civilization. Thanks to the magnificent infrastructure of the rule of law, we now take stability and social trust for granted. We assume that violence, once unleashed in the name of justice, can easily be put back in the bottle.
It cannot.
It was a signal accomplishment of both politics and science to banish humanity’s millennia-long fear of darkness. That city dwellers are now reexperiencing that fear with each fall of night is a measure of how rapidly we are losing our hard-won progress.
The Democrats chose to support Black Lives Matter and to coddle Antifa. Minnesota’s Attorney General Keith Ellison had previously posed with a copy of Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook, touting it as “the book that strike fear in the heart of” Trump. Now Ellison has been tweeting conspiracy theories that blame the riots on “white supremecists”. But, the only white supremacists on the scene are Democrats.
Minneapolis’ last Republican mayor stepped down in 1974. While his city burned, Mayor Jacob Frey, a Biden supporter, attacked President Trump, whining, “weakness is refusing to take responsibility for your own actions, weakness is pointing your finger at someone else in a time of crisis.”
That’s exactly what Frey and the Democrats have been doing in the face of the riots. Frey, a former community organizer, had repeatedly tweeted support for the Black Lives Matter racist hate group that is carrying out much of the violence. Instead of taking responsibility, Frey is blaming President Trump.
Chief Medaria Arradondo was handpicked by Frey’s predecessor as the city’s African-American police boss after the shooting of Justine Damond, an Australian woman reporting a crime, by Mohammed Noor, a Somali Muslim officer. Arradondo replaced Janee Harteau, the first female chief of the force.
Arradondo, like Harteau, came into office promising transformational change. He had already sued the city for racial discrimination, winning a huge settlement, and had all the right buzzwords about diversity and equity.
“I’m committed to making sure that when the history is written, we are on the right side of history,” he declared at his first press conference, echoing Obama.
That’s the police force on whose watch the Floyd riots began.
This national nightmare came out of a deeply progressive city, under the administration of progressives, and happened under elected Democrat officials who embodied the progressive vision for America.
George Floyd and the resulting riots are entirely the work of their hands.
“Jeremiah Ellison, the son of Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison and Minneapolis city council member, wants to ‘dismantle the Minneapolis police department.'” It’s like they want Minnesota to flip to Trump in November. And remember how close Keith Ellison came to becoming DNC chair in 2017…
Other Democrats are showing the knee-jerk anti-police mentality, with Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti cutting $150 million from the LAPD budget to redirect it to race hustling poverty pimps and payoffs to connected black Democrats “communities of color.”
Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS) Director Steve McGraw told the press on Tuesday that Antifa was responsible for the Sunday evening looting of the Capital Plaza Target in Austin.
McGraw also confirmed that the department has agents embedded in Antifa, from which they received the intel.
He said, “[The looting] was done and organized by an Antifa webpage, and of course, the surveillance that was provided over the internet to identify where law enforcement resources were staged was done over Antifa accounts.”
Antifa is a militant left-wing movement dedicated to fighting what it qualifies as fascism, and white supremacy, in America by any means — physically violent, verbally vitriolic, or otherwise — it deems necessary. Tracing its heritage to the German antifaschistischs in the 20th century, it engages in similar street-fight tactics that frequented the Weimar Republic.
This 21st-century version sprung up after the 2016 election and is known for sucker-punching and assaulting those whom they oppose, setting fire to buildings, and inciting riots. They have a reach that extends far beyond the United States, across continents.
I note that Antifa, being the racists they are, looted the Target closest to the poor, still-black part of East Austin. (Hat tip: Holly Hansen.)
Local pharmacy broken into Sat night. Smashed side door. Proprietor says every pharmacy in Bev Hills was broken into between 8PM and 11PM. Sounds well-organized. "What were they after?" "Drugs and money."
Chuck DeVore, who as a captain in the California Army National Guard helped put down the 1992 LA riots, covers historicla uses of the Insurrection Act, and whether invoking it is a good idea.
Jose Nino provides an overview of China’s Communist Party oppressing their own people. Caveats: He fails to mention the brutal subjugation of Tibet, and I think his death toll estimates on starvation deaths from The Great leap Forward are somewhat on the low side.
“As expected DOJ has filed a motion with the DC Court of Appeals SUPPORTING @GenFlynn’s writ of mandamus. Slightly unexpected is how much Team Sullivan & Collusion HQ get absolutely REKT.”
“The NYT has changed, become a social justice paper instead of a Left-wing paper with some social justice op-eds. Wokeness infuses it all.”
Nature wants to kill you:
Important public service announcement: Being a cybercriminal is really, really boring.
Last woman receiving a Civil War era pension dies. Her father, who fought for the Confederacy before switching to the Union side in 1863, married when he was 83.
It seems that every four years the leftwing media complex manufactures another race riot. Who benefits? Do they think they can prevent an erosion of black voters to Trump by playing the “Racist cops!” card from now until election day? That backfired spectacularly in 2016. Minnesota went narrowly to Hillary Clinton in 2016; did they just ensure that it will now flip to Trump? Is that the preferred outcome, so the insane wing can seize control of the Democratic Party from the corrupt wing?
What? “A former club owner in south Minneapolis says the now-fired police officer and the black man who died in his custody this week both worked security for her club up to the end of last year.” I don’t think anyone had that on their bingo card.
According to the CDC’s current best estimate, the case fatality rate of the coronavirus is .4 percent. And that’s just amongst symptomatic cases, which, the CDC estimates, is 65 percent of all cases. This means the CDC estimates that the fatality rate for all infections across all age groups, symptomatic as well as asymptomatic, is approximately .26 percent.
The CDC does caution that the numbers are likely to change with new data, but considering we’ve gone from 3.4 percent to 2.0 percent to now 0.26 percent. The more data we get, the lower the numbers get. So, I’m thinking it might get even lower.
But, the bigger takeaway from this is that the early doomsday predictions about the coronavirus were all wrong. Everything that justified the lockdowns and the shutting down of our economy was wrong. We need to open this country back up.
There appears to be no statistical connection between the economic pain of the nationwide shutdowns and the number of COVID-19 cases or fatalities. None. Let that sink in for a moment, given we were told we had to lock down America to “flatten the curve” and save lives.
On the other hand, the data does suggest that reliance on mass transit is connected with virus cases and fatalities.
Snip.
There appears to be no statistical connection between improved health outcomes and pandemic policies that forced nearly 40 million people into the unemployment lines. None.
One might expect to see that states that suffered the most in COVID cases or fatalities would also be the states with the highest increases in unemployment as politicians and public health officials in those areas instituted strict measures to slow the disease. Alternatively, states that hadn’t seen much in the way of the virus should be relatively better off economically.
Among the 15 most-populous states, New York has the highest COVID case rate, the highest death rate, and the highest age-adjusted death rate, while its unemployment rate jumped 10.8 percent from February to April.
At the other end of the spectrum, Texas has the lowest case rate, the lowest death rate, and the lowest age-adjusted death rate among the 15 most-populous states. Texas’ unemployment rate increased 9.3 percent over the past two months reported.
But New York City’s mass transit probably was a key contributing factor.
“Andrew Cuomo gave immunity to nursing home execs after big campaign donations.” Because being part of the Democratic Money Complex means never having to admit you’re guilty…
For the first time ever, Twitter.com, the company responded directly to one of the president’s tweets. They inserted a link below this one to declare authoritatively that the tweet was false. “Get the facts about mail-in ballots.” If the user has taken to a Twitter news page with a headline declaring “Trump makes the unsubstantiated claim that mail-in voting will lead to voter fraud.” That’s the official story. Voter fraud never happens no matter what, and it definitely won’t happen with mail-in voting. You are hearing trusted news anchors tell you that, a lot. And they say it like they know it. Anyone who disagrees is a conspiracy nut, a flat Earther, a freak. Probably doesn’t vaccinate his kids.
They’re lying. That’s a lie and we know it’s a lie because of fraud at mail-in voting already happens. Not speculating. Do you have Google? Look it up. Ballot harvesting is the problem. Ballot harvesting is the process when the third-party collects and turns in ballots on behalf of another person. It’s only possible with mail-in ballots.
Laws around ballot harvesting vary from state to state. It’s currently legal in 27 states but Democrats want to legalize it in all 50, and, I wonder why. The recent House coronavirus bill declares that “all states” must permit a voter to designate any person to deliver a sealed absentee ballot. The only restriction is ballot harvesters can not be paid based on the number of ballots they collect, but of course, you could easily pay that than a campaign could pay a canvasser for their time or the distance they travel.
With unlimited ballot harvesting, there is no state supervision or chain of custody, to limit on the amount of ballots a single person can collect. Ballot harvesters can go to people’s homes, and they do in California. They pressure them to vote or vote the right way, or they help a person read through a ballot while nudging them on who to vote for.
Why stop there? You could pay a person to sign or turn in a blank ballot… Or simply throw away ballots that don’t vote the right way. We are not saying that all of these methods of fraud are equally likely, you probably could prevent some of them with safeguards but the point is this. Universal mail-in voting with ballot harvesting massively expands the potential for voter fraud and it makes a mockery of the secret ballot.
I don’t care what Twitter tells you, that’s true. It’s obvious. And by the way, it’s been documented. In the past decade, most battles over voter fraud have centered around whether to require an I.D. to vote like most every countries do. But that’s not the real issue… Ballot harvesting is the… choice for those that want to steal an election.
ACLU folds on abortion lawsuit against Texas cities over “sanctuary cities for the unborn.” Which makes you wonder why. Is keeping a slender reed of hope for keeping sanctuary cities for the inevitable illegal alien amnesty more important than the sacrament of abortion? Or maybe, given that they’re all pretty small cities (Big Spring may be the largest) they just didn’t want to spend money on it?
Why water heaters, dryers and freezers aren’t eligible I couldn’t tell you, but if you needed to get any covered appliances, this weekend is a good time.
There is no such evidence in the unmasking list that acting national intelligence director Richard Grenell provided to Senators Chuck Grassley (R., Iowa) and Ron Johnson (R., Wis.). I suspect that’s because General Flynn’s identity was not “masked” in the first place. Instead, his December 29 call with Kislyak was likely intercepted under an intelligence program not subject to the masking rules, probably by the CIA or a friendly foreign spy service acting in a nod-and-wink arrangement with our intelligence community.
“Unmasking” is a term of art for revealing in classified reports the names of Americans who have been “incidentally” monitored by our intelligence agencies. Presumptively, the names of Americans should be concealed in these reports, which reflect the surveillance of foreign targets, primarily under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Broadly speaking, FISA governs two kinds of intelligence collection.
The first is “traditional” FISA — the targeted monitoring of a suspected clandestine operative of a foreign power. If the FBI shows the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) probable cause that a person inside the United States is acting as a foreign power’s agent, it may obtain a warrant to surveil that person. If the foreign power’s suspected agent communicates with Americans, the latter are incidentally intercepted even though they are not the targets of the surveillance.
The second kind of FISA collection occurs under Section 702 of the statute. It brings under FISC jurisdiction various intelligence-collection programs that target categories of non-Americans outside the United States. These foreigners also communicate with Americans, so the latter are incidentally intercepted.
Under federal law, both kinds of FISA collection are subject to so-called minimization procedures. These aim to safeguard the privacy of Americans who have been incidentally monitored. When raw intelligence is refined into intelligence reports (including transcripts of recorded conversations) that are disseminated to U.S. officials, the identities of these Americans do not appear. Rather, a designation such as “U.S. Person” is substituted — the “mask,” as it were.
If, upon reviewing intel reports, an official with national-security or foreign-relations responsibilities believes that the reporting is critical, and that the identity of the U.S. person must be known in order for our government to reap the full benefit of the intelligence, then that official may request unmasking. Decisions on such requests are made by specialists assigned to the agency that reported the intelligence in question — usually the FBI or the NSA for intelligence collected, respectively, inside or outside the United States. Our intelligence agencies, led by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), keep records of these requests. This underscores that unmasking — because of its privacy implications, because foreign intelligence must never be a pretext for government spying on Americans — is a big deal that should be done only rarely and carefully.
With that as background, let’s get back to Flynn.
For three years, we’ve been led to believe that Flynn’s December 29 conversation with Kislyak was intercepted because the latter was “routinely” monitored. (Kislyak was replaced as ambassador in 2017.) That is, Kislyak was an overt agent of Russia, stationed at its embassy in Washington, so the FBI kept tabs on him. Indeed, the “routine”-surveillance story line was repeated by the New York Times just this week.
The implication is that Kislyak was probably subjected to traditional FISA surveillance by the FBI; or, since he lived in Russia and traveled to other places when not in America, perhaps he was also a FISA Section 702 target. In either event (or both), Kislyak was interacting with Americans, who were thus incidentally intercepted.
That, the story goes, is what must have happened to Flynn. Trump’s designated national security advisor was unmasked because, once intelligence agents intercepted the December 29 phone call, they decided it was essential to identify the person with whom the Russian ambassador was discussing sanctions that President Obama had just imposed against Moscow.
I no longer buy this story. If it were true, there would be a record of Flynn’s unmasking. DNI Grenell has represented that the list he provided to Senators Grassley and Johnson includes all requested unmaskings of Flynn from November 8, 2016 (when Donald Trump was elected president) through the end of January 2017 (when the Trump administration had transitioned into power). Yet, it appears that not a single listed unmasking pertains to the December 29 Kislyak call.
Timeline details and Strzok-Page comms snipped.
Well, the possibility that first leaps to mind is: Maybe Flynn was a FISA surveillance target. That is, his interception was not incidental. Rather, the FBI was monitoring him under FISA because he was a suspected agent of a foreign power — the theory based on which the bureau opened their counterintelligence investigation of Flynn in August 2016. But that can’t be right. After an exhaustive investigation of the FBI’s abuse of FISA, Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz concluded that there is no evidence the FBI “requested or seriously considered FISA surveillance of . . . Flynn.” (IG Report’s “Executive Summary,” p. vi.)
It is more likely, then, that the Flynn–Kislyak call was captured by intelligence operations that are not governed by FISA.
Snip.
Readers of my book Ball of Collusion know I have argued that the Obama administration’s Trump–Russia probe/political-narrative long predated the FBI’s July 2016 opening of “Crossfire Hurricane.” I believe there were several strands of the Trump–Russia probe, and that they trace back to 2015, around the time of Donald Trump’s entry into the race for the Republican presidential nomination.
The CIA played a central role. The agency collaborated — I’m tempted to say colluded! — with a variety of friendly foreign intelligence services, especially NATO countries that Trump made a habit of bashing on the campaign trail.
Barack Obama warned his successor against hiring Michael Flynn. It was Nov. 10, 2016, just two days after Donald Trump upset Hillary Clinton to become the 45th president of the United States. Trump told aide Hope Hicks that he was bewildered by the president’s warning. Of all the important things Obama could have discussed with him, the outgoing commander in chief wanted to talk about Michael Flynn.
The question of why Obama was so focused on Flynn is especially revealing now. The Department of Justice recently filed to withdraw charges against the retired three-star general for making false statements to the FBI in a Jan. 24, 2017, interview regarding a phone call with a Russian diplomat. The circumstances surrounding the call and subsequent FBI interview have given rise to a vast conspiracy theory that was weaponized to imprison a decorated war hero and a strategic thinker whose battlefield innovations saved countless American lives. There is no evidence that Flynn “colluded” with Russia, and the evidence that Flynn did not make false statements to the FBI has been buried by the bureau, including current Director Christopher Wray.
So if the Obama administration wasn’t alarmed by Flynn’s nonexistent ties to Russia, why was he Obama’s No. 1 target? Why were officials from the previous administration intercepting his phone calls with the Russian ambassador?
The answer is that Obama saw Flynn as a signal threat to his legacy, which was rooted in his July 2015 nuclear agreement with Iran—the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). Flynn had said long before he signed on with the Trump campaign that it was a catastrophe to realign American interests with those of a terror state. And now that the candidate he’d advised was the new president-elect, Flynn was in a position to help undo the deal. To stop Flynn, the outgoing White House ran the same offense it used to sell the Iran deal—they smeared Flynn through the press as an agent of a foreign power, spied on him, and leaked classified intercepts of his conversations to reliable echo chamber allies.
Rep. Katie Porter, D-Calif., criticized her own party’s coronavirus legislation this week as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., pressured the Republican-controlled Senate to adopt what Porter described as a Democratic “wish list.”
“The HEROES Act is dead on arrival,” Porter said Tuesday, referring to the $3 trillion package the House passed last week as a follow-up to the CARES Act. Her comments during an online meeting hosted by the Tustin [Calif.] Democratic Club were first reported by the Washington Examiner.
“There was no bipartisan negotiation here and no effort at bipartisan negotiation,
Snip.
But tucked into the legislation are provisions that rankled the Republicans, including expanding $1,200 checks to certain undocumented immigrants, restoring the full State and Local Tax Deduction (SALT) that helps individuals in high-taxed blue states, a $25 billion rescue for the U.S. Postal Service, allowing legal marijuana businesses to access banking services and early voting and vote-by-mail provisions.
“I did find myself, Porter said, “on the House floor thinking [of] my Republican colleagues who said, ‘This bill is a Democratic wish list written by a handful of Democrats, and shoved down the throats of the rest of the Congress.’
Restoring SALT is a giveaway to blue state billionaires. Sounds like the marijuana banking part should be passed, but there’s no reason to cram it into a coronavirus relief bill. And the early voting and vote-by-mail provisions are designed to help further voting fraud. Speaking of which:
A former Judge of Elections in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, has been charged and pleaded guilty to illegally adding votes for Democrat candidates in judicial races in 2014, 2015, and 2016.
On Thursday, the Department of Justice (DOJ) announced charges against former Judge of Elections Domenick DeMuro, 73, for stuffing the ballot box for Democrats in exchange for payment by a paid political consultant.
The charges, and guilty plea, include conspiracy to deprive Philadelphia voters of their civil rights by fraudulently stuffing the ballot boxes for specific Democrat candidates in the 2014, 2015, and 2016 primary elections and a violation of the Travel Act.
“The Trump administration’s prosecution of election fraud stands in stark contrast to the total failure of the Obama Justice Department to enforce these laws,” Public Interest Legal Foundation President Christian Adams said in a statement. “Right now, other federal prosecutors are aware of cases of double voting in federal elections as well as noncitizen voting. Attorney General William Barr should prompt those other offices to do their duty and prosecute known election crimes.”
As Judge of Elections, DeMuro was paid to oversee the election process in the 39th Ward, which encompasses Philadelphia.
DeMuro’s guilty plea states that he was paid by a political consultant to illegally add votes for particular Democrat candidates in primary judicial races. The political consultant who allegedly paid DeMuro had been hired by those Democrat candidates.
According to the indictment, the political consultant allegedly solicited payments from Democrat candidates who hired him, classifying them as “consulting fees.” The payments — which ranged from $300 to $5,000 — were then allegedly used to pay Election Board Officials, such as DeMuro, in exchange for those officials illegally adding votes for the consultants’ Democrat candidates.
In addition to certifying fraudulent results to help Democrats, DeMuro also took a hands-on approach to voting fraud: “Demuro fraudulently stuffed the ballot box by literally standing in a voting booth and voting over and over, as fast as he could, while he thought the coast was clear.” (Hat tip: Chuck DeVore.)
Several posts here suggested that Sweden’s model of reaching herd immunity might be a better method than what we were doing. Now that the data is in: not so much. “Sweden becomes country with highest coronavirus death rate per capita.”
Speaking of data, the way media dashboards count the numbers are skewed high. “At the time of Colorado’s announcement on Friday, the CDC-definition tally, used in CNN’s “dashboard” and all the other media reports, stood at 1,150 statewide. But only 878 of those, more than 23 percent less, are identified as deaths due to COVID-19.”
CNN has staked out a position in its coverage of Wuhan virus that can only be explained in one way. They perceive a drawn-out lock down of America as something that will damage President Trump’s reelection chances and therefore it is something to be preserved. The move by a handful of governors to re-open their states to normal life despite the latest pronouncement from the latest M.D. or Ph.D. who fancies himself as Galactic Commander, threatens to reveal the Wuhan virus’s new clothing, so to speak. Therefore, anything that can be done to discredit the incontrovertible data that shows whatever threat Wuhan virus presented is now largely abated must be discredited.
More tests are being given, and the positives rate is actually declining.
Oregon’s Democratic governor Kate Brown: “No shopping in open counties for those in closed counties!”
Speaking of California: More suicides than coronavirus deaths? I know that “data” is not the plural of “anecdote,” but maybe somebody should run the numbers…
Is Tesla planning a Gigafactory near Austin? There are still big tracks of land available out near 130…
Wargaming a war between the U.S. and China in 2030. Don’t be so sure they could knock out our carriers with hypersonic missiles, and our drones and submarines would wreck havoc with their trade.
Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine professor and former Cleveland Clinic employee was arrested Wednesday over his alleged ties to China.
The Justice Department announced that Qing Wang was arrested at his Shaker Heights, Ohio home as part of a joint operation conducted by the FBI and the Department of Health and Human Service Office of the Inspector-General. Wang was charged with wire fraud related to more than $3.6 million in grant funding that Wang and his research team at the Cleveland Clinic had received from the National Institutes of Health.
According to the criminal complaint, Wang failed to disclose affiliations with Chinese universities. He also allegedly failed to disclose that he had received grants from the National Natural Science Foundation of China for a nearly identical research project. He held the title Dean of the College of Life Sciences and Technology at Huazhong University of Science and Technology.
Cleveland Special Agent-in-Charge Eric Smith said this wasn’t “a simple case of omission, ” adding that “Wang deliberately failed to disclose his Chinese grants and foreign positions and even engaged in a pervasive pattern of fraud to avoid criminal culpability.”
The 40-year old girlfriend of 74-year old former Texas Lt. Governor David Dewhurst cracked two of his ribs. (Hat tip: Dwight.)
Magazine publisher Conde Nast lays off about 100 employees. Maybe the entire Teen Vogue Anal Sex department got laid off. Hopefully there are some good Python courses available in their area…
Universally respected mystery expert Otto Penzler was let go as editor of the Best American Mystery Stories of the Year so the publisher could pick stories based on “affirmative action” criteria rather than excellence.
When you're 24 and break into a 73 year-old’s house and threaten him and his wife with a knife and don't know he was a boxer, a marine, and hand-to-hand combat instructor. pic.twitter.com/Ep5pao8GKN
Greetings, and welcome to another Friday LinkSwarm! Today’s theme is Democratic Governor’s ignoring the constitution to keep their precious lockdowns going, Obamagate, spying (domestic and foreign), a bit about aircraft, and funny animals. Dig in!
Remember how Georgia lifting the lockdown and opening the economy was going to kill everyone’s granny? Yeah, not so much: “Georgia Records Lowest Number of Coronavirus Patients in over a Month.”
Ever since President Trump expressed optimism about the use of hydroxychloroquine to treat COVID-19, the mere mention of that drug can elicit instantaneous, strident, and finger-wagging condemnation by the mainstream media and all those who are pulling for the pandemic to lay waste to the economy and pave the way for a fundamental progressive transformation of America. Despite its use by health-care providers across the country and around the world to successfully treat COVID-19, you will be mocked as either a fool or a snake oil salesman if you approvingly utter the word “hydroxychloroquine” or even express hope that it can be used to save lives. The word is simply not to be tolerated in polite, progressive society.
Well, it appears that the list of forbidden words is about to get longer. The new additions include “corticosteroids” and “Methylprednisolone.”
What do these widely available and relatively inexpensive drugs with known safety profiles have in common with hydroxychloroquine? Leading physicians are using them in addition to hydroxychloroquine to successfully treat COVID-19. And they are doing so without waiting two or three years for the results of randomized clinical trials.
“Wuhan Virus Watch: Over Half of All U.S. Deaths Have Occurred in Just Five States.” “New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Michigan and Pennsylvania. New York remains the hardest-hit state of any in the country by far, having logged nearly 27,000 deaths as of Saturday afternoon. The next-hardest-hit state, New Jersey, had recorded over 9,100.”
It is difficult to describe, and impossible to exaggerate, just how badly Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s COVID-19 response has been, and it has been a catastrophe from the very beginning. In early March, when the country was already becoming concerned about the spread of the virus, Whitmer did not cancel the Democratic presidential primary, and indeed, there was record turnout for the March 10 primary, which turned into a “super spreader” event in metropolitan Detroit. She has since bungled practically every aspect of the pandemic, including her deliberately punitive and irrational lockdown policy. Now she would have us believe that she is the real victim of all this:
Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D) said Wednesday that the lockdown protests are “racist and misogynistic” and called on those with a platform to discourage the demonstrators.
Whitmer told ABC’s “The View” that the protests are “really political” as demonstrators have brought nooses, Confederate flags and Nazi symbolism.
“This is not appropriate in a global pandemic,” she said. “But it’s certainly not an exercise of democratic principles where we have free speech. This is calls to violence. This is racist and misogynistic.”
I have no idea who brought nooses, etc., to these protests, although I suspect these were false-flag agents provocateurs — leftists pretending to be part of the protest and acting in ways intended to discredit Whitmer’s opponents. None of this, however, justifies her policies.
Wisconsin Governor and bureaucracy: “Screw your rights. Stay at home.” Wisconsin Supreme Court: “Unconstitutional.” Wisconsin Governor and bureaucracy the very same day: “Oh yeah? Then screw your religion! No meetings for you God weirdos!” Every. Knee. Must. Bend.
Dallas County Commissioner Judge Clay Jenkins has repeatedly tried to act as the ruler of Dallas County by attempting to force his will on everyone within it and each time he’s been put back in his place by everyone from the citizens of Dallas County to his own fellow commissioners.
Jenkins has now awakened the wrath of Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton who issued a warning to him and other officials in other Texas counties who are trying to illegally prevent Texans from living doing things such as attending church.
According to Paxton’s office, a warning was issued to three county judges and two mayors telling them to back off their make-believe thrones, or else there will be consequences:
Attorney General Ken Paxton today issued letters to three Texas counties (Dallas, Bexar, and Travis) and two mayors (San Antonio and Austin), warning that some requirements in their local public health orders are unlawful and can confuse law-abiding citizens. These unlawful and unenforceable requirements include strict and unconstitutional demands for houses of worship, unnecessary and onerous restrictions on allowing essential services to operate, such as tracking customers who visit certain restaurants, penalties for not wearing masks, shelter-in-place demands, criminal penalties for violating state or local health orders, and failing to differentiate between recommendations and mandates.
Many of the most important mitigation strategies are unknown to the general public because they’ve taken place behind closed doors on the initiative of employers, not bureaucrats, and have little or nothing to do with legal mandates (which are themselves, as I can attest is the case here in Canada, a contradictory, hastily-conceived patchwork of federal and provincial directives and advisories). To give but one example I happen to be familiar with: Many of the men and women you see driving delivery trucks and construction vehicles are now governed by all sorts of rules, at pickup and drop-off, that allow them to perform their functions without coming within six feet of others. In some cases, they’ve been enabled with apps on their phones or dash-mounted tablets that permit them to coordinate these functions without any direct on-site human interaction whatsoever. Or they might be subject to thermometer-gun screenings to determine if they have a fever. Having implemented these lockdown-lite policies at great cost and inconvenience, employers aren’t going to dump them the moment the government gives them permission to do so, even though these procedures have increased costs and decreased output.
Many employers I speak to are actually far more constricted by the concerns of their own employees than by the law itself. At one workplace that I know of, the boss announced that loosened provincial restrictions mean that everyone can come back to work this month. To his surprise, his employees announced that they’d voted on the issue through Facebook, and, no, they would not be coming back, at least not yet. And in Quebec, which is starting to let elementary-school students come back to class this month, thousands of parents—a majority at some schools—have decided to keep their children home. I am told by reliable sources within my own family that some of these parents are even pressuring their neighbours to do likewise, and are shaming dissenters on social media as bad parents. It’s lockdown by mob.
To some extent, I find this attitude of populist hyper-vigilance to be exasperating, because sending your young kids to school is now generally safe (and, selfishly, because I think my own seven-year-old could benefit from getting back to a structured education environment). But we got into this mess by letting our guard down, and so it’s not surprising that many ordinary people want to err on the other side of the equation for a month or three. Whatever your views, though, if you’re all in a fuss about lockdown policy, please remember that the real lockdown was never imposed by government. It turns out that it was inside each and every one of us all along.
Don Surber asked a question back in 2017 that we ought to take a fresh look at: Was Obama using the NSA to spy on Romney during the 2012 election? Given what we know of Crossfire Hurricane, would anyone put it past him?
Related:
Comey: 'We Did Not Spy—We Just Observed And Reported Secretly Without The Subject's Knowledge Or Consent' https://t.co/h3uoUi1JKB
Shurer fought his way *up* a mountain, into machine gun fire, RPGs, etc, neutralizing countless jihadis in the process, getting shot, but still moving forward, to render aid to & evac his brothers that were pinned down. His story is awe inspiring. RIP.https://t.co/jHgoR1XLKC
— Jordan Schachtel (@JordanSchachtel) May 15, 2020
TSMC to build chip foundry in Arizona. This is a pretty big deal, as TSMC currently has the best fab tech in the world, and this will be their first ground-up American foundry (they currently have (I think) two other American fabs as the result of acquisitions from WaferTech and TI).
An engineering professor at the University of Arkansas has been arrested by the FBI and faces up to 20 years in prison for allegedly hiding funding that he received from the communist Chinese government.
The New York Times reports that “Simon Ang of the University of Arkansas, was arrested on Friday and charged on Monday with wire fraud.”
“He worked for and received funding from Chinese companies and from the Thousand Talents program, which awards grants to scientists to encourage relationships with the Chinese government,” the report notes, adding that “he warned an associate to keep his affiliation with the program quiet.”
The report explains that Ang’s alleged hiding of the funding enabled him to also get US government subsidies, specifically from NASA, to the tune of more than $5 million.
Who let the goats out?! 🐐 A herd of 200 goats roamed the streets of a San Jose neighborhood on Tuesday after breaking through a fence. Full story: https://t.co/nlHZA6livTpic.twitter.com/NEAp36bJsb
The lockdowns are finally ending for Americans (at least in states without Democratic governors), and the lockdown also ended for Michael Flynn, who was finally freed from his Kafkaesque prosecution:
The Justice Department has moved to withdraw its case against former Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn, citing “newly discovered and disclosed information,” according to a new court filing.
The move, first reported by The Associated Press, comes less than an hour after the top prosecutor on the case, Brandon Van Grack, submitted his withdrawal from the case. The decision said that the White House interview Flynn gave to the FBI, which ultimately led to his guilty plea, was “conducted without any legitimate investigative basis.”
“The Government is not persuaded that the January 24, 2017 interview was conducted with a legitimate investigative basis and therefore does not believe that Mr. Flynn’s statements were material even if untrue,” the decision states, citing Flynn’s 2017 guilty plea of lying to federal investigators. “Moreover, we do not believe that the Government can prove either the relevant false statements or their materiality beyond a reasonable doubt.”
Jeff Jensen, the U.S. attorney tasked by Attorney General Bill Barr in February to reviewing the case, recommended that it be dropped. Flynn moved to withdraw his guilty plea in January, saying he “never lied” to FBI agents over his contacts with Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak.
“Through the course of my review of General Flynn’s case, I concluded the proper and just course was to dismiss the case,” Jensen said in a statement. “I briefed Attorney General Barr on my findings, advised him on these conclusions, and he agreed.” The DOJ’s filing states that Flynn’s contacts with Kislyak “were entirely appropriate on their face.”
In recent weeks, additional information released in the case has shed scrutiny on the way the case was conducted. Flynn’s lawyer Sidney Powell claimed last month in a court filing that Van Grack had made a “side deal” with Flynn’s former defense team that was withheld from the retired Army general, citing heavily-redacted emails that show Flynn’s former lawyers discussing why the deal needed to be “kept secret,” implying that Flynn would be used to testify in further criminal cases.
Further documents released last week showed handwritten notes from an FBI official questioning the goal of Flynn’s White House interview with FBI agents Peter Strzok and Joe Pientka, suggesting the intent was “to get him to lie, so we can prosecute him or get him fired.”
Another release revealed that Flynn had been the subject of a spinoff surveillance operation under the FBI’s “Crossfire Hurricane” probe of the 2016 Trump campaign.
Given all the dirt that has come out about Crossfire Hurricane, AKA the Russian Collusion Hoax, AKA The Plot Against the President, this is not the last we’re going to hear about that conspiracy…
The people running states like New Jersey and cities like Chicago know they’re broke. Ridiculously generous public employee pensions – concocted by elected officials and union leaders who had to have understood that they were writing checks their taxpayers couldn’t cover – are bleeding them dry, with no political solution in sight.
They also know that they have only two possible outs: bankruptcy, or some form of federal bailout. Since the former means a disgraceful end to local political careers while the latter requires some kind of massive crisis to push Washington into a place where a multi-trillion dollar state/city bailout is the least bad option, it’s safe to assume that mayors and governors – along with public sector union leaders – have been hoping for such a crisis to save their bacon.
And this year they got their wish. The country is on lockdown, unemployment is skyrocketing and mayors and governors now have a plausible way to rebrand their criminal mismanagement as a “natural disaster” deserving of outside help.
Early estimates of the COVID-19 death rate, cited to justify the lockdowns, have proven far too pessimistic. In March, the World Health Organization (WHO) estimated a 3.4 percent fatality rate and Dr. Anthony Fauci estimated that the fatality rate of the coronavirus was about 2 percent. As PJ Media’s Matt Margolis reported, at least five studies have placed the death rate below 1 percent, confirming President Donald Trump’s hunch.
Recent studies have found that far more people than expected have COVID-19 antibodies — meaning the virus has spread faster than previously thought, but also proving that it is far less deadly than previously thought.
Furthermore, a recent study showed that Democratic governors were three times more likely than Republican governors to impose a lockdown. This would make sense, given the Democratic control over many population centers experiencing large outbreaks: New York City, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Washington, D.C., for example. However, the study found that “counterintuitively, the percentage of the state’s population infected with COVID-19 had the weakest effect on the governors’ decisions of all the four variables.”
The study found that the three most significant variables were political affiliation (a heavy slant toward Democrats), “social learning” (governors of states afflicted by COVID-19 later acted much faster than governors of states who were afflicted early on), and “mini-cascades” (the actions of some governors sparked multiple other governors to order lockdowns in the next three days).
Both social learning and mini-cascades shine a light on how news of the coronavirus’ danger spread. As states with coronavirus hot spots reacted, other states followed suit, preparing for outbreaks of their own.
Yet the political slant is also extremely significant, especially considering the different ways state and local officials have carried out their lockdowns. Greenville, Miss. Mayor Errick Simmons notoriously defended his ban on drive-in church services that led to parishioners facing $500 fines. New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio threatened to “permanently” close churches and synagogues unless they comply with his orders — and he issued a disgusting threat to the Jewish community in particular. Andy Berke, mayor of Chattanooga, Tenn., banned drive-in church services even though Tennessee’s governor permitted them. Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear dispatched the State Police against a church hosting a drive-in service. Police in Virginia threatened a pastor with a year in jail for hosting a socially-distanced church service, enacting Gov. Ralph Northam’s order.
All these political leaders belong to the same party: the Democratic Party. Not all of the onerous coronavirus restrictions that violate religious freedom have been issued by Democrats, but there is a disturbing correlation between the left-wing party and crisis orders that single out churches, synagogues, and mosques. It seems one party is more likely than the other to think of religion as less than “essential,” and much of that animus traces back to the mistaken idea that religion (Christianity in particular) and science are in conflict.
The outrageous tyranny of Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer and her heavy-handed, illogical, and irresponsible Wuhan coronavirus edicts have finally been outdone by another Democrat governor, this time on the east coast.
Maine governor Janet Mills jumped on the one-size-fits all Wuhan coronavirus bandwagon, and forced a state-wide shutdown order, including in counties that have tiny numbers of infections and zero deaths.
“[Of] the five Upper Midwestern states…Minnesota has both the highest unemployment rate and the worst COVID-19 death rate in the region. Heckuva job, Timmy!” That would be Minnesota’s Democratic governor Tim Walz.
As I write this, I am surrounded by silence: not only the silence of a small university town on lockdown but, also, the silence of the feminists and postmodernists as the COVID-19 pandemic has taken over.
Where are the usual attacks on white male-dominated science? Where’s the “standpoint epistemology” to tell us how different is the knowledge intersectionally-appropriate feminist scientists would bring to this crucial problem? How many of those labs fiercely trying to find a treatment, a vaccine, a path forward, have a demographically appropriate number of women researchers? Not to mention racially and sexually “diverse” ones? What can possibly explain the lack of attention to this terrible problem of marginalization of the already oppressed?
On a women’s studies listserve I subscribe to, activity has been almost at a standstill for weeks. You’d think with the endless attention paid to the virus there would be vigorous debate about the need to bring feminist, queer, trans, and other such perspectives to bear, and heated discussions of how to convey this to students via distance learning. Or, at the very least, that criticisms would be voiced of the data showing that men are more vulnerable to the virus than women. If one is “assigned” the category of male or female at birth—by now a routine formulation aped even by medical organizations– how could an uncaring virus ever make such a distinction?
Can anything positive come out of the current crisis? Or, is it strictly a negative to be reminded that reality – the actual physical world, in all its threatening materiality – is not a social construction, and that solutions to a virus must engage with that material world, and not merely attack the rhetoric of disease and the identity of those researching it.
Part of the frustration in dealing with a really bad situation is a ravenous hunger for magic bullet solutions. One reader wrote in, contending that hydroxychloroquine is effective 100 percent of the time if it’s administered early enough, so why not reopen society and give everyone a prescription for hydroxychloroquine at the first sign of the virus?
Chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine actually slow down parts of a patient’s immune system by “interfere with lysosomal activity and autophagy, interact with membrane stability and alter signalling pathways and transcriptional activity, which can result in inhibition of cytokine production and modulation of certain co-stimulatory molecules” — which is a jargon-heavy way of saying it makes your immune system’s cells not work as well together.
People might wonder why anyone would want to take a drug that weakens their immune system. Hydroxychloroquine can be an effective drug for lupus, because with lupus, the body’s immune system becomes overactive and starts attacking healthy, normal cells. It is also used to treat arthritis, because in patients with rheumatoid arthritis, their immune system attacks the lining of their joints. With patients suffering from malaria, the parasite actually can send out “messages” that distract the body’s immune system, causing it to attack healthy red blood cells and ignore the real threat: “While the immune system is busy defending the organism against fake danger, the real infection proceeds inside red blood cells, allowing the parasite to multiply unhindered at dizzying speed. By the time the immune system discovers its mistake, precious time has been lost, and the infection is much more difficult to contain.” Hydroxychloroquine effectively calms down the immune system and along the way binds to the malaria parasite, breaking it apart.
The coronavirus identified as SARS-CoV-2 can generate a “cytokine storm” — when the body’s immune system kicks into overdrive and starts attacking healthy cells in important organs. Dr. Randy Cron, an expert on cytokine storms at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, told the New York Times last month that in about 15 percent of coronavirus patients, the body’s defense mechanism of cytokines fight off the invading virus, but then attack multiple organs including the lungs and liver, and may eventually lead to death. As the patient’s body fights its own lungs, fluid gets into the lungs, and the patient dies of acute respiratory distress syndrome.
From this, you can get a sense of how and why hydroxychloroquine might be effective in some circumstances and not others. If the patient’s immune system is strong enough to fight off the coronavirus, but is at risk of going into overdrive and setting off a cytotkine storm, administering the right amount of hydroxychloroquine might put their immune system back in the Goldilocks zone — strong enough to fight off and defeat the virus, but not so strong that it starts attacking vital organs by mistake. It’s also easy to see why we would only want people taking this drug under a doctor’s recommendation and possibly supervision — take the drug too early, and you suppress the body’s immune system just when it needs that system functioning well to fight off the invading virus. Take the drug too late, and the damage to the vital organs can’t be overcome.
Media outlets treat conservative Americans as second-class citizens whose arguments don’t need to be listened to or engaged with. Instead, they take the vanishingly small number of column inches or pundit panel seats they have and give the “conservative” slots to people who repeatedly disparage conservative elected officials, their voters, and their policies.
In some cases, the supposed “conservatives” have long ago renounced their conservatism. The Washington Post’s Max Boot, the Washington Post’s Jennifer Rubin, and Twitter’s Bill Kristol receive a great deal of mockery for their boring obsession with Orange Man Bad, an obsession that has led them to renounce every one of the policy positions they once held.
Even as their positions change in response to whatever Trump has said, NeverTrump is known for writing the same column over and over again. It’s usually headlined something like “Why Trump And His Voters Are So Awful That They Forced Me To Leave the GOP But Also Remember To Please Continue Calling Me A Republican To Preserve The TV/Column Gigs That Depend On Me Claiming I’m On The Right Even Though I Am Now Aligned With Democrats, Write Columns About How I Vote For Them, And Generally Work To Help Them Gain More Political Power.”
“Democrat On Committee To Oversee Coronavirus Stimulus Payouts Broke Federal Law By Failing To Report Stock Sales.” That would be Florida Representative (and former Clinton Administration official) Donna Shalala.
Good Samaritan health care workers: I will go to New York to help out with the crush of Wuhan coronavirus cases! Andrew Cuomo: Fark you, have some more taxes.
The Supreme Court unanimously bitch-slapped the Ninth Circuit for ruling that a federal statue that makes it illegal to encourage illegal aliens to come to the U.S. was unconstitutional. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg delivered the opinion.
Happy Victims of Communism Day. Texas is reopening, California is closing beaches, and we contemplate the mysteries of Sweden and Denmark.
Director Blue sent me this comparison of Wuhan coronavirus curves in various countries. The point of the piece was that Sweden, which hasn’t practiced social distancing, is doing better than European countries that have. However, what I find most interesting is that Denmark seems to be doing even better. Anyone know the reason?
“New York Required Nursing Homes To Admit ‘Medically Stable’ Coronavirus Patients. The Results Were Deadly.”
On March 25, New York’s Health Department issued a mandate that state nursing homes could not refuse COVID-19-positive patients who were “medically stable,” meaning facilities that housed the most vulnerable populations were forced to introduce the virus into their midst.
A nursing home in Queens received two coronavirus patients who had been discharged from a hospital (but were still contagious and in need of care) – along with a box containing body bags, The New York Post reported. An executive at the facility told the Post it had been free of the coronavirus prior to accepting those two patients. The executive also said that along with the two patients arrived a shipment of personal protective equipment and the body bags.
“My colleague noticed that one of the boxes was extremely heavy. Curious as to what could possibly be making that particular box so much heavier than the rest, he opened it,” the executive told the Post. “The first two coronavirus patients were accompanied by five body bags.”
The Post reported that within days, “three of the bags were filled with the first of 30 residents who would die there.” The nursing facility continued to receive shipments of five body bags per week since those first two patients arrived – and they have been needed.
“Cuomo has blood on his hands. He really does. There’s no way to sugarcoat this,” the nursing home executive told the outlet. “Why in the world would you be sending coronavirus patients to a nursing home, where the most vulnerable population to this disease resides?”
Speaking Cuomo scandals, here’s a look back at the Buffalo Billions crony graft scandal.
What the hell? “NYPD telling cops to prioritize 311 calls over 911.” “People getting jumped, robbed, assaulted…doesn’t matter.” How do you expect NYPD to deal with assault when there are so many people standing only five feet apart?
While Texas is starting to reopen the economy today, California Governor Gavin Newsom is closing down the beach. This is what happens when your governor is Stuck On Stupid.
Low fatality rates for 2020 are, at this point, a mystery. However, assuming I am reading the CDC spread sheet correctly, one thing is clear: there are nowhere near as many deaths actually caused by COVID-19 as government sources claim. If the Wuhan flu had really killed 40,000 or so people who would not otherwise have died over the last 14 weeks, it would be obvious in the overall mortality statistics. The fact that no such effect is visible–that, astonishingly, the death rate has actually declined–is consistent only with the assumption that not many people have died from COVID-19 who would not have died anyway, at about the same time.
In the land of Blue-on-Blue violence, Michael Moore has produced a new documentary out that takes on environmental green-washing. (The full film can be found here.)
Politico admits that a President Trump/Bank of China hit piece was completely false.
Kentucky’s Democratic Governor Andy Beshear slams somebody for filing for unemployment under the name “Tupac Shakur.” Tiny problem: that’s the guy’s real name.
At a press conference this morning, President Trump said "Good morning." Here are the headlines covering his controversial statement from twelve different news outlets:https://t.co/Lzg8ytpAa4pic.twitter.com/QN1U2lK4bB
The Tara Reade rape-accusation scandal isn’t going away, nor is the Bejing Biden tag, no matter how hard Team Joe might try to jujitsu it away. Plus Q1 fundraising numbers drop. It’s this week’s BidenWatch!
A new piece of evidence has emerged buttressing the credibility of Tara Reade’s claim that she told her mother about allegations of sexual harassment and assault related to her former boss, then-Sen. Joe Biden. Biden, through a spokesperson, has denied the allegations. Reade has claimed to various media outlets, including The Intercept, that she told her mother, a close friend, and her brother about both the harassment and, to varying degrees of detail, the assault at the time. Her brother, Collin Moulton, and her friend, who has asked to remain anonymous, both confirmed that they heard about the allegations from Reade at the time. Reade’s mother died in 2016, but both her brother and friend also confirmed Reade had told her mother, and that her mother, a longtime feminist and activist, urged her to go to the police.
In interviews with The Intercept, Reade also mentioned that her mother had made a phone call to “Larry King Live” on CNN, during which she made reference to her daughter’s experience on Capitol Hill. Reade told The Intercept that her mother called in asking for advice after Reade, then in her 20s, left Biden’s office. “I remember it being an anonymous call and her saying my daughter was sexually harassed and retaliated against and fired, where can she go for help? I was mortified,” Reade told me.
Reade couldn’t remember the date or the year of the phone call, and King didn’t include the names of callers on his show. I was unable to find the call, but mentioned it in an interview with Katie Halper, the podcast host who first aired Reade’s allegation. After the podcast aired, a listener managed to find the call and sent it to The Intercept.
On August 11, 1993, King aired a program titled, “Washington: The Cruelest City on Earth?” Toward the end of the program, he introduces a caller dialing in from San Luis Obispo, California. Congressional records list August 1993 as Reade’s last month of employment with Biden’s Senate office, and, according to property records, Reade’s mother, Jeanette Altimus, was living in San Luis Obispo County. Here is the transcript of the beginning of the call:
KING: San Luis Obispo, California, hello.
CALLER: Yes, hello. I’m wondering what a staffer would do besides go to the press in Washington? My daughter has just left there, after working for a prominent senator, and could not get through with her problems at all, and the only thing she could have done was go to the press, and she chose not to do it out of respect for him.
KING: In other words, she had a story to tell but, out of respect for the person she worked for, she didn’t tell it?
Given that Daou’s Clinton sycophancy meter was pegged at 11 in 2016 (even Renfield told him “dial it back”), that gives some credence to the “replace Biden with Hillary at the convention” conspiracy theory. But Daou went all Bernie Bro in 2019, so maybe he’s just disgruntled. Or maybe he was only a Clinton mole the entire time pretending to be a Bernie Bro. Or maybe…(leads pack mule back to the Sierra Madre)
For months now, it has been clear that Biden family corruption will be a campaign issue. The impeachment focused attention on ties between the vice president’s son, Hunter, and the corrupt Ukrainian oil and gas giant Burisma. But Hunter had equally close, equally profitable ties to Chinese state-owned banks. Those connections were formed when Joe Biden was leading the Obama administration’s policies toward both China and Ukraine.
Cozy, profitable, and possibly corrupt connections with the Chinese government are the last thing Americans want to hear about their politicians right now. Those voters are closeted at home, worried about their future, thanks to a virus that originated in Wuhan. They are mad as hell at Beijing for hiding what it knew, early on, about the pandemic. The Chinese Communist Party knew something terrible was happening, and it refused to share honest information about it. It denied the virus could be spread by human contact, weeks after it knew patients were infecting health care workers, and it hid vital information about the origins and genetic structure of the virus. The World Health Organization spread that misinformation. Beijing’s deception cost lives and livelihoods. Americans are reminded of it every day they are home from work or school under quarantine.
This anger at China’s rulers is bad news for Joe Biden. Voters see China as a rising threat and its economic gains as coming out of American pockets. The Trump campaign was already pushing these issues. It won’t have any trouble tying them to Joe Biden and making his family the face of American elites who profit from their insider positions.
Today @JoeBiden confused the Dem PA Governor Tom Wolf for Dale Wolf.
"All Dale’s been saying, Governor Wolf"
Joe confused him for Dale because a man named Dale Wolf (R) was Governor of Delaware in 1993. Dale is 95 years old. What decade is Joe living in? pic.twitter.com/VGopJwpgnh
Gore looks like he needs to invest in some sunblock.
“Joe Biden: Unfit to Serve by Any and Every Measure.” It’s sort of a Greatest Hits of Biden incompetence. “You might think that after five decades of experience with public policy both foreign and domestic that you’d be able to discern Biden’s governing philosophy, even given his inability to express a coherent thought. But you’d be wrong. The lessons and experiences that inform a person’s decisionmaking seem to pass completely through Biden’s brain without leaving a trace of residue.”
“Joe Biden Advisor Tries to Blame Republicans for Small Business Loan Money Running out. It Doesn’t Go Well.”
New York Times does a Biden in quarantine piece. Anything remotely interesting or unexpected? (scans) “At times, callers deduce from rowdy background noise that Mr. Biden is working beside his German shepherds, Major and Champ.” Good for him. Also:
The former vice president also places calls to mayors and governors; congressional leaders like Representative James E. Clyburn of South Carolina; elder statesmen like Al Gore; potential running mates; donors; and former rivals like Mr. Sanders and Ms. Warren. A few governors have become favorite points of contact, including Andrew M. Cuomo of New York, Jay Inslee of Washington and Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan.
Oh yeah, pick Gretchen Whitmer as your running mate. That move is gonna make you super popular…
There is simply no way Biden can out-hawk Trump on China. Some of the premises of this piece are ill advised, but the conclusion is not.
The implication of Biden’s new ad is that China didn’t give Trump timely information about the COVID-19 outbreak, because Trump wasn’t tough enough on China’s leaders. The commercial mocks Trump’s praise for Xi Jinping and is filled with supposedly damning images of Trump and Xi together. By contrast, it shows Biden vowing, “I would be on the phone with China making it clear: We are going to need to be in your country. You have to be open. You have to be clear. We have to know what’s going on.” In other words, Biden would boss the Chinese around.
This is a jingoistic fantasy. China is a rival superpower run by an authoritarian and fiercely nationalistic regime. Biden can’t force it to comply. When Beijing has given the United States valuable information about virus outbreaks in the past, it’s because American presidents spent time and money building joint U.S.-Chinese initiatives and took pains to make China’s leaders feel like equals. In 2009, Biden’s then-boss, Barack Obama, stood on a stage with the Chinese leader Hu Jintao in Beijing—in the kind of scene Biden mocks in his ad—and said the two governments should “build upon our mutual interests and engage on the basis of equality and mutual respect.” The two leaders announced that they would “deepen cooperation on global public health issues, including Influenza A (H1N1) prevention, surveillance, reporting and control.” As the Rand Corporation’s Jennifer Huang Bouey has noted, this cooperation hastened the development of an H1N1 vaccine. In suggesting that Biden could bludgeon China into submission—in a phone call, no less—the Biden campaign is peddling a lie about how public-health cooperation with China actually works.
This Dem-leaning piece is way too kind on China (as you would expect), but is correct that trying to spin Biden as “tough on China” is absurd.
Reporter tries to nail President Trump for having a rally in early March. Know who had rallies later in March? Biden. To be fair, they were much, much smaller rallies than Trump’s…
The highly educated professional classes can work from home, and their jobs are relatively secure; the service class, on the other hand—the waiters and cooks and hotel maids and retail clerks and others — are out of their jobs and shit out of luck. Not to worry: the professional class will write all of them checks for $1,200. Let them eat cake, you know?
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
