temporary content for usaapay.com courtesy of thenotimes.com
WELCOME

spread the word
.


The No Times
comments, ephemera, speculation, etc.
(protected political speech and personal opinion)

- If this is your 1st visit to this page, please start at the bottom -


2020-


2020-10-15 h
The Plot Thickens

WOW: Computer Repairman Who Exposed Biden Emails Says FBI Told Him to Stay Quiet

Why would they do that?

The Delaware computer repair man who revealed Hunter and Joe Biden’s email dealings with a Burisma executive told reporters that the FBI had asked him to stay quiet about his acquisition of Hunter Biden’s laptop after they recovered the device through federal subpoena.
 
John Paul Mac Isaac owns a Delaware Mac computer repair store. He came into possession of Hunter Biden’s water-damaged laptop in 2019. When the younger Biden never returned to his store to pay for the repairs Isaac carried out on the device, the Mac legally became the property of Isaac under the terms of the repair agreement with Biden- contrary to false information from Twitter and establishment liberals who claim that the laptop’s contents were “hacked.”

Hunter Biden’s laptop contained information and emails that detailed what appear to be meetings between Joe Biden, Hunter Biden and a senior Burisma advisor named Vadym Pozharskyi. Joe Biden had previously denied ever meeting anyone involved with Burisma through his son’s suspicious employment with the Ukranian gas company, an assertion that appears disproven through the emails uncovered on Biden’s laptop.

Isaac reported his possession of the laptop to the FBI at some point in 2019. The federal agency ultimately ended up taking possession of the device through a federal subpoena. However, Isaac- as was his legal right as the possessor of the device- made a hard drive backup of the Macbook’s contents.

Isaac ultimately took the information contained within the laptop to Utah Senator Mike Lee and former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani. Giuliani in turn reported the contents to the New York Post, leading to Wednesday’s bombshell report on its contents.

However, Isaac revealed that the FBI had tried to convince him to stay silent about his discovery of the laptop’s contents, when speaking at length with reporters who arrived at his store on Wednesday after the New York Post published the story.

“They told me that nothing ever happens to people who don’t talk, the FBI, and that made me scared, because that’s not something I would expect the highest branch of,” said Isaac. “Don’t, don’t — It was more along the lines of, in our experiences when stuff like this happens nothing ever bad happens to people that keep quiet.” he added. (read more)

2020
-10-15 g
Hunter Biden's Macbook

Hunter Biden Was NOT “Hacked;” Agreed to Transfer Ownership of Mac Under Terms of Repair Agreement

He legally forfeited the laptop.

Twitter has cited its “Hacked Materials Policy” to justify a wide-ranging and unprecedented censorship campaign against the New York Post’s report on Hunter Biden’s organization of a meeting between Burisma executives and Vice President Biden. But its own policy does not apply, as the materials published in the story were not hacked.

The Post included an invoice that Biden had signed upon handing over his Mac to the computer repair contractor, including his signature.

The New York Post went on to obtain email communications from the Macbook in which Hunter Biden organized a meeting between his father- then-Vice President Joe Biden- and senior executives at Burisma, the oligarch-owned Ukrainian oil company for which the younger Biden had secured a lucrative position at despite having no experience in the energy industry.

Under the terms of the contract Biden signed with a Delaware computer repair man, he legally agreed to forfeit the water-damaged laptop after 90 days of repair completion if he didn’t pay for the services rendered and take back possession of the device. The younger Biden did not recover his laptop, thus surrendering the device to the store owner under the conditions of his agreement.

“Equipment left with [store owner] after 90 days of notification of completed service will be treated as abandoned and you agree to hold [store owner] harmless for any damage for loss of property.”

The FBI ultimately issued a subpoena to recover the laptop, but by the time it had, the computer repair shop owner had created a hard drive of the device’s contents, which include video of the younger Biden engaging in sexual acts, smoking crack, and engaging in suspicious dealings under the terms of his employment with Burisma. Joe Biden had previously denied that he ever met with any Burisma executives in connection with his son’s employment with the company, a statement that email communications between Hunter Biden and a Burisma executive contradicts. (read more)

2020-10-15 f
Trump Tweet

So terrible that Facebook and Twitter took down the story of
“Smoking Gun” emails related to Sleepy Joe Biden and his son,
Hunter, in the @NYPost. It is only the beginning for them. There
is nothing worse than a corrupt politician. REPEAL SECTION 230!!!
https://t.co/g1RJFpIVUZ

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 14, 2020

2020
-10-15 e
Joe Biden: “Well, that’s not true. You’re saying things you do not know what you’re talking about.”

Smoking-gun email reveals how Hunter Biden introduced Ukrainian businessman to VP dad

Hunter Biden introduced his father, then-Vice President Joe Biden, to a top executive at a Ukrainian energy firm less than a year before the elder Biden pressured government officials in Ukraine into firing a prosecutor who was investigating the company, according to emails obtained by The Post.

The never-before-revealed meeting is mentioned in a message of appreciation that Vadym Pozharskyi, an adviser to the board of Burisma, allegedly sent Hunter Biden on April 17, 2015, about a year after Hunter joined the Burisma board at a reported salary of up to $50,000 a month.

“Dear Hunter, thank you for inviting me to DC and giving an opportunity to meet your father and spent [sic] some time together. It’s realty [sic] an honor and pleasure,” the email reads.

An earlier email from May 2014 also shows Pozharskyi, reportedly Burisma’s No. 3 exec, asking Hunter for “advice on how you could use your influence” on the company’s behalf.

The blockbuster correspondence — which flies in the face of Joe Biden’s claim that he’s “never spoken to my son about his overseas business dealings” — is contained in a massive trove of data recovered from a laptop computer.

The computer was dropped off at a repair shop in Biden’s home state of Delaware in April 2019, according to the store’s owner.

Other material extracted from the computer includes a raunchy, 12-minute video that appears to show Hunter, who’s admitted struggling with addiction problems, smoking crack while engaged in a sex act with an unidentified woman, as well as numerous other sexually explicit images.

The customer who brought in the water-damaged MacBook Pro for repair never paid for the service or retrieved it or a hard drive on which its contents were stored, according to the shop owner, who said he tried repeatedly to contact the client.

The shop owner couldn’t positively identify the customer as Hunter Biden, but said the laptop bore a sticker from the Beau Biden Foundation, named after Hunter’s late brother and former Delaware attorney general.

Photos of a Delaware federal subpoena given to The Post show that both the computer and hard drive were seized by the FBI in December, after the shop’s owner says he alerted the feds to their existence.

But before turning over the gear, the shop owner says, he made a copy of the hard drive and later gave it to former Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s lawyer, Robert Costello.

Steve Bannon, former adviser to President Trump, told The Post about the existence of the hard drive in late September and Giuliani provided The Post with a copy of it on Sunday. (read more)

Of related interest: Twitter CEO Dorsey Responds To Biden Block-Gate: Unacceptable

2020-10-15 d
THE COVID-CON IV

Coronavirus Counterfactual: A True Enemy Would Have Alerted Us In 2019

With the coronavirus, the most frustrating counterfactual of all is to think about how much better off we all would have been if politicians had done nothing. Stop and think about it for a minute. The more desperate the situation, the more freedom makes sense.

The reality is that well before the needless lockdowns began, Americans had started to adjust their behavior. This included staying at home for some. Notable about this is that it was in the U.S. states that locked down the latest that citizens adjusted the most. In a global sense, it was reported by the great Holman Jenkins that the supply of masks had run out before major action by Merkel et al in Germany. People get it. They don’t need a law. Fear of sickness or death concentrates the mind.

Remember how restaurants started to clear somewhat before the lockdowns? People were adjusting. Imagine if businesses, including restaurants, had been left free to meet the needs of customers (or not at all) free of business tips from those who brought us the DMV.

No doubt some businesses would have gone under amid fear of the virus, but they were already going under before that. Particularly retail. Remember all the hand wringing about Amazon and the internet “hollowing out” shopping malls? While the nailbiters will eventually regret the association of their names with such alarmism, the reality in a dynamic economy is that the roster of names in shopping malls and town centers is constantly changing.

The main thing is that near-term caution taken by free people would have resulted in more saving, and as a consequence a rising capital base for businesses and entrepreneurs to access on the way to recovery. Natural slowdowns paradoxically fuel the subsequent rebound. Translated, what you’ve been told about “recessions” by economists, pundits and politicians is mostly bunk. This wasn’t nor is it a recession; rather it was a forced contraction. Tragic.

Politicians foisted on us lockdowns that wrecked lives and business. Economic growth produces the resources to fight a virus, but this time around an always obtuse political class outdid itself by choosing economic desperation as the path to a cure. (read more)

2020-10-15 c
THE COVID-CON III

Why has Google censored the Great Barrington Declaration?

Big Tech now treats any opposition to lockdown as misinformation – even if it’s from eminent scientists.

As much of the world gears up for a second round of lockdowns, and restrictions on everyday life grow ever tighter, a group of infectious-disease epidemiologists and public-health scientists have come together to propose an alternative. The Great Barrington Declaration was spearheaded by Martin Kulldorff from Harvard Medical School, Sunetra Gupta from Oxford University and Jay Bhattacharya from Stanford University Medical School.

The declaration was bound to cause controversy for going against the global political consensus, which holds that lockdowns are key to minimising mortality from Covid-19. Instead, the signatories argue that younger people, who face minimal risk from the virus, should be able to go about their lives unimpeded, while resources are devoted to protecting the most vulnerable. The lockdowns, they argue, have not only caused an intolerable amount of collateral damage, but have also contributed to a higher number of Covid deaths. But for making this argument, the declaration has been censored.

Tech giant Google has decided that the view of these scientists should be covered up. Most users in English-speaking countries, when they google ‘Great Barrington Declaration’, will not be directed to the declaration itself but to articles that are critical of the declaration – and some that amount to little more than smears of the signatories. (read more)

2020-10-15 b
THE COVID-CON II

White House Embraces Herd Immunity in Latest Push to End COVID-19 Lockdowns

The White House is doubling down on its push to reopen the economy, now openly embracing a herd immunity strategy at the urging of some health experts.

Two senior advisers told Newsweek and other media outlets on Monday that the Trump administration supports the Great Barrington Declaration, a controversial document that argues against lockdowns and calls for a reopening of schools, businesses and other entities, while protecting people deemed vulnerable to the virus because of age or other risk factors.

"I think Americans should be cautiously optimistic about what's going on here," one of the officials said. (read more)

2020-10-15 a
THE COVID-CON I

Positive association between COVID-19 deaths and influenza vaccination rates in elderly people worldwide

Abstract

Background
The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), is an ongoing global health crisis, directly and indirectly impacting all spheres of human life. Some pharmacological measures have been proposed to prevent COVID-19 or reduce its severity, such as vaccinations. Previous reports indicate that influenza vaccination appears to be negatively correlated with COVID-19-associated mortality, perhaps as a result of heterologous immunity or changes in innate immunity. The understanding of such trends in correlations could prevent deaths from COVID-19 in the future. The aim of this study was therefore to analyze the association between COVID-19 related deaths and influenza vaccination rate (IVR) in elderly people worldwide.

Methods
To determine the association between COVID-19 deaths and influenza vaccination, available data sets from countries with more than 0.5 million inhabitants were analyzed (in total 39 countries). To accurately estimate the influence of IVR on COVID-19 deaths and mitigate effects of confounding variables, a sophisticated ranking of the importance of different variables was performed, including as predictor variables IVR and some potentially important geographical and socioeconomic variables as well as variables related to non-pharmaceutical intervention. The associations were measured by non-parametric Spearman rank correlation coefficients and random forest functions.

Results
The results showed a positive association between COVID-19 deaths and IVR of people ≥65 years-old. There is a significant increase in COVID-19 deaths from eastern to western regions in the world. Further exploration is needed to explain these findings, and additional work on this line of research may lead to prevention of deaths associated with COVID-19.
...
Conclusions
Given the positive relationship between IVR and the number of deaths per million found in this study, further exploration would be valuable to explain these findings and to make conclusions. Additional work on this line of research may also yield results to improve prevention of COVID-19 deaths. (read more)

2020
-10-14 e
WHAT IS AT STAKE - II

The Election to End All Elections

Trump, imperfect as he is, is like a finger in a dike that, if removed, would loose a deluge.

On September 11, 2001, United Airlines Flight 93’s passengers defied armed hijackers and fought to take over the cockpit regardless of danger or odds because they realized that certain death was the alternative. Michael Anton’s 2016 essay “The Flight 93 Election,” written for the Claremont Review of Books and later expanded into a book, argued that although Americans did not know what kind of president Donald Trump would be, they should risk all to elect him because they could be very sure that the alternative would be our republic’s death.

In his new book, The Stakes: America at the Point of No Return, Anton, now a lecturer and research fellow at Hillsdale College, again urges Americans to vote for Trump, disappointed though they may be with his performance, because they know even better than before how much this country’s ruling class would use control of the presidency to hurt us in our private and public lives for having dared to reject their mastery. Trump, imperfect as he is, is like a finger in a dike that, if removed, would loose a deluge. Anton describes how the Democratic Party-led complex of public-private power has been transforming our free, decent, and prosperous country into its opposite—and how it’s going to do to the rest of America what it has already largely accomplished in California. In the book’s final chapters, he lays out several paths that the current struggle for America’s future might take.

Anton’s commentary on the 2020 election does not belabor the obvious: it is a binary choice. The unprecedented level of opposition President Trump has faced explains, but does not excuse, some of his shortcomings. As Anton puts it: “[t]here’s little wrong with President Trump that more Trump couldn’t solve.” Then he adds what is really radically new about the 2020 election: should the Democrats win, the ruling Left—which includes just about everyone who controls American government and society’s commanding heights—is ready, willing, and eager to implement plans that would make it virtually impossible for conservatives ever to win national elections again. These plans include the importation and counting of non-citizen voters. Elections by mail would shift power from voters to those who count the votes, just like in Venezuela. Though reelecting Trump makes the republic’s survival possible, and preserves all manner of good options, it guarantees nothing. Trump’s defeat guarantees disaster—like in 2016, only much more so.

The bulk of this well-written book juxtaposes accounts of life under what had been the American constitutional regime with the ruling-class politics that have gone a long way to destroy it. It opens with a bittersweet description of California, then and now. Anton, a young man, is old enough to remember it a near-paradise. Those of a certain age have even more idyllic memories of the Golden State’s unrivaled beauty and plenty, crowned by freedom, ease, and safety. Millions flocked to work and raise families here.

Yet in 2020 productive middle-class families are fleeing California—so much so that the state will probably lose a seat in the House of Representatives after this year’s census. And all because its government—controlled by oligarchs in the entertainment and high-tech industries, as well as the state bureaucracy and public sector labor unions—raised taxes, imposed regulations, let public services decay, stopped defending against criminals, and empowered left-wing social activists. Today’s California is for government-favored oligarchs and those who service them. You want a career? If you don’t conform every word and action to the ruling orthodoxies, your work and talents will be wasted. You want your children to grow up intelligent and decent? The schools will teach them little reasoning and much depravity. Like you, they will also learn to compete by favor-seeking rather than by performance. You see crime rising, sense that you have to protect yourself, but know that, in most of the state, the police will arrest you for it. And you are sick of paying for it all. That is why you want to emigrate from California into the United States of America.

Having held up California as the example of what full-throttle liberalism looks like, Anton offers a defense of the American regime in the face of criticisms from what one might call the nativist Right as well as from the Left. Impressive in its logic and concise in its comprehensiveness, it shows the partial truths on which these critiques are based in the full light of history. All that the United States is really does follow from the founding generation’s understanding of human beings’ inalienable equality before God. The principle of majority rule has no other foundation. Already by the time of the founding, however, America, like every other nation, had acquired a distinct character—language, religion, and customs—that it meant to preserve and defend. A nation of immigrants, to be sure. But the country was never open to just anybody for any reason. Anton cites the 1795 Naturalization Act that specifies agreement with the Constitution and disposition to help the country as conditions for admission. For almost 200 years the Constitution, the American people’s basic “deal” with one another, channeled our strivings and disagreement into deliberations and compromises that allowed us to live the mostly decent lives our culture prescribed. Adherence to its restraints preserved our capacity to continue dealing with problems in more or less predictable freedom.

But, beginning in the 1930s, America’s ruling class pushed aside the Constitution, reducing to a bad joke the civics class description of the regime: “Congress makes the laws, the president enforces them, and the courts resolve individual disputes about them.” In today’s America, Anton writes,

The real power…resides not with elected (or appointed) officials and “world leaders”; they—or most of them—are a servant class. The real power resides with their donors, the bankers, CEOs, financiers, and tech oligarchs—some of whom occasionally run for and win office, but most of whom, most of the time, are content to buy off those who do. The end result is the same either way: economic globalism and financialization, consolidation of power in an ostensibly “meritocratic” but actually semi-hereditary class, livened up by social libertinism.

This ruling class now explicitly denies that “all men are created equal.” It asserts for itself the right to rule by decree by virtue of expertise, and the power to assign different rights and obligations to classes of people, “protected” and less so. Despising any divine or natural authority and contemptuous of America’s history, those in the ruling class make war on the American people’s culture and national identity. (read more)

2020-10-14 d
WHAT IS AT STAKE - I

2020 Choice: A Man vs. a Movement

I know that President Trump has many faults. I myself sometimes cringe listening to him. Often, he is his own worst enemy. He is a braggart, frequently misinformed, petty, sometimes vengeful. And more.

Yet he is just the man for these times. These are revolutionary times. The Democrats, now controlled by their Black Lives Matter wing, seek to overthrow the American founding, as President Trump said in his excellent Mount Rushmore speech on July 4.

The BLM-Democrats propose a new regime, one that conceives of society not as a collective of individuals with equal rights and a shared understanding of the common good, but as a collection of identity groups, all oppressed by white males. Government’s role in this regime is not to create the conditions for freedom as the Founders intended, but rather to create equal income and power for each identity group.

Achieving this outcome equality requires a never-ending redistribution of wealth and power. This can only be achieved by tyrannical government -- and, as in all tyrannies, dissenters must be silenced. The BLM-Democratic policy agenda is clear: endless affirmative action, reparations, socialism, open borders, defanging the police, and much more. In order to achieve this agenda, the BLM-Democrats must get Americans to change their values, their principles, and the way they understand themselves.

They must get us to believe that national borders and colorblindness are racist; that we are not one culture, but many; that the most important thing in our history -- around which all else pivots -- is slavery. More extensively, they must get us to believe that we are unworthy. Not just that we have sinned (which of course we have), but that we are irredeemably sinful, or, in the language of today, “systemically racist.” And sexist, homophobic, Islamophobic, etc., to boot. Simply put, the BLM-Democrats must get the rest of us to believe we are bad.

This suggests one way to frame the coming election: as a contest between a man, Trump, who believes America is good, and a man, Biden, controlled by a movement that believes America is bad. Put another way, the choice is between a man who wants to preserve the traditional American way of life and a man controlled by a movement that wants to destroy it. (read more)

2020-10-14 c
BLACK AND WHITE - III

News From Walter Duranty’s Paper
                    
You might have missed Bret Stephens’s evisceration, in the pages of The New York Times, of The 1619 Project. It was respectful, in the sense that a pious gourmand prays over his meal before he devours it. Excerpts:

Journalists are, most often, in the business of writing the first rough draft of history, not trying to have the last word on it. We are best when we try to tell truths with a lowercase t, following evidence in directions unseen, not the capital-T truth of a pre-established narrative in which inconvenient facts get discarded. And we’re supposed to report and comment on the political and cultural issues of the day, not become the issue itself.

As fresh concerns make clear, on these points — and for all of its virtues, buzz, spinoffs and a Pulitzer Prize — the 1619 Project has failed.

These two flaws led to a third, conceptual, error. “Out of slavery — and the anti-Black racism it required — grew nearly everything that has truly made America exceptional,” writes Silverstein.

Nearly everything? What about, say, the ideas contained by the First Amendment? Or the spirit of openness that brought millions of immigrants through places like Ellis Island? Or the enlightened worldview of the Marshall Plan and the Berlin airlift? Or the spirit of scientific genius and discovery exemplified by the polio vaccine and the moon landing? On the opposite side of the moral ledger, to what extent does anti-Black racism figure in American disgraces such as the brutalization of Native Americans, the Chinese Exclusion Act or the internment of Japanese-Americans in World War II?

Monocausality — whether it’s the clash of economic classes, the hidden hand of the market, or white supremacy and its consequences — has always been a seductive way of looking at the world. It has always been a simplistic one, too. The world is complex. So are people and their motives. The job of journalism is to take account of that complexity, not simplify it out of existence through the adoption of some ideological orthodoxy.

This mistake goes far to explain the 1619 Project’s subsequent scholarly and journalistic entanglements. It should have been enough to make strong yet nuanced claims about the role of slavery and racism in American history. Instead, it issued categorical and totalizing assertions that are difficult to defend on close examination.

It should have been enough for the project to serve as curator for a range of erudite and interesting voices, with ample room for contrary takes. Instead, virtually every writer in the project seems to sing from the same song sheet, alienating other potential supporters of the project and polarizing national debate.

Stephens says, “The 1619 Project is a thesis in search of evidence, not the other way around,” and concludes, “Through its overreach, the 1619 Project has given critics of The Times a gift.”

Read it all. It was a thorough repudiation of the celebrated project. Given the Jacobin atmosphere in the Times newsroom, Stephens has real stones to write that, and so does whoever runs the editorial page these days for running it. Someone, can’t remember who, said on Twitter that Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger must have been really pissed off over the criticism of The 1619 Project if he signed off on such a rebuke in the pages of the paper. Maybe. He ought to be. The 1619 Project, as Stephens proves, was nothing but left-wing agitprop.
...
Yep. The 1619 Project tells an ideologically appealing falsehood. It’s corrupting. And it’s a sign of decline towards something nasty. As I write in Live Not By Lies, Hannah Arendt saw this kind of thing — propaganda, and the willingness to believe useful lies — as a bellwether of totalitarianism: (read more)

2020-10-14 b
BLACK AND WHITE - II

Michael Brown’s Myth and Counter-Narrative

Shelby Steele and his son confront racial folklore in their radical documentary What Killed Michael Brown?

As the title of the new investigative documentary What Killed Michael Brown? appears on screen, its orange letters startlingly recall the font that was used for Quentin Tarantino’s 1997 neo-Blaxploitation film Jackie Brown. More than coincidence, this reveals the motives of director Eli Steele and his father-collaborator Shelby Steele. Their analysis of the Ferguson, Mo., incidents involving Michael Brown, which sparked the social upheaval perpetrated by Black Lives Matter, goes beyond historical facts to confront their roots in culture. The Steeles’ real subject, like Tarantino’s, is racial narrative.

This inquiry starts with the media’s immediate control of the Michael Brown incidents: Brown’s assault on policeman Darren Wilson; assertions about Brown’s “hands up, don’t shoot” surrender; and officer Wilson’s shooting of him. Rather than searching to find guilt and innocence, the doc follows Shelby Steele as he reflects on his personal experience as a black youth and community organizer in the Seventies. A witness to the history of race politics before Michael Brown was born, he examines what it was that precipitated 18-year-old Michael Brown’s behavior and the circumstances of his death.

“What was more remarkable than the tragedy itself was the explosion of controversy that surrounded it,” Steele observes. “Black militants of every stripe, national black leaders, politicians, mainstream media, cable news, even the president and attorney general of the United States all became players in the Ferguson story.”

Archival video records that story’s almost spontaneous mass responses, followed by the quickly calculated protests. Already in Ferguson, we saw the use of pyrotechnic explosives during riots — a now-familiar tactic of the recent mysteriously organized anarchists. “There was something unconvincing about all these protests,” Steele comments. “The anger seemed ritualized, almost choreographed.”

In the larger narrative that emerges, Michael Brown, Shelby Steele, and the entire U.S. were affected by long-standing, post-civil-rights-era policies. Government involvement had an impact on how Americans perceived themselves, socially and as individuals capable of forging their own destinies — “recruit[ing] people into the welfare system . . . destroy[ing] their equity and creat[ing] a permanent black underclass.” This brings the Steeles to closer scrutiny of the social and spiritual disenfranchisement in the Michael Brown story. (read more)

2020-10-14 a
BLACK AND WHITE - I

I've always loved fried chicken. But the racism surrounding it shamed me

It should be a source of pride for black people. It’s complicated, though

Growing up as a black kid in England’s white West Country, a car trip east to the busier, more exciting parts of the country meant one thing: KFC on the way back.

No matter how thrilling the purpose of our trip, the promise of salty, greasy chicken on our return would be the highlight of our day. My brother and I would get excited in the back seat just as the colonel’s bright face was due to make an appearance on the horizon. We knew what was coming.

“Shall we?” Dad would ask, as if it were a question and not an inevitability. Mum would nod, and soon enough I’d be savouring my two pieces of chicken – leg, if I was lucky. I can still smell the sharpness of the lemon hand wipe that would clean me up afterwards.
...
Back then, I’d promised myself that as soon as I was old enough, I’d eat fried chicken all the time. Only, by the time I made the move to London in 2000, with its countless chicken shops, I’d read about the inhumane conditions most birds destined for fast-food fryers were subjected to, so my trips to them were rare, often preceded by alcohol and always succeeded by guilt.

Already, I was noticing a pattern. The cheap chicken shops, fronted with happy cartoon chickens, were always concentrated in poorer areas, ones with a bigger black population. I’d muse that if only someone opened a shop serving southern fried chicken, but using free-range birds, they would make a killing.

And so it came to pass.

Shops serving “ethical” fried chicken started popping up all over the place, selling an experience marketed as superior to the neon-lit shops serving food in red-and-yellow cardboard boxes. They boasted about the happy lives their chickens enjoyed, and how they honoured them with 24-hour buttermilk baths and shiny, homemade glazes.

There was almost always a boneless option, too, presumably catering to an audience for whom the skeleton is an unwelcome reminder that what they were eating was once alive. That’s not to say the chicken was not good. Sometimes, it was. But there was always something so far removed from the dish’s origins. It lacked soul.

In the end, I, too, would make a living out of fried chicken, but not southern fried. It was karaage, the Japanese iteration, made with boneless (I know) and skinless chicken thighs marinated in soy sauce, mirin, ginger and garlic.

I became hooked after my Japanese sister-in-law made it for me. For months, I’d make it every weekend, and once I had run out of friends and family to feed it to, I started a supper club so strangers could pay me to make it.

The club was held in my home, with all the furniture pushed back against the wall to make space for collapsible tables, and the menu changed constantly, but karaage was a permanent fixture. And while I loved it, I still preferred regular fried chicken. So why didn’t I sell that instead?

Because I was ashamed.
..
Back then, I was not even conscious of the racist baggage fried chicken came with in the US. But it was seeping into my subconscious, and I felt it.

As with most things, what happens in the US winds its way over to the UK. Including, it turns out, racist tropes. In my day job as a writer on a national newspaper – my supper clubs then were still a hobby – I sat next to someone who would often crack the same joke when I stood up to go for lunch. “What you getting?” he’d grin. “Fried chicken?”

It infuriated me, but I could never articulate why. My colleague’s was a specific type of racism, a sort perpetuated by liberals so believing in their supposed lack of prejudice they think they can make racist jokes ironically. (read more)

2020
-10-13 f
Life in a Socialist Paradise - II

Minneapolis residents scared to leave their homes as city on the brink

'I'm scared to even drive after dark'
 
Why are Minneapolis residents terrified to leave their homes in recent months? For the same reason why someone brazenly shot and killed an anti-Antifa counterprotester in broad daylight in Denver on Saturday. There is no deterrent against violent criminals any more and therefore no protection for the average citizen.

"We have never seen anything like this."

"I'm scared to even drive after dark."

"I don't feel safe walking around my neighborhood."

"Everybody feels the same way. We all want to move."

This is just some of the feedback that members of the Minneapolis city council received during a meeting of the Public Health and Safety Committee last Thursday, according to Alpha news. During a two-hour virtual hearing, numerous citizens spoke about their concern of understaffed and demoralized police and the role of the city's politicians in emboldening criminals. With almost a quarter of the year left to go, there is already a 37.5% increase in homicides over the 12-month total of 2019.

The message has essentially been telegraphed that law and order is a racist concept, and so long as anyone acts violently in the name of "racial justice," it is forgiven or even encouraged. The black communities closest to the violence are paying for this a lot more than the gated communities of politicians.

Bill Rodriguez, a passionate citizen speaker at the meeting, summed up the consequences perfectly. "If we don't act soon, here's what's going to happen: you'll be presiding over the biggest exodus of businesses and families that this town has ever seen just as some of you are running for reelection next year." (read more)

2020-10-13 e
Life in a Socialist Paradise - I

An Open Letter on Campus Culture

Academics speak out against the threat of censorship.

The dangers of ideological groupthink in our colleges and universities have been evident for decades. It was over 30 years ago now that Allan Bloom diagnosed the pathology in The Closing of the American Mind. But as the campus Left becomes increasingly empowered, radicalized, and intolerant of other perspectives, it seemed to me that dissident thinkers in higher education would be well-served to consider specific ways to resist these trends at our universities. What follows was initially a letter to myself that articulated my rationale for resisting the campus ideologues and the means by which I would resist them. Through the drafts, it became an open letter to people in academia at large. Over the last two months, the letter has circulated online among professors, many of whom have added their names. We now have over 160 signatures from brave teachers and scholars all over the world. The undersigned speak for themselves—not their institutions. Unlike other open letters that have recently captured public attention, this one doesn’t merely voice disapproval of the ideological vision for higher education. Instead, the signers below commit to particular forms of action that might counter that vision. In short, the letter is a commitment to principled non-compliance. We invite other sympathetic academics to join the fight by adding their names. To do so, email me, Adam Ellwanger, at ellwangera@uhd.edu.

To the Administration, Faculty, and Staff of our Colleges and Universities,
 
As your colleagues and friends, we feel compelled to collectively express our concerns with the current climate of higher education. Over the last half-century, universities have moved steadily to the left in terms of curriculum, governance, and campus culture. In and of itself, this was not a problem. Although a balanced diversity of political orientations among the faculty is desirable, it is not necessary as long as those in the ideological majority remain resolutely committed to open inquiry, unrestricted deliberation, and freedom of speech and thought.
 
Over time though, we have watched with some worry as the empowered campus left gradually (but unmistakably) wavered in their commitment to those ideals. At first, the erosion of these key values was evident only in conversations in classrooms and with peers—it seemed the range of acceptable viewpoints on any given issue was shrinking, and that it was consistently the left position that was privileged, while conservative and other dissident perspectives faced increased scrutiny, skepticism, and derision. This development, alone, has weakened the university’s capacity to fulfill its function as a crucible where all ideas are tested and critiqued, by which it helps chart a reliable course for democracy.
 
In the last decade, the state of affairs on campus has grown increasingly dire. No longer is campus groupthink limited to academic conversation – it is enshrined and encoded in the protocols and procedures of university governance. This has meant that the penalties for any deviation from the accepted left paradigm in thought or speech now far exceed any mere conversational mockery. Rather, often at the faculty’s prodding, administrative structures now investigate and prosecute deviations from orthodoxy through formal and informal exercises of institutional power. (read more)

2020-10-13 d
BLACK AND WHITE - IV

USA Today Tries to Fact-Check Viral Meme on Black on White Crime, Inadvertently Proves the Meme Correct

Yes, The USA Today is now fact-checking memes detailing black on white crime, to try and downplay the reality of just how bad black on white crime is in America. [Fact check: Rates of white-on-white and Black-on-Black crime are similar, USA Today, September 30, 2020]:
...
Black on white crime isn’t as bad as white people believe it to be on social media, when they share viral memes, but as The USA Today admits, it’s still pretty bad.

But white people noticing how bad it is… well, that’s the real crime in the eyes of The USA Today. (read more)

2020-10-13 c
BLACK AND WHITE - III

"If Black Lives Really Matter, Black Folks Have to Stop Killing Black Folks": A Modest Proposal to End Black Gun Crime in America

You have to ask yourself, when you realize gun violence (be it fatal or nonfatal) is committed almost exclusively by blacks all across America: would black individuals be safer in every community of America if the 2nd Amendment didn’t apply to them, and the state made it illegal for black people to own firearms?

Contrary to media driven reports, white people aren’t hunting black bodies for recreational sport; black individuals are collectively responsible for shocking acts of barbarism from Gainesville, Florida to Philadelphia.

So why not just disqualify black people in America from firearm ownership, since gun violence in the USA is almost exclusively a black problem?
...
All across America, major cities are uninhabitable for families and law-abiding citizens because of the threat of gun crime and gun violence by predominately black males.

And it is predominately black males who are the victim of gun crime committed by individual black males.

So why not just disqualify blacks from participation in the 2nd Amendment?

Wouldn’t this simple act ensure no more marches to stop black on black crime? (read more)

(read also: The Buffalo News Admits the Unmentionable: Nearly All Fatal/Non-Fatal Gun Violence in the City (And America) Is Perpetrated By Black People)

2020-10-13 b
BLACK AND WHITE - II

The Black Trump Vote

Why African Americans should be very, very mad at the Democratic Party

Polls show Trump’s support among Black Americans (and Hispanics) is rising. This suggests that black Americans are in fact angry at being coopted for Democrat Party causes, even while they are intimidated into silence by the cancel-culture tactics of the Left.
 
Two other interesting indicators of anger: Kim Klacik, Candace Owens, Kanye West, Sharika Soal, Joe Collins: a growing list of black, highly visible celebrities and politicians who are fed up with Democrats. Republican congressional candidate Klacik’s viral video speaks for itself. Owen’s book Blackout has been riding the Amazon top 100 while other trendy books on race have come and gone. Soal’s enormous twitter following adores her conservative tweets. And Kanye West’s repeated arguments against abortion and its effects on the black community have been among the most powerful public statements in years.
 
Black Americans are angry with the Democratic party, but not angry enough. They should be very, very angry. They have good cause to be. (read more)

2020-10-13 a
BLACK AND WHITE - I

The Civil Rights Legend Who Opposed Critical Race Theory

Critical race theory, or CRT, is in the news these days but many people still may not know what it really means. They think CRT is part of the Rev. Martin Luther King's civil rights efforts. In truth, it is directly opposed to the central concept and vision he most stood for. One of the last and greatest civil rights leaders of our time -- and one of King's closest friends and advisers -- did understand CRT, and explicitly rejected it.

Dr. Wyatt Tee Walker was a legend in the American civil rights movement. Executive director of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in the critical years of 1960-1964, he was a co-founder of CORE (the Congress of Racial Equality), chief of staff to King, and King's "field general" in the organized resistance against notorious Birmingham safety commissioner "Bull" Connor. Walker compiled and named King's "The Letter From Birmingham Jail." He was with King for the march on Washington that produced the "I have a dream" speech, and in Oslo for the Nobel Peace Prize.

Afterward, Dr. Walker came north to New York City to serve as minister of the Canaan Baptist Church of Christ in Harlem. He was one of the nation's most respected ministers until his death in 2018. In his book "David and Goliath," Malcolm Gladwell dedicated a chapter to Dr. Walker and his work in Birmingham. The cover of Ebony magazine called Walker "The Man Behind Martin Luther King."  In short, no one may have known King's thoughts better or been closer to them than Dr. Walker.

Even as he aged, Dr. Walker never backed down from the passionate pursuit of civil rights for all. Later in his life, he was chairman of the Rev. Al Sharpton's National Action Network and a supporter of reparations for African Americans. I got to know him soon after Amadou Diallo had been horribly gunned down in New York City in 1999. We joined together to form New York's first and longest-surviving charter school, now named the Sisulu-Walker Charter School of Harlem. We stayed friends from that time until he died. 

Afterward, Dr. Walker came north to New York City to serve as minister of the Canaan Baptist Church of Christ in Harlem. He was one of the nation's most respected ministers until his death in 2018. In his book "David and Goliath," Malcolm Gladwell dedicated a chapter to Dr. Walker and his work in Birmingham. The cover of Ebony magazine called Walker "The Man Behind Martin Luther King."  In short, no one may have known King's thoughts better or been closer to them than Dr. Walker.

Even as he aged, Dr. Walker never backed down from the passionate pursuit of civil rights for all. Later in his life, he was chairman of the Rev. Al Sharpton's National Action Network and a supporter of reparations for African Americans. I got to know him soon after Amadou Diallo had been horribly gunned down in New York City in 1999. We joined together to form New York's first and longest-surviving charter school, now named the Sisulu-Walker Charter School of Harlem. We stayed friends from that time until he died. 

In 2015, Dr. Walker and I co-authored an essay about education reform and race relations, where we wrote:

"Today, too many ‘remedies’ -- such as Critical Race Theory, the increasingly fashionable post-Marxist/postmodernist approach that analyzes society as institutional group power structures rather than on a spiritual or one-to-one human level -- are taking us in the wrong direction: separating even elementary school children into explicit racial groups, and emphasizing differences instead of similarities.

“The answer is to go deeper than race, deeper than wealth, deeper than ethnic identity, deeper than gender. To teach ourselves to comprehend each person, not as a symbol of a group, but as a unique and special individual within a common context of shared humanity. To go to that fundamental place where we are all simply mortal creatures, seeking to create order, beauty, family, and connection to the world that -- on its own -- seems to bend too often towards randomness and entropy."

Before publishing this essay, I questioned Dr. Walker to make sure he really wanted to be on record with this opposition to CRT.  I was worried this might put him in a bad way with other civil rights leaders. But he had never backed down in his life, and he reiterated that this was his position. (read more)

2020
-10-12 e
Celebrate Columbus Day

Let’s Not Say Goodbye to Columbus

The 528th anniversary of Columbus’s landfall in the Americas has arrived. So many statues and monuments of Columbus have already been defaced or taken down in 2020 that the barbarians at our gates may be despairing about what worlds they have left to conquer—the targets for October mischief have rapidly disappeared at the hands of public officials too cowardly or woke to defend them. The Columbus statue at the intersection of Memorial Parkway and Mohawk Street in downtown Utica, N.Y.—near where I live—had remained relatively free of harassment until late September, when a vandal sprayed “Killer” in red paint on the statue’s plinth. Work crews removed the paint, but little more than a week later, the statue was hit again with the same message, in the same color. No arrests have been made.

Columbus Day in the United States has become just another symbolic marker of Western civilization to take a beating from the woke clerisy and its acolytes. On college campuses, defensive administrators may give thanks if Monday’s holiday passes quickly and silently into Tuesday’s classes. If not, noisy undergraduate activists stoked by faculty mentors may stage alternative ceremonies, which typically portray a lovely and pristine New World before palefaces arrived to ensanguine and despoil it. Columbus-bashers appear to see history post-1492 as a long, neat row of fallen dominoes, with Columbus at the beginning and Donald Trump at the end.

To dismiss Columbus’s heroism and daring accomplishments, however, is to revel in ignorance. A closer look at Columbus’s own writings indicates that he straddled the line between medieval and modern. Columbus understood himself as less an agent of Spanish imperialism than as a purveyor of Christian evangelicalism. He embarked on his first voyage excited by biblical prophecy, determined to fulfill an eschatological vision that he believed would usher in the millennium. Hungry for status, believing himself chosen by God, he failed to realize his prophetic dreams—and his discoveries led to unforeseeable consequences. The burden of their causation cannot fairly be blamed on him, however, as if he were some bow-backed Atlas bearing responsibility for all the crimes of the world. 

After 1492, powerful forces were unleashed over which human agency had little or no control. The demographic disaster experienced by the New World’s indigenous peoples stemmed largely from the unintended consequences of pathogenic agents that had accompanied Europeans and Africans to the Americas. Columbus critics often use him as a stand-in for all of European or Western civilization. But we shouldn’t forget that he sailed from a world of war, colonization, servitude, and immiseration to another world of war, servitude, colonization, and immiseration. Neither the Aztecs nor any other polity of indigenous peoples qualifies for sainthood. Hernando Cortes and the Spanish conquistadors could not have taken central Mexico so quickly without the assistance of tens of thousands of indigenous allies eager to free themselves from brutal overlords who, according to one scholar, ran a “theocratic anti-state whose rigidity might have made Albert Speer faint.”

Several decades before Columbus’s arrival, for example, the Huaxtecs of the northern Gulf Coast revolted against their Aztec oppressors and were crushed. The victors marched tens of thousands of captured men, women, and children to the Aztec’s capital city. The adult males were connected by cords that passed through perforations in their nostrils. For days, thousands of Huaxtecs, perhaps more than 20,000, were sacrificed at ceremonial centers before capacity crowds. Their hearts were cut out, Apocalypto style, with dull stone knives. The Maya and the Inca also showed a predilection for bloodletting.

Whatever the net balance of Columbus’s demonstrable sins when weighed against his remarkable achievements, his “Enterprise of the Indies” set in motion the formation of an Atlantic world with sustained and intensifying contacts between peoples on four continents. Over the ensuing centuries of exploration, successful and not, the design emerged of an orderly system of trans-Atlantic commerce—one that, along with considerable human suffering, also brought enormous and undeniable benefits to the world’s peoples. Determining who won and who lost defies any simple calculus. (read more)

2020-10-12 d
Black Crimes Matter

New Photographic Evidence Shows BLM Martyr Breonna Taylor was a Drug-Dealing, Gun-Brandishing Thug

Typical of a Black Lives Matter martyr.

Deceased black woman Breonna Taylor, the alleged victim of a police shooting, has been shown in new photographic evidence to be a drug-dealing, gun-brandishing thug.

In one particularly revealing photo, Taylor can be seen with her boyfriend Kenneth Walker holding guns in a particularly menacing fashion. The caption at the top reads, “How he coming behind me” with a devil emoji, indicating that they were ready to go out in a blaze of glory at a moment’s notice, with the caption at the bottom reads, “Partners in Crime.” The BLM terror movement made up a bunch of lies about the situation in order to activate the savages to rape and pillage on behalf of their latest felon martyr.

Other revelations from the treasure trove of evidence released by the Louisville Metro Police Department include Taylor’s extensive drug dealing. Cops also “found numerous conversations about drug trafficking” with regards to her boyfriend Walker, and he was apparently selling pills to waitresses at a nearby Hooters restaurant. He was also selling large quantities of marijuana and sending messages indicating he was a veteran armed robber. (read more)

2020-10-12 c
Leftist Censorship

The New York Times Guild Once Again Demands Censorship of Colleagues

The union demanded “sensitivity readers” for their colleagues. Now they’re angry that a columnist wrote about a major controversy.

The New York Times Guild, the union of employees of the paper of record, tweeted a condemnation on Sunday of one of their own colleagues, op-ed columnist Bret Stephens. Their denunciation was marred by humiliating typos and even more so by creepy and authoritarian censorship demands and petulant appeals to management for enforcement of company “rules” against other journalists. To say that this is bizarre behavior from a union of journalists, of all people, is to woefully understate the case.
                                   
What angered the union today was an op-ed by Stephens on Friday which voiced numerous criticisms of the Pulitzer Prize-winning “1619 Project,” published last year by the New York Times Magazine and spearheaded by reporter Nikole Hannah-Jones. One of the Project’s principal arguments was expressed by a now-silently-deleted sentence that introduced it: “that the country’s true birth date” is not 1776, as has long been widely believed, but rather late 1619, when, the article claims, the first African slaves arrived on U.S. soil.

Despite its Pulitzer, the “1619 Project” has become a hotly contested political and academic controversy, with the Trump administration seeking to block attempts to integrate its assertions into school curriculums, while numerous scholars of history accuse it of radically distorting historical fact, with some, such as Brown University’s Glenn Loury, calling on the Pulitzer Board to revoke its award. Scholars have also vocally criticized the Times for stealth edits of the article’s key claims long after publication, without even noting to readers that it made these substantive changes let alone explaining why it made them. (read more)

2020-10-12 b
THE COVID-CON II

Lab Coat Tyranny

California is using “public health” as a rationale to push progressive political goals.

Public health authorities in California have unveiled a “Blueprint for a Safer Economy” that requires counties to meet new “health equity metrics” in order to emerge from the current Covid-19 lockdowns. It’s a broad experiment in social justice. Under the plan, counties must reduce “disparities in levels of transmission” in “low-income, Black, Latino, [and] Pacific Islander” communities before they can move forward with reopening. In effect, local businesses must remain closed until local bureaucrats are satisfied that ill-defined racial quotas have been met.

The underlying assumption of the blueprint is that race-based coronavirus disparities are the result of “systemic racism,” despite zero evidence that the state’s coronavirus policies have been discriminatory. The plan ignores potential differences in culture, behavior, and underlying health, resting instead on the premise that racism is the driving force behind every disparate outcome. The blueprint also subverts the democratic process. Unelected public health officials are restricting essential freedoms, including mobility, worship, and economic activity, without deliberation by the state legislature or the possibility of review or appeal.

Unfortunately, the California blueprint is just part of a broader pattern of state governments using public health as a rationale for seizing power. Throughout the pandemic, blue-state politicians have appealed to science as justification for long-term economic lockdowns, mask mandates, and other emergency measures, regardless of whether these policies have been sanctioned by state legislatures or voters. Science becomes the highest authority; citizens must obey.

Yet progressive leaders have been willing immediately to jettison science when it conflicts with their pre-existing political priorities. (read more)

2020-10-12 a
THE COVID-CON I

The better Sweden does on the coronavirus, the angrier they get

My columns on Sweden’s laissez-faire approach to the coronavirus always provoke an angry response. But it is striking that, the better Sweden does, the angrier its critics become.

Like anti-Trumpers who couldn’t hide their annoyance at the success of the U.S. economy, or British Remainers who longed for a recession so as to be able to say “I told you so” about Brexit, lockdown enthusiasts determinedly screen out the good news.

They trot out three main arguments. First, they say, “You can’t compare us to Sweden. It has a low population density.” Second, they argue that “Sweden hasn’t succeeded; it has had more deaths per capita than neighboring countries.” Third, the claim that “Sweden has taken an economic hit as well — the worst of both worlds."

I’ll come to these assertions in a moment, but it is worth noting that they are all retrospective. The lockdown was initially sold across the world as the only way to avert calamity. The cost of the closures (in terms of lost liberty, lost livelihoods, and, indeed, lost lives through non-coronavirus health conditions) was so vast that there was no other way to justify it. Lockdown proponents didn’t say, “This might slightly reduce the mortality rate.” They said, “Do it or our hospitals will be overwhelmed!”

Which was, to be fair, what they initially expected to happen in Sweden. “Heading for disaster” was the headline in Britain’s right-wing Sun. “They are leading us to catastrophe,” agreed the left-wing Guardian. Time magazine reported that “Sweden’s relaxed approach to the coronavirus could already be backfiring” and quoted a doctor saying that it would “probably end in a historical massacre.” “We fear that Sweden has picked the worst possible time to experiment with national chauvinism,” chided the Washington Post. President Trump, justifying his own crackdown, bizarrely claimed that Sweden “gave it a shot, and they saw things that were really frightening, and they went immediately to shutting down the country.”

Not one commentator in March or April argued that Sweden might be less at risk than other places. Lockdown enthusiasts have switched very suddenly from “Sweden is heading for a genocide” to “well, we couldn’t do that here because we’re nothing like Sweden.”

What we are seeing is a version of the sunk cost fallacy — a determination to justify the huge losses imposed by the lockdown. It is beyond depressing to see scientists give in to these basic cognitive biases.

So, to the specific criticisms: Yes, Sweden has a low population density if you divide its population by its land area. But Swedes are not evenly spaced out across their country. Most of them live in towns and cities — 85% of the population occupies 2% of its surface area. The idea that Swedes live shyly among the birch trees, plunging into their chilly lakes at the footfall of a stranger, is one of the oddest arguments to have come out of this whole unedifying debate.

It is true that Sweden has had more coronavirus fatalities than other Nordic states. But remember that the lockdown was only intended to buy time. Infection rates are now rising faster in the rest of Scandinavia as things catch up.

In any case, though, so what? The argument for the lockdown was that there was no alternative. For that argument to work, it is not enough for Sweden to lag a bit behind Finland. Sweden would have to stick out like a sore thumb on every graph. It doesn’t.
...
The philosopher Karl Popper argued that the defining characteristic of science was that its propositions were falsifiable. But we have somehow reached a place where everything is turned into an argument for more restrictions. If infections rise, we need a tougher lockdown. If they fall, the lockdown is working, so we should keep it.

Yet, there it stands, stolid, sensible, social-democratic Sweden (alongside its U.S. equivalent, South Dakota) silently rebuking the doubters by its success. No wonder they get so angry. (read more)

2020
-10-11 f
THE COVID-CON IV

Breaking Up With Fear and Conformity

Data’s rotten,
Tests are toast.
News is sullen,
Coast to coast.

Feudal darkness
Here and now!
To the masters
Peasants bow.

Facts are fiction,
Love is screen.
Gossip’s trending,
Trends are mean.

Hear, hear,
Where’s the joy?
Ask Alexa.
She’ll annoy.


This is a breakup letter. I am breaking up with fear.

Farewell, my clean and proper friends. I’ve had enough. I am not interested in your scarecrows and rules of good behavior.

I did my time inside the cage, and now I intend to breathe.

Your air is stale with gossip and anxiety. It’s suffocating. It’s low on oxygen. I can’t.

Your safe space is for crippled animals.

I feel bad for you but I don’t owe you self-abuse.

I really can’t do this anymore. I tried and tried and tried—but my fear is no more, and it’s time to say good bye. It’s not me, it’s you. The heroes you pray to insist that I betray my heart and intellect. I can’t do that. I am not a slave. You do it if you want but you have to let me be.

Perhaps I’ve never belonged in the cage of good behavior. Perhaps, I’ve always been unshackled.

This world is full of love and beauty.

This world does not belong exclusively to you or whomever has hurt you and made you proudly, complacently obedient.

You are not the owner of everyone’s descriptions of things and ways to think. My relationship with language, with the mystery of life and with the physical world around us is important to my heart, and you don’t have any say in that.

Thus, your influence over my language is over. Your convictions and hangups have nothing to do with me.

So please do what’s best for you, and I’ll do the same, with love and hope for truth. I wish you well, and I am not scared of your ghosts.

If I can be of help to you in a dignifying way that doesn’t require my self-betrayal, I am around with all good vibes. Just don’t hate me for not kneeling before your fears.

I feel like a kid again, free from adult confusions, curious about everything, attracted to freedom and aliveness, and drawn to my fellow travelers whose spirits are pure and whose minds are interesting.

Please spare me the shaming and the boring Pravda-like clichés, they won’t convince me, they will only prolong the agony of parting.

I’ve been waiting for this moment my entire life. Farewell.

We’ll meet again. (source)

2020-10-11 e
THE COVID-CON III

The Smoking Gun: Where is the coronavirus? The CDC says it isn’t available.
                            
The CDC document is titled, “CDC 2019-Novel Coronavirus (2019-nCoV) Real-Time RT-PCR Diagnostic Panel.” It is dated July 13, 2020.

Buried deep in the document, on page 39, in a section titled, “Performance Characteristics,” we have this: “Since no quantified virus isolates of the 2019-nCoV are currently available, assays [diagnostic tests] designed for detection of the 2019-nCoV RNA were tested with characterized stocks of in vitro transcribed full length RNA…”

The key phrase there is: “Since no quantified virus isolates of the 2019-nCoV are currently available…”

Every object that exists can be quantified, which is to say, measured. The use of the term “quantified” in that phrase means: the CDC has no measurable amount of the virus, because it is unavailable. THE CDC HAS NO VIRUS.

A further tip-off is the use of the word ‘isolates.” This means NO ISOLATED VIRUS IS AVAILABLE.

Another way to put it: NO ONE HAS AN ISOLATED SPECIMEN OF THE COVID-19 VIRUS.

NO ONE HAS ISOLATED THE COVID-19 VIRUS.

THEREFORE, NO ONE HAS PROVED THAT IT EXISTS.

As if this were not enough of a revelation to shock the world, the CDC goes on to say they are presenting a diagnostic PCR test to detect the virus-that-hasn’t-been-isolated…and the test is looking for RNA which is PRESUMED to come from the virus that hasn’t been proved to exist.

And using this test, the CDC and every other public health agency in the world are counting COVID cases and deaths…and governments have instituted lockdowns and economic devastation using those case and death numbers as justification. (read more)

2020-10-11 d
THE COVID-CON II

Morning in Hell

“it’s the proper morning to fly into Hell.”
—Arthur Miller (The Crucible)


“One of the greatest delusions of the average man is to forget that life is death’s prisoner.”
—Emil Cioran (On the Heights of Despair)

Increasingly, I think, the American public operates in a mild dissociative state. I wrote about it here. It is almost as if people are afflicted with a kind of PTSD — only one where the trauma is generalized, relatively low grade, but ongoing.

Any of us who have questioned the Covid narrative have had to put up with an inordinate amount of hectoring, name-calling, ridicule, and ostracism. I remember when I signed on the artist appeal as part of the Milosevic Defense Committee, and the abuse and anger I faced whenever this topic came up. People who had no history with the region, knew little of the political landscape, would nonetheless wax irate, furious and near tears that I would hold such outrageous positions.

Now, over a decade later, two members of that committee have won Nobel Prizes (Harold Pinter and Peter Handke). You would think that might cause people to take a moment, reflect, recalibrate their thinking on the topic. But alas, it rarely does.

The Covid narrative has generated the same near-hysterical indignation. The narrative, as it has been constructed by the WHO, CDC, and more likely a dozen or so billionaires (including Bill Gates) is so rife with contradiction and illogic that one might think cracks would begin to show.

That many who accept the word of authority in general, might at this point start to question why none of this story makes sense. But no. Not in America anyway. (or rather, to be more precise, there is a pushback, but it keeps to a low profile lest the little Cotton Mathers of the haute bourgeoisie put one in the stocks).

Leave it to America to make the flu into a morality play.
...
The Covid story takes place in a universe of Whedon and Abrams, with parts of The Hunger Games, Breaking Bad, and the films of John Hughes. (Hughes was really the precursor for both Whedon and Abrams). Covid is taking place on the streets where Breakfast Club was filmed. In people’s heads anyway.

Covid the virus is an overdetermined symbol — and one that only makes even a tiny bit of sense if it is located in these personal streaming sites in your brain. (and I recommend Jonathan Beller, The Cinematic Mode of Production).

There is a tendency toward fetishization, too, and hence the ubiquitous appearance and opinion of celebrities. Its bordering on surreal much of the time: Hip Hop moguls are asked about climate change, Silicon Valley billionaires voice opinion on overpopulation or vaccinations, soap opera stars offer thoughts on stem cell research.

Nothing is investigated, really. It is all driven by whatever is most lurid or sensationalized. The ruling class has clearly encouraged, if not mandated, a certain line of thinking on the pandemic. The ruling class has profited enormously from the lockdown, and is quite happy with a semi-permanent state of crisis.

In fact it is likely that this was at least partly all planned. I mean what does one think those billionaires at the Bilderberg meeting talk about? Or at DAVOS or the like? The ruling elite anticipated crises in Capitalism, and the lockdown certainly provides cover for massive plunder or pensions, real estate, and really, most everything.

But the system, to some extent, does the work for the ruling class without instruction at this point. For revenue is generated by blood and violence, and secondly by sex. The template has already been put in place. (If it bleeds it leads). Although something has happened to the ‘sex sells’ dimension of the Spectacle. People seem less and less in the throws of passion or lust.

The societies of the west are declining into some form of neurasthenic bloodless onanism. The consumption of porn is up, but I’m pretty sure sex acts are actually down. And the allegorical dimension of the Covid narrative serves as both substitute gratification and as a symbolic purification ritual.
...
There is a veritable mania, now, concerning testing. And yet even the NYTimes admits the tests are virtually meaningless. But no matter. We must test more!
...
The ruling class don’t wear masks or have travel restrictions imposed on them.

There is no longer even a pretense. The rich are entitled to special treatment. The rich deserve a clean depopulated world where they can cavort on the green, frolic in elysian fields by murmuring brooks, and to not be troubled by darkies and riff-raff. Remember it was a mere hundred years ago that Belgium brought Congolese from their African home, to be paraded in human zoos. Those they hadn’t already murdered.

Covid is the final act in the transference of wealth to the top 1%. And culture is being destroyed along with everything else. Cinemas are closing, permanently, theatres, too, permanently, and museums. Galleries and other art spaces are shuttered, likely to never reopen. Something like 30 million jobs have been lost. There is an acute desperation across America.

Who survives? Amazon, Netflix, Google, Comcast, Facebook, et al. Those who control the screens control the world. It is a new morning in hell. (read more)

2020-10-11 c
THE COVID-CON I

Together Apart: The Social Distance Backstory

In the midst of outrage at restrictions on our living arrangements, issued by a UK government that has lost its orientation to reality, two questions arise.

The first continues to receive fulsome treatment, at least in non-mainstream media. It is: How can such restrictions be necessary?

The second is less frequently addressed. It is: How can such restrictions be possible?

We have, for months, been mulling over, What makes them do it?

Here, I consider, What makes us take it?

From his isolation bunker, during his quarantine with ‘Covid19,’ prime minister Boris Johnson assured the people of Britain that, after all, there is such a thing as society.

This was to reprise a theme of his predecessor, Margaret Thatcher, who famously said, ‘There is no such thing as society.’

In between Thatcher and Johnson, another Conservative prime minister, David Cameron, successfully ran an election campaign based on his vision of a ‘Big Society.’

Despite the wrangling over its extent, what all three recognize is the adjustable character of this thing we call ‘Society,’ which may be emphasized or, not or expanded or not, because it is a function of kinds of government and not, as we might imagine, a set of grass-roots relations between people living out their lives.

It is true, there have always been societies. But when we refer to ‘Society,’ we refer to a quite particular mode of human relations oriented towards the management of populations.

This management has not trod heavily on those populations. It has not ridden roughshod over them or put their noses to the grindstone. On the contrary, it has worked on and through their very hearts’ desires, rendering those desires explicit and tethering them to strategies for their realization.

The result: an endlessly satisfied populace whose ways of living are available for infinite readjustment, even wholesale suspension.

Our lives are now social lives, and social lives are regulated vertically by abstract concepts and the strategies that apply them, not horizontally between beings in communities.

Our lives are now social lives, and they grow more rigid and more meaningless, and more vulnerable to revision and cancellation, every day. (read more)

2020-10-11 b
Racism Indoctrination in America

Barbie has a very difficult conversation with her black doll friend about racism she experienced in video about white privilege

"White people get an advantage that they didn't earn"
 
Mattel published a video for their Barbie franchise featuring the cartoon version of the doll having a very difficult discussion about the racist experiences of her black doll friend, Nikki.

The video was posted to the official Barbie YouTube page on Wednesday.

"There is a huge movement going on," Barbie said.

"Millions of people across the world are standing up to fight against racism, and they're doing this because too often and for such a long time, people have been treated unfairly, and in some cases even hurt by others, because of the color of their skin," she explained helpfully.

Barbie encouraged Nikki to explain the racism she faced as a black doll in modern day America. (read more)

2020-10-11 a
Dangerous Leftist Word Games

New AP Stylebook guidance recommends using 'unrest' instead of 'riot' to avoid stigmatizing protesters

Even rioting is protected by the PC police

The Associated Press Stylebook tweeted an admonishment to stop using the word "riot" to describe political protests and instead use the milder "unrest" to avoid stigmatizing protesters.

The guidance was tweeted on Tuesday amid numerous protests, riots and looting across the country.

"Use care in deciding which term best applies: A riot is a wild or violent disturbance of the peace involving a group of people. The term riot suggests uncontrolled chaos and pandemonium," the official AP Stylebook Twitter account said.

New guidance on AP Stylebook Online: Use care in deciding
which term best applies: A riot is a wild or violent dis…
https://t.co/JgoCLzat38

— APStylebook (@APStylebook) 1601487064.0


"Focusing on rioting and property destruction rather than underlying grievance has been used in the past to stigmatize broad swaths of people protesting against lynching, police brutality or for racial justice, going back to the urban uprisings of the 1960s," the AP Stylebook explained. (read more)

2020
-10-10 e
Let Us Praise Excellence

The brilliance lives loudly within her

When Amy Coney Barrett came before that microphone in the Rose Garden to make her official introduction to the wider public, you knew you were getting a different sort of Supreme Court nominee. This wasn’t polished civics instructor Neil Gorsuch or earnest political operator Brett Kavanaugh. Here was a joyous, American-as-apple-pie judge next door.

“ I love the United States, and I love the United States Constitution,” she said on that Saturday afternoon at the White House. “I am truly humbled by the prospect of serving on the Supreme Court.” What a breath of fresh air amid the 2020 miasma, disarming critics and even dispelling some of the toxic clouds over Washington.

Barrett’s resume is impressive: Latin honors in college and law school, a Supreme Court clerkship, a distinguished professorial career with prolific scholarship. Yet the unassuming nature of this Notre Dame professor-turned-7th Circuit judge sets her apart from the Ivy-festooned club she’s set to join. As the mother of seven, including two adopted from Haiti, she would become the first female justice with school-age children. “The president has asked me to become the ninth justice, and, as it happens, I am used to being in a group of nine — my family,” Barrett quipped, in a twist on Kavanaugh’s “team of nine” moniker.

Indeed, how she and her husband Jesse, also a successful lawyer, juggle it all is as remarkable as Barrett’s accomplishments. The shot of their gaggle getting into a minivan to fly to Washington, with the nominee driving, was the icing on the cake. While some loft-dwelling coastal elites may have turned up their noses at the large family and its bourgeois habits, my wife and I looked at our comfortable but harried suburban existence and marveled at how this couple made both personal and professional achievement look so effortless.

But the Barretts might have stayed in their college-town idyll were it not for the Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee. As one of Donald Trump’s earliest circuit court nominees, Amy Coney Barrett faced a barrage of bigoted attacks on her religiosity. “Do you consider yourself an orthodox Catholic?” Dick Durbin queried, as if praying the rosary were a disqualifier. “The dogma lives loudly within you,” added Dianne Feinstein, in what sounds like a rejected line from Star Wars.

“My personal church affiliation or my religious belief would not bear on the discharge of my duties as a judge,” Barrett responded to this line of questioning, as anyone could’ve expected. But the fact that she faced that kind of attack angered conservative elites and mainstream voters alike. By the time she was confirmed in October 2017, she had become a martyr, for lack of a better term, and the odds-on favorite for Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s seat if it became available while Trump occupied the White House. “I’m saving her for Ginsburg,” the president said less than a year later after picking Kavanaugh to replace Anthony Kennedy. (read more)

2020-10-10 d
“committing academic genocide”

(Government) schools are passing students who can’t read at any level — all to avoid blaming teachers, lawmakers, and bureaucrats.
 
(Government) schools from coast to coast are failing to teach young students the most basic skill they need to succeed in school and life: reading. This failure is widespread, tragic, and mostly unnecessary. We know how to teach reading, but many school administrators refuse to use the proven methods.

The extent of this self-inflicted catastrophe, which has ruined countless lives, was driven home to me again when the new school year began several weeks ago.

Some 20 years ago I founded the Roger Bacon Academy (RBA), which manages a family of four charter schools in southeastern North Carolina. This year, for the first time in RBA’s history, the schools enrolled large numbers of students who transferred from the traditional county public schools.

Of the 168 first- and second-grade transfer students, 75 (approx. 45 percent) could not pass the basic readiness assessment to begin kindergarten-level reading instruction. Not only could they not read at any level, but their spoken vocabularies were insufficient to understand reading instruction if it were taught to them. Therefore, the 51 first-graders and 24 second-graders are now taking a kindergarten preparatory course called Language for Learning (L4L) that must be mastered before effective reading instruction can begin.

Unfortunately, the prevalence of nonreaders moving through our public-school systems is widespread. Here in North Carolina, in a typical year such as 2017–18, 55.7 percent of public-school students in grades three through eight fail North Carolina’s end-of-grade reading test. On the most recent reading tests administered by the National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP), our so-called Nation’s Report Card, just 36 percent of North Carolina fourth-graders “performed at or above the NAEP proficient level.” Sixty-seven percent performed at the basic level — meaning that a third of all students did not. Lest you think this is a North Carolina problem alone, both measures were on par with, and in fact a little above, the national average.

The significance of this can’t be overstated. If students haven’t learned how to read proficiently (or in some cases read at all) by the time they enter fourth grade, it may be all over for them. As the National Conference of State Legislatures pointed out in a report at the end of last year, citing research by the Annie E. Casey Foundation, “third grade has been identified as important to reading literacy because it is the final year children are learning to read, after which students are ‘reading to learn.’” (read more)

2020-10-10 c
The "Woke" Hate Our Culture and Freedoms, and Envy Our Success

A history of “wokeness”

Stay woke: How a Black activist watchword got co-opted in the culture war.

Before 2014, the call to “stay woke” was, for many people, unheard of. The idea behind it was common within Black communities at that point — the notion that staying “woke” and alert to the deceptions of other people was a basic survival tactic. But in 2014, following the police killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, “stay woke” suddenly became the cautionary watchword of Black Lives Matter activists on the streets, used in a chilling and specific context: keeping watch for police brutality and unjust police tactics.

In the six years since Brown’s death, “woke” has evolved into a single-word summation of leftist political ideology, centered on social justice politics and critical race theory. This framing of “woke” is bipartisan: It’s used as a shorthand for political progressiveness by the left, and as a denigration of leftist culture by the right.

On the left, to be “woke” means to identify as a staunch social justice advocate who’s abreast of contemporary political concerns — or to be perceived that way, whether or not you ever claimed to be “woke” yourself. At times, the defensiveness surrounding wokeness invites ironic blowback. Consider the 2020 Hulu comedy series Woke, which attempted to deconstruct the identity politics behind ideas like “wokeness,” only to garner criticism for having an outdated and too-centrist political viewpoint — that is, for not being woke enough.

On the right, “woke” — like its cousin “canceled” — bespeaks “political correctness” gone awry, and the term itself is usually used sarcastically. At the Republican National Convention in August, right-wing Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) scolded “woketopians,” grouping them together with socialists and Biden supporters, as though the definition of a “woketopian” was self-evident.

But as use of the word spreads, what people actually mean by “woke” seems less clear than ever.

After all, none of these recent political concepts has anything to do with the idea of demanding that people “stay woke” against police brutality. Despite renewed activism against police brutality in 2020, the way that terms like “woke” and “wokeness” are used outside of the Black Lives Matter community seems to bear little connection to their original context, on either the right and the left. (read more)

2020-10-10 b
The Wicked Witch of the East Coast Elites

Yes, Hillary Clinton Orchestrated the Russia-Collusion Farce

The Clinton campaign dreamed up, paid for, and peddled the Trump-Russia collusion farce.

Did she or didn’t she?

Of course she did. In late July 2016, Hillary Clinton, in an effort to divert attention from the email scandal that was haunting her presidential bid, directed her campaign to peddle a political narrative that Russia’s suspected hacking and leaking of Democratic Party emails was in furtherance of a conspiracy between Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump to swing the election to Trump.

That is, as I argued in Ball of Collusion, the Clinton campaign dreamed up, paid for, and peddled the Trump–Russia collusion farce. (read more)

2020-10-10 a
Travelers Beware of Thailand

Thai hotel to drop charges against US man who faced jail over bad reviews

Koh Chang hotel to drop charges in exchange for public apology

Wesley Barnes held under defamation and computer crime laws

A hotel in Thailand has agreed to drop charges against an American guest who faced up to five years in jail for posting negative reviews – as long as he issues a public apology for his comments.

The hotel, on the holiday island of Koh Chang, filed a complaint against American teacher Wesley Barnes in August after he posted what the hotel said were false and defamatory write-ups after a row over a 500 baht ($16) corkage fee.

Police detained Barnes under criminal defamation and computer crime laws for two days in September before he was released on bail.

“Under conditions that Mr Barnes shows his sincerity and takes full responsibility for what had happened and remedy the situation, the hotel will be delighted to drop the charge,” the Sea View Koh Chang hotel said in a statement to Reuters on Friday.

The case brought new scrutiny to Thailand’s defamation and computer crime laws, which human rights activists say are too harsh and sweeping.

Under the laws, Barnes could be fined up to 100,000 baht ($3,200) and be jailed for up to five years.
...
The dispute began when Barnes stayed at the resort in June and disagreed with staff who tried to charge a corkage fee for alcohol he and a friend had brought on to the premises.

He told the Guardian that he felt the hotel’s manager was aggressive.
...
The resort said that it had initially tried to contact Barnes directly to resolve the matter, but took legal action because multiple reviews had been posted across different platforms, weeks apart.

Defamation is a criminal offence in Thailand, carrying a maximum sentence of two years in prison, along with a 200,000 baht (£4,915) fine. Rights groups have long warned that the law is draconian, and that it has been abused to silence activists and journalists. Unlike in many other countries, truth cannot automatically be relied upon as a defence. (read more)

2020
-10-09 d
The Racism Con

On the Peculiar Character of American 'Racism'

That America is a racist country is the great self-evident truth of the Left and of the ruling class whose moral opinions are shaped by it. This truth is self-evident in the sense of being readily apparent to them, as evidenced by the countless disparities in life outcomes between blacks and whites. No explanation for these disparities is ever required. Their mere existence is proof of racism.

The disparities between Asians and whites, between Indians and whites, and between Nigerian immigrants and whites all go studiously ignored, since these groups generally outperform whites in income and educational attainment. Also ignored is the role that the pathologies of inner-city black culture—fatherlessness, crime, nihilistic alienation, and the exaltation of thuggery—play in producing and sustaining disparities.

America’s racist nature is also self-evident in the philosophical sense. It is an axiomatic truth: the predicate (racism) is contained in the subject (America). In the same way that all bachelors are, by definition, single, so is America, by definition, racist.

Formulated as such, the self-evident truth of American racism cannot be refuted. It is impervious to counterarguments, data, and historical developments. Believers in American racism don’t care about your facts. In 1991, Derrick Bell, one of the founders of critical race theory, declared that blacks had made no progress in America since 1865. He made this claim with a straight face at Harvard University, where he had been a tenured professor for two decades. In 1865, Harvard did not admit black students.
no progress. (read more)

2020-10-09 c
THE COVID-CON

Joe Biden Is the Shutdown Candidate

The Democratic party’s bias for economic and social shutdowns has not changed since March.

If a tree falls in an empty forest, will the press blame Donald Trump?

Even by the standards of Trump derangement syndrome, the media compulsion during a U.S. president’s tour through Covid-19 to build every molehill into a mountain of duplicity was a new low. (read more)

2020-10-09 b
The Debate Con

"Fix" - Trump Slams Next Debate Moderator As "Never-Trumper" After Tweet Debacle
             
As Summit News' Steve Watson noted earlier, Steve Scully, the C-SPAN employee chosen by the Commission on Presidential Debates to moderate the second presidential debate (now in jeopardy), has a long history of anti-Trump tweets and comments. During his college days, he even interned in the Senate office of Sen. Joe Biden.

But in a strange tweet that may have been intended as a direct message, the next presidential debate moderator asked former White House Communications Director Anthony Scaramucci for advice about whether to "respond to Trump." (read more)

2020-10-09 a
The Russia Con

The 40 key Russia documents President Trump must still declassify

Many unreleased pieces of evidence have been sought by Congress dating back to 2017.

President Trump earlier this week vowed complete and final transparency in the Russia probe, ordering the declassification (without redaction) of all relevant documents that show how the false Russian collusion narrative was created by Hillary Clinton operatives and then investigated for three years by the FBI.

With less than four weeks to Election Day 2020, there is little time to complete the mission so that voters can understand the foreign influence, dirty tricks and misconduct that began in the last presidential election and continued for years.

So Just the News put together a list of the 40 most important documents yet to be released that would help America understand what really happened and who is most culpable.

Most of the documents have been sought by Congress dating all the way back to 2017 and have been withheld from public release, mostly by bureaucrats at the State Department under Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and the FBI under Director Christopher Wray.

The many letters and subpoenas demanding these documents are attached below. Here is the list of unreleased documents: (read more)

2020
-10-08 d
THE COVID-CON II

Lockdown backers' risk aversion is producing a more unequal society

In between Donald Trump’s exit from Walter Reed National Military Medical Center and the vice-presidential debate, let’s turn to an apolitical analyst to understand what’s happening. Vaclav Smil, 76, native of communist Czechoslovakia, University of Manitoba professor for four decades, has written 39 books on energy, technology, and demography. “Nobody,” says Bill Gates, who has read every one, “sees the big picture with as wide an aperture as Vaclav Smil.”

What he sees now, he writes in a characteristically terse IEEE Spectrum essay, he finds puzzling. The COVID-19 death rate per million is about one-fifth that of the 1957-58 Asian flu and one-third of the 1968-70 Hong Kong flu. Yet these earlier pandemics had only “evanescent economic consequences” and did not “leave any deep traumatic traces in memories” of the 350 million people who, like Smil (and me), were 10 or older during both. “Countries did not resort to any mass-scale economic lockdowns, enforce any long-lasting school closures, ban sports events or cut flight schedules deeply.”

Why not? “Was it because we had no fear-reinforcing 24/7 cable news, no Twitter and no incessant and instant case-and-death tickers on all our electronic screens?” asks the non-cellphone-owner Smil. “Or is it we ourselves who have changed, by valuing recurrent but infrequent risks differently?”

Some of both is my tentative answer. As I’ve written about previously, Americans’ child-rearing practices are increasingly risk-averse. But this is not entirely consistent. Kids are kept in car seats till age 9, then encouraged to ride bicycles in heavy traffic a few years later. And some Americans are more risk-averse than others. Polls show that political liberals are more likely than political conservatives to wear masks and support extended lockdowns (except for “mostly peaceful” demonstrations against police). (read more)

2020-10-08 c
THE COVID-CON I

A Failed Experiment

The lockdowns must end.

Lockdowns are typically portrayed as prudent precautions against Covid-19, but they are surely the most risky experiment ever conducted on the public. From the start, researchers have warned that lockdowns could prove far deadlier than the coronavirus. People who lose their jobs or businesses are more prone to fatal drug overdoses and suicide, and evidence already exists that many more will die from cancer, heart disease, pneumonia, and tuberculosis and other diseases because the lockdown prevented their ailments from being diagnosed early and treated properly.

Yet politicians and public-health officials conducting this unprecedented experiment have paid little attention to these risks. In their initial rush to lock down society, they insisted that there was no time for such analysis—and besides, these were just temporary measures to “flatten the curve” so as not to overwhelm hospitals. But since that danger passed, the lockdown enforcers have found one reason after another to persevere with closures, bans, quarantines, curfews, and other mandates. Anthony Fauci, the White House advisor, recently said that even if a vaccine arrives soon, he does not expect a return to normality before late next year.

He and politicians like New York governor Andrew Cuomo and British prime minister Boris Johnson profess to be following “the science,” but no ethical scientist would conduct such a risky experiment without carefully considering the dangers and monitoring the results. After doing so, a group of leading researchers this week called for an end to the experiment. In a joint statement, the Great Barrington Declaration, they predicted that continued lockdowns will lead to “excess mortality in years to come” and warned of “irreparable damage, with the underprivileged disproportionately harmed.” (read more)

2020-10-08 b
Kamala Lost Camelot

Pence wins VP debate -- Harris proves she's not ready to be president

The VP debate should cause some to take a longer look at Kamala Harris.

Joe Biden and Donald Trump are the oldest men ever to run for president of the United States. Especially given President Trump’s recent COVID infection, and the former vice president’s frequent mental lapses, voters should be paying close attention to their running mates.

They had an opportunity to do just that during the first and only vice presidential debate, held in Salt Lake City, when Vice President Mike Pence squared off against Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif., Joe Biden’s second-in-command.

After the raucous and disappointing head-to-head between Trump and Biden a week earlier, the VP contest came off as infinitely more civilized, but at times equally frustrating to viewers.

In particular, it was annoying that Harris dodged significant questions, like whether she and Biden agree with Democrats calling to pack the Supreme Court. Like Biden, she simply refuses to answer the question, an important one to voters.

In fairness, both candidates were evasive at times, but Pence has been in the public eye longer than his rival. We have a good idea where he stands on most questions, while Harris has skittered back and forth on issues like the Green New Deal, “Medicare-for-all” and law and order, bending with the politics of the moment.

We know Pence; we do not know Harris 2020.

Trump supporters looked to Pence to provide the defense of his administration that the president failed to offer up in his debate against Biden.

They were not disappointed.

Pence was solid as a rock and though he started tentatively, got more powerful and convincing as the night wore on.

Pence looked presidential. (In spite of a fly which inopportunely landed on his head for several minutes.)

The same could not be said for Harris. She constantly smirked and frowned and shook her head in derision while listening to Pence; no wonder Democrat primary voters decreed her “unlikeable.” (read more)

2020-10-08 a
Leftist/Progressive Culture War Has Lost This Battle

Welcome to Christian Girl Autumn, The Purest Thing on the Internet Right Now

The "basic" fall aesthetic that was once mocked is making converts of even its most ardent critics

With a hint of nutmeg in the air and knitted sweaters, large-brimmed hats and cozy flannels flooding your social feeds, you know that fall is finally here. What you might not know is that regular fall has actually been canceled. In its place rises “Christian Girl Autumn.” A meme. A mantra. A way of life for Octobers to come.

Hold on, what is “Christian Girl Autumn?”
                                         
The trend derives its name and much of its cachet from Hot Girl Summer, the summer 2019 mantra that awakened our inner unapologetic bad bitch.

In August 2019, Twitter user @bimbofication tweeted, “Hot Girl Summer is coming to an end, get ready for Christian Girl Autumn,” with a photo of two white women with long, wavy brunette hair dressed almost identically: oversized scarves, ripped denim jeans, brown booties and matching leather totes.

Naturally, other users replied with jokes assuming certain traits about the then-anonymous women who were dressed like your stereotypical, pumpkin spice latte-sipping basic white girls.

The tweet then gave rise to an entire genus of memes, with people posting about their transition from “Hot Girl Summer” into “Christian Girl Autumn,” and riffing on similar CGA poses.

The trend eventually found its way to Caitlin Covington and Emily Gemma, the two girls pictured in the initial CGA tweet. (read more)

2020
-10-07 d
Russia Hoax

What Obama Knew, and When He Knew It

Last week, Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe declassified information to the effect that U.S. intelligence agencies “obtained insight into Russian intelligence analysis alleging that U.S. Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton had approved a campaign plan to stir up a scandal against U.S. Presidential candidate Donald Trump by tying him to Putin and the Russians’ hacking of the Democratic National Committee.” Ratcliffe also indicated at that time that CIA Director John Brennan briefed President Obama and others on the intelligence. Today Ratcliffe declassified documents relating to last week’s communication, including handwritten notes by John Brennan.

Brennan’s notes, reportedly dated July 28, 2016, relate to a briefing that he gave on that date to President Obama, “JC” (James Comey), “Denis” (Denis McDonough), and “Susan” (Susan Rice). (read more)

2020-10-07 c
Big Brother - II

Facebook removes Donald Trump post for spreading myth that Covid is 'far less lethal than flu'

It is only the second time the company has done so, coming less than 24 hours after the President himself was discharged from hospital

Facebook has removed a post by President Donald Trump that claimed Covid-19 is "far less lethal" than the flu less than 24 hours after being discharged from hospital with the disease.

The social media giant said Mr Trump had broken its rules against dangerous misinformation by wrongly playing down the "severity" of coronavirus.

With less than a month to go until the 2020 United States election, it is the second time that Facebook has removed a post from Mr Trump's own account for false information about the virus, and the first time that it has done so in a statement  posted directly to the service.

The company previously removed a video clip posted by Mr Trump from a Fox News broadcast, in which he told an anchor that children were "virtually immune from the infection". In fact, children can catch it but tend to have milder symptoms. (read more)

2020-10-07 b
Big Brother - I

IRS Investigated For Warrantless Location Tracking Of Americans

Following Ron Wyden and Elizabeth Warren's request for the Treasury Department watchdog to investigate the IRS' use of smartphone location data to track ordinary Americans without a court warrant, Motherboard has obtained a letter from the head of the watchdog committee that specifies a formal investigation is underway.

Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration J. Russel George said in the letter he would examine the IRS' use of a commercial database containing millions of U.S. cellphone locations. The data was used to conduct warrantless surveillance of Americans. (read more)

2020
-10-07 a
FINALLY

I have fully authorized the total Declassification of any & all documents pertaining to the single
greatest political CRIME in American History, the Russia Hoax. Likewise, the Hillary Clinton Email
Scandal. No redactions!
https://t.co/GgnHh9GOiq

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 7, 2020

2020-10-06 d
THE COVID-CON IV

Doctors Say Trump Suffering "No Symptoms" Of Coronavirus During First Day Back At White House

Update (1250ET): With the number sickened in the White House climbing to 30 on Tuesday, President Trump's doctors held another press briefing to update the public on the president's condition (and hopefully squeeze the market higher).

In a memo, Dr. Sean Conley claimed Trump is showing no symptoms of the virus on Tuesday following his first night out of the hospital.

"This morning the President’s team of physicians met with him in the Residence," Dr. Conley wrote in the memo, his latest update on Trump’s condition, and first since the briefing that preceded Trump's Monday exit from Walter Reed.

“He had a restful first night at home, and today he reports no symptoms,” Conley wrote. Trump’s "vital signs and physical exam remain stable,” Conley wrote. “Overall he continues to do extremely well." (read more)

2020-10-06 c
THE COVID-CON III

CNN Reporter Slams Trump For Taking Off Mask; Trump Campaign Shows Video Of Her Removing Mask At White House

“CNN reporters like Kaitlin Collins obsess over masks when the cameras are on, but when they think they’re off, off comes their masks!”

A CNN reporter angrily whined about President Trump triumphantly removing his mask outside the White House Monday night, leading the President’s campaign staff to release video of the very same reporter casually removing her own mask inside the White House after cameras had stopped rolling.

CNN White House correspondent Kaitlan Collins commented on Trump’s return from Walter Reed hospital, seeming to be bitter about the level of care he received, and complained about Trump urging Americans not to live in fear.

“What the president is portraying by taking his mask off when he gets back to the Truman balcony to give this grand return to the White House, is that everything is fine and, as he said, don’t let coronavirus control your life,” Collins stated.

“But that is very much still a president who has coronavirus,” Collins continued, adding “Despite the lights and the flags and the staged entrance that the president wants to create, he still has coronavirus and he is only a few days into the diagnosis.”

Collins also tweeted out the video clip, adding the comment “Only days into his diagnosis, the first thing President Trump does when he gets back to the White House is take his mask off.” (read more)

2020-10-06 b
THE COVID-CON II (A Red under every bed?)

Harvard CNN Analyst Claims ‘Russian Agents’ Were Inside Walter Reed Hospital With Trump

Deranged

A Harvard professor has claimed, without providing a single shred of evidence, that Russian intelligence agents were able to gain access to Walter Reed hospital where President Trump recovered from coronavirus over the weekend.

Juliette Kayyem, who is also a regular CNN analyst, declared that it is “very likely” that Russian spies were there to gather information about Trump’s condition.

Kayyem, a senior lecturer in international security at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, tweeted out the bizarre proclamation along with “#doctorslietoo”.
...
Kayyem followed up with a double down tweet, asking “What part of this don’t you believe?” as if it was a perfectly rational claim to make.
...
Kayyem’s assertions on Twitter are one thing, but her sometime employer CNN has been running programming claiming that Trump’s doctors and staff are all lying and “hiding” the severity of his condition: (read more)

2020-10-06 a
THE COVID-CON I

Out of the Woods?

Hallelujahs echoed across the Blue Media late last week when the news broke that Donald Trump tested positive for coronavirus. For four years the president had foiled every ambuscade set along his path by a morally-inflamed, predatory Resistance, and each time he beep-beeped his way around the trap. But, now, with a little help from a pitiless universe, they had him! A gazillion tiny, viral assassins were stealing through his bloodstream like so many microscopic jihadis, primping him for an agonizing death: his alveoli withering, red corpuscles robbed of their vital O2, pink foam issuing from his nostrils, toes and fingers turning blue-green — and most deliciously of all, he’d remain conscious of his imminent defeat, of the life (which he’d never deserved in the first place) draining by degrees from his wicked, orange, bloated, supine carcass…

Except… wait a minute… what the hell…? How could it be! Late Sunday he somehow arose from his bed-of-death, ordered pizza (with meat!) for a thousand imps and demons camped outside Walter Reed Hospital, and walked under his own power (!) into a limousine to take a ride around the block and wave at his unholy minions! The cheek of this man!

CNN had a whack attack. Brian Stelter was beside himself, hinting that sinister forces had punked the network, and all the other righteous Resistance cadres, and that Mr. Trump could be endangering every federal employee down to the enlisted men posted overseas by venturing from his sickroom. The New York Times went farther afield (of course), declaring that “the murky and shifting narrative of his illness was rewritten again with grim new details.” Nicely put by an outfit that has come to specialize in shifting narratives!

And indeed, the new Resistance narrative demands to know just exactly when did the president start to feel ill? Did he, perhaps on-purpose, haul his ailing, hulking, scheming Golem ass into the Cleveland debate venue with the hope of infecting his rival, delicate Ol’ White Joe Biden? Did he recklessly put at risk the White House staff, dignitaries and luminaries coming and going, their family members, associates, underlings, servants, children? Did he threaten the global order, world peace, the fate of humanity?

So now, a keening wail of lamentation rings out across the land at Mr. Trump’s possible, dastardly recovery. How dare he! (read more)

2020
-10-05 d
THE COVID-CON III

Coronavirus vaccine trial subjects report extreme exhaustion, shortness of breath, day-long headaches and shaking so violently that one of them cracked a tooth

Get ready for the depopulation kill shots that cause severe neurological damage and lobotomize anyone stupid enough to take them. Even mainstream media outlet CNBC.com is now reporting that vaccine trials conducted by Moderna and Pfizer are producing extreme side effects in trial subjects.

“High fever, body aches, headaches and exhaustion are some of the symptoms participants in Moderna and Pfizer’s coronavirus vaccine trials say they felt after receiving the shots,” reports CNBC:

Luke Hutchison woke up in the middle of the night with chills and a fever after taking the Covid-19 booster shot in Moderna’s vaccine trial. Another coronavirus vaccine trial participant, testing Pfizer’s candidate, similarly woke up with chills, shaking so hard he cracked a tooth after taking the second dose.

High fever, body aches, bad headaches and exhaustion are just some of the symptoms five participants in two of the leading coronavirus vaccine trials say they felt after receiving the shots.

CNBC goes on to explain that the study participants then claimed all the pain, “was worth it.” Worth it for what? For a pandemic that’s already over for people under the age of 70?

These are all symptoms of neurological damage occurring in real time

Here’s a more detailed description of the side effects reported by a pro-science, pro-vaccine trial participant:

After getting the first shot on Aug. 18, he said he felt a little under the weather for several days with a low-grade fever. He got his second shot at a clinic on Sept. 15. Eight hours later, he said he was bed bound with a fever of over 101, shakes, chills, a pounding headache and shortness of breath. He said the pain in his arm, where he received the shot, felt like a “goose egg on my shoulder.” He hardly slept that night, recording that his temperature was higher than 100 degrees for five hours.

After 12 hours, Hutchison said he felt back to normal and his energy levels returned. Having signed a lengthy consent form, Hutchison was aware that he might experience symptoms. But he was still struck by the severity and duration, tweeting on Sept. 16 that he experienced “full on Covid-like symptoms.”

Does this sound like a “safe” vaccine to administer to hundreds of millions of people? Full-on Covid-like symptoms?

What CNBC isn’t saying, of course, is that all these symptoms — extreme exhaustion, long duration headaches and violent shaking — are signs of neurological damage happening in real time.

These are obvious signs that a kind of vaccine lobotomy is taking place, causing permanent, long-term neurological damage to the trial participants (who may already be brain damaged to begin with, as they volunteered for these medical experiments). (read more)

2020-10-05 c
THE COVID-CON II

Corporate Media Is Vomiting Trump Coronavirus Reporting All Over The Bed
 
The latest news cycle over President Trump's COVID-19 diagnosis illustrates yet again how destructive the U.S. corporate media are to national unity and a clear understanding of reality.

The latest news cycle over President Trump’s COVID-19 diagnosis illustrates yet again how destructive the U.S. corporate media are to national unity and a clear understanding of reality.

While we are all aware that COVID-19 can be a truly devastating and deadly disease for some, despite the volume of media coverage dedicated to it in the past seven months, the American public still lacks crucial context for understanding Trump’s diagnosis. Not only has major media coverage not brought clarity, but it has also, as usual, obscured reality. This is especially harmful to a story with such significant potential ramifications for the nation and world.
...
Look, viruses aren’t political. They don’t infect only Republicans. They don’t infest anti-mask rallies and avoid Black Lives Matter rallies. They can even infect people who religiously wear masks and wash their hands constantly. Just ask health care workers.

It is not a moral failing to get sick. Unless someone deliberately infects himself — and such crazies do exist, but they are very few — an infection is an accident. The world is full of accidents. There is no way to make life completely safe, and sometimes attempting to do so may create more harm than good. This is an ancient truth.

President Trump knew the risks of staying in public, and he chose to face those risks along with the American people he leads, rather than hiding masked in the White House basement. There is something to be said for a leader getting in the trenches with his troops during a war despite the risks to his safety. It could even be called courage.

To many in our press, however, courage is only for fools. This attitude is precisely the opposite of every historic moral framework. Every serious moral philosophy teaches people how to suffer rather than how to avoid suffering at all costs. Thus in wiser eras, the people who made personal comfort their highest priority in life, and let fear drive their actions, were called selfish, hedonistic cowards and despised. (read more)

2020-10-05 b
THE COVID-CON I

And a plague shall cover the land of Trump

The anti-Trump lobby views Covid as divine retribution for the masses’ blasphemy against experts.

This is a moment that ‘feels Biblical’, says Maureen Dowd at the New York Times. She is talking, of course, about President Trump being struck down by the plague, by Covid. Going full Leviticus, Dowd marvels at the karmic retribution of this chief doubter of Covid now being infected by Covid, of this blasphemer against experts now suffering the fate that experts warned would befall him if he didn’t comply with their rituals of mask-wearing and lockdowns. ‘The implacable virus has come to his door’, Dowd writes, giving Covid-19 sentience, power almost: the power to smite its unbelievers. Implacable: that means something which cannot be appeased. That’s Covid, apparently: the insatiable beast, the terrible god, who will brook no questioning.

Dowd isn’t the only Trump-basher getting all Biblical over Covid’s visitation upon the White House. Across the commentariat and the Twittersphere there is much Schadenfreude that the man who scoffed at the idea that he should change his entire life in response to a virus must now meekly, weakly watch as the virus has ‘come to his door’. ‘It’s hard to overlook the symbolism of Trump’s positive test’, says one writer. The president who ‘recklessly and flagrantly disregarded science and factual information’ has had his viral comeuppance. We have some ‘justification’ for considering Trump’s contraction of coronavirus ‘to be a kind of karmic retribution’, says a writer for the Guardian. It is retribution, he suggests, for Trump’s ‘irresponsible pursuit of partisan advantage over the national interest’.

‘Karmic retribution’ is of course only a slightly more PC, hippyish way to say what people in medieval times thought about plagues: that they were divine punishment. Punishment of avaricious individuals or of entire sinful communities. A key metaphor in this pre-modern understanding of plagues-as-retribution was that these judgmental diseases were inescapable. No one – not Pharaohs, not the wealthy, not even a reality-TV star who becomes the most powerful man in the world – could hide from their pox-ridden reprimands. As Susan Sontag writes in her masterful AIDS and its Metaphors (1989), the pre-modern view of disease as retribution was an ‘essential vehicle for the most pessimistic reading’ of humanity’s capacity. ‘[T]he standard plague story was of inexorability, inescapability’, she wrote. This insistence on inescapability, on the plague as discoverer of all sinners, wherever they cower and lurk, infuses the cynically joyous commentary on Trump’s illness. ‘Fate leads the willing, Seneca said, while the unwilling get dragged’, writes Dowd. Fate. That pre-Renaissance idea. It’s back.
...
And so shall a plague cover the land of Trump. That is what these people are saying. They have imbued Covid with moral power and even political authority. For the sins that Trump is apparently being judged for, apparently being sickened for, are fundamentally political ones. It is not merely that he has refused to wear a mask or has questioned the wisdom of lockdowns. Enforced masking and the shutdown of economic life that we have seen across much of the Western world are strategies about which it is entirely legitimate (or ought to be) to have differing points of view, to have reasoned, rational debates about efficacy and impact. No, Trump’s chief sin is a larger one than that: it is that he has bristled against the rule of experts and the contemporary liberal orthodoxy that says science has all the answers to our political and moral problems. This is the true thoughtcrime for which Covid has apparently infected Trump. (read more)

2020-10-05 a
CIA (CYA) Obstruction

Intel Sources: CIA Director Gina Haspel Banking On Trump Loss To Keep Russiagate Documents Hidden
 
Haspel is hoping Trump loses his re-election bid so she can run out the clock on Russiagate document declassifications, multiple intelligence community officials told The Federalist.

Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Director Gina Haspel is personally blocking the declassification and release of key Russiagate documents in the hopes that President Donald Trump will lose his re-election bid, multiple senior U.S. officials told The Federalist. The officials said Haspel, who served under former CIA Director John Brennan as the spy agency’s station chief in London in 2016 and 2017, is concerned that the declassification and release of documents detailing what the CIA was doing during the 2016 election and the 2017 transition could embarrass the CIA and potentially even implicate Haspel herself.

“Haspel and [FBI Director Christopher] Wray both want Trump to lose, because it’s the only chance they have of keeping their jobs,” one senior intelligence official told The Federalist. “They’re banking on Biden winning and keeping them where they are.” (read more)

2020
-10-04 d
Mink Link Sinks Minks

Covid-19 tears through mink population in Denmark: Up to 1 million to be culled as human transmission panic grows

Fear of animal-to-human transmission has pushed the world’s largest producer of mink products to order the slaughter of up to one million animals, as fur farms prove to be a hotbed of Covid.

The Danish government announced on Thursday that up to 100 mink herds must be culled to reduce the risk to humans. The cull applies to all mink herds where Covid-19 has been found as well as farms situated within eight kilometers (five miles) of a farm with infected mink. It is believed that all the affected mink farms are in the North Jutland region.

Minister of Food, Agriculture and Fisheries Mogens Jensen said they are taking the situation in North Jutland very seriously as cases multiply faster than elsewhere in the country. (read more)

2020-10-04 c
THE COVID-CON II

Lewandowski: Nothing stopped Trump before; COVID-19 won't now

I spent the better part of the 2016 campaign season on the road. Well, not just on the road: On the road, in the air, on the ground, at the rallies, inside campaign offices, outside caucus sites, in town halls, around polling stations, backstage at TV studios — you get the point.

Running campaigns and advancing political causes was how I made my living. It was the industry I knew. The nouns might change, but the verbs always stay the same. Very little, I thought, could ever surprise me.

But as he’s done to so many throughout his career, Donald Trump proved me wrong.

It was more than his knack for presenting the right message at the exact right time. It went well beyond the skill he showed in merging Donald Trump, the billionaire real estate mogul and TV star, with Donald Trump, the candidate for President of the United States who people could believe in.

The edge he had, above any candidate in American history, was drive. Never had I seen a fiercer, more aggressive campaigner.

I kid you not — I got more sleep in the final month before I agreed to manage the campaign than in the entire 18 months on the campaign trail with him. And he was never one to even think about slowing things down.

Actually, the one time I made the mistake of napping for 20 minutes on the plane between events, he was happy to remind me that if I couldn’t handle the job, I could be replaced.

Let me say this as clearly as I can — there is nothing that can stop this guy: (read more)

2020-10-04 b
THE COVID-CON I

Stats Hold a Surprise: Lockdowns May Have Had Little Effect on COVID-19 Spread

Data suggest mandatory lockdowns exacted a great cost, with a questionable effect on transmission.

In 1932, Supreme Court justice Louis Brandeis famously called the states “laboratories of democracy.” Different states can test out different policies, and they can learn from each other. That proved true in 2020. Governors in different states responded to the COVID-19 pandemic at different times and in different ways. Some states, such as California, ordered sweeping shutdowns. Others, such as Florida, took a more targeted approach. Still others, such as South Dakota, dispensed information but had no lockdowns at all.

As a result, we can now compare outcomes in different states, to test the question no one wants to ask: Did the lockdowns make a difference?

If lockdowns really altered the course of this pandemic, then coronavirus case counts should have clearly dropped whenever and wherever lockdowns took place. The effect should have been obvious, though with a time lag. It takes time for new coronavirus infections to be officially counted, so we would expect the numbers to plummet as soon as the waiting time was over.

How long? New infections should drop on day one and be noticed about ten or eleven days from the beginning of the lockdown. By day six, the number of people with first symptoms of infection should plummet (six days is the average time for symptoms to appear). By day nine or ten, far fewer people would be heading to doctors with worsening symptoms. If COVID-19 tests were performed right away, we would expect the positives to drop clearly on day ten or eleven (assuming quick turnarounds on tests).

To judge from the evidence, the answer is clear: Mandated lockdowns had little effect on the spread of the coronavirus. (read more)

2020-10-04 a
Blatant Media Bias

Media continue to cover up Joe Biden’s mental decline

Get well soon, Mr. President!

But with President Trump unfortunately sidelined at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center for a few days, do you think the media will now be able to devote more attention to examining the incoherent babbling of Dementia Joe Biden?

Nah, won’t happen. The media have been ignoring and/or covering up Biden’s obvious mental decline for more than a year now, even though the video evidence is at their fingertips.

So while Trump is recuperating, let us consider some of Joe’s recent Greatest Hits. Since it’s the big story of the weekend, let’s get the veep’s latest takes on the virus.

During the two-on-one debate, Biden attacked Trump’s handling of the Panic. As always, Biden’s grasp of the facts was, well, different. All dialogue guaranteed verbatim:

“By the way, the 20, the 200 million, the 200,000 people that have died on his watch, they — have many of those and and have survived?”

How many indeed? (read more)

2020
-10-02 d
Somali Ballot Harvesting Scheme

James O’Keefe Gets Locked Out of Twitter After Uncovering Democrat Ballot Harvesting Scheme

Big Brother rears its ugly head again.

Project Veritas founder James O’Keefe was recently locked out of his Twitter account for a nine-month-old tweet that supposedly violated a copyright shortly after he uncovered a Democrat ballot harvesting scheme operating out of Minneapolis, Minn. tied to Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN).

The revelations demonstrated how the Somali-dominated areas of Minneapolis are rife with fraud, showing how importing the third world can negatively impact electoral integrity in the U.S.

O’Keefe was temporarily locked out of his account and unable to promote the ballot harvesting story for a short period. However, he eventually had functionality restored to his Twitter account. He believes the censorship is proving what a massive impact he is having in exposing the globalist establishment. (read more)

2020-10-02 c
THE COVID-CON III

Trump Heads To Walter Reed Military Hospital As "Precautionary Measure"

Update (1720ET): President Trump will be spending the next few days at Walter Reed military hospital as a "precaution", according to the White House.

All day, Trump's senior staff have been reluctant to comment on his condition, beyond saying that both he and the First Lady have mild symptoms, until roughly a half hour ago when Trump's doctor delivered an update, saying the president felt "fatigued, but in good spirits" (read more)

2020-10-02 b
THE COVID-CON II

Trump Faking Covid? Michael Moore, Other Leftists Peddle New Conspiracy Theory

Filmmaker Michael Moore peddled a conspiracy theory on Thursday night, suggesting that President Trump might be "lying about having COVID-19" in order to "gain sympathy."

"He’s an evil genius and I raise the possibility of him lying about having COVID-19 to prepare us and counteract his game," Moore posted to Facebook, just hours after President Trump announced his positive test result "He knows being sick tends to gain one sympathy. He’s not above weaponizing this."

"Democrats, liberals, the media and others have always been wrong to simply treat him as a buffoon and a dummy and a jackass. Yes, he is all those things. But he’s also canny. He’s clever. He outfoxed Comey. He outfoxed Mueller. He outfoxed 20 Republicans in the GOP primary and then did the same to the Democrats, winning the White House despite receiving fewer votes than his opponent," Moore continued.

Moore also suggested (in all caps): "HE MAY USE THIS TO PUSH FOR DELAYING/POSTPONING THE ELECTION."

And "He may use his Covid as a pretext to drop out of the race and move Pence to the top of the ticket. Pence would temporarily become President, and then Pence could pre-emptively pardon Trump for all of his crimes."

Meanwhile, as Summit News notes, the 'Trump faking it' conspiracy theory is gaining steam. (read more)

2020-10-02 a
THE COVID-CON I

Hot Mic Moment: Lawmakers Admit Masks Are All "Political Theater"

In a hot mic moment, Pennsylvania lawmakers admitted that the masking ritual is all political theatre. The huge scam is being pushed on us from all sides, and it is beyond time to wake up to what is going on.

Pennsylvania State Representative Wendy Ullman and Governor Tom Wolf were caught joking off-camera about taking their masks off just before they spoke at a press conference touting the need to defend Obamacare during COVID-19. Politics is smoke in mirrors and a distraction at this point. Nothing more. The goal is the New World Order, and it’s being rolled out as I type this.

The admission that masks are nothing more than “political theatre,” took place yesterday. (read more)

2020
-10-01 d
INTOLERANT LIBERAL RACISTS - II

The media’s mad obsession with white supremacy

It isn’t the Proud Boys who have been rioting for the past two months.

Everyone agrees that the first televised debate between Donald Trump and Joe Biden was atrocious. Like sitting through ‘an argument about an arcane procedural rule during a senior bingo night at a nursing home in purgatory’, as one columnist put it. But the media’s follow-up on the debate hasn’t been much better. The way the media have obsessed over what Trump said (or didn’t say) about so-called white supremacy confirms that Trump and Biden aren’t the only ones who are incapable of engaging in an honest, reasoned discussion about the problems facing America.

Trump and white supremacy have become the main talking points in the post-debate fallout. From CNN to the BBC, and of course across the Trump-loathing Twittersphere, all the talk is of why Trump won’t condemn the white-supremacist groups that are apparently tearing apart the soul of America. During the debate, Trump was asked if he would condemn the Proud Boys, the stupid right-wing gang founded by Gavin McInnes to defend Western values (if these chinless wonders are the last line of defence for Western civilisation, then we’re even more screwed than I thought). Trump said he doesn’t know who the Proud Boys are but he would be happy to condemn them if they are indeed white supremacists. (read more)

2020-10-01 c
INTOLERANT LIBERAL RACISTS - I

Business Leaders Who Reject Woke Culture To Be 'First People Lined Up Against The Wall And Shot In Revolution': Ex-Twitter CEO

If one needed any further evidence of Twitter's far-left corporate culture, look no further than former CEO Dick Costolo - who went full Bolshevik in a Thursday Twitter rant warning that "me-first capitalists" who don't agree with injecting political activism into the workplace will be "the first people lined up against the wall and shot in the revolution," adding "I'll happily provide video commentary." (read more)

2020-10-01 b
THE COVID-CON II

The Unscientific Attack On The Science Of Dr. Scott Atlas

The news media until recently had rarely criticized the medical advice of experts - especially those who worked for federal bureaucracies, international organizations or elite universities.

Yet the much-praised Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director-general of the World Health Organization, has demonstrably weakened the effort to fight COVID-19.

During the critical initial weeks of the virus’s spread, Tedros parroted Chinese propaganda. He falsely assured a complacent world that the virus was likely not transmissible between humans and did not warrant travel bans. That Tedros was the first WHO director not to have a medical degree was seldom cited by the media.

Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel is known to the public for his past advocacy of the Obama administration’s Affordable Care Act. Although he now advises 77-year-old presidential candidate Joe Biden, Emanuel once wrote an article for The Atlantic titled “Why I hope to die at 75,” contending that that life after age 75 is, and should be, mostly over — now an eerie idea in a time of a pandemic that targets the elderly.

Emanuel has often weighed in on the COVID-19 pandemic, sometimes in overly pessimistic fashion by suggesting that some acquired collective immunity and a viable vaccine were not likely to come soon.

Yet Emanuel also has been largely exempt from media criticism. No reporters have questioned his epidemiological expertise despite his background as an oncologist specializing in breast cancer.

The esteemed Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, has given conflicting advice on the use of masks, quarantining and the methods of viral transmission.

Yet such inconsistency is either ignored or chalked up by the media to the usual learning curve of dealing with a new epidemic.

So why — other than politics — is there now a concerted media attack on Dr. Scott Atlas, an adviser to the Trump administration on COVID-19 policy? (read more)

2020-10-01 a
THE COVID-CON I

Covid and the collapse of reason

How we got here, and how we might get back to normality.

On 23 March, Boris Johnson locked down the country. It would last for three weeks, he said, and it had one simple aim: to prevent the NHS from being overwhelmed by Covid cases. Six months on, where are we? A quarter of the population is still under lockdown. The rest of us are living under the most stringent social rules in living memory. Students in Scotland and Manchester are locked in their halls of residence and are prevented by actual police officers from going outside, visiting a pub or returning to their family home. Riot police are violently shutting down anyone who protests against this new authoritarianism, as we witnessed in Trafalgar Square on Saturday. And the economy is in freefall: we are heading for the largest recession on record, with millions of jobs on the line.

How has this happened? How did we go from a three-week effort to protect the NHS from a sudden spike in coronavirus cases to a forever lockdown; to the reorganisation of political, social and economic life around a novel virus; to a situation where fresher students are putting signs saying ‘HELP’ on the windows of their dorm rooms fearful they will be arrested if they leave? This question needs urgent answering. Because the only way we will get out of this crisis – this crisis of freedom, of autonomy, and of reason itself – is if we know how we got into it. Understanding the origins of this unprecedented reorganisation of the relationship between the state and society is essential if we are to find a way back to normality.

If we were to assess the state of the nation right now, we would find that it is not good. Liberty, democracy and reasoned discussion have all suffered greatly over the past six months. We now live in a nation where arbitrary rules are introduced by government decree. (read more)

_____________________

Permission is hereby granted to any and all to copy and paste any entry on this page and convey it electronically along with its URL, http://www.usaapay.com/comm.html

______________________

2020 - September 16 - 30
 ARCHIVE

2020 - September 1 - 15
 ARCHIVE

2020 - August 16 - 31
 ARCHIVE

2020 - August 1 - 15
 ARCHIVE

2020 - July 16 - 31
 ARCHIVE

2020
- JULY 1 - 15
 ARCHIVE

2020
-
JUNE 16 - 30
 ARCHIVE

2020
- JUNE 1 - 15
 ARCHIVE

2020 - MAY 16 - 31
 ARCHIVE

2020
- MAY 1 - 15
 ARCHIVE

2020
- APRIL 16 - 30
 ARCHIVE

2020 - APRIL 1 - 15
 ARCHIVE


2020 - MARCH
 ARCHIVE


2020 - FEBRUARY
 ARCHIVE

2020 - JANUARY

 ARCHIVE


...
 News and facts for those sick and tired of the National Propaganda Radio version of reality.


- Unlike all the legacy media, our editorial offices are not in Langley, Virginia.


- You won't catch us fiddling while Western Civilization burns.


-
Close the windows so you don't hear the mockingbird outside, grab a beer, and see what the hell is going on as we witness the controlled demolition of our society.


- The truth usually comes from one source. It comes quietly, with no heralds. Untruths come from multiple sources, in unison, and incessantly.


- The loudest partisans belong to the smallest parties. The media exaggerate their size and influence.


THE ARCHIVE PAGE


No Thanks
If you let them redefine words, they will control language.
If you let them control language, they will control thoughts.
If you let them control thoughts, they will control you. They will own you.

© 2020 - thenotimes.com - All Rights Reserved