| WELCOME |
|
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- 2020-10-31 f "the severe acceleration of intelligence community propaganda and interference in our domestic politics" Greenwald: The Aftermath Of My Move Back
To Independent Journalism
Interviews Discussing My Departure, Media Culture, the Need For Trans-Ideological Dialogue, and Intelligence Community Propaganda The last twenty-hours have been exhilarating. I had no idea what to expect when I decided to leave The Intercept and move my journalism here, but the outpouring of support — both words of encouragement from readers and those subscribing and supporting my work here — has been beyond what I can describe and it is incredibly gratifying and appreciated. Thank you to everyone who has subscribed and reached out. This morning I discussed various aspects of my resignation from The Intercept on the outstanding YouTube program Rising with Krystal Ball and Saagar Enjeti. We discussed more in-depth my rationale for leaving, my response to various criticism and accusations from former colleagues and other assorted journalists, why I speak to both conservative and liberal media outlets, and what this episode reflects about broader media pathologies: (video) Last night, I was on with Tucker Carlson to discuss not only the reporting of mine that was censored, but also the severe acceleration of intelligence community propaganda and interference in our domestic politics and the increasingly restrictive media and political climate: (video) My appearances on Tucker Carlson’s programs typically provoke some controversy and even consternation among some of my long-term readers on the left. In addition to discussing my rationale for doing so in that above Rising interview, I also explained my reasoning on the Rolling Stone podcast “Useful Idiots” with Matt Taibbi and Katie Halper. Those interested can hear part of my answer in these two short clips: (video) Finally, for those who did not see it, I appeared earlier this week, for the first time, on Joe Rogan’s program. It was an extraordinary three-hour discussion that covered a very wide range of topics, from my experience in reporting on the Snowden story and our exposés last year in Brazil, the state of free speech generally in the U.S. and in journalism, regulation of our discourse by unaccountable Silicon Valley overlords, the 2020 election, the need for dialogue across partisan and ideological lines, and a great deal of personal introspection and examination. Having done the show, I understand much more why he has built up such a massive and loyal audience. It is very worth thinking about why that has happened and what it says about what is missing from our media ecosystem (we discussed that as well): (video) The last twenty-four hours have been intense, exciting, draining and so energizing — not just for me but for my family as well. The predictable attacks from journalists trapped in repressive institutions were easily endured as a result of the far more organic and principled support I received. I am very enthusiastic about what is possible on this platform and the journalism it will enable. (read more) 2020-10-31 e BLACK AND WHITE - II "Time To Switch Hands" - Pro-Trump
Candidate Kim Klacik Says Liberals Ruined
Baltimore
Baltimore congressional candidate Kimberly Klacik could be the next face of the Republican Party - and if she wins a Congressional seat on Nov. 3, it would be the first time in more than fifty years Republicans controlled Maryland's 7th District. Klacik's popularity exploded after President Trump shared her campaign video on Twitter, which criticized the Democratic leadership of Baltimore City with a huge African American population (see: here & here). She even appeared at the Republican National Convention and made several television appearances, raising $6.5 million from Jul. 1 through Sept. 30. ... Klacik is running for late Rep. Elijah Cummings' old seat in a race against Rep. Kweisi Mfume. She routinely accuses Democrats in Baltimore of abandoning the black community. Most of her fame comes from videos of her speaking to the camera as she walks the poorest and most dangerous neighborhoods of the city, or maybe even the country, littered with abandoned homes, dormant factories, and opioid clinics. The District is a Democratic stronghold, and her opponent, Mfume, recently declined to debate Klacik on local television. So broadcaster Fox 45-Baltimore, owned by Sinclair Broadcast Group., decided to hold a conversation with the young black Republican candidate. At the beginning of the conversation, Klacik told Fox 45's Kai Jackson: "Democrats have controlled the Baltimore City area for 53 years;" expanding on that idea, she said it's time to "switch hands," referring to the possibility she can win the district seat to usher in a new era of Republican control. The video ends with Klacik outlining how Baltimore County residents are too scared to visit the city because decades of failed Democratic leadership has resulted in surging violent crime, out of control homicides, and an opioid crisis that has decimated the area. ... Klacik is not alone - other black republicans have launched political campaigns in Democratic cities across the country in the hopes of winning a seat in Congress. (read more) 2020-10-31 d BLACK AND WHITE - I Whitlock: White Liberals Are ‘Threatened
by’ Independence, Self-Determination of Black
People — ‘They Want Us Dependent upon Them’
Friday on FNC’s “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” Outkick.com’s Jason Whitlock weighed in on the backlash some high-profile Black Americans were facing for supporting Republican President Donald Trump’s reelection bid instead of his Democratic Party counterpart, former Vice President Joe Biden. Whitlock asserted there were white liberals, like Chelsea Handler, who were treated by the “independence” of black people. Partial transcript as follows: CARLSON: Jason, why just the kind of mania about trying to force certain people to stay in their prescribed lane? Why not just kind of ignore it. Let it go. Like, you know, some rapper wants to vote for Trump. Okay, who cares? But they do care. Why? JASON WHITLOCK, OUTKICK.COM: Oh, because white liberals just being very honest, like Chelsea Handler, think it’s their job to control, maintain, and limit the amount of freedom that black people enjoy here in America. We are supposed to be beholden and dependent upon them and it threatens them when people like Lil Wayne, Ice Cube, 50 Cent and any of these guys stray from their prescription or course of action that they want us to take. It threatens them. And it is her job as basically a modern-day overseer to whip us back in line, and it really is that simple. 2020-10-31 c THE COVID-CON III - Masks Don't Stop Virus These 12 Graphs Show Mask Mandates Do
Nothing To Stop COVID
No matter how strictly mask laws are enforced nor the level of mask compliance the population follows, cases all fall and rise around the same time. Masks have become a political tool and a talisman. When COVID-19 hit, governments panicked and created enormous fear. The Centers for Disease Control currently estimates a COVID-19 survival rate of 99.99 percent for people younger than 50, but the damage created by the panic was too great to undo. It is likely that some politicians eventually realized their mistake and needed a way to back-pedal without admitting their lockdowns were a policy disaster. Their solution was for people to put any old piece of cloth across their face and magically believe that it’s okay to go out shopping again. Masks are not merely a small inconvenience. They have inadvertently become a key impediment to returning to a more normal life, a desirable goal for those seeking to twist the pandemic for political and electoral purposes. Masks dehumanize us, and ironically serve as a constant reminder that we should be afraid. ... Faking ‘Science’ to Achieve Political Goals These same politicians and health officials are so desperate to make people believe in masks that they doctor charts to make their case, even when their own data actually undermines them. So what is the actual science behind masks? Let’s begin by reviewing the leading scientific studies. (read more) 2020-10-31 b THE COVID-CON II - Mainstream UK Newspaper Calls It Sinister Conspiracy or not, this Covid strategy
is deeply sinister
We are still being discouraged from asking simple questions and engaging in honest debate In three years of writing for The Telegraph, I have never received so many comments and emails from a single story. In it I confessed, such was my exasperation over the UK’s ever more nonsensical lockdown strategy, that I was almost starting to believe this pandemic really could be a conspiracy.... (read more) 2020-10-31 a THE COVID-CON I - Parisians Escape Macron the Madman's Edict Escape from Paris: City is gridlocked as
tens of thousands flee, stations are packed,
violent protests break out and shelves are
stripped ahead of month-long lockdown that BANS
travel
•Thousands of Parisians caused massive traffic jams as they tried to flee the French capital for the country •Huge numbers of locals attempted a mass exodus in a bid to avoid the start of the second national lockdown •Many were enjoying their final night of freedom in France ahead of new lockdown restrictions from Friday •Draconian measures will see people needing documents to show their reasonable excuse for leaving home Tens of thousands of Parisians last night caused massive traffic jams in a desperate attempt to flee the French capital ahead of the start of Emmanuel Macron's new national shutdown. Video posted to Twitter shows huge numbers of Parisians attempting a mass exodus out of the city in a bid to avoid the 9pm curfew and the start of the second lockdown from midnight. The night air was filled with the sound of blaring car horns while social media users estimated that Parisians had created 'hundreds of miles' of gridlock to escape to their second homes in the country. Revellers also seized the opportunity to spend one last night with friends and family last night before bars and restaurants are closed as the French government plunges the country back into lockdown. Meanwhile French people emptied supermarkets in a repeat of the panic-buying that swept Europe in March as Parisians and other city dwellers prepared for a month in confinement. Shoppers stocked up on pasta and toilet roll while people queued outside hairdressers for a final trim. Office workers in the capital's business district hauled their equipment to cars and trains in preparation for WFH. Emmanuel Macron's draconian measures are due to be enforced until at least December 1, with people required to carry documents justifying their reason for leaving home that will be subject to police checks. (read more) 2020-10-30 c Foiling the Devil and His Minions The Great Reset: Globalists
using the virus to destroy the 'Old World Order'
2020-10-30
bSpectator Columnist James Delingpole says the World Economic Forum is seeking to use COVID-19 to reshape the world with its "Great Reset" in what globalists see as a chance to destroy capitalism and the "old world order". "I started off this pandemic thinking it was just people being a bit stupid and it would all pass, but now I realise this is organised," he said. "When you hear the phrase "Build Back Better"... this is the code phrase for the great reset of our lives. "They don't want us to own anything, it will be provided for us. Who does own the property? Who's renting it out to us? Some shadowy elite. This is a takeover by the technocrats." Mr Delingpole said the reset involved The World Economic Forum combined with UN Agenda 2030 - formerly Agenda 21 - is a complete transformation of the world's societies on Communist or Fascist lines. (see more) Speaking of the Devil ... Just in TIME The Great Reset
The COVID-19 pandemic has provided a unique opportunity to think about the kind of future we want. TIME partnered with the World Economic Forum to ask leading thinkers to share ideas for how to transform the way we live and work.
(Or, better still, see above a critique of the Great Reset) 2020-10-30 a A Modern Epistle Those
observing the long descent of our civilization into
chaos, accelerating this year with a universal fear
campaign rooted in a pandemic of lies, have sought
its origins in the historical record. Some see the
beginnings of this unraveling of civilization in the
French Revolution. Others date the beginning of the
end to the writings of Karl Marx and Friedrich
Engels. Yet others blame Gnostics, Illuminati,
nihilists, Jews, sybarites or libertines for this
decline.
I reduce all of it to a struggle between good and evil. It’s not that I am drawn to Manichean theology or see everything as either black or white, with no gradations of gray; it is because I seek ultimate causes that I see things so starkly. Civilization is ultimately possible because of two conditions: a universally agreed moral code and nuclear families. Yes, a reliable source of water, fertile soil, a fishery or animal husbandry, agriculture (and agricultural surpluses), trade and commerce, a stable currency, and peaceful relations with neighboring groups assist the process. But that process can neither start nor continue without the ultimate good of morality and stable families. Human agency can undermine or destroy components of civilization. However, only ultimate evil can strike at the root of ultimate good. Though I am not a Roman Catholic, a 25 October epistle by Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò addressed to Donald J. Trump reinforces my understanding of our world and identifies the true enemies of humanity. The epistle: Mr. President, Allow me to address you at this hour in which the fate of the whole world is being threatened by a global conspiracy against God and humanity. I write to you as an Archbishop, as a Successor of the Apostles, as the former Apostolic Nuncio to the United States of America. I am writing to you in the midst of the silence of both civil and religious authorities. May you accept these words of mine as the “voice of one crying out in the desert” (Jn 1:23). As I said when I wrote my letter to you in June, this historical moment sees the forces of Evil aligned in a battle without quarter against the forces of Good; forces of Evil that appear powerful and organized as they oppose the children of Light, who are disoriented and disorganized, abandoned by their temporal and spiritual leaders. Daily we sense the attacks multiplying of those who want to destroy the very basis of society: the natural family, respect for human life, love of country, freedom of education and business. We see heads of nations and religious leaders pandering to this suicide of Western culture and its Christian soul, while the fundamental rights of citizens and believers are denied in the name of a health emergency that is revealing itself more and more fully as instrumental to the establishment of an inhuman faceless tyranny. A global plan called the Great Reset is underway. Its architect is a global élite that wants to subdue all of humanity, imposing coercive measures with which to drastically limit individual freedoms and those of entire populations. In several nations this plan has already been approved and financed; in others it is still in an early stage. Behind the world leaders who are the accomplices and executors of this infernal project, there are unscrupulous characters who finance the World Economic Forum and Event 201, promoting their agenda. The purpose of the Great Reset is the imposition of a health dictatorship aiming at the imposition of liberticidal measures, hidden behind tempting promises of ensuring a universal income and cancelling individual debt. The price of these concessions from the International Monetary Fund will be the renunciation of private property and adherence to a program of vaccination against Covid-19 and Covid-21 promoted by Bill Gates with the collaboration of the main pharmaceutical groups. Beyond the enormous economic interests that motivate the promoters of the Great Reset, the imposition of the vaccination will be accompanied by the requirement of a health passport and a digital ID, with the consequent contact tracing of the population of the entire world. Those who do not accept these measures will be confined in detention camps or placed under house arrest, and all their assets will be confiscated. Mr. President, I imagine that you are already aware that in some countries the Great Reset will be activated between the end of this year and the first trimester of 2021. For this purpose, further lockdowns are planned, which will be officially justified by a supposed second and third wave of the pandemic. You are well aware of the means that have been deployed to sow panic and legitimize draconian limitations on individual liberties, artfully provoking a world-wide economic crisis. In the intentions of its architects, this crisis will serve to make the recourse of nations to the Great Reset irreversible, thereby giving the final blow to a world whose existence and very memory they want to completely cancel. But this world, Mr. President, includes people, affections, institutions, faith, culture, traditions, and ideals: people and values that do not act like automatons, who do not obey like machines, because they are endowed with a soul and a heart, because they are tied together by a spiritual bond that draws its strength from above, from that God that our adversaries want to challenge, just as Lucifer did at the beginning of time with his “non serviam.” Many people – as we well know – are annoyed by this reference to the clash between Good and Evil and the use of “apocalyptic” overtones, which according to them exasperates spirits and sharpens divisions. It is not surprising that the enemy is angered at being discovered just when he believes he has reached the citadel he seeks to conquer undisturbed. What is surprising, however, is that there is no one to sound the alarm. The reaction of the deep state to those who denounce its plan is broken and incoherent, but understandable. Just when the complicity of the mainstream media had succeeded in making the transition to the New World Order almost painless and unnoticed, all sorts of deceptions, scandals and crimes are coming to light. Until a few months ago, it was easy to smear as “conspiracy theorists” those who denounced these terrible plans, which we now see being carried out down to the smallest detail. No one, up until last February, would ever have thought that, in all of our cities, citizens would be arrested simply for wanting to walk down the street, to breathe, to want to keep their business open, to want to go to church on Sunday. Yet now it is happening all over the world, even in picture-postcard Italy that many Americans consider to be a small enchanted country, with its ancient monuments, its churches, its charming cities, its characteristic villages. And while the politicians are barricaded inside their palaces promulgating decrees like Persian satraps, businesses are failing, shops are closing, and people are prevented from living, traveling, working, and praying. The disastrous psychological consequences of this operation are already being seen, beginning with the suicides of desperate entrepreneurs and of our children, segregated from friends and classmates, told to follow their classes while sitting at home alone in front of a computer. In Sacred Scripture, Saint Paul speaks to us of “the one who opposes” the manifestation of the mystery of iniquity, the kathèkon (2 Thess 2:6-7). In the religious sphere, this obstacle to evil is the Church, and in particular the papacy; in the political sphere, it is those who impede the establishment of the New World Order. As is now clear, the one who occupies the Chair of Peter has betrayed his role from the very beginning in order to defend and promote the globalist ideology, supporting the agenda of the deep church, who chose him from its ranks. Mr. President, you have clearly stated that you want to defend the nation – One Nation under God, fundamental liberties, and non-negotiable values that are denied and fought against today. It is you, dear President, who are “the one who opposes” the deep state, the final assault of the children of darkness. For this reason, it is necessary that all people of good will be persuaded of the epochal importance of the imminent election: not so much for the sake of this or that political program, but because of the general inspiration of your action that best embodies – in this particular historical context – that world, our world, which they want to cancel by means of the lockdown. Your adversary is also our adversary: it is the Enemy of the human race, he who is “a murderer from the beginning” (Jn 8:44). Around you are gathered with faith and courage those who consider you the final garrison against the world dictatorship. The alternative is to vote for a person who is manipulated by the deep state, gravely compromised by scandals and corruption, who will do to the United States what Jorge Mario Bergoglio is doing to the Church, Prime Minister Conte to Italy, President Macron to France, Prime Minster Sanchez to Spain, and so on. The blackmailable nature of Joe Biden – just like that of the prelates of the Vatican’s “magic circle” – will expose him to be used unscrupulously, allowing illegitimate powers to interfere in both domestic politics as well as international balances. It is obvious that those who manipulate him already have someone worse than him ready, with whom they will replace him as soon as the opportunity arises. And yet, in the midst of this bleak picture, this apparently unstoppable advance of the “Invisible Enemy,” an element of hope emerges. The adversary does not know how to love, and it does not understand that it is not enough to assure a universal income or to cancel mortgages in order to subjugate the masses and convince them to be branded like cattle. This people, which for too long has endured the abuses of a hateful and tyrannical power, is rediscovering that it has a soul; it is understanding that it is not willing to exchange its freedom for the homogenization and cancellation of its identity; it is beginning to understand the value of familial and social ties, of the bonds of faith and culture that unite honest people. This Great Reset is destined to fail because those who planned it do not understand that there are still people ready to take to the streets to defend their rights, to protect their loved ones, to give a future to their children and grandchildren. The leveling inhumanity of the globalist project will shatter miserably in the face of the firm and courageous opposition of the children of Light. The enemy has Satan on its side, He who only knows how to hate. But on our side, we have the Lord Almighty, the God of armies arrayed for battle, and the Most Holy Virgin, who will crush the head of the ancient Serpent. “If God is for us, who can be against us?” (Rom 8:31). Mr. President, you are well aware that, in this crucial hour, the United States of America is considered the defending wall against which the war declared by the advocates of globalism has been unleashed. Place your trust in the Lord, strengthened by the words of the Apostle Paul: “I can do all things in Him who strengthens me” (Phil 4:13). To be an instrument of Divine Providence is a great responsibility, for which you will certainly receive all the graces of state that you need, since they are being fervently implored for you by the many people who support you with their prayers. With this heavenly hope and the assurance of my prayer for you, for the First Lady, and for your collaborators, with all my heart I send you my blessing. God bless the United States of America! + Carlo Maria Viganò Tit. Archbishop of Ulpiana Former Apostolic Nuncio to the United States of America 2020-10-29 g (see also) Glenn Greenwald’s Article on Media Reaction to Emails from Hunter Biden's Laptop Article on Joe and Hunter Biden Censored
By The
Intercept
An attempt to assess the importance of the known evidence, and a critique of media lies to protect their favored candidate, could not be published at The Intercept I am posting here the most recent draft of my article about Joe and Hunter Biden — the last one seen by Intercept editors before telling me that they refuse to publish it absent major structural changes involving the removal of all sections critical of Joe Biden, leaving only a narrow article critiquing media outlets. I will also, in a separate post, publish all communications I had with Intercept editors surrounding this article so you can see the censorship in action and, given the Intercept’s denials, decide for yourselves (this is the kind of transparency responsible journalists provide, and which the Intercept refuses to this day to provide regarding their conduct in the Reality Winner story). This draft obviously would have gone through one more round of proof-reading and editing by me — to shorten it, fix typos, etc — but it’s important for the integrity of the claims to publish the draft in unchanged form that Intercept editors last saw, and announced that they would not “edit” but completely gut as a condition to publication: TITLE: THE REAL SCANDAL: U.S. MEDIA USES FALSEHOODS TO DEFEND JOE BIDEN FROM HUNTER’S EMAILS Publication by the New York Post two weeks ago of emails from Hunter Biden's laptop, relating to Vice President Joe Biden's work in Ukraine, and subsequent articles from other outlets concerning the Biden family's pursuit of business opportunities in China, provoked extraordinary efforts by a de facto union of media outlets, Silicon Valley giants and the intelligence community to suppress these stories. One outcome is that the Biden campaign concluded, rationally, that there is no need for the front-running presidential candidate to address even the most basic and relevant questions raised by these materials. Rather than condemn Biden for ignoring these questions -- the natural instinct of a healthy press when it comes to a presidential election -- journalists have instead led the way in concocting excuses to justify his silence. After the Post’s first article, both that newspaper and other news outlets have published numerous other emails and texts purportedly written to and from Hunter reflecting his efforts to induce his father to take actions as Vice President beneficial to the Ukrainian energy company Burisma, on whose board of directors Hunter sat for a monthly payment of $50,000, as well as proposals for lucrative business deals in China that traded on his influence with his father. Individuals included in some of the email chains have confirmed the contents' authenticity. One of Hunter’s former business partners, Tony Bubolinski, has stepped forward on the record to confirm the authenticity of many of the emails and to insist that Hunter along with Joe Biden's brother Jim were planning on including the former Vice President in at least one deal in China. And GOP pollster Frank Luntz, who appeared in one of the published email chains, appeared to confirm the authenticity as well, though he refused to answer follow-up questions about it. Thus far, no proof has been offered by Bubolinski that Biden ever consummated his participation in any of those discussed deals. The Wall Street Journal says that it found no corporate records reflecting that a deal was finalized and that "text messages and emails related to the venture that were provided to the Journal by Mr. Bobulinski, mainly from the spring and summer of 2017, don’t show either Hunter Biden or James Biden discussing a role for Joe Biden in the venture." But nobody claimed that any such deals had been consummated -- so the conclusion that one had not been does not negate the story. Moreover, some texts and emails whose authenticity has not been disputed state that Hunter was adamant that any discussions about the involvement of the Vice President be held only verbally and never put in writing. ... Publication of that initial New York Post story provoked a highly unusual censorship campaign by Facebook and Twitter. Facebook, through a long-time former Democratic Party operative, vowed to suppress the story pending its “fact-check,” one that has as of yet produced no public conclusions. And while Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey apologized for Twitter’s handling of the censorship and reversed the policy that led to the blocking of all links the story, the New York Post, the nation’s fourth-largest newspaper, continues to be locked out of its Twitter account, unable to post as the election approaches, for almost two weeks. After that initial censorship burst from Silicon Valley, whose workforce and oligarchs have donated almost entirely to the Biden campaign, it was the nation's media outlets and former CIA and other intelligence officials who took the lead in constructing reasons why the story should be dismissed, or at least treated with scorn. As usual for the Trump era, the theme that took center stage to accomplish this goal was an unsubstantiated claim about the Kremlin responsibility for the story. Numerous news outlets, including the Intercept, quickly cited a public letter signed by former CIA officials and other agents of the security state claiming that the documents have the “classic trademarks" of a “Russian disinformation” plot. But, as media outlets and even intelligence agencies are now slowly admitting, no evidence has ever been presented to corroborate this assertion. On Friday, the New York Times reported that “no concrete evidence has emerged that the laptop contains Russian disinformation” and the paper said even the FBI has “acknowledged that it had not found any Russian disinformation on the laptop.” The Washington Post on Sunday published an op-ed -- by Thomas Rid, one of those centrists establishmentarian professors whom media outlets routinely use to provide the facade of expert approval for deranged conspiracy theories -- that contained this extraordinary proclamation: "We must treat the Hunter Biden leaks as if they were a foreign intelligence operation — even if they probably aren't." ... The few mainstream journalists who tried merely to discuss these materials have been vilified. For the crime of simply noting it on Twitter that first day, New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman had her name trend all morning along with the derogatory nickname “MAGA Haberman.” CBS News’ Bo Erickson was widely attacked even by his some in the media simply for asking Biden what his response to the story was. And Biden himself refused to answer, accusing Erickson of spreading a "smear." That it is irresponsible and even unethical to mention these documents became a pervasive view in mainstream journalism. The NPR Public Editor, in an amazing statement representative of much of the prevailing media mentality, explicitly justified NPR’s refusal to cover the story on the ground that “we do not want to waste our time on stories that are not really stories . . . [or] waste the readers’ and listeners’ time on stories that are just pure distractions.” (read more) 2020-10-29 f THE COVID-CON I Hecho en México / Made in Mexico
This Explains the Surging
Numbers: Whistleblower Says El Paso Ambulances Are
Bringing COVID-19 Patients from Juarez to US
Hospitals
This is one way to up the COVID-19 numbers… A whistleblower in El Paso, Texas told FOX 14 reporters that local firefighters are making several trips a day to the border with Juarez and bringing sick Mexicans to US hospitals in El Paso. The whistleblower said some days it’s only 3 or 4 trips to the border but on other days the firefighters make 13 to 14 trips to the border to bring the COVID patients to US hospitals. And, it goes without saying, US taxpayers are covering the costs. ABC News reported on the situation in El Paso without mentioning the obvious — that dozens of patients are from Juarez, Mexico. (read more) 2020-10-29 e INTOLERANT AND HUMORLESS DEMOCRAT PARTISANS Glenn Greenwald: My
Resignation From The
Intercept
The same trends of repression, censorship and ideological homogeneity plaguing the national press generally have engulfed the media outlet I co-founded, culminating in censorship of my own articles. Today I sent my intention to resign from The Intercept, the news outlet I co-founded in 2013 with Jeremy Scahill and Laura Poitras, as well as from its parent company First Look Media. The final, precipitating cause is that The Intercept’s editors, in violation of my contractual right of editorial freedom, censored an article I wrote this week, refusing to publish it unless I remove all sections critical of Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden, the candidate vehemently supported by all New-York-based Intercept editors involved in this effort at suppression. The censored article, based on recently revealed emails and witness testimony, raised critical questions about Biden’s conduct. Not content to simply prevent publication of this article at the media outlet I co-founded, these Intercept editors also demanded that I refrain from exercising a separate contractual right to publish this article with any other publication. I had no objection to their disagreement with my views of what this Biden evidence shows: as a last-ditch attempt to avoid being censored, I encouraged them to air their disagreements with me by writing their own articles that critique my perspectives and letting readers decide who is right, the way any confident and healthy media outlet would. But modern media outlets do not air dissent; they quash it. So censorship of my article, rather than engagement with it, was the path these Biden-supporting editors chose. The censored article will be published on this page shortly. My letter of intent to resign, which I sent this morning to First Look Media’s President Michael Bloom, is published below. As of now, I will be publishing my journalism here on Substack, where numerous other journalists, including my good friend, the great intrepid reporter Matt Taibbi, have come in order to practice journalism free of the increasingly repressive climate that is engulfing national mainstream media outlets across the country. This was not an easy choice: I am voluntarily sacrificing the support of a large institution and guaranteed salary in exchange for nothing other than a belief that there are enough people who believe in the virtues of independent journalism and the need for free discourse who will be willing to support my work by subscribing. Like anyone with young children, a family and numerous obligations, I do this with some trepidation, but also with the conviction that there is no other choice. I could not sleep at night knowing that I allowed any institution to censor what I want to say and believe — least of all a media outlet I co-founded with the explicit goal of ensuring this never happens to other journalists, let alone to me, let alone because I have written an article critical of a powerful Democratic politician vehemently supported by the editors in the imminent national election. But the pathologies, illiberalism, and repressive mentality that led to the bizarre spectacle of my being censored by my own media outlet are ones that are by no means unique to The Intercept. These are the viruses that have contaminated virtually every mainstream center-left political organization, academic institution, and newsroom. ... American media is gripped in a polarized culture war that is forcing journalism to conform to tribal, groupthink narratives that are often divorced from the truth and cater to perspectives that are not reflective of the broader public but instead a minority of hyper-partisan elites. The need to conform to highly restrictive, artificial cultural narratives and partisan identities has created a repressive and illiberal environment in which vast swaths of news and reporting either do not happen or are presented through the most skewed and reality-detached lens. With nearly all major media institutions captured to some degree by this dynamic, a deep need exists for media that is untethered and free to transgress the boundaries of this polarized culture war and address a demand from a public that is starved for media that doesn’t play for a side but instead pursues lines of reporting, thought, and inquiry wherever they lead, without fear of violating cultural pieties or elite orthodoxies. (PLEASE READ GREENWALD'S ENTIRE ARTICLE) 2020-10-29 d INTOLERANT AND HUMORLESS COLLEGE BRATS Waking to the Woke
Northwestern University’s president takes a commendable hard line against student rioting—but he helped create the climate for the destructive behavior. Since June, a group of Northwestern University students has demanded that the school disband its campus police force and sever ties with the Evanston, Illinois police department. On Saturday, October 17, their protests became unruly. Members of NU Community Not Cops (NUCNC) sprayed anti-cop graffiti on private and public property, broke a window at the local Whole Foods market, set at least one trash can on fire, and burned a school banner. The following Monday, Northwestern’s president denounced the violence in the most unequivocal of terms—and was himself promptly denounced as a racist for having done so. But the president, Morton Schapiro, to his enormous credit, has neither apologized nor backed down on his refusal to abolish the campus police department. The Northwestern episode is doubly instructive. Schapiro is one of the most woke college presidents in the country. Yet he has done something that almost no Democratic politician or progressive opinion leader has dared do with such forcefulness: draw a bright line between Black Lives Matter protests and violence. Had Democratic presidential and vice presidential candidates Joe Biden and Kamala Harris been as unhesitating in their condemnations of this year’s murderous race riots, the country might have avoided the worst of the anarchy. But Schapiro is to a considerable extent the architect of his own problems. Over the last several years, he has pandered to the maudlin identity politics that lead students at the most prestigious colleges in the country to think of themselves as oppressed. The ongoing conflict at Northwestern should remind college presidents everywhere that they feed the beast of adolescent narcissism and self-pity at their peril. ... Schapiro’s initial reaction to the Saturday, October 17 unrest and his subsequent refusal to back down are thrillingly unconventional. He deserves plaudits for so full-throated a rejection of politically correct vandalism. But if today he is bucking campus orthodoxies, until quite recently he was strengthening them. He helped create the campus climate that views student victimhood as justifying property destruction. ... Schapiro’s condemnation of vandalism is welcome, even if, ideally, he would have spoken up against the national violence before he was himself subject to harassment. Time will tell whether his firm stand now will change the victim mentality on his own campus. For now, Schapiro is reaping what he has sown. (read more) 2020-10-29 c INTOLERANT AND HUMORLESS LEFTIST BRATS Girl Scouts spark outrage with
since-deleted post congratulating Amy Coney Barrett
The Girl Scouts of America on Wednesday congratulated Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett on her appointment, but deleted the social media posts after sweeping criticism. The Scouts’ Facebook, Twitter and Instagram accounts featured an image of Barrett and the first four women justices to serve on the nation’s highest court. That includes Sandra Day O’Connor, Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, whose death last month paved the way for President Donald Trump to nominate Barrett. “Congratulations Amy Coney Barrett on becoming the 5th woman appointed to the Supreme Court since its inception in 1789,” the group tweeted around 1 p.m. ET, screenshots of the tweet show. The Scouts then clarified that the group is “a nonpolitical, nonpartisan organization.” “We are neither red nor blue, but Girl Scout GREEN. We are here to lift up girls and women. If you would like to debate partisan police–keep scrolling,” the Girl Scouts posted on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. The post sparked immediate criticism on social media of both the Girl Scouts and Barrett, who many liberals consider a threat to abortion rights, Obamacare and other progressive matters because of her religious conservative and religious viewpoint. The Group deleted the posts from all of its social media sites Wednesday evening. Twitter users continued to slam the Girl Scouts from both sides, for both the original post and relenting to the criticism. “Of course the @girlscouts caved to the mob and deleted this tweet congratulating Amy Coney Barrett. SAD,” The Independent Women’s Forum tweeted from its official account. Just after 7:30 p.m. ET, the Girl Scouts posted again, saying that the post “was quickly viewed as a political and partisan statement which was not our intent and we have removed the post.” (read more) 2020-10-29 b INTOLERANT AND HUMORLESS TWITTER PLUTOCRAT Twitter is running a blackmail
operation — cooperate or no traffic for you
For all their talk of “neutral platforms,” the Big Shots at Big Tech — Twitter, Facebook and Google — are running a protection racket. They figure they can dictate what Americans get to see and read, and what other media companies must do to reach the public via those platforms. It’s a clear threat to a healthy democracy — and Congress has noticed. On Wednesday, the Senate launched a hearing to investigate “Big Tech’s bad behavior.” Center-stage: Twitter’s strong-arm tactics to censor The Post ever since we began reporting on Hunter Biden’s emails. First, it froze our account and banned our stories; then, amid a public backlash, it agreed to unfreeze us — but only if we deleted our original tweets. Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey sounded like every mob enforcer and shakedown artist in history: Nice paper you got there, New York Post. Shame, should something happen to it. He knows full well media outlets depend on social media, and Google search algorithms, to help readers access our reporting. (read more) 2020-10-29 a INTOLERANT AND HUMORLESS TURKISH AUTOCRAT I see London. I see France. I see Recep's underwear. Turkey threatens legal action
over Charlie Hebdo's caricature of president
French satirical newspaper depicted Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in his underwear Turkey has threatened “legal and diplomatic” action against the French satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo after it published a caricature of president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan on its latest front page. The drawing described as “disgusting” by the Turkish leader and Ankara’s announcement that prosecutors have launched an official investigation into the publication have worsened already heightened tensions between the two countries. Erdoğan, who has already suggested French president Emmanuel Macron needed “mental checks”, accused Western countries mocking Islam of trying to “relaunch the Crusades”. He told the Turkish parliament he had not seen the latest caricature and would not be looking at it. He is depicted in his underwear lifting up a woman’s hijab to reveal her buttocks. “I consider it wrong to look at these immoral publications … scoundrels who insult our beloved Prophet,” Erdoğan told MPs. “I believe the enemies of Turkey and Islam are going to drown in a swamp of hatred and animosity in the name of freedom. It’s a sign that Europe has returned to the dark ages.” (read more) 2020-10-28 j THIRD WORLD VOTE FRAUD IN TEXAS Texas ‘Ballot Chaser’
Pressures Voter to Change Vote from Cornyn to Hegar:
‘That’s My Job’ … ‘I Can Honestly Say I'm Bringing
at Least 7,000 Votes to The Polls’ … Said Garza Gave
Her $2,500 Gift Budget
[BEXAR COUNTY, TEXAS—Oct. 27, 2020] Project
Veritas undercover journalists infiltrated a ballot
harvesting racket deep in the heart of Texas in a
devastating report released today.
“We keep hearing voter fraud is a myth and anyone who challenges that notion is simply creating hysteria,” said James O’Keefe, the founder and CEO of Project Veritas. “I went to Texas to be part of the Project Veritas investigation into election fraud and to be on the ground here with our undercover journalists,” O’Keefe said. “Our journalists discovered a voter fraud system positioned to swing Texas in 2020,” he said. “These so-called ‘ballot chasers’ use a mix of gifts and coercion to work down their list of targeted voters and make sure they vote for their paymasters,” he said. “The actions violate both federal and state law and constitute a direct threat to the integrity of our election-based republic.” ... Journalist: “I guess Trump was right. (laughs) I’m sorry.” Rodriguez: “About doing stuff illegal?” Journalist: “I’m sorry?” Rodriguez: “About doing stuff illegal?” Journalist: “Yeah, they all said he was full of sh#t.” Rodriguez: “Oh hell no, he’s not. It’s true—‘cause you’re not supposed to do that.” (read more) 2020-10-28 i Black LIES Matter People are noting the irony of
a Chick-fil-A in Philadelphia being looted by
rioters just months after the company’s CEO Dan
Cathy shined a black rapper’s shoes in a pro-Black
Lives Matter PR stunt.
BLM supporters and other criminal opportunists reacted to the police shooting of Walter Wallace Jr., who was killed after advancing towards officers with a knife, by staging violent unrest, attacking police and looting stores. After targeting a local Walmart and Footlocker, looters turned their attention to Chick-fil-A, smashing into and damaging a branch of the food chain. According to reporter Julio Rosas, who has covered numerous BLM riots, he hasn’t “seen anything like this on this scale since Minneapolis back in May.” (read more) 2020-10-28 h THE MINISTRY OF TRUTH - II Leftists Cry And Moan To
Spotify As Alex Jones Appears On Joe Rogan Podcast
Nancy Pelosi’s kid, journalists for censorship, and an army of bedwetters demand action Leftists were triggered Tuesday as Infowars guru Alex Jones was able to appear on a big tech platform without being censored or banned. Jones was once again a guest on The Joe Rogan Experience, however, it was the first time Jones has appeared since Rogan moved to Spotify, prompting scores of butthurt leftists to immediately begin lobbying the streaming service to take down the episode. The Independent complained that “Rogan and Jones appeared in a photo that showed them failing to practise social distancing,” before noting that “critics called out Spotify for hosting Jones via the episode when he is supposed to have been banned from the platform.” Christine Pelosi, Nancy Pelosi’s kid, claimed that “Alex Jones posted death threats against me. He called Sandy Hook a hoax and harassed mourning families. Now he is lying about covid vaccines. His hate speech is not just vile – it’s dangerous. WTH Spotify?” (read more) 2020-10-28 g THE MINISTRY OF TRUTH - I Disinformation By Popular
Demand: How The Authenticity of Hunter’s Laptop
Became Immaterial
Yesterday, former Vice President Joe Biden was again insisting that the scandal involving Hunter Biden’s laptop was Russian disinformation despite the direct refutation of that claim by the FBI. No mainstream reporter bothered to ask the simple question of whether this was his son’s laptop and emails, including emails clearly engaging in an influence peddling scheme and referring to Joe Biden’s knowledge. Instead, media has maintained a consistent and narrow focus. Indeed, in her interview, Leslie Stahl immediately dismissed any “scandal” involving Hunter in an interview with the President on 60 Minutes. It was an open example of what I previously noted in a column: “After all, an allegation is a scandal only if it is damaging. No coverage, no damage, no scandal.” In her interview with Joe Biden, CBS anchor Norah O’Donnell did not push Biden to simply confirm that the emails were fake or whether he did in fact meet with Hunter’s associates (despite his prior denials). Instead O’Donnell asked: “Do you believe the recent leak of material allegedly from Hunter’s computer is part of a Russian disinformation campaign?” Biden responded with the same answer that has gone unchallenged dozens of times: “From what I’ve read and know the
intelligence community warned
the president that Giuliani was being fed disinformation from the Russians. And we also know that Putin is trying very hard to spread disinformation about Joe Biden. And so when you put the combination of Russia, Giuliani– the president, together– it’s just what it is. It’s a smear campaign because he has nothing he wants to talk about. What is he running on? What is he running on?” It did not matter that the answer omitted the key assertion that this was not Hunter’s laptop or emails or that he did not leave the computer with this store. Recently, Washington Post columnist Thomas Rid wrote, saying the quiet part out loud by telling the media: “We must treat the Hunter Biden leaks as if they were a foreign intelligence operation — even if they probably aren’t.” Let that sink in for a second. It does not matter if these are real emails and not Russian disinformation. They probably are real but should be treated as disinformation even though American intelligence has repeatedly rebutted that claim. (read more) 2020-10-28 f Real News Fox News’ Tucker Carlson
Tonight Has The Highest Rated Cable Show In History
Fox News host Tucker Carlson’s show achieved the highest amount of viewers in cable news in October among numerous records, according to Nielsen Media Research data released by Fox. “Tucker Carlson Tonight” surpassed “CBS Evening News with Norah O’Donnell,” with more than 5.3 million viewers, according to Fox News’ press release. “Over 5.3 million viewers, 1 million in the key demographic, and 670,000 in the 18-49 demo” were counted by Nielsen Media Research, according to the press release. “Tucker Carlson Tonight has achieved a new record in October, posting the most-watched month of any program in the history of cable news: 5.3 million viewers tuning into his show during the 8 p.m. hour,” A.J Katz, senior editor and TV business reporter for Adweek, said in a tweet. (read more) 2020-10-28 e Hunting Hunter Biden - II Tucker Carlson Interviews
Hunter Biden Business Partner Tony Bobulinski About
Joe Biden Involvement
FOX News host Tucker Carlson interviewed former Hunter Biden business partner Tony Bobulinski about his alleged dealings with Hunter and Joe Biden. Bobulinski explained how Biden would personally benefit from a stake in a Chinese business deal. Transcript, via FOX News, below the second and third part of the interview. (read transcript and watch videos) 2020-10-28 d Hunting Hunter Biden - I Biden family scandal: Seven
uncomfortable realities confronting the Democrat
nominee
It's not the Russians exposing Joe Biden, it's his son's former business partners. Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden has offered short, at times, halting defenses of his son Hunter's business deals in recent weeks after months of ignoring an increasingly clear narrative of a family member pursuing lucrative business deals in the shadows of his vice presidency. "Not one single solitary thing was out of line," Biden said last Thursday when the questions about his son's business dealings came up at the last presidential debate. "Not a single thing." "My son has not made money in terms of this thing, about what are you talking about, China," Biden said. "I have not had, the only guy that's made money from China is this guy," he added, point to Donald Trump. Other times he and his defenders have rebuffed questions about the family business as a "smear job" or "Russian disinformation." But Biden's campaign hasn't disputed much of the evidence that has become public, instead declaring it doesn't matter because no crimes have been proven. "Investigations by the press, during impeachment, and even by two Republican-led Senate committees whose work was decried as 'not legitimate' and political by a GOP colleague, have all reached the same conclusion: that Joe Biden carried out official US policy toward Ukraine and engaged in no wrongdoing," a campaign spokesman said recently. But criminality isn't the only standard by which Americans evaluate their leaders. Judgment, ethics and transparency are also essential attributes. On such, the Biden campaign has not yet explained or confronted these seven uncomfortable realities, many which have emerged not from Russian disinformation but rather from former associates of Hunter Biden and former government subordinates of the vice president. (read more) 2020-10-28 c THE COVID-CON III How Covid Deaths Are
Over-Counted
The system for counting deaths from Covid is not working properly and we are over-counting Covid deaths. This can be fixed, easily, by improving cross-checking and retesting all alleged positive PCR test results. Accurate data is a basic prerequisite for good policy choices. The remedial steps needed are simple and relatively inexpensive. Central government should mandate them to be done immediately. When trying to understand the impact of increased testing on case numbers we look to the percentage of tests reported as positive. In a similar way, it is important to double check other data points against each other, as percentages, to truly understand how the epidemic is progressing. Using this approach, it appears that we are over-counting deaths because there are not enough severely sick people from Covid to account for them. In other words, there are proportionately more Covid deaths per case and per hospital admission since the Summer. This paper explains this phenomenon and calls for proper scientific cross-checking to be instituted before a Covid outbreak is declared. Contradictions in the data The ONS carry out random testing of the population to estimate how many people have Covid in the UK each week. A sample of people are randomly tested and then modelling is used to predict what proportion of the population test positive at that time. This estimate includes all ‘asymptomatic cases’ so should be higher than the number that eventually come forward with symptoms and are diagnosed as true positive cases. (Whether asymptomatic cases can be considered ‘true’ infections is a separate matter entirely, which will not be discussed here.) ... Mathematical models that assume every rise will be an exponential one without any real ‘sense check’ must be abandoned. The Government must acknowledge that those carrying out the modelling may be erring on the side of caution when evaluating the evidence presented to them. They must also ensure that real world data is given more weight than mathematical models especially when the two are in brazen conflict. A model is only as good as the data put into it. Modelling has its place but also has severe limitations when too much reliance is placed on many dubious assumptions and seemingly authoritative outputs with lots of zeros. What is needed is a much more careful approach to diagnosis. Loss of sense of smell or characteristic ‘ground glass’ findings on chest CT scans should be used as a gateway to testing. Any patient testing positive should have a second positive confirmatory test before an official diagnosis is made. Although this approach is less sensitive it would still have sufficient sensitivity to detect a genuine outbreak and prevent spread. The current approach to testing has become the problem it was designed to stop. (read more) 2020-10-28 b THE COVID-CON II Why The WHO Faked A Pandemic –
Forbes
Note: This article, published on 5 February 2010, originally appeared in Forbes. It was removed sometime in mid October 2020 with no explanation. While you can find a capture at archive.org, we have saved a copy here to protect against censorship and for easy sharing. The World Health Organization has suddenly gone from crying “The sky is falling!” like a cackling Chicken Little to squealing like a stuck pig. The reason: charges that the agency deliberately fomented swine flu hysteria. “The world is going through a real pandemic. The description of it as a fake is wrong and irresponsible,” the agency claims on its Web site. A WHO spokesman declined to specify who or what gave this “description,” but the primary accuser is hard to ignore. The Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE), a human rights watchdog, is publicly investigating the WHO’s motives in declaring a pandemic. Indeed, the chairman of its influential health committee, epidemiologist Wolfgang Wodarg, has declared that the “false pandemic” is “one of the greatest medicine scandals of the century.” Even within the agency, the director of the WHO Collaborating Center for Epidemiology in Munster, Germany, Dr. Ulrich Kiel, has essentially labeled the pandemic a hoax. “We are witnessing a gigantic misallocation of resources [$18 billion so far] in terms of public health,” he said. They’re right. This wasn’t merely overcautiousness or simple misjudgment. The pandemic declaration and all the Klaxon-ringing since reflect sheer dishonesty motivated not by medical concerns but political ones. (read more) 2020-10-28 a THE COVID-CON I Anthony Fauci: 40 Years of
Lies From AZT to Remdesivir
As the planet’s “Virus Tsar” since 1984, he has spread misinformation and ignored critical questions. The consequences could hardly be more fatal. Last week, US president Donald Trump committed a kind of blasphemy by attacking Anthony Fauci, his pandemic consultant and practically the spokesperson for the White House regarding COVID-19, saying that: “People are tired of hearing Fauci and all
these idiots.
He’s been here for 500 years. Fauci is a disaster. If I listened to him, we’d have 500,000 deaths.“ A remarkable statement of historical dimension, since Trump is the first American head of state to cast doubt on Fauci, who has acted as the virus tsar for no less than six presidencies: Reagan, Bush, Clinton, Bush Jr., Obama and Trump. To make it clear, the logic behind Trump’s attack is scientifically unfounded. He refers to a statement of Fauci he made some months ago, according to which people should “not wear face masks.”. But even if all Americans had followed this advice, it would not have lead to a single extra death. The simple reason is that the COVID-19 death rate data show unambiguously that a viral cause for the excess mortality seen in some countries, including the US, is virtually impossible — and that instead the massive experimental use of highly toxic drugs is the key factor in this context, as I recently outlined together with Claus Köhnlein MD, in an in-depth analysis for Real News Australia. But on one point Trump hits the nail on the head: Fauci is simply a disaster, because he has been telling the world one lie after another for decades, while his presence actually feels almost as if he has been there for 500 years. And tragically, the mass media sell them to their audience of billions as a kind of gospel. An example is — there’s no other way to put it — the downright shameful four page interview with Anthony Fauci in Germany’s best-known news magazine, Der Spiegel, published recently. Shameful because Fauci here, too, is doing what he is a master at, namely, hoaxing the world — and Der Spiegel has been hoodwinked by him and, in admiration for the man dubbed by The New Yorker as “America’s Doctor,” which is a euphemism of the highest order, has forgotten to do its job: to ask critical questions. The initial question alone is unworthy of a journalistic medium: “Dr. Fauci, you once said of yourself that
you had‚ a
reputation of speaking the truth at all times and not sugarcoating things. Can we hope to get a few samples of previously unspoken truths from you today?” And Fauci answers: “Of course! I will always give you truth.
Just ask the
question and I’ll give you the truth. At least to the extent, that I think it is, right [laughs].” Fauci: 36 years as the Modern Munchausen What a farce. What Fauci thinks is right may be true for himself. But his statements do not stand up to an objective examination of scientific evidence. Therefore he is not only “Dr. Wrong”, as he has been called recently by the conservative economist Stephen Moore, but actually “Dr. Baron of Lies”, because he must be aware that he is telling the untruth or that there are well-supported doubts about his theses. Especially because, since the beginning of his “reign” as global virus tsar in 1984, he has been repeatedly confronted with critical questions by many people (including me). And what was his reaction over and over again? He just silenced and ignored the inquirers. This is why his answer to Der Spiegel, “Just ask the question and I’ll give you the truth” is also a downright Fauci lie. Unfortunately, he gets away with it not least because even world-famous personalities like Brad Pitt buy his lies and sell him to the world public as thoroughly sincere. ...The abundance of lies Fauci puts into the world is so great that you don’t even know where to start to enumerate them all. One of the many topic fields he is sending out factually untenable statements to the whole world is without question COVID-19. In order to become aware of this, one has to realize that:
Thus, Fauci‘s narratives about the alleged novel coronavirus become downright a fairy tale. And a fairy tale teller, a modern-day Munchausen “Baron of Lies”, Fauci has been since he became the director of the NIAID in 1984 — the year Ronald Reagan was US president and AIDS was put on the world stage. (read more) 2020-10-27 hTHE MINISTRY OF TRUTH - II The Hunter Biden Scandal Has
Exposed The Corporate Press’s Corruption And
Condescension
Major U.S. media outlets are living in an alternate fantasy world in which the Biden scandal is a 'miasma' meant to confuse and mislead gullible Americans It’s hard to read Anne Applebaum’s recent article on the Hunter Biden scandal at The Atlantic without guffawing at the outlandishness of her argument, which is that the whole thing amounts to a shadowy “psy-op” that’s too complicated to understand—a “miasma” conjured up by unreliable Fox News characters trying to create a “foggy world in which misdeeds might have taken place, and in which corruption might have happened.” Applebaum’s approach is emblematic of the mainstream media’s collective refusal to cover the Hunter Biden story. She spends zero time discussing the actual facts that have come to light through the reporting of the New York Post and a handful of other news outlets, and instead opens her essay with a lengthy anecdote about herself that serves as an ad hominem attack on a reporter she dislikes. We are meant to understand that this reporter, Matthew Tyrmand, is a creep, not a real journalist, and not to be trusted. For this reason, Applebaum tells us, you can ignore the trove of emails Tyrmand got from an erstwhile business partner of Hunter Biden’s that implicates former Vice President Joe Biden in foreign influence-peddling schemes similar to those uncovered by the Post. The idea is to disparage the source of the information rather than grapple with what the information reveals. This of course has been the media’s posture toward the Post’s reporting from the outset: pay no mind to the laptop or the emails, uniformly referred to as “documents of questionable provenance,” because it all came from Rudy Giuliani and Steve Bannon, and they aren’t trustworthy. Real journalists, you see, only investigate and report on information that’s verified and trustworthy — you know, like the Steele dossier. Hence Applebaum makes no mention of Tony Bobulinski, Hunter’s former business partner who came forward last week claiming he met with Joe Biden about China, that Biden is indeed “the big guy” referenced in an email about a proposed equity split in a deal with CEFC China Energy, a Shanghai-based conglomerate. She makes no mention of the text messages between Bobulinski and James Gilliar, another Hunter associate, that clearly show the deal was an influence-peddling scheme that relied on the Biden name. She makes no mention of a recent Senate report detailing millions in payments from CEFC to a company controlled by Hunter and James Biden, Joe’s brother. All of this, writes Applebaum, is just noise. Smart people who “live outside the Fox News bubble” do not “need to learn any of this stuff” — it’s all just a vague conspiracy theory meant to rile up the unwashed rubes. Pay it no mind. ... But suppression and distraction can only go so far, even when big media and big tech join forces. The longer the Hunter Biden story is out there, the more one can see a kind of psychosis developing in the American press. After weeks of insinuating, without evidence, that the Hunter Biden emails are just “Russian disinformation” and therefore not worthy of serious coverage, the media circulated a Reuters report on Monday that Russian President Vladimir Putin said there’s “nothing criminal” about Hunter Biden’s business deals. Apparently, if it comes straight from Putin’s mouth it can’t be disinformation. The American people are not helpless rubes, and they smell a rat. For as much as big media and big tech are trying to control what audiences see and hear, for as much as they try to keep unwanted or counter-narrative information out of the public square, they can’t quite do it. (read more) 2020-10-27 g THE MINISTRY OF TRUTH - I BLM - Biden's Laptop
Matters
Unfriending Free Speech
Who will guard the gatekeepers of our political discourse? On October 14, a New York Post story presented evidence that Hunter Biden had monetized access to his father, Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden. The exposé, based on the hard drive of a laptop computer alleged to have been owned by the younger Biden, may or may not hold water. It is, however, worth noting that no one has ever explained what else, besides the prospect of a direct connection to the Obama White House, could account for Ukrainian energy firm Burisma’s decision to make then-Vice President Biden’s dysfunctional son a board member and pay him $50,000 a month. The pixels had barely dried on the Post article before it generated, then became intertwined with, a controversy about the controversy. Within hours of its appearance on the newspaper’s website, two of the biggest social media platforms, Facebook and Twitter, took steps to suppress the story. Facebook announced that, pending an independent assessment of whether the claims were accurate, it had adjusted its operating software to make it more difficult for users to share or discuss the article. Twitter went further, flatly preventing users from sharing the “potentially harmful” story. It also froze the Post’s own Twitter account, which has had no new entries for the past 11 days, as of this writing. If Facebook and Twitter intended to make the Biden laptop story go away, however, their intervention had the opposite effect. Questions about a political family’s corruption became part of a larger debate about the power of social media platforms. Do the proprietors of our digital public squares censor and curate our discourse there? Are the rules for what can and can’t be said clear and universally applicable, or arbitrary and selectively enforced? Other media platforms, too, have moved on from disinterested presentation and examination of the facts to explicitly supporting particular political causes. National Public Radio, for example, announced that it would have nothing to do with the Post’s story about Hunter Biden’s laptop. “We don’t want to waste our time on stories that are not really stories,” a managing editor explained, “and we don’t want to waste the listeners’ and readers’ time on stories that are just pure distractions.” (In August, NPR felt that an excellent use of its journalists and listeners’ time was a long, sympathetic interview with Vicky Osterweil, who had written the book In Defense of Looting) Similarly, Glenn Reynolds devoted one of his weekly USA Today columns to Facebook and Twitter’s efforts to halt the spread of the Post’s story on the Bidens. USA Today spiked the column without explanation; it was available only to readers of Reynolds’s blog. Open the aperture wider still, and it becomes clear that cutting-edge “liberal” thinking is increasingly hostile to liberty. John Stuart Mill believed that the free and full exchange of ideas not only honors the rights of the people who express them but also enhances the understanding of those who read or hear them. People shielded from ideas that they find noxious or absurd “have never thrown themselves into the mental position of those who think differently from them, and considered what such persons may have to say,” Mill wrote in On Liberty, in 1859. As a result, “they do not, in any proper sense of the word, know the doctrine which they themselves profess.” (read more) 2020-10-27 f THE MARXIST NATIVES ARE RESTLESS - III 7 Open Leftist Threats That
Political Terror Is Coming To America Whether Trump
Wins Or Not
Examples of hostilities toward Trump and his supporters abound, but leftists' threats of terror are even greater should Biden win the presidency. Many leftists have directed some deeply disturbing rhetoric at conservatives and Trump supporters in recent months, claiming President Trump’s bombast is responsible for the political polarization of today’s America. This is pure nonsense. Sure, Trump talks about MS-13 as “animals,” Antifa as “thugs,” and Hillary Clinton as crooked enough to “be in jail.” His supporters know his presentation to be a bombastic and theatrical schtick, but he never threatens any group of voters. By contrast, some ominous tones, even homicidal and terrorist tones, are coming from the mainstream left. Increasingly, through mainstream media and Big Tech, high-profile leftists are speaking openly about violence to be inflicted on Trump and all his supporters. I’m not talking specifically about the Antifa and Black Lives Matter street violence we’ve seen in places like Denver and Portland, which includes outright murders of Trump supporters. I’m referring here to voices that normalize and promote open terror against any freedom-respecting person who has different views from those blessed by left-wing leaders, media, and Big Tech. Seven examples are included below. ... How far will this go? Members of the domestic terror organization Weather Underground, headed up by 1960s radical Bill Ayers, explained some 50 years ago that when “the revolution” came, a lot of Americans would have to be located to education camps. This sounds eerily like what Reich and others are now proposing after they oust Trump. Weather Underground members said that those who didn’t comply despite re-education, which they estimated would include about 25 million Americans, would have to be eradicated, as in killed. Of course, that could never happen here, right? Just remember that history is littered with societies filled with decent, normal people who descended into chaos and murder, often incited by propaganda from a heavily controlled media. However unlikely this seems, we must pay close attention to these patterns so we don’t repeat some of the darkest days of history. (read more) 2020-10-27 e THIS IS BLOG ENTRY
NUMBER 1000 for 2020
THE MARXIST NATIVES ARE RESTLESS - II Video: Female Cop Run Over by
BLM Mob in Philadelphia
Another night of looting and rioting. A video out of Philadelphia shows a female police officer being run over by a truck driven by BLM rioters as another night of chaos unfolded. The rioters hit the streets after the police shooting of Walter Wallace Jr. in an incident being described as yet another unprovoked murder of a black man. In reality, footage of the incident shows Wallace Jr. ignoring numerous warnings from police officers to drop the weapon as he advances on them before being shot. His name
was Walter Wallace Jr. He was given repeated
warnings to drop the knife.
Rather than listen to those warnings, he charged at officers while brandishing the knife. This was 100 percent a justified shooting, as any rational person can see. https://t.co/BUsYX37ngw — Matt Walsh (@MattWalshBlog) October 27, 2020 However, as we have seen multiple times over the past 5 months, Black Lives Matter agitators don’t let the facts get in the way of yet another chance to riot. A female sergeant suffered a broken leg as she was struck by a speeding vehicle. ... A total of 30 police officers were injured during the clashes. (read more) (See also: https://twitter.com/shanermurph/status/1320872419020677121?s=20 ) 2020-10-27 d THE MARXIST NATIVES ARE RESTLESS - I New TikTok Trend: Threatening
to Kneecap People Who Don’t Support BLM
So much for the tolerant left! A new TikTok trend has emerged in which leftists playfully threaten to “kneecap” anyone who doesn’t support Black Lives Matter. Clips uploaded to the Chinese-owned website show users, most of them young women displaying LGBT colors, dancing while miming to the words, “If you don’t support Black Lives Matter, I’ll break your neko-neko-kneecaps.” Neko is the Japanese word for cat, which is also used to describe characters in anime or manga that have catlike features. ... As we previously highlighted, another TikTok viral trend that emerged last month featured parents and older siblings throwing their babies off camera to the tune of a hip-hop song about abortion before twerking. In general, TikTok serves as a hub for young girls (some of them underage) to perform sexually suggestive dances to whatever happens to be the latest degenerate hip-hop song. (read more) 2020-10-27 c THE COVID-CON III Follow the Science! 1.2
Million COVID deaths edition
This post was originally my comment to a person on Facebook, which somebody then deleted. This person repeatedly throws out the 1.2 M deaths worldwide number and I finally lost it and posted a response to him after he scolded people for “spreading disinformation and not listening to science”. He actually told people disputing the Second Wave Hysteria to “shut up and listen to the government and science”. As one of my all-time favourite economists, Thomas Sowell, would say…. “Oh dear, where to begin?” 1 million or 1.2 million deaths worldwide sounds like a big number and on its own you can use it to club “Covidiots” into silence, that is, until you actually look at it. For starters, bandying out a number, any number in isolation is meaningless. For any number to have any relevance, to anything, it has to be part of a data set or otherwise part of some meaningful comparison. If we take the 1.2 million COVID deaths worldwide, at it’s face (more on that below), the obvious question then becomes “is that good or bad?” The most useful signal we can get from a global COVID death toll is how it compares to what is called the “Absolute Fatality Rates” globally, which is simply the rate of all fatalities from all causes. (graph) From the charts, we can clearly see, there was a lot of excess mortality in March and April, and then, like every other meaningful metric around Coronavirus, it drops off drastically and starts to level out, with a slight seasonal rise as we head into the winter. Interestingly, in “no lockdown” Sweden, it turns out their absolute death toll is much lower than one would think: (graph) It could possibly come in lower by the end of the year, but if not, will come in not that much higher. Not as high as, say, the US or England. If reducing fatalities is the goal, there is a much easier way to do that Sadly, a lot of people die every day, and I’m sure you’ve seen memes on social media on how many more people die from other causes like Tuberculosis (1.4M in 2019) than COVID-19. In the US, where the COVID death toll currently sits at 225K, it is estimated that medical malpractice kills 250K Americans a year. But an even bigger number, according to the WHO, is that alcohol abuse kills 3 million people annually, and that number will surely go even higher this year given the massive spike in mental illness, domestic violence, child abuse, depression and suicide caused by the lockdowns. If this is about saving lives, we could literally bring those alcohol related deaths to zero, turning it off like the flick of a switch by instituting a global ban on alcohol. We could do it tomorrow. Should we? The lives we save may include your own. In fact if we banned alcohol then we could let Coronavirus run and still be ahead nearly 2M preventable deaths annually, provided COVID-19 kept going with the same intensity it was going in March and April, which it clearly isn’t (see below). Of course, nobody would seriously entertain that, and they could probably articulate some decent logic around why we shouldn’t. But they may dismiss it without considering how closely the lockdown approach toward reducing COVID fatalities is analogous to a worldwide ban on alcohol to eliminate alcohol related deaths would be. Especially since we also know that a large portion of coronavirus fatalities die with COVID-19 and numerous other comorbidities* than of it (however, see my footnote on that at the end of this post). In that sense, alcohol related carnage is very similar. Few alcoholics drink themselves to death outright. Far more kill themselves (and others) in car accidents, commit suicide, or generally wreck their livers, hearts, kidneys, brains or generally run themselves down so low nearly anything else will finish them off. (read more) 2020-10-27 b THE COVID-CON II Enough conspiracy, let’s stick
to data and science to end the lockdowns, Part 2
... There is no shortage of science and data to challenge the flawed policies of the governments whose basic playbook has been: lockdown, close economy, print money, ignore data, and double down. This may be a good time to quickly outline my arc of how my views on the pandemic shifted over time. My journey from Zombie Apocalypse to lockdown skeptic I began monitoring the reports of a new virus emerging out of China in January. On January 23rd I emailed a friend advising him to go out the next day and pick up some N95 masks. By the first week of February I was stocking up on food, medical supplies, cash, and weapons while advising friends and family to do the same. I was bracing for a full breakdown of the global supply chain and a collapse of the global economy. Based on early reported numbers of an R0 around 3.1 with an IFR of 5%, it looked like we’d see doubling times of 15 days. By March all three levels of government, city, province and national were reporting case rates and fatalities daily. I put together a spreadsheet and using those numbers as a model I forecast Toronto to have 1.7M cases by the end of June. If the IFR really was 5%, or even 3%, it would mean between 51,000 and 136,000 fatalities. This was terrifying, so as the world started locking down, it seemed to make sense. In fact I was wondering why we were still allowing inbound flights from hotspots like China? There were rumblings from The Clerisy like the New York Times that blocking flights from China would be racist. This was the early innings of the politicization that was to follow. But then, a curious thing happened. The rate of change in infections and fatalities started coming down, drastically. (read more) 2020-10-27 a THE COVID-CON I Enough conspiracy, let’s stick
to data and science to end the lockdowns, Part 1
A couple of recurring conspiracy theory themes keep being circulated to me, they are specific to Canada but I’m sure these are typical across all locations. I find these maddening because there is plenty of factual, well sourced and scientifically verified counterfactuals to draw from when being critical of the near universal mishandling of pandemic response by national governments worldwide. For lockdown skeptics, embracing or amplifying fact-free hysterical conspiracy theories makes them look like lunatics, so they should stop doing that. Allow me to dispense with the two big Canuck-themed conspiracy theories and then inject some much needed sanity into the conversation via a recent Triggernometry podcast with guest Ivor Cummins. (read more) ... Comment David Barnett, Ph.D. - October 25, 2020 The data show clearly that unfocussed lockdowns were a colossal and pointless error. There were voices, such as Michael Levitt’s, pointing this out before any western societies indulged in lockdowns, but the March panic was understandable. And had the various governments reversed themselves by May, I think they would have been forgiven. None of the lockdown governments have reversed themselves. Instead they have doubled down . It seems as if justifying the previous error is more important than embarking on rational policy. I cannot help seeing a parallel between this present compounding of a manifest error and the French Military’s persistence in the Dreyfus affair of 1894. They persisted in their persecution of Dreyfus for 12 years, even forging “evidence” to justify it. The affair divided French society. The big worry is that the backlash against the shortsighted rear-covering establishment will bring chaos of the kind which all sorts of nasty elements can exploit. 2020-10-26 h ELECTION COUNTDOWN - VI 'You'll Bury Everyone
Involved': Bobulinski Recorded Biden Operatives
Begging Him To Stay Quiet, Set To Release Tues
Former Biden insider Tony Bobulinski allegedly has a recording of Biden family operatives begging him to stay quiet, or he will "bury" the reputations of everyone involved in Hunter's overseas dealings. According to The Federalist's Sean Davis, Bobulinski will play the tape on Fox News' "Tucker Carlson Tonight" on Tuesday, when Carlson will devote his show 'entirely' to an interview with the Biden whistleblower. According to a source
familiar with the planning, Bobulinski
will play recordings of Biden family operatives begging him to stay quiet and claiming Bobulinski's revelations will "bury" the reputations of everyone involved in Hunter's overseas deals. — Sean Davis (@seanmdav) October 26, 2020 (read more) (see also: https://twitter.com/TuckerCarlson/status/1320820871267639296 ) 2020-10-26 g VACCINE NEWS (FOLLOWUP - see earlier story) South Korean authorities stick
to flu vaccine plan after deaths rise to 48
SEOUL (Reuters) - The number of South Koreans who have died after getting flu shots has risen to 48, the Korea Disease Control and Prevention Agency (KDCA) said on Saturday, adding that the vaccines would continue to reduce the chance of having simultaneous epidemics. The health authorities said they found no direct link between the deaths and the shots. They plan to carry on with the state-run vaccination programme to try to avoid having to fight both the flu and the coronavirus over the coming winter. “After reviewing death cases so far, it is not the time to suspend a flu vaccination programme since vaccination is very crucial this year, considering ... the COVID-19 outbreaks,” KDCA Director Jeong Eun-kyung told a briefing. ... The rising deaths have caused some doctors and politicians to call for a halt to the government campaign to vaccinate about 30 million of the country’s 54 million people. While encouraging people to get flu vaccines, Jeong issued precautions to take before getting the shot, such as drinking enough water and telling healthcare workers about any underlying medical conditions. She also advised people to wait 15-30 minutes before leaving the clinic where they receive their vaccine. “If possible, try to get the flu shot when it’s warm, since there are concerns that low temperatures could affect cardiovascular disease or cerebrovascular disease,” she said. The KDCA said 9.4 million people had been inoculated as of Friday in the programme that began in September, with 1,154 cases of adverse reactions. (read more) 2020-10-26 f THE MINISTRY OF TRUTH - I Twitter Goes Full Orwell,
Censors All Topics "Likely To Be Subject To Election
Misinformation"
Twitter is pulling out all the stops, with just 7 days left until the 2020 election. As if a complete and total coverup of the Hunter Biden story by the mainstream media and big tech wasn't far enough; and as if every social media product and app you use annoyingly reminding you to vote on November 3 wasn't enough, Twitter has now apparently gone "full Orwell" and, through a spokesperson, basically said they will prompt users with warnings on "topics that are likely to be the subject of election misinformation". The news hit Bloomberg around 12:30pm EST on Monday: TWITTER WILL BEGIN TO
SHOW PROMPTS TO U.S. USERS THAT ADDRESS TOPICS
THAT
ARE LIKELY TO BE SUBJECT OF ELECTION MISINFORMATION - TWITTER SPOKESPERSON What are "topics that are likely to be the subject of election misinformation", anyway? We're guessing it can include any literally anything that would be detrimental to Democratic nominee Joe Biden, while negative press and conspiracies about President Trump are allowed to run amok at will. For example, we pointed out the recent hypocrisy of Twitter allowing Rudy Giuliani's alleged sexually explicit scene in the new Borat movie to run wild on Twitter, while video of a Presidential nominee's son allegedly smoking crack while engaging in sex acts with a woman was promptly pulled from the platform. Around the same time, Twitter Support put up a Tweet calling the 2020 election "unlike any other in US history" and informing users it is going to prompt them about potentially delayed election results and voting by mail. (read more) 2020-10-26 e ELECTION COUNTDOWN - V The New York Post endorses President
Donald J. Trump for re-election
We can return to the explosive job creation, rising wages and general prosperity we had before the pandemic. We can have economic freedom and opportunity, and resist cancel culture and censorship. We can put annus horribilis, 2020, behind us and make America great again, again. We can do all this — if we make the right choice on Nov. 3. The New York Post endorses President Donald J. Trump for re-election. Elections are always about the economy, but never more so than this year. So a reminder: Until the necessary shutdown to fight the coronavirus, the unemployment rate stood at 3.5 percent, the lowest in a half-century. African American unemployment was 6.8 percent, the lowest figure since 1972. Adults out of the workforce for years found new prospects; for 17 months of Trump’s term, there were 1 million more job openings than people unemployed. That drove up salaries. For the first time in a decade, wage growth exceeded 3 percent year-over-year. It also narrowed the wealth gap. Between 2016 and 2019, real median incomes rose the most, 9 percent, for those without a high school diploma. Real median incomes declined 2.3 percent for those with a college degree, mostly because older workers retired, according to the Federal Reserve’s Survey of Consumer Finances. How did President Trump do it? First, by trusting the free market. He championed lowering the corporate tax rate to a figure more in line with the rest of the industrialized world. He cut cumbersome regulations, particularly ones rammed through as President Barack Obama was headed out the door. He streamlined the permitting process that would delay infrastructure projects by years, sometimes decades. A Joe Biden administration would be beholden to a socialist left that sees an opportunity to remake the nation in its vision, one more dependent on government debt. Consider Biden’s dance on fracking — against it for his party, in favor of it in general because he knows what a positive force it’s been for Pennsylvania. Which position would he have in office? Trump also rejected the globalist axiom that trade deals and unfettered immigration were better for Americans. The US has lost 3.7 million jobs to China since 2001, according to the Economic Policy Institute. ... President Trump will not be looking to remake the country. He will trust that America will, given support but not interference, bounce back. He will, in short, not get in the way. Re-electing him is the best choice for the United States. Plus, it’ll really tick off Hollywood. (read more) 2020-10-26 d ELECTION COUNTDOWN - IV The big Trump rallies you
don't see
WASHINGTON, Pennsylvania — "I can't believe there aren't any newspeople here," said Linda of Greene County, Pennsylvania, as she stood among hundreds of cars and pickup trucks idling in long parallel lines in a vast big-box-store parking lot Saturday, waiting to join the Interstate 70 Trump Train. Indeed, although there were carloads of Trump supporters as far as one could see, and many more on the way from Ohio and West Virginia, and this enormous political event was happening less than two weeks before the presidential election, as far as I could tell, I was the only newsperson there. It was the biggest political rally no one saw. And gatherings like it have been happening for months in some of the places President Trump needs most to win if he is to be reelected. And, remarkably, the rallies are not the work of the Trump campaign. The road rally in Washington, Pennsylvania, was organized and staged by local Trump supporters, linked together largely by Facebook, who want to show that enthusiasm for the president in western Pennsylvania and surrounding areas is not just strong but stronger than it was when Trump eked out a victory in Pennsylvania in 2016. If Trump wins this critical state, it will owe in significant part to this organic movement and the energetic organizers who have nothing to do with his campaign. Saturday's rally started in St. Clairsville, Ohio, in the parking lot of a store called Oil & Gas Safety Supply. After hundreds of cars, probably the majority were pickup trucks, lined up there, they became a rolling rally headed east on I-70 to Wheeling, West Virginia, about 12 miles away. There, hundreds more cars were waiting to join, and the much bigger rally returned to the freeway for the 30-mile drive to Washington. That's where Linda and several hundred more people were waiting in the parking lot of the other branch of Oil & Gas Safety Supply. The cars from Ohio and West Virginia exited off the interstate, rolled past the Home Depot, then past Oil & Gas, and then, when the last car had passed, the Washington cars joined it, making one massive line of vehicles heading back to St. Clairsville. There were so many cars — organizers estimated the number to be 2,000, many of them with whole families inside — that it took a very long time to pass through the lot. As that happened, people honked and waved American flags, and Trump flags, too, and talked about why they think it is critical for the president to be reelected. "We're here because we believe he is the only way we're going to have an economy in the future," said Sherri from Claysville. "You can have a pandemic and distance and be safe and not shut the economy down." The car rallies themselves are an answer to the problem of campaigning amid a coronavirus pandemic — what could be safer than thousands of people gathered, but all inside their cars? Maria, from Washington, described herself as a lifelong Democrat who turned Republican when Trump ran in 2016. She and a lot of her family members voted for Barack Obama twice, she said. Now, looking around, she marveled that "the enthusiasm for Trump is unreal." But one person wasn't there — Maria's husband, who was at work in a coal mine in Waynesburg, where he has been a miner for 20 years. It was no surprise that a crowd in Washington, located in the massive Marcellus Shale oil and gas range, would include a lot of people involved in the energy industry. "We're a big oil and gas family," said Kristie from Washington. "We're living the American dream because of the oil and gas industry." "Born and raised in it," added her husband Zane, whose ancestors had drilled some of the first oil wells in McKean County, Pennsylvania. Now, Kristie added, "We're all about fracking." "Check out my license plate," said one man out his window as I walked by. I looked at the back of his car, and the plate said FRAC-IT. "All in, buddy," he shouted. Several other people said they either worked directly in the energy industry or one of the many businesses that support and benefit from it. When I asked if people were connected to the energy industry, my favorite answer came from Dan from Greene County, who said, "Yes, I am connected to the energy industry, because I've got electricity and gas in my house." Point made. We all have a connection to the energy industry. It's just more obvious to the people living in western Pennsylvania. They feel so strongly about Trump because they know he has supported their industry while Obama and his vice president, Joe Biden, wanted to cripple and ultimately eliminate it. They know Trump has not miraculously saved the energy industry in Pennsylvania. They didn't expect that he would. Their calculus was much more basic: In 2016, they voted for the candidate who would stop trying to kill the industry that supports 322,000 jobs in Pennsylvania, according to an energy industry estimate. (read more) 2020-10-26 c ELECTION COUNTDOWN - III The Only Middle Finger
Available
If Trump wins, it will be as a gigantic rude gesture to the cultural Left. If Donald Trump wins a second term, it will be an unmistakable countercultural statement in a year when progressives have otherwise worked their will across the culture. After months and months of statues toppling and riots in American cities and a crime wave and woke virtue-signaling from professional sports leagues and absurd firings and cancellations, the year would end with a stunning, stark rebuke of all of that. If Trump manages to pull off an upset in 2020, it will be as a gigantic rude gesture directed at the commanding heights of American culture. (read more) 2020-10-26 b ELECTION COUNTDOWN - II Biden's very bad week shakes
up race against Trump
We will soon know whether the 2020 campaign went on one week too long for candidate Joe Biden Welcome to the final week of one of the most vengeful and acrimonious elections in our country’s history. Very soon we will know whether Establishment Elites have succeeded in defeating a president who broke some glass in order to make our country great again. We will also know whether the campaign went on one week too long for Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden. New revelations that Biden apparently lied when he claimed no knowledge of his son Hunter’s shady business dealings in China, Ukraine, Kazakhstan and elsewhere and that the candidate may in fact have been entangled in those activities, has rocked the campaign. Biden said recently: “Our characters are on the ballot; look at us closely.” Perhaps he should add: “But not too closely.” A poor debate performance Thursday hurt Biden as well. Biden stumbled several times, and also admitted that he wanted to “close down the oil industry.” That was an awkward pronouncement to make on nationwide TV for a candidate who needs to win the energy-producing state of Pennsylvania. The candidate later tried to walk back his statement but, like earlier promises to end fracking, the damage was done. It should not surprise voters; you cannot get to Biden’s stated goal of net zero emissions in the next 30 years without dismantling our wonderfully inexpensive and reliable energy infrastructure, and jettisoning oil and gas. Though Biden leads in national polls by on average 8 points, according to Real Clear Politics, his advantage is slipping both nationally and in certain critical swing states. Who can be surprised? He has carried out the most pitiful non-campaign ever, refusing important interviews and hiding out in his basement.(read more) 2020-10-26 a ELECTION COUNTDOWN - I Joe Biden Forgets Trump's Name
Again, Claims He Is Running Against "George Bush"
With 8 days left until Election Day, Vice President Joe Biden is still having trouble remembering exactly who he's running against. It's definitely not the first time this has happened, but during a critical opportunity to appeal to young voters from the safety of his basement (Joe and Dr. Jill Biden were making a brief appearance during the "I Will Vote" livestream) Biden stumbled and appeared to forget President Trump's name, awkwardly referring to him as "my opponent" before stammering out "George Bush". Amusingly, after the stumble, Dr. Jill nudges him and whispers "Trump" as her husband stammers. (read more) 2020-10-25 h A Plan of Action Scoop: Trump's post-election execution
list
If President Trump wins re-election, he'll move to immediately fire FBI Director Christopher Wray and also expects to replace CIA Director Gina Haspel and Defense Secretary Mark Esper, two people who've discussed these officials' fates with the president tell Axios. The big picture: The list of planned replacements is much longer, but these are Trump's priorities, starting with Wray. Wray and
Haspel are despised and distrusted almost
universally in Trump's inner circle. He would have
fired both already, one official said, if not for
the political headaches of acting before Nov. 3.
Why it matters: A win, no matter the margin, will embolden Trump to ax anyone he sees as constraining him from enacting desired policies or going after perceived enemies. Trump last
week signed an executive
order that set off alarm bells as a means to politicize
the civil service. An administration official
said the order "is a really big deal" that would
make it easier for presidents to get
rid of career government officials.
There could be shake-ups across other departments. The president has never been impressed with Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, for example. But that doesn't carry the urgency of replacing Wray or Haspel. The nature of top intelligence and law enforcement posts has traditionally carried an expectation for a higher degree of independence and separation from politics. Be smart: While Trump has also privately vented about Attorney General Bill Barr, he hasn't made any formal plans to replace him, an official said. Trump is
furious that Barr
isn't releasing before the election what Trump
hoped would be a bombshell report by U.S. Attorney
John Durham on the Obama administration's handling
of the Trump-Russia investigation.
Durham's investigation has yet to produce any high-profile indictments of Obama-era officials as Trump had hoped. "The attorney general wants to finish the work that he's been involved in since day one," a senior administration official told Axios. Behind the scenes: "The view of Haspel in the West Wing is that she still sees her job as manipulating people and outcomes, the way she must have when she was working assets in the field," one source with direct knowledge of the internal conversations told Axios. "It's bred a lot of suspicion of her motives." Trump is
also increasingly frustrated with Haspel for
opposing the declassification
of documents that would help the Justice
Department's Durham report.
A source familiar with conversations at the CIA says, "Since the beginning of DNI's push to declassify documents, and how strongly she feels about protecting sources connected to those materials, there have been rumblings around the agency that the director plans to depart the CIA regardless of who wins the election.” As for Wray,
whose expected firing was first reported by The
Daily Beast, Trump is angry his
second FBI chief didn't launch a formal
investigation into Hunter Biden's foreign business
connections — and didn't purge more officials Trump
believes abused power to investigate his 2016
campaign's ties to Russia.
Trump also grew incensed when Wray testified in September that the FBI has not seen widespread election fraud, including with mail-in ballots. A senior FBI official tells Axios: "Major law enforcement associations representing current and former FBI agents as well as police and sheriff's departments across the country have consistently expressed their full support of Director Wray's leadership of the Bureau." (read more) 2020-10-25 g THE COVID-CON IV Child care not associated with spread of
COVID-19, Yale study finds
Yale researchers conducted the first-ever large-scale assessment of the risk of working in child care during the COVID-19 pandemic. Their findings show child care programs that remained open throughout the pandemic did not contribute to the spread of the virus to providers, lending valuable insight to parents, policymakers, and providers alike. The study, published in the journal Pediatrics, found that exposure to child care was not associated with an elevated risk of spreading COVID-19 from children to adults, provided the child care programs took multiple safety measures — including disinfecting, handwashing, symptom screening, social distancing, mask-wearing, and limiting group size — and were located in communities where the spread of COVID-19 was contained. For the study, Yale researchers surveyed 57,000 child care providers across all 50 states, Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico in May and June, 2020, comparing self-reported COVID-19 infections and hospitalizations among workers whose programs stayed open and those whose programs closed. The research was done in collaboration with Child Care Aware of America. No differences in COVID-19 outcomes were observed between workers who continued to provide in-person care for young children and those who did not. (read more) 2020-10-25 f Hunting Hunter Biden - II Long-standing claims of Biden corruption
all but confirmed with Hunter’s emails
Thanks to three brave Americans, we now know that Joe Biden has long misled the public about his involvement with his family’s foreign business entanglements while he served as vice president. At considerable personal risk, former Biden family business partners Tony Bobulinski and Bevan Cooney, and computer shop owner John Paul Mac Isaac, have come forward with tens of thousands of primary-source documents — internal corporate records, emails, and text messages — detailing years of business dealings that centered on trading on the Biden name. This material suggests that, despite Joe Biden’s insistence that he knew nothing about his family’s business deals, he was well aware of his son Hunter Biden’s business ventures in China, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, and elsewhere. These new troves constitute hard evidence of Biden family corruption, and confirm our reporting dating back to our 2018 book “Secret Empires.” In 2018, when we first broke the foreign influence scandals that have now engulfed the former vice president, it seemed apparent that China and Ukraine were not paying Biden’s family members for their expertise, they were buying access to the vice president of the United States. This was never a scandal solely about Hunter or Joe’s brothers, James and Frank. It was, and has always been, a Joe Biden scandal. For nearly three years, Biden and his surrogates have responded to the scandal with an increasingly unconvincing series of denials — including another from the former Vice President in his last debate with President Trump. (read more) 2020-10-25 e Hunting Hunter Biden - I Twitter Nukes Alleged Hunter Biden Sex
Tape After Letting Borat-Giuliani Sex Scene Trend
Interested parties can find the video here. A few days ago, the MSM and their political allies in the Democratic Party celebrated the release of a "compromising" photo appearing to show former NYC Mayor Rudy Giuliani with his hands down his pants. Giuliani claimed that he was merely retucking in his shirt after removing some recording equipment, but nevertheless, the whole news cycle played out in full view of the public as social media giants like Twitter and Facebook looked the other way, allowing the photo, and links to news stories covering the controversy (orchestrated by "Borat" prankster Sasha Baron Cohen) to circulate widely. However, just days later, a Chinese digital media company has published footage showing a man who looks identical to Hunter Biden engaging in a sex fetish act with an unidentifiable woman (along with a photo purporting to show what appears to be the same man engaging in sex with a Ukrainian prostitute). But instead of allowing discussion and links to the video to circulate, Twitter has scrubbed all links and photos related to the video and story, and is suspending accounts that appear to be trying to spread the video or screenshots from the footage. Some background: Late Saturday afternoon, a mysterious link surfaced on Reddit purporting to be the vaunted Hunter Biden sex tape - or at least, one of the Hunter Biden sex tapes (whispers about more footage have so far gone unsubstantiated). In it, a naked Hunter Biden can be seen, smoking crack, and laying with an unidentified woman, possibly a prostitute. The woman's face is blurred out, making it impossible to tell whether or not she appeared to be underage. The video itself was posted by a news site purporting to be an anti-CCP intelligence operation called G-TV, which is also tied to Guo Wengui, the Chinese billionaire dissident who is close to Steve Bannon (Bannon was reportedly arrested after a visit on Guo's yacht in Connecticut). Interested parties can find the video here. (read more) 2020-10-25 d Bizarre Biden Blunder, OR, An Honest Statement? In Bizarre Freudian Slip, Biden Brags
About Assembling "Most Extensive Voter Fraud
Organization In History"
Former Vice President Joe Biden suffered from either a senior moment or a Freudian slip on Saturday, when he told Pod Save America host Dan Pfeiffer - a longtime Obama aide - that his campaign has assembled the "most extensive and inclusive voter fraud organization in the history of American politics." "What’s your message to the folks who have not yet voted or do not yet have a plan to vote. And part two, for the 50 million Americans who’ve already voted, what can they do over the last ten days to help make sure that you’re the next President of the United States?" Pfeiffer asked Biden. Biden returned word salad at first, saying "Well, first of all, you know, uh, what really rankles, uh, my opponent is I say that, uh, the thing that bothers him most is he’s not a patch on Barack’s jeans. I mean, you know Barack was one hell of a president, and I tell you what, man, what an honor it was — I think you guys believe it, too — to serve with him. I mean, incredible honor. And, uh, I’m not being solicitous. I really mean that. Um, he had more integrity in his little finger than most people have in their whole body and he had a backbone like a ramrod. Has one." Then Biden touted his 'voter fraud' organization: "Secondly, we’re in a situation where we have put together — and you’d [sic] guys, did it for our, the president Obama’s administration, before this — we have put together, I think, the most extensive and and inclusive voter fraud organization in the history of American politics. What the president is trying to do is discourage people from voting by implying their vote won’t be counted, it can’t be counted, we’re gonna challenge it, and all these things. If enough people vote, it’s gonna overwhelm the system. You see what’s happening now. You guys know it as well as I do. You see the long, long lines in early voting. You see the millions of people who have already cast a ballot." (read more) 2020-10-25 c THE COVID-CON III Epidemiologists Stray From the Covid
Herd
Great Barrington Declaration co-authors Martin Kuldorff and Jay Bhattacharya on the costs of lockdown, the science of immunity, and the politicization of the coronavirus pandemic. The Covid rebels make an unlikely pair. Jay Bhattacharya was born in Kolkata, an Indian city that pulsates with people. Martin Kulldorff is from Umeå, Sweden, population 90,000. Yet they have much in common. “I almost view Martin like a brother,” says the talkative Dr. Bhattacharya, 52, who moved to the U.S. with his Bengali parents when he was 4. “I mean, we complete each other’s sentences, as you can see.” (read more) 2020-10-25 b THE COVID-CON II Why so many believe in the Covid Cult
THERE is a scene in the television series The Handmaid’s Tale in which hundreds of women stand silently, their faces covered by red masks. These symbols of oppression and obedience can now be seen on every high street in Britain. Humans are sociable animals. We are not meant to be locked away in solitary confinement and denied the sight of each other’s faces. To be forcibly separated from our loved ones damages our mental health. Masks dehumanise us and feed fear. Yet lockdowns, social isolation and masks are the weapons of choice for politicians in their lunatic ‘war’ on a virus, despite being detrimental to our health, economy and society. My TCW colleague Will Jones recently explained that making masks mandatory is a political choice, and not a scientific one. Masks are not only useless for combating Covid-19, they can also be harmful to healthy users. Masks act as filters, not barriers. Surgical masks are useful when visiting a hospital or a vulnerable person as long as they’re worn and disposed of appropriately. But fabric and cheap paper masks worn in other circumstances are hazardous, aiding the transmission of the virus. Masks also weaken children’s immune systems, setting them up for health issues in later life. To see a child in a mask is to witness a form of child abuse. A mask worn in a shop functions only as a social signifier of virtue and obedience. ... Politicians have turned Covid-19 into a moral crusade, quasi-religious in nature, creating a doomsday cult. Masks generate fear and help keep the cultish behaviour going. Lockdowns demoralise us, reducing our capacity to resist dangerous authoritarian rule. Defeating the virus is the impossible aim that keeps the cult leaders in business. Wearing a mask and cheering on lockdowns makes people feel as if they are doing their duty, even if their actions are causing untold damage to themselves and others. All too easily they relinquish their sense of responsibility by saying that they are following government orders. They may not be entirely immune to the gross suffering caused by this but, as cult members are prone to do, they ignore it for the ‘greater good’. History is littered with the calamitous antics of doomsday cults. Yet we must be the only civilisation in history which thinks we can cheat death on a mass scale, destroying ourselves in the process. Our political class won’t help us. They are leading this delusion, described by one psychiatrist elsewhere on these pages today as a mass ‘delusional psychosis’. We need, as he also says, to break free from cultish thinking, stop following orders and save ourselves. (read more) 2020-10-25 a THE COVID-CON I Sweden Refuses to Impose New Lockdown
Measures, Saying People Have Suffered Enough
Loneliness, mental health impact of lockdown balanced against COVID threat. Health authorities in Sweden have refused to follow the rest of Europe by imposing new coronavirus lockdown measures on their population, arguing that those beset by loneliness and misery of being isolated have suffered enough. Despite Sweden mirroring other countries on the continent with rising coronavirus infections, the government has held firm in refusing to lockdown its population, weighing the untold misery and health impacts of isolation against the threat of COVID-19. “The elderly, they said, have suffered enough,” writes Fraser Nelson. “They have spent months being advised to avoid public transport, shopping malls and other parts of everyday life. And the result? Loneliness. Misery. This is more than unpleasant: it quickly translates into depression, mental health issues and mortality. “We cannot only think about infection control,” said Lena Hallengren, Sweden’s health minister, “we also need to think about public health.” An important distinction: focus on Covid to the exclusion of other conditions and you risk lives.” Hallengren’s 21 page report also uncovered a “decline in mental health” that was “likely to worsen the longer the recommendations remain in place,” leading officials to lift lockdown restrictions that previously applied to over-70s. (read more) 2020-10-24 e A Marxist Malaise America is exhausted
Jesse Singal and Katie Herzog tell Andrew Doyle how wokeness conquered the world. Jesse Singal and Katie Herzog, co-hosts of Blocked and Reported, are Andrew Doyle’s latest guests on Culture Wars. They discuss their run-ins with cancel culture, how big business went woke and what the election means for the culture wars. (listen) 2020-10-24 d Anarchy with Mail-In Ballots No Signature Match? No
Postmark? No Problemo! It's This Week in Ballot
Shenanigans!
When last we left you, Dear Reader, we were dumpster-diving for ballots, navigating the depths of a 15-yard box for the 100 stale beer and coffee ground-stained ballots dumped by some malevolent (or lazy) postal worker in Kentucky. This week, another 99 ballots and hundreds of pieces of first-class mail were found dumped by yet another postal worker, this one in New Jersey. Both ballot-tossing layabouts are being prosecuted by the feds, but it’s unknown at this point if this is their first ballot-tossing caper or just their latest ballot-tossing caper. It’s hard to judge what’s worse, some disgruntled postal worker tossing ballots or Pennsylvania accepting and counting all ballots – even ones that have no identifying information, the right postmark, and mailed after the election. We’ll start with the story that made headlines recently when Pennsylvania authorities tossed out 372,000 ballot applications. Far from disenfranchising voters, we are assured by Pennsylvania officials that 90% of the applications were duplicates due to confused voters signing up at multiple places and with different groups, according to Just the News. Hmm. (read more) 2020-10-24 c Anarchy in the City Anarchy in New York?
One senses order slipping away. After Attorney General William Barr designated New York, along with Portland and Seattle, as “anarchistic” cities, Gotham mayor Bill de Blasio expressed outrage. He characterized it as a political attack on “black and brown cities”—though Portland and Seattle are two of the whitest cities in the nation—and denied that New York is remotely lawless or otherwise anarchic. Now the mayors of the three jurisdictions, facing the loss of federal funding, have sued the administration, calling the designation false and illegal. It’s true that New York City wouldn’t be confused for Tegucigalpa or Mogadishu. And its violent crime rate, while soaring, is still much lower than that of Baltimore or St. Louis, for instance. But comparing New York today with the New York of even a few years ago makes clear that the city is undergoing a serious fracturing of civic order—one trending toward further disintegration. One late summer Sunday morning, Demetrius Harvard, a 30-year old Bronx man, stood on a subway platform in Greenwich Village and methodically threw construction material onto the tracks. Bystanders tried to stop him, and someone even went into the train well to remove the debris, but Harvard persisted in his sabotage. Eventually, he succeeded in derailing an uptown A train, injuring several passengers. You had to read to the end of tabloid news reports to get the real story. Two weeks earlier, in the same neighborhood, Harvard had tossed a steel bench through a bus window. He was arrested, charged with criminal mischief, and immediately “ROR’d”—released on his recognizance—with no bail. This cycle is now all too common in New York, where public order and safety have been buffeted by chaotic forces. Criminal-justice reform at the state level removed bail as an option for all but the most heinous charges. Locally, the NYPD has stopped enforcing many quality-of-life laws. ... In New York City, it feels as though things are getting out of control. When wildcat protests can take over the streets, blocking traffic at will while cops indicate they have been ordered to stand down, one observes a lack of order. Homeless drug addicts set up camp on lower Broadway and shoot up openly—a sight hard to imagine not long ago, but now common. Hotels on the Upper West Side have been converted into homeless shelters; when neighbors complain about random crime, public defecation, and harassment, local elected officials excoriate them as racists. (read more) 2020-10-24 b Anarchy in the Classroom Submitting to Unrule
Two charter school networks are walking back their behavioral standards. With discussions of racial injustice dominating headlines, some of America’s most successful elementary and secondary schools are caving to progressive pressure and renouncing what sets them apart: high behavioral standards. As America’s largest and arguably most successful charter school system, KIPP serves more than 100,000 students at 242 schools. In July, however, it renounced its revered slogan: “work hard, be nice.” The justification? It fosters “inequitable discipline practices” and places too much value on being “compliant and submissive.” Uncommon Schools followed this lead in August, posting an open letter detailing its intention to loosen behavioral norms. KIPP led a once-bipartisan movement to reshape American education. Uncommon perfected the craft and published bestselling books detailing its behavioral and academic methods—few teachers remain unaware of Doug Lemov’s Teach Like a Champion. KIPP and Uncommon are among America’s most influential schools; their apparent turn against themselves signals a loss not just for their students but also for the thousands of schools inspired by their example. In How the Other Half Learns, scholar Robert Pondiscio describes how he spent a year observing one of these no-excuses charter schools. He relates stories of children sent home for wrong-colored socks and children walking down the hall in absolute silence. It’s hard to argue with the results: 99 percent of students score proficient in math, compared with 33 percent nationwide. The figures are similar for reading, history, and science. ... Some schools maintain their commitment to appropriate discipline. Katharine Birbalsingh of Michaela Schools and Eva Moskowitz of Success Academy remain staunch advocates of high standards, even as advocates, journalists, and education ideologues condemn them and their practices. But millions of disadvantaged schoolchildren are consigned to academic mediocrity, emotional abuse, and physical threat in the name of “equity” and restorative justice. It is tragic that KIPP and Uncommon, two excellent charter networks that have provided a life-saving education to underserved students, seem to be submitting to this program of despair. (read more) 2020-10-24 a The goal of the hysterical reaction to the
coronavirus, from both local and national politicians,
has been to distract from the much bigger crisis we
face dealing with: the Fed’s responsibility for the
economic collapse and its hunger for unlimited power.
The fact that responding to the exaggerated
coronavirus crisis made the economic downturn much
worse was not a disappointment to those individuals
who see economic turmoil as an opportunity to promote
radical Marxist ideas.
The coronavirus epidemic is not the bubonic plague….It’s now recognized that much of the data reported on the severity and extent of the disease was seriously flawed and misleading. The reports inevitably made it appear that the epidemic was much worse than it was. To many observers, this was more than just careless mistakes but rather a concerted effort to spread fear and panic. This effort amazingly led to a delusional and extreme reaction by the media, politicians, public health fanatics, drug companies, national and global governments, supporters of socialism, fascism, and Marxism, all promoting the infamous lockdown. Ron Paul, The End of Unearned Opulence ______________________ 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 - October 16 - 23 ARCHIVE 2020 - October 1 - 15 ARCHIVE 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.
|
|
| THE ARCHIVE PAGE |
| 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 |