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Open thread 1/23/23 — 71 Comments

  1. Is there any close caption available for that?
    Sign language?
    – – – – – – – – –
    In any event, no need, fortunately, to read between the lines on this:
    “Africa Is Starkly Unvaccinated, And Starkly Unvanquished By COVID”—
    https://www.zerohedge.com/covid-19/africa-starkly-unvaccinated-and-starkly-unvanquished-covid
    Key grafs (RTWT), from the Section titled, “How Africa Defeated COVID so Decisively Without Vaccines”
    “…Part of the African continent’s success is no doubt due to a fortunate accident of microbiology, infectious diseases, pharmacology and immunology. It so happens that two of the most effective treatments for COVID, ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine, are also routine prophylactic weekly medicines throughout equatorial Africa, because they happen to be known for a half-century as the most effective, applicable and safest anti-parasite medications. So the population, particularly through about 31 countries, the tropical middle rectangle roughly, of Africa already were well-equipped prior to COVID events launching in late 2019 to early 2020.
    As fortune would have it, the unpatented and relatively inexpensive half-century old drug ivermectin, whose inventors won the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 2015, also has been the most effective medicine against COVID, [15] due in part to its specific effect against RNA transcriptase, as well as its blocking effect on all three parts of the trimeric spike protein, and other mechanisms.
    “Hydroxychloroquine is also used widely throughout at least equatorial regions of Africa as a prophylactic against parasites, but which fortunately has now been studied extensively and used successfully as both prevention and treatment of COVID disease, and as inhibitor of SARS-CoV-2 replication and activity.
    This is shown in over 380 studies conducted in 55 countries….” [All emphasis mine; Barry M.]

    Fishtank cleaner? Horse dewormer? Boosters, boosters, boosters? Gotta get everyone vaxxed? EVERYONE. Including all those kids? (Still pushing it today! Now how ’bout that…)
    Fauci & Co., the CDC, the NIH, et al.—with the AVID ASSITANCE AND COLLUSION of the FBI, of the CIA, of media AND of infotech, are, essentially, killers.
    (Maybe that’s why Walensky way back when was weeping so piteously….)

  2. Am I the only one who is sick of hearing about Alec Baldwin? I doubt that the Lincoln or JFK shootings would have gotten this much media attention. And I just heard that he is going to continue in Rust. I hope no one watches.

  3. Actually, it was Baldwin who could shoot someone in NYC (or NM), must be because he played Trump on TV. See, OMB can be a good thing?

  4. Lots of violence in Atlanta, and folks there are worried that a local Walmart will close permanently after two arson attempts in recent months.

    They’re afraid that the area will become one of the supposed “food deserts” afflicting black communities around the country.*

    I also note a recent article pointing out that there has been a tremendous upsurge in shoplifting, with the annual cost to businesses here in the U.S. estimated to be $94.5 billion dollars per year.**

    Things have gotten so bad that some stores have even resorted to putting products like SPAM in special tamper proof plastic boxes to deter theft.***

    (On a recent trip to our local Walmart I discovered that a whole section of the Pharmacy department has a locked plastic cage around all sorts of different products, and you had to call an employee to come unlock the cage if you wanted to get one of these many different products.)

    Why would a company keep a store open when there is rampant violence in the area, when some “patrons” have twice tried to burn the store down, and when they are probably running in the red because of constant shoplifting losses?

    https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/an-even-bigger-food-desert-vine-city-neighbors-concerned-walmart-could-close-for-good/ar-AA16DXPd

    **See https://nypost.com/2022/12/23/retail-theft-cost-retailers-$94.5-billion-in-2021-report/

    ***https://twitter.com/willystaley/status/1552736176590708736/photo/1 and see also https://www.curbed.com/2023/01/shoplifting-crime-wave-spam-keeper-retail-loss-prevention-design.html

  5. Here’s a book recommendation:
    Lies My Gov’t Told Me: and the better future coming
    It is written by Robert Malone, MD, who invented the original mRNA vaccine. The book also has several chapters written by other medical and non-medical experts.
    While parts of it are very scary (e.g., the government paid news media to do stories about how great the vaccines are – in other words our tax dollars are being used to feed us propaganda) it is something we should all be aware of.

  6. Off-topic, open-thread, public service(?) announcement:

    From time to time, Neo writes a post in which she cites an article that’s behind a paywall. For those who want to read the blocked article, there’s an alternative to getting out your credit card and starting a subscription.

    Here are six sites for getting around paywalls. Sometimes they work; sometimes they don’t. The last two are internet archives, which are also useful for finding pages that have succumbed to link rot.

    1. pdf.fivefilters.org
    2. printfriendly.com
    3. 12ft.io
    4. txtify.it
    5. archive.today (mirrors: archive.ph, archive.vn, archive.li, and archive.is)
    6. web.archive.org (Internet Archive Wayback Machine)

    Postscript:

    After a while, I got tired of taking the extra step of using these sites. Laziness drove me to install a browser extension that automatically implements paywall bypass. Of course, this doesn’t work for every blocked site. To install the extension, just download and follow directions.

    For Chrome and other Chromium-based browsers:
    https://gitlab.com/magnolia1234/bypass-paywalls-chrome-clean

    For Firefox and other Mozilla-based browsers:
    https://gitlab.com/magnolia1234/bypass-paywalls-firefox-clean

  7. We are having a storm and a power outage. I’m writing this comment on my phone. I have no idea when I’ll be able to post again.

  8. Think about getting a bicycle (i.e., pedal) generator…
    (A great way to get in shape while everyone else is wondering how long the power outage will last…)
    In the meantime, good luck….

  9. This guy does a speech about Climate Change as a part of (I guess) an Oxford University debate series.

    He is awesome.

    Tucker Carlson had him on his show last week.

  10. Iran’s government wants to stop Iran’s people, from protesting for
    Iranian women’s rights.

    It is my understanding that- to stop some people in Iran from protesting, The Iranian government is arresting some of the protesters, and putting them on trial for “breaking Iran’s morality laws”.

    These are unfair trials.

    If found guilty in these trials, Iran’s govt. will give these people THE DEATH PENALTY.

    Iran’s govt., in these trials, is unfairly giving these trials’ defendants, [about 15 minutes] to plead their cases in court.

    The defendants are given the 15 minutes- to try to convince the courts, that these defendants/people don’t deserve [to be found guilty of these crimes, and be given the death penalty for these crimes].

    …How can anyone defend themselves against a [death penalty], in just 15 minutes?

    [Where are the usual US government people, and the usual US reporters,] or any nation’s people, who usually speak out for [women’s rights], and [human rights]?

    It’s disappointing to see- that these people, who usually speak out for women’s rights, and people’s human rights, are not protesting loudly and strongly, for the protesting people of Iran.

    Will they not speak out for the people of Iran?

    Here’s a link to this news story:

    https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-64302726

  11. IIRC in late March or early April 2020, some doctors in eastern Va announced they came up with a treatment protocol that worked. Next day (IIRC) doctors in Tenn said they had come up with something very similar. The news disappeared.

    When they were shut up and shut down, it was apparent that something sinister was going on. Then we saw the Cal doctors whose youtube was shut down. And then Malone and McCullough and a Nobel prize winner in Europe were subjected to massive cancellation efforts.

    While this was going on, the treatment protocol pushed by the CDC and the rest of the health establishment was to do nothing until someone got so sick, they were in the ICU in the hospital, and they got put on a ventilator. Which killed them.

    Then HCQ got slandered. Then Ivermectin. And the government built the massive censorship corps to lean on news media, Big Tech and social media sites to shut down all dissent from Big Brother.

    The clown show continued through lockdowns, masks, social distancing and eventually the jabs. All pushed with lies and slanders relentlessly.

    When did you figure out that this had NOTHING to do with providing medical assistance to people? What’s crazy is that some people still haven’t figured it out.

  12. Ah, New England in stormy weather. When the forecast called for a storm, we’d fill up a bathtub and draw drinking water.

  13. Courageous Atlanta mayor in grave danger of outing himself as a white supremacist…
    ‘ “Domestic Terrorism” – Atlanta Mayor Disputes Claims That Anti-Police Riots Weren’t Violent’—
    https://www.zerohedge.com/political/domestic-terrorism-atlanta-mayor-disputes-claims-anti-police-riots-werent-violent
    Opening graf:
    ‘ Atlanta Mayor Andre Dickens is disputing claims that anti-police protests and rioting on Jan. 21 weren’t violent, saying that charges against six individuals who were arrested will include “domestic terrorism.”…’

  14. Billions spent annually by our medical bureaucracy, and they still haven’t done any studies of the Africa results. My guess is that they won’t do any studies. Wouldn’t be “prudent.” No money to be made from cheap treatments. All anecdotal data. Not worth the time and money. Etc.

    Konstantin Kosin makes the simplest, most direct argument for dealing with climate change. No need to refute the warmers’ science. Just plain common sense about economics and the human desire to improve your life. His video should be played in classrooms all over the nation.

    Warming temps and CO2 cause black outs. Exactly how that works is only understood by geniuses such as Gore and Kerry. 🙂 Hope you power outage doesn’t last too long, Neo. We need more posts.

  15. Stan,

    I ranted about HCQ and Ivermectin in an earlier one of Neo’s posts. The reason was and is money. The NIH collects royalty money from drug companies if it’s got a patent on a drug and then distributes that to their doctors. The Covid vaccines were pushed post haste out without the usual four to five year trial under an EUA, emergency use authorization. But, if there is a treatment then there no EUA. It was imperative to kill them off or Pfizer, Moderna, and company would not be able to sell their vaccines and the NIH doc wouldn’t get their money.

    Rand Paul interrogated Fauci about how much money he made off the vaccines. He refused to answer under some special dispensation that the docs didn’t have to reveal their take. Must be an embarrassingly large amount.

  16. Konstantin Kisin got a mention on this blog last year, talking about Russian national and political culture and the war in Ukraine with Australian interviewer John Anderson:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j1C8awu_d6Y

    Kisin starts by talking about his family’s history during the Great Terror and WWII. Pretty typical for most Russian families during that time. Almost everybody had a relative in the camps; the shorthand colloquial expression for that was “On/ona sidel/sidela” (“He/she sat”). He also talks about the societal collapse in Russia in the 1990s–like the 1920s in Germany–and the sources of Putin’s popularity. Worth watching again.

  17. The absence of extensive deaths in Africa from COVID will no doubt be explained by Western researchers as coming from the generally younger population there. That’s a good point, but I think the prevalence of HCQ and ivermectin use is also part of it.

    Now that the US Customs are no longer aggressively stopping small shipments from India, I’ve been able to acquire some ivermectin and will take it if I ever get COVID.

  18. Kate, Neo: New England weather…I don’t miss it, but have noted (my SiL and BiL live in Wethersfield), that CT is not having much of a winter. Somewhere around 8″ snow total when they should be near 40″ by now, and averaging about 10 degrees above normal. Thing is about NE weather, there’s always a payback. Not much winter Nov-Jan?? Just wait for Feb and March, and even April!

  19. President Fentanyl can cut another notch on his presidential belt.
    “Seattle-area medical examiner’s office running out of space for dead bodies, top health official reveals;
    “Drug overdoses fueled record number of homeless people who died in King County, Washington, last year”—
    https://www.foxnews.com/us/seattle-area-medical-examiners-office-running-out-space-dead-bodies-top-health-official-reveals

    + Bonus:
    “The Retail Exodus Continues: Nike’s Flagship Store Closes In Seattle After 26 Years”—
    https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/retail-exodus-continues-nikes-flagship-store-closes-seattle-after-26-years

    Perhaps “the plan” is that once the out-of-control drug problem encouraged and promoted by the Democratic Party becomes an undeniable fact of life in the US, “Biden” can arrogate yet more power to “himself” to “help fix” the problem…that “he”‘s intentionally created.

  20. New England cold weather is miserable. I lived there for 5 years and won’t be going back!

  21. More fun to be had at uni.

    So now my registration this semester is being held hostage (again) until I get another booster for Covid.
    _______________________

    To protect and preserve the health, safety, and welfare of the UNM community, the University requires that all faculty, staff, and students be fully vaccinated for COVID-19, which includes receiving an initial booster dose of the vaccine when eligible according to the FDA.

    According to our records, you have been eligible for a booster dose for more than four weeks but have not yet submitted your documentation to the Vaccine Verification site.
    _______________________

    Reboost for Covid!
    _______________________

    Don’t take off your shoes!

    –Firesign Theatre, “Don’t Crush That Dwarf, Hand Me the Pliers”
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t8drMsE224Y

  22. so mcgonigal was taking money from albanians, didn’t he see taken, this can’t end well,

  23. I’m not taking French, but I am taking Calculus 2 (never mind that I already passed Calculus 3 — rules). The professor is old-school and that’s a good thing.

    He’s a small, elfin soul with wire-rim glasses and his hair is whiter than mine. He knows his stuff and his lectures are solid, but part performance with entertaining asides such as noting that “ATM machine” is redundant.

    There is a machine that builds ATMs, but that’s in Austin, Texas.

    His assignments are regular old problem sets. No online problems one must work step-by-step exactly under the guidance of a computer eye.

    I’m lucky my keyboard still works after banging on it in frustration trying to satisfy the eye.

    I remember teachers like that in the 70s. Now most of my teachers are untenured, overworked, checking boxes and they look scared.

  24. Thanks for the John Anderson, Kisin video, Hubert. Good stuff. I’ve become a big admirer of Kisin.

  25. Must be fun to be a medical researcher. You get to do exotic things like rediscover the theory behind integral calculus, all by yourself, and get a paper published on it…

    OBloodyHell:

    That paper was cited 400x!

    A friend who became an MD told me that half the students in her medical school (Emory) would “faint dead away” if a calculus formula were written on the blackboard.

    Too bad calculus really is important for science and medicine.
    _____________________________

    [Calculus] is the language God talks.

    –Richard Feynman

  26. Is anyone in a state doing this kind of “demand management” for avoiding blackouts (because their solar and wind power takes time off in the winter and the gas and nuclear are retired).

    https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2023/01/demand-management-in-britain.php

    Temperatures have plummeted again, Britain is becalmed by an anticyclone, and the National Grid is warning that supply is going to be tight this evening. Coal plants are being dusted down several months after they were supposed to have closed, and the National Grid is activating what it calls its Demand Flexibility Service. This means customers signed up to the scheme can earn up to £6 per kilowatt-hour saved if they agree to turn off their appliances between 5 and 6pm.

    It is not hard to spot a slight issue with this offer: the more electricity you use on a normal Monday, the easier it will be for you to cash in today. As with so many green subsidies, it perversely rewards the well-off at the expense of the poor. …
    ***
    But there is a far bigger problem with trying to deal with the intermittency of wind and solar power through demand management. The gaps in supply are far too big to be filled in this way. Britain already has enough installed wind and solar capacity – 38 gigawatts of it – to theoretically meet 100 per cent of average electricity demand. On a good day, such as we had a fortnight ago, solar and wind generate more than 50 per cent of our energy needs. But this morning at 10 am it was down to 19 per cent, and at times in December it fell to less than two per cent. If you are going to try to build a grid based on wind and solar, and try to manage demand by paying people to switch their appliances off, you are going to have to chuck such enormous quantities of money at people that they are prepared to spend days on end shivering in the dark.

    The trouble is that that is more or less what the Government is trying to do.

  27. More from Kisin – whose speech at the climate change debate was masterful.

    https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6493921/Comedian-signed-behaviour-agreement-reveals-family-fled-censorship-Soviet-Russia.html

    When a mysterious contract for a stand-up gig at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) popped into my inbox on Sunday, I didn’t give it a second thought.

    After all, I’ve been a stand-up comedian for three years now — I’m used to contracts — and the gig wasn’t until January. What possible surprises could there be?

    As it turned out, its contents were as depressing as they were alarming.

    Scrolling through the small print, I found something plucked out of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four called a ‘behavioural agreement form’, which prescribed an endless list of themes I couldn’t make jokes about: ‘Racism, sexism, classism, ageism, ableism, homophobia, biphobia, transphobia, xenophobia, Islamophobia or anti-religion or anti-atheism.’ Phew!

    The irony was that I’d first been approached by a student who’d seen my normal set at Top Secret, one of London’s best comedy clubs, and clearly enjoyed it. Would I be prepared to do an unpaid gig to raise money for the school’s Unicef charity, he asked.

    I was happy to help. And yet here, just a few weeks later, I was told what kind of jokes I was allowed to make.

    Of course, the list itself is a laughable pastiche of today’s politically correct times. But it is also deeply concerning — especially for someone like me, who was born in the Soviet Union, the home of Stalinist purges, the KGB, gulag prison camps and just about the last place on Earth you would readily associate with freedom of speech.

    And yet here I was in London, the capital of a country still seen as the birthplace of democracy and as a bastion of tolerance and free speech, being told what I could and couldn’t say at an event being hosted at a leading university. It’s extraordinary.

    He continues with his family’s history of persecution for wrong-think in the USSR & Russia, his rejection of the invitation to perform, and a review of the progression of leftist censorship in the universities and then other institutions.

    Here in my adopted homeland I co-host a podcast, TRIGGERnometry, in which myself and another comedian, Francis Foster, discuss controversial subjects with a range of guests. If I did that in Russia, our only listeners would be the KGB.

    Ideological oppression is exactly what I hoped I had escaped by coming here. But as that ‘behavioural agreement form’ showed, I was wrong.

    Not that I was particularly surprised. For as we have seen, Britain’s conviction in freedom of expression is waning.

    And its decline is most obvious at our universities, where barely a week goes by without news of someone being ‘no-platformed’ — having their invitation to speak suddenly withdrawn by outraged students frothing at the mouth about some perceived slight or other.

    But if comedians give in to the prescriptive whims of this minority of intolerant and humourless British student officials, they will become the intolerant and humourless opinion-formers of tomorrow — not just the speechwriters, advisers and politicians, but the police officers, judges and journalists, too.

    There is a glimmer of a hope that this country’s centuries-old commitment to free speech will prevail.

    Soon after I went public with this ridiculous invitation, I was asked to perform at Comedy Unleashed, a new comedy club set up in London to discourage self-censorship and promote freedom of expression.

    I read out the behavioural agreement form and got a few nice laughs. I then announced that I would be doing my normal set in the spirit of SOAS’s rules to be ‘respectful and kind’.

    ‘Hello, my name is Konstantin Kisin,’ I announced. ‘Thank you very much — good night!’

    And walked off the stage to huge cheers.

  28. Re: Gerard Van der Leun

    buddhaha:

    Sorry to hear it.

    He was a friend of a friend back in the post-counterculture. Bright. Fast. Charismatic. Something of an egomaniac, still striving for the light.

    As I recall, he made his money as an editor for “Chicken Soup for the Soul” or that kind of book.

    We interacted some at an earlier online hippie-ish venue. We both turned conservative after 9-11 and ended up leaving that venue. (I am being a bit cagey here.)

    He was a fine writer — his first-person account of 9-11 is electrifying — and a natural poet.

    https://americandigest.org/saw-notes-made-september-11-2001-brooklyn-heights/

    Beams.

  29. Neo, I hope you have plenty of candles and blankets- and some insulated pitcher filled withe tea or coffee or chicken broth. A flashlight would come in handy too to get you into another room.

  30. We had a funeral today for my predecessor as choir director. Had a pretty good snowstorm going at the same time, so the roads were not wonderful – it took me almost twice the normal time to get to church. That kept quite a few people away; attendance was sadly quite a bit lower than it would have been for Alex in warmer months. Nevertheless, we put him on his last journey worthily, I think.

    Sarah, do you think those muffins are suspect if they’re in dairy?

  31. Follow-up to the Kisin post – I wonder if he writes for the Babylon Bee too?
    https://www.chortle.co.uk/correspondents/2018/12/22/41961/i%e2%80%99ve_changed_my_mind_about_free_speech

    An apology from Konstantin Kisin

    It’s been a sobering week. After news of my refusal to sign a behavioural agreement form because it demanded that I not joke about religion and atheism and ensure that ‘all topics are covered in a way that is respectful and kind’ broke in the mainstream media, I have had the opportunity to reflect on my actions and I would now like to make a public apology.

    Let me state unequivocally: I no longer believe that free speech matters. Especially in comedy.

    It’s hard to pin down the exact moment when the realisation hit me.

    For too long the world of comedy has struggled under the toxic yoke of irreverence which has stifled much-needed uniformity of thought. Why else go on stage night after night if not to deliver exhilarating ‘please clap’ comedy that bravely does away with the problematic tradition of making people laugh.

    I have a dream that one day we might even follow the example of Manchester University which eliminated the triggering microaggression formerly known as ‘clapping’ and replaced it with jazz hands, which only discriminate against the blind, the deaf, the physically disabled and people who aren’t morons. Collectively, they only make up a mere 95 per cent of the population and, let’s face it, statistically-speaking most of them probably voted Brexit so what do they know?

    We should seek to take the words we had previously uttered for comedic effect as seriously and as literally as possible. Numerous studies have shown that words are violence and we must treat them as such. (The disturbing reality is that no studies have shown anything remotely like this but we know that ‘reality’ is the product of right-wing media propaganda).

    Context, intent and nuance are old fashioned relics from a bygone era. Never again must a comedian be allowed to explain that what they meant was something other than what-they-didn’t-say-but-we-wanted-them-to-have-said-in-order-to-be-rightfully-outraged. We know exactly what they didn’t say and they must be held accountable for it.

    The age of irony is over and I, for one, salute it.

    In conclusion, and most important of all, we must ask no questions as to why a story about a no-name comedian turning down an unpaid charity gig at a college no one cares about made international headlines on the day the Prime Minister of this country was nearly removed from office by her own party.

    Could it be that ordinary people feel strongly about political correctness and a culture of fear in society? Is it possible that the great unwashed care so passionately about their inability to express their views that they saw their own experience of imposed speech codes reflected in this incident?

    For the sake of everything that is progressive, we must never, ever find out.

    Published: 22 Dec 2018

  32. Hmm…now I remember. I ran into Konstantin Kisin a few months ago when I went down the Peter Zeihan rabbit hole and found his Triggernometry interview:

    –Triggernometry, “Economic Disaster is Already Here – Peter Zeihan”
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tjYDcuOlK_M

    Great interview. An excellent introduction to Zeihan with a light touch.

  33. Some interesting points made by J.E. Dyer on the Topics of the Week.

    https://theoptimisticconservative.wordpress.com/2023/01/14/two-pings-on-potuses-with-classified-docs-and-the-riddle-wrapped-mystery-of-george-santos/

    Consider what this does for the “cabal” (TIME’s word, not mine) behind the Biden administration. It puts both of the presidential document capers, and potentially Hunter Biden’s always-compromised circumstances, behind the DOJ/FBI secrecy wall of “ongoing investigations,” at a time when the Republican-majority House intends to open an investigation of the Biden family’s overseas financial adventures as they relate to the current president.

    Don’t think small on this. It doesn’t have to be just a measure to protect the Bidens.

    Rather, it throws a DOJ cloak over three of the major chess pieces in the game of “2024.” The leverage is optimal from this position to calibrate what’s done with each case. Keep in mind that the goal of leaving Trump as roadkill is still there, but still unfulfilled, and you’ll be thinking broadly enough.

    The point of throwing that DOJ cloak is to exert significant control over what can happen to Joe Biden and Trump with reference to their classified-document embarrassments, and exert similar control over how much Congress can find out about the connection of Hunter Biden’s activities to Joe Biden’s execution of his offices.

    The nexus of control is all in one place.

    Ponder, for example, the possibility that the “cabal” is willing to heave Joe Biden overboard, if that’s what it takes to get rid of Trump. I do not suggest this is an envisioned strategy. Don’t read that into this. It’s not implausible, given the astonishing, once-unthinkable fact of the Russiagate conspiracy, but for now it’s merely a thinking aid.

    I do suggest, however, that if I can see the outlines of such a possibility, others can. And holding the reins on both operations is what would enable a “permanent state” contingent to have such an option.

    What would make more sense than rendering Trump ineligible to run in 2024, for the same “high misdemeanor” a noble Democratic Party would accept defenestrating Biden for as well?

    Even if we assume it wouldn’t come to that, we still have the situation in which there’s a center of knowledge and power outside of Congress – DOJ – with independent discretion over all three extraordinarily important cases.

    The discretion is what matters. Whoever’s actually running the Biden administration controls what’s done by that DOJ. They can go big, or go small, depending on shifting circumstance. That, and not a specifically determined course of action, is what this looks to be about.

    That’s the position a power broker would want to be in, between now and November 2024. It doesn’t militate against this point, to reflect as numerous commentators have that officials connected with Russiagate, Spygate, and in general with the Obama administration, are all over this array of moving parts.

    Developments since 1/14 are, I think, supportive of the view that whoever is running the Democrat Party is dumping Biden.

  34. Bunge is almost a year late in discovering escalation, say February 22, 2022. It was escalation for Ukraine to resist Roosia apparently. Too bad Bunge doesn’t know what escalation means. Bunge doesn’t even seem to know that Ukraine gave up its nukes back in 1994. Roosia promised then not to attack Ukraine?

  35. Second topic on the same Dyer post, and a note that the Santos revelations have gotten still stranger since 1/14:

    Dirt-diggers on the Left have been having a field day with Santos, and he’s really a toxic stew of inexplicability, going by what they’ve turned up on him. (I did independent digging of my own and found much of the same material.)

    A data point that seems to have come only through the Left – namely, the Daily Beast – is one of the most interesting. For some reason, a Santos-connected PAC and a fundraising entity reportedly received some $56,000 in campaign funding from Andrew Intrater, a cousin of and financial manager for oligarch Viktor Vekselberg. Left-wing media have been at pains to link Vekselberg and Intrater to Trump via Michael Cohen. The donations from Intrater (and from his wife) started in March 2021.

    But as chronicled in some of my earlier articles (here, here, here), Vekselberg was linked to enterprises of the Clintons going back to Uranium One, the Rosatom buy-out, and Hillary Clinton’s money-intensive patronage of the Russian “Silicon Valley” at Skolkovo, outside of Moscow, during her time as Secretary of State. The Ukrainian-born Vekselberg (who was thus a Soviet citizen at birth) was also a big donor to the Clinton Global initiative in its heyday in the early-mid-2010s. He’s considered a crony of Oleg Deripaska, an even better-known figure from Russiagate, as well as Vladimir Putin.

    LOTS more connections between Santos and Democrats revealed.

    And there’s more. In the 2022 election cycle, Santos received a donation from Paul Singer, the angel donor for the Washington Free Beacon who initially (2015) funded the dirt-on-Trump investigation to be done by Fusion GPS. Singer, an activist-investor billionaire, isn’t known for throwing his money around without vetting recipients. So that strikes me as peculiar.

    Meanwhile, the corporate entity from which Santos received the greatest amount of individual contributions – i.e., PACs, company officers, and employees contributing to his campaign – was … FTX. Yes, that FTX.

    For some reason, the left-wing Internet sleuths haven’t been taking much if any note of that.

    On the other hand, Peter Strzok was Johnny-on-the-spot with commentary about Santos at his Substack account. Go figure Strzok being so well informed.

    Who sprang this guy Santos on the GOP? It’s no excuse for the Republicans of New York and Long Island, who didn’t vet him better, but this doesn’t look at all like a random eccentric dude running as a Republican for no apparent reason. It looks like a ringer of some kind. That $700,000 had to come from somewhere, and the $29,000 of attention from the FTX meteor (presumably from executive Ryan Salame, who did the Republican giving while Sam Bankman-Fried gave to Democrats) only increases the weirdness. The DOJ has yet to probe the depths of the murky FTX enterprise to launder money and inject it into politics.

    An activist non-profit, the Campaign Legal Center (website here) has been on Santos for a while, and moved very quickly after the November election. Peruse the CLC’s personnel pages; it’s a group of usual suspects, few with high-profile names (though you’ll see Debo Adegbile on an advisory council) but all with the inevitable accomplishments in their bios. The group’s main dedication is to causes like the House Democrats’ H.R. 1 of 2019, the “voting reform” act that served as a wish-list for the various extra-legal alterations to election practice made by the states in 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic was declared.

    One of the CLC donors is the Voter Participation Center (heavily funded by Tom Steyer; see here as well), which along with a linked, Steyer-funded organization, the Center for Voter Information, dispatched hundreds of thousands of questionable ballot-related mailings to several East coast states in the national election cycles from 2012 to 2018.

    Other donors past and present can be seen here, including the Open Society Foundations and the Tides Foundation.

    It doesn’t pass the smell test, that the CLC knew so much so quickly about Santos while the New York GOP knew nothing.

    The GOP should always do a better job checking out the candidates they put on their party list, and at least letting voters know before the primaries.
    Of course, Dyer is assuming the GOP didn’t know anything about him, but I’m not willing to be that sure, given the antics of McConnell and McCarthy Inc. in past elections.

    And here’s a perception that I haven’t seen elsewhere about an event that has been mentioned by some of the punditocracy.

    Something else that doesn’t pass the smell test is Santos’s little speech in Washington, D.C. on 5 January 2021, the day before Trump’s rally and the riot at the Capitol.

    Santos doesn’t talk the way actual Trump supporters talk. He talked the way the Left has relentlessly characterized the speech and motives of Trump supporters: he talked of wanting to “overturn the [2020] election.” This isn’t about whether you agree with one side or the other; it’s about how actual Trump supporters see it.
    They don’t think they wanted to overturn anything, and they don’t talk about it that way. They think and say that their purpose is to recover a “stolen” election – not “overturn” an election.

    Santos’s speech had a tellingly false ring, with just those few words. Santos is neither who he claims to be, nor what the Left depicts him to be. There’s something else going on here. He should not be ridden out of Congress on a rail, and suffered to disappear from history, until there’s sunshine illuminating for all of us what that is.

    IMO, Santos is definitely a ringer who was meant to be a lightning-rod for whataboutism when Republicans complain about Democrat liars and charlatans: “you have one too and he’s worse than ours!” — which isn’t a winning slogan for most voters, despite what the denizens of the DC bubble think.

    However, I also don’t like invalidating voters’ choices, short of actual criminal offenses (and even then, Democrats have a habit of re-electing convicted felons), so why not wait to see what Santos actually does — if he walks his conservative talk (such as it is), then he’s a needed vote. If not, he can be procedurally walled off by the GOP leadership.

    I wish I had some money in popcorn stocks.

  36. Another essay by Dyer, who doesn’t post very often anymore, but always sees an angle not usually grasped by the standard pundits.

    https://theoptimisticconservative.wordpress.com/2023/01/16/brief-meditation-on-weaponized-use-of-language-dei-and-disinformation/

    I’m not quite sure why the “equity” in Diversity, Equity, Inclusion (DEI) has suddenly become a hot topic in the conservative punditry. It seems to have erupted in the last 72 hours.

    But the eruption is a nice opportunity to drop a few observations on the use of language entailed in the DEI formulation. I had occasion to tweet this weekend about the same use of language with the term “disinformation,” as it is deployed by Western cultural planners today, so I’m including that in the discussion.

    What we’re talking about with DEI is the noun “equity” as linked to the adjective “equitable.” Equity and equitable have a longstanding sense in the English language of justice or fairness among parties – but, crucially, an undefined one, without objective, reliable, or commonly agreed-on means of measurement. (Unlike equality, which can be measured by commonly-agreed methods.)

    And that’s the point. Without an objective means of measurement, held in common by everyone, there’s no way to hold “equity” itself to a good-faith, predictable meaning.

    The same is true of diversity and inclusion. Indeed, the ordinary meanings of those terms are routinely turned on their heads in DEI orthodoxy, such that if white people are included, that’s actually exclusionary because it traumatizes other races; and if “cisgender” people are involved in something, it’s non-diverse, because diversity can be proclaimed at any time to be a matter of getting rid of as many cisgender people as possible, or ensuring that supposed cisgender perspectives are not just minimized but silenced entirely.

    Determining whether there is diversity, equity, and inclusion is wholly subjective. That’s by prescription, not just in effect. If observers or participants – either one – are in particular, assumed categories in a matrix, their subjective perception of diversity, equity, and inclusion is controlling. If observers or participants are in other categories, they have no independent say in perceiving or defining diversity, equity, and inclusion. There’s no higher appeal to a standard that can be referenced and used as a guide.

    Don’t slow down here and stop listening, because it’s this next part that’s important.

    Using DEI this way is intentional, because it puts everyone at perpetual, unending risk of violating “DEI.”

    With DEI, there’s no way to achieve a defined set of improved conditions and put the complaint-and-punishment regime of DEI behind us. The purpose of DEI isn’t to foster diversity, equity, and inclusion. It’s to ensure that the putatively malevolent absence of them is being endlessly identified.

    There’s some development of that theme, which isn’t new to anyone here.

    As Rush Limbaugh used to say, don’t doubt me on this. DEI is meant to have the stature of a permanent cultural institution because it’s a tool of vilification, and it can be turned on anyone. It has no limits of definition or foundational expectation that can forestall that. You may be on the “right” side of it today, but woe unto you tomorrow.

    Note, incidentally, that DEI hasn’t been introduced as a basis for or element of law. America is still too pragmatic a nation for that, in terms of our understanding of what law is supposed to be.

    It’s been introduced via academic and corporate workplace culture. Significantly, it’s hacking a path into government agency regulations for personnel and work space interactions, increasingly a twilight zone hovering penumbra-like over the actual content of statute law.

    If left to run its course, DEI will poison the whole culture, and at that point, law, fatally corrupted by the people’s altered expectations, can follow.

    Not that it’s likely to matter much. Societal institutions are well capable now of holding people at risk: of their opportunities, options, freedom, livelihoods. All law has to do is invoke – however disingenuously, and regardless of double standard – principles like the freedom of private institutions to adopt their own rules, and the sanctity of contractual obligations, and there will be no protection for those vilified by the DEI regime.

    With this in mind, it doesn’t take much to lay out why the concept of “disinformation” fits the same weaponization of language and its cultural impact.

    Urging a concept of menacing “disinformation” on the public isn’t about striving for good, valid information. In its current use in Western culture (the volcanic ooze started ca. 2016), it never was.

    It’s about having the concept of “disinformation” to accuse other people of. As with “equity” in DEI, there’s no reliable, commonly-agreed way to identify or measure disinformation. What matters is conditioning the people to think it’s a category of threat they have to be protected from. Once the people are so conditioned, they will mostly agree by default that it originates with malevolent actors, who are the parties to be vilified.

    It’s the vilification, and a perpetual shorthand method of alerting people to it, that are at work here. There’s no payoff in stopping short of that understanding, and getting stuck on things like what “equity” is or what “disinformation” means. The whole point is that those quantities will never be settled on. Meanwhile, the division, vilification, intimidation, silencing, de-platforming, and un-personing can accelerate.

  37. THANK YOU, AesopFan.

    I believe you’ve been an excellent, spontaneous, Neo-substitute, under emergency volunteer action, no less!

    To the substance of what you’ve just related, and in brief summary, Just WOW!

  38. To MBunge on Putin’s War and Ukraine — “Hmm. I wonder what the over/under is on when Lindsey Graham advocates we just give Ukraine tactical nukes? -Mike”

    With Germany letting Poland send Zelenskyy their tanks, and Macron in France doing the same — and the NATO-ization of Ukrainia’s War nearing completion — I can’t see a future without some sort of Nuke of hypersonic action. It looks inevitable to me.

    And if so for an observant nobody from flyover country, how can my inference elude the Best and Brightest among us?

    Did we turn our backs on Jesus so long that there’s no peacemaker even for profit to be found? Anywhere?

  39. Meteorologist Dr Ryan Maue has satellite pics up online, via Twitter, showing extremely intense bomb cyclones developing over the Pacific, East of Japan…

    https://twitter.com/RyanMaue/status/1617717593795866627

    Cold, violent storms HEADED for the West Cost of North America, it seems?

    His copy reads : “Extremely intense ‘bomb cyclone’ for the ages developing off the coast of Japan. Bitter cold Siberian air floods behind the storm system through Korean Peninsula and Japan.”

  40. Thanks, AF, for exposing Santos, which I believe you did more than adequately.
    (To be sure, he was just waiting to be exposed, the question being how to do it…)
    And so, a Democratic Party plant after all.
    Sneaky arseholes. (Talk about typical MO…)

    “Overturning” the elections, eh?
    If anybody did any “overturning” (AKA “FORTIFYING”—stated triumphantly! Proudly!) it was “Biden”—that’s right, the MOST POPULAR “candidate” EVAH! (…the reason for whose popularity becomes clearer with each new day!)

    As mentioned before, stopping ballot counting in several key states at practically the same time for almost practically the same time period and then coming up—MAGICALLY!—with the SAME results in ALL states (i.e., Trump’s lead evaporating and Biden winning by some ridiculously small percentage of “ballots”) is simply, overwhelmingly…MIRACULOUS!!
    There can be no other explanation…unless, of course, there can!

    Thanks, too, for the deeper ramifications of the latest “Biden” scandal—which, as has been stated in several venues, is ONLY the tip of the proverbial iceberg—and the uses of language to subvert the Republic via controlling/weaponizing/fortifying(!) the meaning of words.
    IOW, words have no use anymore to describe the crimes of the Deep State.
    The result? Since they cannot be described, they are not crimes! But only figments of (the collective) Winston Smith’s “imagination”….or what the Deep State might classify, with a straight face, as “false news”….
    (Think of it as the linguistic equivalent of what Soros’s merrye harem of public prosecutors has been able to do with the law… Making words meaningless; making the law meaningless.)

    We are in a mess.
    The Augean Stables must be cleaned out, but how?
    Perhaps the little mice have to start nibbling furiously at the too-durable fabric of the net in which the country has become entangled? Captured?
    A herculean task…

  41. Speaking of “iceberg”, the question must be raised (not that it hasn’t been already):
    What leverage might—does?—Ukraine have on “Biden”?
    Ditto Putin?
    Ditto Xi?
    …that make ALL these extraordinary distractions and coverups so vitally necessary (i.e., necessary for “Biden”)?

    Leading to the ultimate(?) question:
    If one is being compromised BY EVERYONE, does that mean that one is being compromised by NO ONE…?
    (I think this calls for another crisis…or ten..)

  42. In case anyone was wondering why the borders are so “SECURE”….
    ‘”Connecticut GOP: State Democrat have ‘lost their minds’ on plan to give voting rights to illegals;
    “The measure is being considered by the state’s Democrat-led House.”—
    https://justthenews.com/politics-policy/elections/connecticut-democrats-call-voting-rights-illegal-immigrants

    (Just think of it as THE opening salvo…)

    File under: And the rockets’ red glare….

  43. Well, that was some storm in Neo’s neighborhood. I hope she has power, and I hope she stayed warm last night!

  44. Santos is fake but mayorkas protector tony gonzalez is real full stop he spoke about the caucasus game like cawthorn that mccaul another cornyn wannabe is full speed ahead for

  45. Kinzinger who dropped that wombat into the illinois delegation

    Kolomoisky owned burisma and privat bank he leased zelensky privat sbfed 6 billion dollars those who tried to claim the money as recently as 4 years ago faced bomb threats

  46. TJ hasn’t fuguredbout that Vlad and Roosia want peace, actually pieces if not wholes; the Baltics, Moldova, the ‘stans. Just pay attention to what Vlad’s and the voices of Greater Russia have been calling for. Until then Roosian missiles will just keep making bigger and bigger holes. Holes to bury Ukrainians in.

    TJ doesn’t remember Vlad’s threats to nuke any and all. Or playing arty games around Europe’s largest nuclear power installation.
    Escalation indeed say Vlad’s boys. TJ hasn’t noticed that many of Vlad’s calling cards (missiles) are nuclear capable. Escalation, indeed, but those MBTs can’t fire nuclear rounds; 120 mm is just too small.

    Information warfare.

  47. I am increasingly fascinated by the mindset of news media peeps. A news reader on Bloomberg’s financial channel reports that defendants were found guilty for their actions during the Jan 6 “insurrection.” Surely, she has to know that she is using a highly charged, politicized description of the events that day. Also, one that is brain dead stupid. [After all, Biden says the people would need an F-15 to take on the govt and the Jan 6 protesters didn’t even bring pea shooters.]

    The woman is lying. My interest — does she know she’s lying? Or at least engaging in blatant propaganda that defies logic? Or is she just a pretty face without a functioning brain?

    Does she even think about it at all? Does she care?

    I’m reminded of a video of a Tenn legislative session my brother shared with me 20 years ago. A Dem legislator from Chattanooga was speaking about how she helped win elections by having dozens of friends and family from outside her district register as living in her home so they could vote for her. She had no idea that she was admitting to dozens of felonies on the floor of the House. One of her fellow Ds eventually ran to the front of the room and took her mic away. [Of course, no criminal repercussions. She’s a minority and a D.] She was only relaying what she’d been taught by the party. She was a crook, but she didn’t know it. Criminality was just a natural aspect of the system.

    Perhaps the news reader is so steeped in the propaganda process that it never occurs to her to question anything from the Ds, only the evil Rs. She’s a fish and she’s never considered the nature of water.

  48. The absence of extensive deaths in Africa from COVID will no doubt be explained by Western researchers as coming from the generally younger population there.
    ==
    1. About 5% of their population is over 60

    2. Africa is poor. Comparatively fewer obese people.

    3. They don’t spend much time indoors in climate controlled air, on average.

    4. Their data collection apparatus is not comparable.

  49. }}} Too bad calculus really is important for science and medicine.

    Huxley:

    Mrrrr, yes and no. It IS critical for certain/many jobs, but if you’re not involved in those jobs, it’s far less needed — this holds particularly true for medicine. Calculus is/was used as a “weedout” course for pre-Med, the last I heard, but 99% of doctors it serves no purpose. It’s better as an intellectual triage than anything else, as well as honing your critical thinking and analytical skills, which is HIGHLY valuable but the math itself will likely never be used again, unless (as I noted) you’re going into medical research, in which case it’s very significant.

    One of my jobs long long ago was for an Architect, as his CAD manager (early days of CAD). I also did drawing on the side (I picked up CAD easily back in the early 90s, when no one knew much about it), and at one point wanted to answer a question using trig, which I learned at 15. They didn’t even have a reference book on the subject lying around (e.g., in those days, something like the CRC handbook). Architects tend to use geometry but not trig. Surprised the eph out of me. I have a considerably strong background in math, including a number of grad level courses… really never had any chance to use it anywhere. Even engineers tend to punch numbers into spreadsheets and the like (mildly dangerous, yes, you need to have a feel for the numbers lest GIGO strike).

    I think everyone SHOULD take as much math as they can handle, just because it helps one hell of a lot with reasoning/analysis skills, but it’s really surprising how rarely anyone uses more than basic arithmetic outside of school. And this is why so many fools believe math is “unneeded” in modern society for most people.

  50. }}} AF: they are prepared to spend days on end shivering in the dark.

    Well, or they’re going to go out and chop down trees and burn them in their fireplaces… 😛

    That’s pretty much what the Germans are doing.

  51. Mrrrr, yes and no. [calculus] is critical for certain/many jobs,

    OBloodyHell:

    I take your point that calculus is not critical for many jobs. I never used it as a professional graphics programmer. Trig and linear algebra sufficed.

    However, I stand by my claim that calculus is critical for science and medicine as fields. Calculus is key to understanding things which vary over time — be they orbits, radioactive decay or prairie dog populations.

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