Saturday, October 10, 2020
A Question for NIMBYs on Housing and the Family
Article by Addison del Mastro in The American Conservative
A Question for NIMBYs on Housing and the Family
I didn’t quite expect this tweet to garner as much attention as it did, from a mix of conservatives and progressives. (NIMBY is shorthand for “not in my backyard,” itself shorthand for people who oppose new housing or development in general in their communities.)
If a grown child cannot afford to live somewhere in the community where he grew up, is that community family friendly? Do NIMBY parents feel their children should be kicked out and only allowed back in when they've gotten rich? I've been thinking about this lately.
— Addison Del Mastro (@ad_mastro) October 1, 2020
The replies are fascinating and include agreement, disagreement, and, yes, examples of parents who are in fact indifferent to whether their adult children could, if they choose, afford to remain the community in which they grew up.
I am not suggesting that it’s more moral to remain in one’s hometown, or that there’s some sort of social obligation to do so. Rather, I’m trying to get at this question: would families with some kids and some money, and whose default position on new housing or new development is to oppose it, think differently if they imagined the new housing being for their children? Forget the NIMBY bogeymen of traffic, crime, “renters,” etc, and the idea that the absence of these things makes a community “family friendly.” If a child cannot choose to remain somewhere in the community he grew up in, is that community really family friendly? If he cannot start a family himself because of affordability issues, is that family friendly?
There are plenty of ordinary people who simply default to opposing development for a variety of reasons, most of them usually innocent. But the professional NIMBY position often boils down to the idea that individual communities should be restricted by income (or even, usually implicitly, by race.) That the suburbs are where families can find a refuge. But this is a betrayal of solidarity—both with the less fortunate who are already in many communities but have little voice, and within the family itself. It seems to encourage an uprooting and a starting over that is at odds with building the civil society and intermediating institutions that conservatives otherwise champion. It is one thing for adult children to move out of their parents’ homes. It is another thing for their parents to treat the entire community as a nest which must be flown until their children can prove, with their incomes, that they “deserve” to remain.
There are broader issues here: individualism vs. communitarianism, the idea that earning money is evidence of moral worthiness, and an aversion to the idea of entitlements such that homeownership is viewed as a reward rather than a means to the very practical end of ensuring that everyone can live somewhere. But despite my strong wording here, this is an open thread and I’m genuinely looking for thoughts: How would people raising families in expensive communities, who tend towards a NIMBY position on housing and development, respond to these questions?
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/urbs/a-question-for-nimbys-on-housing-and-the-family/
Not Just a Tattoo: Transgenderism Attacks Our Fundamental Humanity
Article by Jennifer Bilek in The American Conservative
Not Just a Tattoo: Transgenderism Attacks Our Fundamental Humanity
It should seem obvious that dyeing one’s hair is nothing like getting surgery or taking sex hormones to pose as the opposite sex. Yet over the past several years of organizing against and resisting the gender identity industry, I have come upon this conflation a number of times by transgender activists. Variations on this have come in the form of “it’s just like getting a nose job, or breast enhancement surgery, or tattoos,” which isn’t true. None of these things are like attempting to alter your sex, and it isn’t just a matter of degrees in medical alterations.
Intense body modifications, including breast enlargement or reduction, though they can fall into dangerous territory if they are medically unnecessary, are not in the category of attempting to change what we are at our core. We are not our noses. We are not our un-inked skin or our hair color or the size of our breasts. What we are is a sexually dimorphic species. Our sex is what keeps us whole.
I often hear that adults who change their sex markers should be able to do as they please, to express themselves, even as the line is drawn at changing sex markers for, or giving hormones and drugs to, children. Adults should be able to make up their own minds, or so the argument goes, all in the name of freedom and individual choice.
But why? Why should adults be granted legal documents and risky and harmful surgeries, and allowed to become life-long medical patients as a means of expressing themselves? Why should they do it when the changes wrought by these allowances come at great cost to society? This is an especially pertinent question given recent retractions by a prominent psychiatric journal, which now states, as the ranks of detransitioners grow, that surgeries to change sex markers don’t fix people’s mental health.
In Western cultures, adults are being granted new birth certificates and driver’s licenses that reflect the opposite sex, or third sex, not gender, as the term “transgender” would denote. Gender refers to sex stereotypes. Opposite gender (sex-stereotype) performances can be played out without drugs, wrong sex hormones, surgeries, and a lifetime of dependence on the medical-industrial complex. These gender stereotypes can be played out without changing official documents denoting our sex. Musicians and other artists do it frequently. What society is now allowing is for governments to create a social falsehood out of sex, with technology and pharmacology embedding this lie into law and language.
Those of us who want to live in a world that is at least somewhat ordered to the natural need to ask what happens when others are allowed this lie and what makes their free expression more important than what we desire. Even if their issue is intense body dysphoria, which I imagine is painful, why does the emotional pain of a few trump what it means to be human?
Right now, women are losing their rights to sexual privacy. Rape crisis centers, domestic violence shelters, women’s homeless shelters, change rooms, and bathrooms are being adapted to sex-neutral spaces that allow biological males. This is a safety issue, yet it’s being completely ignored to accommodate a few men. More importantly, it’s an attempt to violate and deconstruct the boundaries that makes us a sexually dimorphic species. Women bleed. They menstruate. They have to remove clothing to urinate and change menstrual products. They breastfeed. They carry babies. They have bodily needs that men do not have, and their bodies should not be privy to men without permission. Danger is a secondary, though not inconsequential, issue. Boundaries are important for structure over chaos, for privacy, for safety, and for wholeness. Why is respect for the boundary of sex being eroded and coded into law?
Women’s sports are no longer women’s sports if men claiming a different gender expression are granted access. So far, we are not reordering society for those who are blind or deaf, though there are a lot more of them than those referring to themselves as “transgendered.” Yet women’s organizations, birthing centers, and health facilities are rearranging language that deconstructs female biology into parts, purportedly so women who choose to alter their sex markers feel comfortable.
Lesbians are encountering more males claiming to be women than they are women on their own dating sites. Men are being offered not just the sexually objectified women of their dreams on their sports magazine covers, but the drugged and surgically adapted male to look like the sexually objectified female of their dreams. This is all being normalized at a rapid pace.
In medicine, law, language, and crime statistics, there is chaos. This is the point of the gender identity industry. Society is being sold a bill of goods by the corporate state, which is following technological advancement over a cliff. The media outlet Market Watch has stated clearly that the rise of medical procedures to change sex markers is due to the technological ability to do so. The technology creates the demand, not the other way around. This corporate bill of goods wants to make a human right out of a crime against humanity, out of a eugenicist pursuit of changing human biology, until what we are is beyond human, or inhuman.
Martine Rothblatt, founding father of the transgender empire, self-identified “transgender woman,” and renowned transhumanist, in 2016 spoke at the Trans History Forward Movement conference in British Columbia. The conference was organized by the Transgender Chair at the University of Victoria (a position—first of its kind—purchased by another rich, powerful man claiming to be a woman). Rothblatt suggested that techno-transhumanists attempt to use the same procedures as techno-transgenders to make legal changes allowing for alterations to human biology.
The implication is clear: Rothblatt and some of the richest and most powerful men in the world—like Bill Gates, Ray Kurzweil, Peter Diamandis, Elon Musk and others—are willing to sacrifice our reality as a sexually dimorphic species to their technological and megalomaniacal eugenicism. As they do so, it behooves us to consider the conflation of superficial changes to our bodies with changing who and what we are.
I Didn’t Vote For Trump In 2016, But I’d Crawl Over Broken Glass To Vote For Him Now
Even though I had voted for every Republican presidential candidate since 1980, I didn’t vote for Donald Trump in 2016.
Many Republican nominees had been huge disappointments to me, and I wasn’t going to vote for yet another GOP candidate I thought would betray my trust. I couldn’t imagine Trump as a genuine conservative who would champion limited government, respect individual freedom and liberty, and protect the unborn — but was I ever wrong. Although I didn’t vote for Trump in 2016, I would crawl over broken glass to vote for him in 2020.
In 2016, I was convinced Trump was just another New York liberal. On election night, however, I smiled. I was happy that at least Hillary Clinton wouldn’t be president, and I suspected that the next four years with Trump would at least be entertaining.
The primary reason I didn’t vote for Trump in 2016 was that I didn’t believe him. I didn’t trust that he would be pro-life, a non-negotiable issue for me. His bluster and bravado didn’t appeal to me. I took him literally but not seriously, in contrast to his supporters who took him seriously but not literally (credit to Peter Thiel for identifying this significant distinction).
By the time Trump took office, I was willing to give him a chance. He was the president, after all, and deserved the opportunity to prove himself. During the first year of his presidency, I was impressed by his commitment to keeping his campaign promises, unlike most politicians. By the end of 2017, I classified myself as a Trump supporter because of what he had already done as president.
Trump’s list of first-term accomplishments has been truly impressive:
- Building the strongest U.S. economy in my lifetime through historic business and personal tax cuts, resulting in millions of jobs created and record-low unemployment
- Cutting federal government regulations that had a stranglehold on American business innovators and entrepreneurs
- Confronting China’s trade abuses and negotiating fair trade deals with Canada, Mexico, South Korea, and Japan
- Eliminating the Obamacare individual mandate
- Rebuilding our military through investments in our defense capabilities as well as securing the largest military pay raise in a decade
- Nominating and confirming more solid conservative circuit court judges than any other first-term administration
- Nominating and fighting for the confirmation of two originalists, Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh, to the Supreme Court and then nominating Amy Coney Barrett to fill the vacancy left by the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg
- Moving the U.S. Embassy in Israel to Jerusalem and then brokering the Abraham Accords peace deal between Israel, the United Arab Emirates, and Bahrain
- Consistently fighting Democrats to build the wall to secure our southern border, reinforcing and repairing hundreds of miles, with more construction on the way
Trump has upheld the same objectives in his foreign policies, such as through the Global Health Assistance Policy and by ending funding for the pro-abortion United Nations Population Fund. In January 2020, Trump became the first U.S. president to attend and address the March for Life.
The Trump administration’s accomplishments have been in spite of relentless, daily attacks by the mainstream media, which act as the Pravda-like arm of the Democratic Party. Trump Derangement Syndrome is evident every day on television and online.
Then as details about SpyGate were revealed in early 2018, I became a full-throated proponent of Trump, incensed that the Obama administration colluded with Clinton, the Democratic National Committee, and legacy media to weaponize the federal government intelligence and law enforcement agencies against an opposition party candidate and then a sitting president. When the Russian collusion hoax didn’t work, Trump’s enemies tried to take him down with fake impeachment charges over a legitimate phone call with a new Ukrainian administration.
As president, Trump has largely kept his promises and fought against relentless opposition. I don’t care about the tone of his tweets nor if his opponents think he’s rude. I’ve seen that he is a patriot who genuinely loves the United States of America and its people. I misjudged Trump in 2016, but I will do everything I can to see that he is re-elected in 2020 — and I’m sure I’m not the only one.
Thoughts from the ammo line
Article by Susan Vass in Powerline
Thoughts from the ammo line
Ammo Grrrll calls out a few TERRIBLE, TERRIBLE PEOPLE. She writes:
My husband, the famous novelist Max Cossack, has also written several excellent plays and musicals which were produced under his given name, Joseph D. Vass. Thus, it has been our privilege to know some fine stage actors. One actor/director from St. Paul, is, in fact, a dear personal friend. All but a tiny handful of these actors lean left, sometimes far left.
The few actors, writers, and directors who lean conservative have learned to keep their mouths shut if they wish to work. Often mere silence is not enough. One must JOIN in the “Two Minutes – or, in this case, four YEARS — Hate” in order to make a living.
In a column some years ago, I described a phone conversation with a potential client during the George W. Bush years. You remember W – he was Bushitler, following the Hitlers of Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon before him. We have had more Hitlers than a casting call for Mel Brooks’s The Producers, and somehow our Republic has staggered on.
Anyhow, the phone conversation I discussed was going along in a warm and friendly manner. We were actually to the point of my asking where to send the contract when he requested that I prepare some special material about how horrible Bushitler was. I explained that I tried to avoid politics, which I found only divided my audience and needlessly alienated people. He informed me frostily that such “jokes” would NOT alienate a single person in his group. I would not agree to do it. I also did not get the job. Didn’t need it. Still, it was quite annoying emanating from leftists who have whined for over seventy years about how terribly unjust was the “blacklisting” under McCarthyism.
It is one thing to be an actor on the local scene, even one in such a vibrant theater town – at least pre-riots – as Minneapolis. In the ’80s when I started, there were even more seats PER CAPITA for comedy and theater than in New York or Los Angeles. With more or less constant hustling, maybe getting some commercial or voiceover work on the side, an actor in the Twin Cities could make a respectable living, raise children, buy a home, the whole American Dream. Especially with a spouse with a more stable job.
But, of course, the further you go up the food chain of fame and wealth, the more is at stake. Now there is access to the hottest women, the fastest cars, the stupidest drugs, mansions on the beach or in the Hollywood Hills, private schools for your designer kids, private security guards so you can rail against gun ownership. More money than Scrooge McDuck.
Several people I know who made the great leap to Hollywood changed completely, and not for the better. One standup who shared an apartment with a comic from back home surreptitiously listened to his roommate’s answering machine and stole his auditions. He left insulting messages on Johnny Carson’s voicemail in Jay Leno’s voice. One successful comic returned to Minnesota to tell us that an A-Lister must never “carry anything, open a door for yourself, or drive yourself anywhere.” Yikes! Not for me. Though I would put my best 45-minute set up against any comic’s, I’m not suggesting I would have made it big in that cesspool. But I was not interested in competing for a prize I actively did not want to win.
We live in an almost evenly divided center-right (sometimes, center-left) country. It would be logical that around half of the actors in Hollywood would be conservative. But that is either not the case or only the leftists get all the attention from the leftist media.
Every time I see the wretched tub of goo that is Michael Moore, I think of the gross childhood song that the boys would sing in the lunchroom to drive me from the table: “Great green gobs of greasy, grimy gopher guts.” He has announced to great hilarity that with the President and First Lady suffering from COVID his “thoughts and prayers are with COVID.”
It is not shocking that a “joke” both mocking prayer and wishing death on the President would be repeated by other copycats. These are not, as a general rule, people half as bright as the average farmer, truck driver, or engineer. They have fooled themselves into believing they are smart because much smarter people have written humorous or poignant lines for them to memorize. This came home to me with force when one evening I watched an actress who played a smart woman in her sitcom giggle her way through a painful interview with Johnny Carson. She was a ditz or high and Johnny did not know what to do with her.
It is also hardly surprising that these spoiled, entitled adult children wish death from disease upon someone they hate – Rush, Laura Ingraham, or Trump. Not trusting to disease, they have repeatedly wished that President Trump be murdered – by beheading, stabbing, shooting – even offering to do it themselves. They fantasize about the rape of the First Lady and her son. They mock the First Lady’s accent. They struggle to find ever more naughty words to call women associated with Trump, while accusing conservatives of a #WarOnWomen.
There is no bottom to which they will not sink. Remember, these are people who will do ANYTHING to keep their aging, “lifted” gargoyle faces on the big screen – even watch Harvey Weinstein shower.
I take second place to no one in despising everything Barack Hussein Obama said and did during his eight year “fundamental transformation” of America. But I never wished him dead or ill or asserted, like a moron, that he was “not my President.” He was. My guys lost. I got used to it, and carried on with my life. In fact, my W/L record since 1968 is 5/8. I never once rioted or wore a poorly designed genital hat. I disagreed profoundly with the late Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and wished she would resign from the Court to heal and do no more harm, but I cheered for her valiant, awe-inspiring fight against cancer. Why? Because I am not insane.
The leftist stars in the media and entertainment rooting for the President to die cause normal human beings to recoil in disgust. What, we wonder, could cause such corrosive hatefulness in an individual? Particularly, in one whom this country has rewarded far beyond any obvious merit?
Yet dozens of them issue daily semi-literate expressions of unbridled rage towards President Trump and us, his supporters. Cher, Bette, Barbra, the grotesquely unfunny “comediennes” and late-night frat boys, the harpies of The View, Rob Reiner, the list goes on and on. Oddly, most of these people are in their SEVENTIES, still spewing obscenities. I would not want a one of them for a friend. I would not trust a one of them to hold my purse, keep a confidence, or babysit my children. I would sooner clean Grand Central Station with a toothbrush than spend five minutes in their presence. They are terrible, terrible people.
https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2020/10/thoughts-from-the-ammo-line-345.php
Trump Drops F-Bomb in Warning to Iran
In a two hour virtual rally held online during the Rush Limbaugh show, Donald Trump took a shot over the bow of Iran to remind them just who is the big dog on the block. Iran has been a thorn in the side of the world for years through the Strait of Hormuz by allowing for Iranian-backed rebels in the area to commit acts of piracy against ships traveling through the strategic waterway. Iran’s own military has engaged in similar acts, even taking over an American patrol boat and holding the sailors aboard, hostage at gunpoint.
Tensions between the US and Iran have escalated in the last several years with the US’ withdrawal from the disastrous Iran Deal, the targeted killing of Qasem Soleimani, and the subsequent weak-sauce airstrike response from Iran. Trump has spoken in strong terms previously when addressing Iran, but today’s statement is the strongest he has made to date.
” And Iran knows that, and they have been put on notice. If you f*** around with us, if you do something bad to us, we are going to do things to you that have never been done before.”
TRIGGER WARNING: Uncensored video below.
TRUMP: “If you fuck around with us, if you do something bad to us, we are going to do things to you that have never been done before.”
— Breaking911 (@Breaking911) October 9, 2020
pic.twitter.com/C3TkBlZlhe
I truly believe that Trump’s foreign policy has been the most “libertarian” to date. With numerous drawdowns of troops, the willingness to meet with any foreign leaders, and the countless trade deals and renegotiation of free trade agreements, he has put America first in a lot of ways.
I really don’t see this as a threat though. It should be the US’ policy toward every other nation on the planet. Either you play nice, and we will play nice right in return OR you try to screw with us and we will wipe you from the planet. I was always a vocal opponent of the Iraq War and have suggested a complete withdrawal from Afghanistan after we killed Bin Laden. The only triggering factor to Iran’s demise is to attack the US or her interests. Steer clear of those, and you should be fine.
It goes back to the old adage, ‘play stupid games, win stupid prizes.’ Qasem Soleimani played a stupid game in attempting to organize and fund attacks against American soldiers. His prize? A once-in-a-lifetime experience of learning what happens when the drone camera goes fuzzy. As long as Iran doesn’t play stupid games, like backing Houthi rebels in Yemen or encouraging piracy in the Straits of Hormuz, everything is copacetic.
The generation that gutted America – with the help of China
Article by Curtis Ellis in World Net Daily
The generation that gutted America – with the help of China
Fifty years ago, Yale law school professor Charles Reich laid out his vision of the future. He called it The Greening of America.
As the '60s counterculture generation ascended to positions of power in society, it would bring about a cultural and economic revolution.
That generation did indeed assume power. One of Reich's students was Bill Clinton.
But the change they wrought was not the greening of America.
When Bill Clinton and a bipartisan congressional coalition brought the people's Republic of China into the World Trade Organization in 2000, they set the stage for the gutting of America's industries.
And just as the Chinese Communist Party has gutted America's manufacturing base, it has gutted most of our nation's foundational institutions – academia, finance, media and government.
We have long regarded our institutions of higher education as one of America's crown jewels, shrines of academic freedom, free inquiry and intellectual expertise. Our universities would inculcate students from across the globe with Western values, who would carry them back home and liberalize the world.
A nice fantasy but the reality is quite different.
A Chinese student at the University of Minnesota was arrested in China and sentenced to six months in prison for tweets he posted while in the United States, Axios reports. The student used his Twitter account to post pictures of a cartoon villain that resembles Xi Jinping and of Winnie the Pooh, a character Chinese netizens use to lampoon Xi.
In response, the University of Minnesota has said … nothing. American universities have become so dependent on Chinese money they have abandoned all standards and values.
Add academia to the list of the hollowed out.
We do not know the full extent university programs dedicated to everything from foreign relations to climate science have been tainted by Chinese money.
Leading China watcher and CCP critic Christopher Balding describes the China exclusion rule and how it's corrupted so many institutions.
"Universities and political science professors will talk at length about foreign interference and disinformation and rightfully so. Ask them to ensure their own universities and departments are following the laws for foreign donations and we get the [China exclusion] response: trust me," Balding writes.
On another front, Chinese companies listed on U.S. stock exchanges are refusing to follow U.S. securities laws. Those arguing that we should allow Chinese companies to raise money in our capital markets are literally arguing we should ignore U.S. securities law for Chinese companies. And some of the most well-known bold-faced names in American finance are making that argument.
The unequal application of laws has hollowed out not just American capital markets. It has hollowed out the rule of law itself.
Neither are religious institutions immune. Pope Francis has surrendered Chinese Christians to the atheist totalitarian regime.
The Chinese Communist Party has hollowed out our political institutions, too.
We expect politicians to be free of conflicts of interest. But current and former officials from Sen. Dianne Feinstein to former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and most famously Joe Biden have enriched themselves and their families through lucrative business deals with CCP-controlled entities.
Corporate America has suffered the same fate. In fact, there is no longer such a thing as "corporate America." The titans of business consider themselves global, not American, corporations. They control our news and entertainment media – ABC/Disney, AT&T, Warner/CNN, Viacom-Paramount/CBS, Universal-Comcast/NBC.
While Industrial America was the arsenal of democracy, Hollywood was the signal corps. From World War II to the Cold War, Hollywood promoted American freedoms, values and can-do attitude to the world.
Now, Hollywood's corporate giants have extensive business interests in China and shuns criticizing the Red regime.
In the end credits of its film "Mulan," Disney thanks the Chinese Communist authorities running concentration camps in Xinjiang. Mickey Mouse has become Mickey Mao-se.
The CCP has hollowed our academic, financial, political and cultural institutions as certainly as it has our industries. This may well prove more decisive than aircraft carrier battle groups to the outcome of the contest between East and West.
The generation that was supposed to usher in the greening of America is responsible for the gutting of America.
https://www.wnd.com/2020/10/generation-gutted-america-help-china/
Presidential Debate Commission Ideology Exposed...
Put this in the ‘things that make other things make sense‘ file, and give full credit to Revolver News for the research and citation assembly.
You might have seen Presidential Debate Commission Co-Founder Frank Fahrenkopf on Fox News last night trying desperately to explain and justify why the presidential debates were randomly modified to be a virtual format.
However, a terrific deep investigative dive into the background of Fahrenkopf and the people who make up the debate commission reveals a scale and scope of ideology that is almost jaw-dropping in sunlight; and that research completely explains how and why this group has supported far leftist candidates for decades.
“The nominally Republican Chairman of Presidential Debate Commission, Frank Fahrenkopf, is both a co-founder and current board member of the International Republican Institute (IRI), a top “Color Revolution” propaganda outfit. The IRI was run by Never Trump neoconservative John McCain for decades. It is closely linked to the thoroughly discredited Steele Dossier at the center of the Russia Hoax.”
~ Read Full Expose ~
You will want to bookmark that research. Suffice to say, after reading the background of the organization, the Presidential Debate Commission should no longer be considered a valid enterprise. Unreal…
Unhinged Olbermann Suggests Internment for Trump Supporters
In the recent past it was announced that Keith Olbermann was leaving sports broadcasting to make his triumphant return to political commentary, right in time for the 2020 election.
After the right spent several days in uncontrollable laughter, Olbermann launched into this absolute disaster of a rant in which he suggests some pretty questionable treatment for conservatives and Trump supporters.
“Trump can be and must be expunged. The hate he has triggered, the pandora’s box he has opened, they will not be so easily destroyed. So, let us brace ourselves. The task is two fold: The terrorist Trump must be defeated, must be destroyed, must be devoured at the ballot box and then he and his enablers and his supporters and his collaborators, and the Mike Lees, and the William Barrs and Sean Hannitys and the Mike Pences and the Rudy Guilianis and the Kyle Rittenhouses, and the Amy Coney Barretts must be prosecuted and convicted and removed from our society while we try to rebuild it and to rebuild the world Trump has nearly destroyed by turning it over to a virus. Remember it, even as we dream of a return to reality and safety and the country for which our forefathers died. That the fight is not just to win an election but to win it by enough to chase, at least for a moment, Trump and the MAGAts off the stage and then try to clean up what they left. Remember it even though to remember it, means remembering that the fight does not end November 3rd, but in many ways, will only begin that day.”
Now my next question is just how exactly, Olbermann et al, think that they are going to enforce this little threat. Do they really think they are going to come at a bunch of gun-loving, God-fearing, left-hating conservatives with threats of forced internment without any push back? And is Olbermann going to be on those front lines attempting to arrest and detain these people? Of course not.
Now of course there will be those on the left that suggest Olbermann didn’t “say that.” Well there, Sparky, what exactly do you think “removing people from society” means? Do you think we are all headed to a summer camp with smores every night and waterskiing everyday? He is literally calling for internment, that last of which was done by…. oh that’s right… Democrat FDR in World War II. Olbermann’s words aren’t just a call to action, they are a call for war, one which he and the rest of his ilk, are likely to lose.
These are the same people who consistently lecture the right on “incendiary language” and calls to arms. What does the left expect? For the right to just agree and go along with their garbage agenda, even if it means the literal extermination of conservatives? I guess so.
Olbermann is going to Olbermann. At least he’s entertaining (just not in the way that he thinks).
How China Is Overtaking the US With World’s No. 1 Navy
Article by J. William Middendorf in The Daily Signal
How China Is Overtaking the US With World’s No. 1 Navy
Chinese shipbuilders have produced more than 100 warships in the past 10 years, a build rate easily outstripping that of the U.S. Navy.
The Chinese navy is already the largest in the world with an estimated 350 ships and submarines.
The speed with which China’s first aircraft carrier was built is the fastest in the history of aircraft carrier construction. It took only two years from the laying of the hull to its launch. It was delivered to the Chinese navy nearly a year ahead of schedule late last year.
Three nuclear-powered supercarriers are now under construction and are expected to form the center of carrier battle groups in the 2020s.
The Chinese navy is augmented by a shadow fleet of more than 2,000 fishing boats fishing illegally in other countries’ coastal domains. Some of those boats are not fishing at all. Disguised as fishing boats and called “sea phantoms,” they are fire-support vessels equipped with 16-tube rocket launchers and anti-aircraft guns.
These sea phantoms also resupply the People’s Liberation Army offshore garrisons and perform such functions as intelligence gathering and countersurveillance.
China has built six new classes of destroyers featuring more advanced hull designs, propulsion systems sensors, weapons, and electronics. The Type 055 destroyers displace 13,000 tons and are 590 feet in length. These massive ships feature multimission designs with anti-submarine capabilities.
The Chinese navy’s ballistic submarine fleet is being improved and expanded with the older Type 092 Xia-class nuclear-powered submersible ship ballistic missiles being replaced with several Type 094 Jin-class versions.
Four of these newer subs are already operational and are expected to be equipped with the new, longer-range JL-2 submarine-launched ballistic missiles with a range of 5,281 miles.
China is engaged in a significant effort to upgrade its mine warfare prowess. Relying heavily on sea mines, the Chinese navy is already fully capable of blockading Taiwan and other crucial sea lines of communication in the western Pacific area.
Taiwan’s relative trade dependence, the inherent difficulty in clearing mines, and the extreme weakness of American mine-clearing capacity, particularly in the Pacific theater, all make blockading Taiwan a tempting strategy for China.
Sea mines, used to complement a variety of other capabilities, constitute a deadly serious challenge to U.S. naval power in East Asia.
Most of China’s 1960s-era aircraft have been replaced, and the People’s Liberation Army Air Force is now dominated by fourth-generation fighter aircraft. They include the domestically designed and produced J-10 and the Su-27 fighter, which are comparable to our F-15 or F-18 and dominate both the fighter and strike missions.
China is also thought to be preparing to field two stealth, fifth-generation fighter designs. The J-20 is the larger aircraft, resembling the American F-22 fighter. The J-31 appears to resemble the F-35, but with two engines rather than one.
A variety of modern support aircraft has also entered the Chinese air force’s inventory, including early-warning command-and-control and electronic warfare aircraft.
China’s pursuit of a range of advanced weapons with disruptive military potential is part of its plan to seek dominance in the high-tech weapons area. They include maneuverable missile warheads, hypersonic weapons, laser and beam weapons, electromagnetic rail guns, space weapons, and artificial intelligence-directed robots.
We do not have any defense against hypersonic missiles, estimated to have a speed of Mach 20 (about 15,000 mph).
China’s air defenses are rapidly modernizing, with the recently acquired advanced S-400 surface-to-air missile system analogous to the American Patriot SAM system. Key industrial and military centers, such as Beijing, are now defended by surface-to-air missile systems.
It’s also developing its own advanced SAM, the HQ-9, which is deployed both on land and at sea.
China has used cyberwarfare to save billions of dollars in research and development costs. Chinese hackers stole massive amounts of highly sensitive data related to undersea warfare, including secret plans to develop a supersonic anti-ship missile for use on U.S. submarines.
The hacks took place in January and February 2018 and targeted an unidentified contractor working for the Naval Undersea Warfare Center in Newport, Rhode Island. Taken were 614 gigabytes of material relating to a closely held project known as “Sea Dragon,” as well as signals and sensor data, submarine radio information relating to cryptographic systems, and the Navy submarine development unit’s electronic warfare library.
On Oct. 6, Defense Secretary Mark Esper rolled out a new 25-year road map with a goal of about 355 manned ships and half as many unmanned surface and subsurface ships. His plan calls for fewer large carriers and more submarines in a Navy of 500 ships or more. He also wants an attack submarine force of 70 to 80 boats, up from today’s 55.
Six years ago, General Dynamics was awarded a $17.8 billion contract to build 10 Virginia-class submarines to replace the Los Angeles class, which has been on station since 1976. With nuclear power giving them limitless range, attack submarines can prowl the globe, shadowing Russian and Chinese ICBM submarines or delivering devastating missile barrages. They covertly collect intelligence that cannot be obtained in any other way.
Esper would like to increase the production of Virginia-class submarines to three a year, up from the current two. The Navy is also committed to building 12 Columbia-class nuclear ballistic submarines to replace the Ohio-class submarines.
The sole mission of the Ohio-class submarines is strategic nuclear deterrence, for which it carries long-range submarine-launched ballistic missiles. They provide the most survivable leg of America’s strategic nuclear deterrence with 70% of the nation’s accountable nuclear warheads and its only assured second strike or retaliatory nuclear strike capability.
Our greatest danger lies between now and 2031, when the first of the Columbia-class submarines will be deployed. That’s a long period of terrifying vulnerability. Nothing should be done to slow the development and deployment of the Columbia- or Virginia-class submarines, and we should support any opportunities to speed it up.
“We are at a point where we must chart a new path to a future fleet that will maintain our naval superiority long into the future,” Esper said, adding:
Cutting-edge technologies are altering the character of warfare and expanding the geometry of the battlefield in multiple ways. Artificial intelligence, autonomous systems, ubiquitous sensors, and long-range precision weapons will play an increasingly leading role in a future high-end fight.
Whoever harnesses these technologies first will have a clear advantage on the high seas for years to come. Getting there ahead of everyone else demands a whole-of-nation effort.
J. William Middendorf is a former secretary of the Navy and author of “The Great Nightfall: How We Win the New Cold War” (2020).
https://www.dailysignal.com/2020/10/09/how-china-is-overtaking-the-us-with-worlds-no-1-navy/
Some Facts You’re Not Hearing That Might Dampen Your Enthusiasm for the Vaccine
In my previous column, we took a look at an alarming article by a professor of law from Stanford University that – though it appeared in the latest issue of the New England Journal of Medicine – had nothing whatsoever to do with science.
Instead, it brazenly outlined a scheme to deprive anyone refusing the impending COVID-19 vaccine of their liberty and right to work without running afoul of any “legal challenges on procedural due-process grounds” – or, as they probably like to call it at Standford’s law school, ‘that pesky Fifth Amendment.’
But even putting aside any right you may have to decide which drugs get injected into your body, it’s hard to say whether the idea of forcing us to get vaccinated for COVID-19 is more frightening or nonsensical.
On the frightening side: Two of the leading contenders in the race to produce a vaccine are using experimental technology that artificially stimulates an immune response by… hold on to your seats… genetically altering your cells with RNA from the virus so they start producing proteins from its outer shell. Though it probably won’t be described this way in any ad campaign, it’s tough to see what’s inaccurate about saying mRNA technology works by genetically modifying you into a human-coronavirus hybrid.
Moreover, not only are these potential COVID vaccines being developed with never-before-witnessed haste, mRNA technology has never been approved for use before. In fact, this will be the first time it’s even been tested in a large-scale clinical trial!
There’s always some risk attending the introduction of any new medication. But put all of this together, and it’s hard to see how the impending COVID-19 vaccine won’t be one of the riskiest if not the riskiest pharmaceutical product ever marketed.
The pharmaceutical companies racing to be the first to develop it certainly seem to think so.
Something else you probably haven’t heard is that they’ve managed to get immunity from liability should anything go horribly wrong and you or a member of your family wind up seriously harmed or even killed by the most hastily produced vaccine in history. Doubly distressing since, apart from signaling an alarming lack of confidence in the safety of their own product, it also removes the normal incentives the firms in this record-breaking rush to develop a COVID-19 vaccine have to make sure it’s safe.
But to add insult to your inability to sue for injury, the FDA is totally fine with a COVID-19 vaccine that’s only 50% effective. So as many as half the people risking an injection may very well wind up having done so for absolutely no reason.
Which brings us to the nonsensical.
Why on earth would anyone so much as consider getting injected with such a vaccine – let alone be forced to do so by the state as soon as it’s on the market – given that even on the World Health Organization’s official numbers, COVID-19 is now no more deadly than the seasonal flu?
But you may not have heard the latest entry in the long list of crucial facts the media’s been keeping from you.
Last week, W.H.O. officials estimated that 750 million people have been infected with the virus worldwide. Even ignoring that, just like the U.S. a lot of countries seem to be using criteria that are massively inflating the virus’s death count, the roughly one million reported deaths worldwide would imply that COVID’s fatality rate is around .13%. That is, it’s the same as the flu’s.
But what’s even more disturbing about this hysterical push to get us to take a COVID-19 vaccine is that dozens of research studies have shown that a lot of us already have preexisting immunity through prior contact with long-common but harmless variants.
As I reported a few weeks back, Trump’s COVID-19 advisor, Dr. Scott Atlas explicitly called out CDC director Robert Redfield for… well he didn’t put it this way but there’s no way around it… lying to Congress and the American people about how many of us are still susceptible to the virus.
Researchers have known since the middle of the last century that, besides antibody-producing B-cells, your body also has a second equally important defense against infections provided by T-cells. And, as Dr. Atlas pointed out:
Immunity to the infection is not solely determined by the percent of people who have antibodies. If you look at the research – and there’s been about 24 papers at least on the immunity from T-cells, a different type of immunity than antibodes – […]the reality is that according to the papers from Sweden, Singapore, and elsewhere, there is crossover immunity highly likely from other infections and there is also T-cell immunity. And the combination of those make the antibodies a small fraction of the people that have immunity. So the answer is no, it is not 90% of people that are susceptible to infection.
Moreover, even if it turns out that immunity from antibodies fades quickly, crossover immunity from T-cells doesn’t. As I reported a couple of months back in a column on some related new research indicating that COVID-19 isn’t very infectious, T-cell immunity to coronaviruses has been shown to last as long as 17 years.
We’ve known for months that common cold coronaviruses which pretty much everyone has had can also provide T-cell immunity to COVID-19.
And contrary to Redfield’s reprehensible perjury before Congress, the research shows that, as a result, around half of us were likely immune to COVID-19 even before the virus that’s supposed to cause it ever existed.
But the way we’re being pushed into taking a COVID-19 vaccine is made even more distressing by someone else who denied the existence of T-cell immunity while testifying to the Senate.
Just a few weeks back, the unofficial celebrity spokesperson for mass vaccination, Anthony Fauci himself, also tried to deny all the research indicating that half of us have no need for a COVID-19 vaccine because we’re already immune when Rand Paul finally stood up and challenged what can be charitably described as Fauci’s six-month reign of malignant deception.
Fauci offered to address Paul’s concerns in private:
I’d like to talk to you about that also. because there was a study that recently came out that pre-existing immunity to coronaviruses that are common cold do not cross react with COVID-19.
As his use of the word “also” suggests, this was a trick Fauci used repeatedly when Rand Paul finally called out the relentless stream of deadly BS he’s inflicted on us since his nightmarish reign began.
America’s answer to Pol Pot kept suggesting that he’d be happy to discuss Paul’s objections alone away from prying eyes. Who knows whether the idea was to bribe, threaten, or schmooze the Senator into backing down. Whatever Fauci’s response was, peasants like us evidently don’t need to hear it and need to just do as we’re told.
Pre-existing T-cell immunity to COVID-19, however, is an established and completely unsurprising fact.
As Dr. Atlas said, there are literally dozens of studies showing it exists. It’s not even clear what lone recent study that allegedly says otherwise Fauci is referring to. In fact, it appears he was simply lying and it doesn’t even exist.
In a later interview, he criticized Dr. Atlas for informing the American people that Redfield’s testimony to congress was contradicted by dozens of studies as “extraordinarily inappropriate” without naming a single study or any other evidence showing that Dr. Atlas was wrong.
On Fauci’s way of thinking, Redfield had exercised his prerogative to lie to the peasants and Dr. Atlas had despicably sided with the peasants by trying to expose one of their masters’ deception. And, if you think that description is in any way sarcastic, you’re still not getting what’s happening to us.
But it’s telling that Fauci was unwilling to identify this alleged study or answer most of Rand Paul’s other questions about what in God’s name he’s been doing to us these past six months in front of the American people and, instead, requested a private audience with the Senator to assuage his concerns.
It’s hard to imagine anything more disturbing than the main bureaucrats pushing for a rushed-to-market vaccine that may wind up using technology to modify the genetic makeup of our cells also flagrantly lying about how many of us are already immune.
Indeed, it’s disturbing that Fauci and Redfield aren’t behind bars, let alone that they’ve continued to get away with deceitfully pushing one disastrous policy after another on us for months now unhindered.
But, though it scarcely seems possible, the situation is even worse.
You see, when you weren’t looking, Redfield’s CDC quietly asserted that they have blanket authority to:
[A]pprehend, detain, examine, quarantine, isolate, or conditionally release individuals for purposes of preventing communicable disease spread.
Surprise!
Of course, the sweeping powers to which the CDC laid claim seem to license a whole lot more than merely locking you up for refusing a vaccine.
“Purposes of preventing the disease from spreading” is such a broad mandate that you could find yourself deprived of liberty for suspicion of being infected by the virus.
This would be troubling enough were it coming from an agency we had any reason to think could be trusted.
Quite the contrary, however.
Both the CDC and its director, Robert Redfield have spent the last six months feeding us: disinformation, bogus stats, advice that ranged from useless to deadly, and as we’ve seen – just to show they really meant it – the occasional barefaced lie.
Neither the agency nor the man in charge could have possibly shown themselves to be more contemptible or less worthy of our trust. So, the sweeping totalitarian power they’ve claimed over our lives portends a lot worse than just forcing you and your loved ones to incur the risk that attends taking any drug by injecting an utterly pointless and hastily produced experimental vaccine while depriving you of the legal recourse you would normally have should something go awfully wrong.
Tyrannical mayors and governors have already closed down our businesses, shuttered up our churches, locked us in our homes, and forbade appearing in public with our faces uncovered – all for absolutely no legitimate reason and all on the CDC’s say-so.
A few weeks back, a Maryland man was sentenced to a year in jail for hosting a couple of outdoor gatherings at his home against his Governor’s orders.
Half the country hears about his sentence and thinks: The bastard deserved it.
They watch an asthmatic woman in Texas get tasered and dragged away in handcuffs for not pointlessly harming her health by wearing a mask outdoors and think: They should have clubbed the b**** too.
While the rest of us are shocked & appalled for a minute or two after which time we completely forget – as we gradually become accustomed to a totalitarian new normal that, just last year, we would have scoffed at anyone suggesting could ever happen here.
So if you think it’s outlandish to suppose they’ll start hauling people off to “quarantine wards” for suspicion of having COVID-19 or maybe just for calling out any of Redfield or Fauci’s blatant lies about it in too loud a voice, you need to wake up and look at all the dead canaries collecting in front of the coal mine exit before the pile gets too big to claw your way out.
But what makes the CDC’s authoritarian power grab even more alarming is that, though the media didn’t report on it, they nonetheless did do a whole lot of reporting on one small part of the very strange document in which it was announced.
Though most of its roughly 800 words are about those “regulatory updates” codifying the CDC’s sweeping “federal isolation and quarantine authority,” their announcement abruptly veers off into its main subject only after a brief 112-word opening that peddles some arrant nonsense about the 1918 Spanish flu which turned out to be instrumental in grooming us for our future as docile slaves under the boot of a tyrannical Chinese Communist-style all-powerful bureaucracy.
…Continued in the next installment of “COVID-1984″…