Here's to another week, folks! Here's tonight's news:
Article by Nick Arama in RedState
The movement seemed to start spontaneously last weekend.
As we reported, suddenly, folks at college football games and other events like concerts were chanting “F**k Joe Biden!” What’s sort of amazing about it all is that college students are generally some of the most liberal folks you’re going to find on the planet. But, obviously, not the folks we’re seeing behind all this, and that’s a positive right there.
Now, I’m not necessarily a big fan of expletives. But this isn’t just random cursing. It indicates they are engaged and involved in what’s been going on — and they’re letting Biden know that they’re not happy with what he’s done, in a way that’s stark and that will get noticed.
Could we call it “resistance?” Except these resisters aren’t burning things down or physically attacking people like the leftist resisters. It’s Democrats who changed the rules here and spent the last four years undermining the president with everything they had. So, they really don’t have any standing to object to some chants now.
There are so many things that the people chanting could be upset with Biden about, from inflation to COVID restrictions. But this followed the Afghanistan debacle, with Americans service members getting killed and Americans being stranded there; so, I’m thinking that’s likely at least part of the impetus that kicked it off.
The chants were in evidence again this weekend.
The Alabama Crimson Tide made the stadium reverberate, as everyone chanted.
Caution: coarse language
FUCK JOE BIDEN, ROLL TIDE! 🗣 pic.twitter.com/F551mJrC4b
— Old Row Sports (@OldRowSports) September 11, 2021
Virginia Tech:The entire stadium at the Alabama game was chanting 'Fuck Joe Biden' 🤣🤣🤣 #RollTide pic.twitter.com/Ij3GdLGlfw
— Savage Neanderthal (@TheKingIsBack80) September 12, 2021
The Tennessee Vols:Virginia Tech joins in! #FJB pic.twitter.com/VX6TekQbRW
— Old Row Sports (@OldRowSports) September 11, 2021
Ole Miss:TENNESSEE CHECKING IN 🗣 #FJB pic.twitter.com/u3WHUHElgM
— Old Row Sports (@OldRowSports) September 11, 2021
LSU:HOTTY TODDY FUCK JOE BIDEN! @OldRowOleMiss pic.twitter.com/sR5BCUup5w
— Old Row Sports (@OldRowSports) September 12, 2021
FUCK JOE BIDEN CHANT IN DEATH VALLEY 🗣 @OldRowLSU pic.twitter.com/wS1yzbl7Yq
— Old Row Sports (@OldRowSports) September 12, 2021
— Old Row Sports (@OldRowSports) September 11, 2021The chants also broke out at the Evander Holyfield fight last night, along with “We want Trump!”
“WE LOVE TRUMP” chant erupts at Holyfield vs Belfort fight
— Jewish Deplorable (@TrumpJew2) September 12, 2021
The silent majority is getting louder
pic.twitter.com/OYUjUDfA7Y
ICYMI - Fans at the Holyfield vs Belfort fight last night chant "We want Trump" and "F*** Joe Biden".
— Disclose.tv (@disclosetv) September 12, 2021
🎥https://t.co/gOygrW1N39 pic.twitter.com/GTFbDGAsjY
Now, this may actually be reaching Joe Biden himself, as we reported in an earlier post. When Biden was visiting the Shanksville, PA, 9/11 memorial for the 20th anniversary remembrance, he even tried to use the victims to defend himself, “What would the people who died be thinking? They think it makes sense to be doing this kinda thing where you ride down the street and see a sign that says ‘F so-and-so’?” Just a really disgusting exploitation of the dead for his own purposes. But it’s also clear that he’s seeing the discontent, seeing the diving polls, and he’s not a happy camper. He should try listening, but that would require humility and accepting that he’s not right — something he hasn’t seemed inclined to do on anything. So, Biden’s likely to hear more of this in the coming weeks.
Alana McLaughlin, the second openly transgender woman to compete in MMA in the United States, won her debut on Friday night via submission at the Combate Global prelims.
The 38-year-old used a rear-naked choke against Celine Provost to end the match three minutes, 32 seconds into the second round.
McLaughlin, who began her gender transition after leaving the U.S. Army Special Forces in 2010, said she hopes to be a pioneer for transgender athletes in combat sports.
“I want to pick up the mantle that Fallon put down,” McLaughlin told Outsports before the fight, referring to Fallon Fox, who in 2012 became the first transgender woman to fight in MMA.
“Right now, I’m following in Fallon’s footsteps. I’m just another step along the way and it’s my great hope that there are more to follow behind me.”
Fox, who sat cageside on Friday, last fought in 2014. Four years later, Patricio Manuel became the first transgender male to compete in a pro boxing match in the United States when he beat Hugo Aguilar via unanimous decision.
Alana McLaughlin, the second openly transgender woman to compete in MMA in the United States, won her debut on Friday night via submission at the Combate Global prelims.
The 38-year-old used a rear-naked choke against Celine Provost to end the match three minutes, 32 seconds into the second round.
McLaughlin, who began her gender transition after leaving the U.S. Army Special Forces in 2010, said she hopes to be a pioneer for transgender athletes in combat sports.
“I want to pick up the mantle that Fallon put down,” McLaughlin told Outsports before the fight, referring to Fallon Fox, who in 2012 became the first transgender woman to fight in MMA.
“Right now, I’m following in Fallon’s footsteps. I’m just another step along the way and it’s my great hope that there are more to follow behind me.”
Fox, who sat cageside on Friday, last fought in 2014. Four years later, Patricio Manuel became the first transgender male to compete in a pro boxing match in the United States when he beat Hugo Aguilar via unanimous decision.
McLaughlin began training a year ago and was cleared to fight by the Florida State Boxing Commission after having her hormone levels tested, according to ESPN.
She said it was a “nightmare” finding an opponent.
“I have nothing but respect for (Provost),” McLaughlin said.
The fight was originally scheduled for August 6 but was postponed after Provost, a 35-year-old boxing and MMA veteran, tested positive for the coronavirus.
Provost landed multiple punches in the first round before McLaughlin came out on top.
As she was declared the victor, McLaughlin wore a shirt with the phrase, “End Trans Genocide.”
Her debut comes as multiple states argue bills aimed at restricting transgender athletes from participating in youth, high school and college sports.
“If we want to see more trans athletes, if we want to see more opportunities for trans kids, we’re going to have to work out way into those spaces and make it happen,” McLaughlin told Outsports.
“It’s time for trans folks to be in sports and be more normalised.”
White people haven’t been doing so hot, it’s true. Their share of drug overdoses, alcoholism, and suicide (“deaths of despair”) have been high and rising for years, and many are clearly down in the dumps about themselves. According to polls, for instance, a substantial minority think it’s OK to teach “white privilege” in school, aren’t too fussed about themselves becoming a minority, and actually view racial out-groups more favorably than they do their own (a first for any group, says political scientist Eric Kaufmann).
Whether this explains, or is in response to, the barrage of “whiteness is bad” articles and opinion pieces pumped out daily by the mainstream press is unknown. But that’s likely neither here nor there as most of people writing such pieces are white themselves.
Surely, however, one’s heritage can’t only be about blame and shame. After all, the flipside of accepting collective guilt is also getting a collective thumbs-up once in a while. Every race has neat things about it, of course, white folks included. The art, the stories, the tech, the achievements; surely within the whole sweep of indigenous European history, even the most self-loathing of white Vice readers can say: “OK, what we did there was actually pretty cool.”
In the spirit of all those oft-seen “It’s time we acknowledge such-and-such an area of white racism”-articles, perhaps it’s time for white people to relax the handwringing and lighten up a bit. To take a moment, perhaps, and reflect on a few of the cooler things about their own branch of homo sap. There is plenty out there, after all.
Take all the cool battles whites have been in. Like all the ones fought on ice. Perhaps the baddest being the Battle on the Ice, which took place over frozen Lake Peipus in Novgorod, Russia. In the Baltic Crusades (one of the last ones), colonizing Catholic knights from Central and Northern Europe sought to forcibly convert pagans in the Baltic and Slavic regions as well as Orthodox Christians in Russia. The campaign against the latter culminated in a 1242 standoff with 20-year-old Russian prince Alexander Nevsky. By drawing the Crusaders in across the iced-over lake and then outflanking them, several thousand of Nevsky’s infantry, including horse-archers, managed to repel several thousand heavily armored and sometimes mounted Crusaders.
There’s an excellent 30-minute depiction of the battle in the Stalin-commissioned film, “Alexander Nevsky.” It ends with the surviving Crusaders trying to flee back to shore only to break through the ice and fall into the freezing waters below. Nevsky’s victory allowed him to concentrate on even more formidable colonizers from the East: the Mongols.
Just as cool were the fake battles. In Rome’s Colosseum during Emperor Vespasian’s reign, ancient writers record the first of the empire’s simulated sea battles. These events, which usually recreated famous Greek sea campaigns involving actual men (prisoners mostly), entailed diverting water from Rome’s aqueducts and filling up the Colosseum’s grounds so boats could float, then quickly draining it away so gladiator events could take place. Smaller versions of these were enjoyed in the hundreds of Roman coliseums and amphitheaters built around the empire: from England to Israel, to Tunisia to Bulgaria, and dozens of other countries.
Engineering Progress
Admittedly more important than facilitating aquatic entertainment was the aqueducts’ provision of drinking water throughout the empire. Starting around 300 B.C., the Romans engineered miles and miles of arched waterways built over varied terrain (including valleys) allowing gravity to distribute water sometimes over dozens of miles with the excess used to flush out sewers and supply public fountains and baths. Much like the flushing toilets of ancient Crete, the technology gradually went into disuse due to mismanagement, although some are still in use today. The best-preserved one today stands in Segovia in southern Spain, serving as a constant reminder to the local people of perhaps the greatest engineering feat of the ancient world.
Fast forward to 100 years ago with Holland’s creation of the Afsluitdijk. Pronounced “Off-schly-deck” and meaning shut-off dike, the 20-mile-long, 25-foot-high dam has been saving the lovely lowland nation from devastating floods ever since. The dam, which also serves as a road connecting two coastal provinces, cuts off the North Sea and has created an enclosed freshwater lake. Today, if you drive at night along the Afsluitdijk, you’re treated to the permanent “Gates of Light” art installation where reflective lines along the dam’s sluices get lit up by car headlights, creating an ultracool, Kraftwerkian effect—and with zero energy expenditure.
To the storied, British explorer David Livingstone, an Arab slave-trader in Zanzibar once said: “We travel little by little to get ivory and slaves . . . but you white men only look for rivers and lakes and mountains and you spend your lives for no reason, and to no purpose.” This is true. Europeans have always explored cool and dangerous places. Just for the heck of it.
Take the aquanauts. Despite deep-sea exploration getting far less attention than space travel, it’s arguably just as important and challenging. A couple of hundred years before they discovered North America in 1,000 A.D., the Vikings are recorded to have dropped weights attached to ropes in an attempt to measure water depth. Understanding water depth is the first step needed to examine the sea floor. Fast forward roughly a millennium to 1960 and American Don Walsh along with Swiss explorer Jacques Piccard would descend seven miles into the Mariana Trench; the lowest point on Earth and deeper than Mount Everest is tall by over a mile. Walsh’s son did it again last year as did America’s first woman to walk in space, Kelly Sullivan.
Thanks to underwater exploration, we’ve been able to investigate sunken ships like the Titanic, raise some to the surface like Henry VIII’s Mary Rose, mine the seafloor for its rich deposits of minerals—some of which are vital to developing renewable energy—and, of course, gain insights into the mysteries of deep-sea life. Pretty awesome stuff.
Miracles of Medicine
A chief characteristic among those who view western history as one long trail of “injustice” is their refusal to appreciate just how brutal life was not even a century or two ago. In mid-19th century England, for instance, for every 1,000 children born, 200 to 300 of them died within a day. As for their moms, around six out of 1,000 died during childbirth.
But thanks to a host of Western medical advancements, conditions are quite a bit better for mother and child. Instead of 200 to 300 dying per 1,000, the infant mortality rate in the UK is now around 3.5—a 70-fold drop. And instead of around 0.5-1 percent of British women dying during birth, now only seven for every 100,000 do— nearly a 100-fold drop.
The gains have been impressive outside the West as well. For instance, just since 1990 (when the data roughly begins), Ethiopia has experienced around a four-fold drop in both infant mortalities and maternal mortalities. The country’s life expectancy has also increased 40 percent to 61 years since 1955; far higher than the UK’s 13-percent increase (to 81) during the same period.
In Steven Pinker’s Enlightenment Now, in which he implores progressives to acknowledge the extent of human accomplishment post-Enlightenment, he quotes an economist saying, “[t]he improvements in health among the global poor in the last few decades are so large and widespread that they are among the greatest achievements in human history.” Amen.
Last but not least: the music.
As part of China’s Cultural Revolution in 1966, Mao sought to insulate the proletariat from decadent foreign influences, which entailed banning all foreign music from the country. Having unapproved music got you jailed or worse, and Mao’s infamous Red Guards (students mostly) commonly beat up classical musicians and smashed their instruments. Over the next four years, only “model operas” could be composed, which were more like sycophantic odes to Mao, Maoism, the revolution, etc.
Due to the stress of the period, 18 of the best conductors and music professors in Shanghai (China’s music capital) committed suicide. While rousing himself up from his routine beatings, Shanghai Symphony Orchestra conductor Lu Hongen would hum Beethoven’s “Missa Solemnis” as an act of defiance. On the eve of his execution, he asked his cellmate for a favor: “if you ever get a chance to escape China, go to Austria, the home of music, and lay flowers by Beethoven’s tomb. Tell him his disciple in China was humming the ‘Missa Solemnis’ as he marched to his death.” Many years later, the cellmate did manage to fulfill the favor.
According to Jindong Cai, who was in China at the time and is now director of the U.S.-China Music Institute, unlike traditional Chinese music which contains just one melody, Western classical music like Beethoven’s has a polyphonic structure which provides a unique level of melodic support. Anyone who’s heard Stokowski’s rendition of Bach’s “Little Fugue,” Liszt’s “Les Préludes,” or Respighi’s “Pines of Rome” can appreciate the importance which multiple, interlocking melodies has on music’s ability to achieve its transcendent and inspirational quality.
A few months after Mao died in 1976, authorities permitted Beijing’s Central Philharmonic to reform and play a concert over the radio. They chose to perform Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. As Cai recounts, for many in China who heard the opening of the Fifth (which starts with the most famous four notes in musical history), they felt something above and beyond the pleasure of the music. For them, it meant the mass psychosis of the Cultural Revolution was finally over.
So, there’s clearly plenty about Western Civilization that spans the spectrum between coolness and awesomeness. The above is just a smattering, of course. If some whites want to be focused on the doom and gloom all the time, fine, but to marinate in past guilt is to ignore and erase all things kick-ass about themselves and their history. And to do that is truly shameful.
Joe Biden is seeking by executive order to compel private businesses with more than 100 employees to require all their workers to be vaccinated or tested weekly for COVID-19. To do so, he seeks to meld the regulatory power of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration with compulsory healthcare.
When they said “healthcare for all,” we did not realize they meant it in a way that would make Nurse Ratched uneasy.
Through this unprecedented move, Biden has set up a confrontation with his own countrymen. He does this while he shrinks from confrontation around the world.
It’s personal, and not a little bit mid-century German.
On Thursday, Biden said:
My message to unvaccinated Americans is this. What more is there to wait for? What more do you need to see? We’ve made vaccinations free, safe, and convenient. The vaccine is FDA approved. Over 200 million Americans have gotten at least one shot. We’ve been patient, but our patience is wearing thin. And your refusal has cost all of us.
In 1938, Adolf Hitler said:
But in the same way I desire to state before the German people that with regard to the problem of the Sudeten Germans my patience is now at an end!
Biden could have just as easily said this:
But in the same way I desire to state before the American people that with regard to the problem of the unvaccinated my patience is now at an end!
Ja!
Who in Hell is doing the writing for Vaxi Führer Joe Biden?
America's Post-9/11 Surveillance Authorities Were Inevitably Turned Against Its Own Citizens
(Friso Gentsch/dpa/picture-alliance/Newscom)
In less than two months after terrorists brought down the Twin Towers, Congress passed the USA PATRIOT Act, granting federal law enforcement and intelligence agencies expanded authorities to engage in surveillance to hunt down suspected terrorists.
The bill sailed through Congress. The House of Representatives voted 357-66 to pass it. Then-Rep. Ron Paul (R–Texas) was one of only three Republicans to oppose it. In the Senate, only one senator, Russ Feingold (D–Wis.), voted against it.
In a speech on the Senate floor, Feingold warned against compromising our own civil liberties as we pursued Osama bin Laden and others who might mean Americans harm. He took note of the many, many times in America's history where the government chose security over liberty and the results were not pretty:
There have been periods in our nation's history when civil liberties have taken a back seat to what appeared at the time to be the legitimate exigencies of war. Our national consciousness still bears the stain and the scars of those events: The Alien and Sedition Acts, the suspension of habeas corpus during the Civil War, the internment of Japanese-Americans, German-Americans, and Italian-Americans during World War II, the blacklisting of supposed communist sympathizers during the McCarthy era, and the surveillance and harassment of antiwar protesters, including Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., during the Vietnam War. We must not allow these pieces of our past to become prologue.
Twenty years after the Sept. 11 attacks, we can see now that Feingold's warnings were on point (as were many warnings by many civil liberties experts). The USA PATRIOT Act ultimately led to a massive federal campaign of internal domestic surveillance that, when revealed, outraged many Americans even as government officials attempted to downplay and mislead citizens about what was happening.
Edward Snowden became a household name for good reason. In 2013, Snowden, a military intelligence contractor, leaked classified documents showing how the National Security Agency (NSA) was using the authorities of the USA PATRIOT Act to collect massive reams of communication data not just from suspected terrorists but from millions of Americans as well. Government officials (when they weren't lying to Congress about the existence of the program) downplayed what the NSA was doing. President Barack Obama responded to the outrage by insisting, "Nobody was listening to your phone calls."
But what the government was doing was collecting lots and lots of information about everything else related to those calls. The term "metadata" slid into the popular lexicon. Metadata refers to all the information about a communication outside of the actual contents of it—who people call, when, and where they are when they do so. One of the lessons Americans learned about all this domestic surveillance was how easy it is—as communications technology over the past two decades turned our phones and personal devices into actual computers—for the government to keep track of your behavior even when they aren't listening to your phone calls. Did you call a clinic that provides abortions? A person with a criminal history of dealing drugs? A leader of an organization with a history of protesting government behavior? Metadata collection allowed the government to collect all of this information about citizen behavior absent any suspicion of a crime or an individualized warrant, bypassing the protections of the Fourth Amendment entirely.
One man apparently shocked by the breadth of this surveillance was Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner (R–Wis.), the man responsible for authoring the PATRIOT Act in the first place. Sensenbrenner did not intend for Section 215 of the PATRIOT Act to allow for mass, warrantless collection of records of millions of Americans. He blasted the Department of Justiceunder the Obama administration for interpreting it that way, pointing out that the records of every American's phone calls are assuredly not relevant to any investigation of terrorism.
But the genie is not going back into the bottle easily. Section 215 of the PATRIOT Act did finally expire, replaced by the USA Freedom Act, which formalized some of these surveillance tools but added restrictions. NSA has since said that it is no longer collecting all of this data, and, by 2020, their authority to do so formally expired. It has never been shown to assist them in catching any terrorists.
Nevertheless, fear of terrorism has been used all this time and continues to be used to try to scare the public into making it easier for the government to snoop on them. The technology used to track terrorists' location data through their phones can and is used to track citizens through the commandeering of cell tower signals. The same thing has happened with facial recognition software. So-called Department of Homeland Security "fusion centers" formed in the wake of Sept. 11 were sold to the public as information clearinghouses between the feds and local police departments that allow them to better communicate with each other about potential terrorist threats. In reality, a Senate reportfrom 2012 found no examples where they helped uncover a potential terrorist threat. Instead, there have been examples of these centers snooping on domestic activist groups and protests.
In recent years, fears of terrorism have been used by police and lawmakers to attack encryption, particularly end-to-end encryption, which helps protect the privacy of data on your computers, phones, and tablet devices. Encryption makes it harder for hackers and criminals to access your data. It also makes it harder (if not impossible) for the government to access your info without your knowledge or permission.
When two Muslim homegrown terrorists killed 14 people in an attack in San Bernardino, California, in 2015, the FBI attempted to force Apple to disable the phone's security to access the data within. The feds did have a warrant to search the phone, but Apple declined to assist, arguing that undermining their own encrypted security system via what's known as a "back door" would create security risks for users. Eventually, the FBI was able to turn to a third party to hack into a phone, which turned out to not have any information relevant to the attack stored on it.
Nevertheless, the war on terror has been invoked repeatedly by police, prosecutors, and lawmakers as a reason why tech companies should be required to allow for these back doors to allow officials access to data. Tech companies, privacy rights advocates, and cybersecurity experts are all pretty much in agreement here: Encryption back doors are very, very bad. There is no such thing as an encryption bypass that only the "right" people can access. Any mechanism that can break through this security can fall into the hands of criminals or authoritarian governments.
And even when they don't, the lesson of the PATRIOT Act is that we really cannot trust the government to accept limits on surveillance tools unless there is a transparent public mechanism of enforcement. The same government agencies who insist they'd be careful with encryption bypasses and would seek warrants are the same government agencies who had been secretly collecting whatever data they can about our personal communications as part of the War on Terror.
Feingold warned about all of these potential dangers in his critique of the PATRIOT Act:
But under this bill, the government can compel the disclosure of the personal records of anyone—perhaps someone who worked with, or lived next door to, or went to school with, or sat on an airplane with, or has been seen in the company of, or whose phone number was called by—the target of the investigation.
And under this new provisions all business records can be compelled, including those containing sensitive personal information like medical records from hospitals or doctors, or educational records, or records of what books someone has taken out of the library. This is an enormous expansion of authority, under a law that provides only minimal judicial supervision.
Under this provision, the government can apparently go on a fishing expedition and collect information on virtually anyone. All it has to allege in order to get an order for these records from the court is that the information is sought for an investigation of international terrorism or clandestine intelligence gathering. That's it. On that minimal showing in an ex parte application to a secret court, with no showing even that the information is relevant to the investigation, the government can lawfully compel a doctor or hospital to release medical records, or a library to release circulation records. This is a truly breathtaking expansion of police power.
This speech was given on Oct. 21, 2001. And it's exactly what happened.
Biden Unveils 'Your Body, My Choice' Vaccination Program
WASHINGTON, D.C.—In a speech today, Joe Biden unveiled a brand new program to force the rest of the country to get vaccinated, entitled "Your Body, My Choice."
"Listen folks, make mistake. Uh, make no mistake," said the President, reading carefully off the teleprompter. "I have complete control and sole authority over everything you do with your body, and everything you put in your body. I'm the government for God sakes! I have F-15s and nukes! Jus getha vashine! Jusdoit!"
Biden then walked out of the room to get a snack.
Many concerns remained around issues of freedom and natural immunity, but the President was already eating his applesauce with the crushed-up pills in it and was unable to answer questions.
Companies will be forced to comply with the mandate until the Supreme Court strikes it down in a few hours.