On February 16, 2023,
in Uncategorized,
by magoo1310
It’s Wednesday, February 15th, 2023…and today we begin with a question…
…occasioned by Ohio police arresting a journalist reporting on the train derailment in East Palestine…
BREAKING: @EvanLambertTV, a DC-based correspondent for @NewsNation, has been in Ohio covering the train crash. He was doing a live shot in the back of the room during a press conference-was told to stop by police, was pushed to the ground, cuffed & arrested & put in a patrol car. pic.twitter.com/RZv6nT7j8o
First up, following up on an earlier submission from The Boss, in his latest installment of The Blade of Perseus, the great VDH details what could perhaps be…
“Octogenarian journalist Seymour Hersh’s recent allegations that the United States blew up sections of the Russo-German Nord Stream 1 and 2 pipelines were scarcely covered by the media that otherwise runs with the usual Hersh-fed embarrassments to the U.S. government. Oddly, in this case, it stayed mum. The story was adamantly denied by the Biden Administration and most of the bipartisan foreign policy establishment.
The news media’s neglect cannot be due to any journalistic standards, because a sloppy and corrupt media long ago swore falsely that Trump let Putin put kill-bounties on our soldiers in Afghanistan, and insisted the Biden laptop was authentic evidence of Russian disinformation designed to help Trump. So we have no idea whether the media suppression of the story was due to its usual warped ideology or a rare, disinterested standard of ignoring a conspiracy theory.
Hersh’s reporting was largely based on one anonymous source, but oddly marked by an unusual level of detail about the planning, carrying out, and purpose of the operation. The Left had long deified Hersh for the consistently anti-American government themes in his sensationalized dispatches. His accuracy, however, is not always contested, given he was largely accurate in the disclosures about the My Lai massacre and the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuses. But in this instance, he has been met with ridicule rather than the usual adulation from the liberal media.
Still, there were a variety of circumstances that kept the smothered story breathing—and for a multitude of reasons. The only concerned countries with the operative ability to carry out such an intricate attack were likely Russia, the United States, and European Union countries. The Washington Post in December concluded that, despite initial circumstantial evidence, there was no reason to believe Russia blew up its own multibillion-dollar investment that was deemed critical for future Russian foreign exchange revenues. While Hersh mentioned Denmark and Norway as cooperating with the United States, it is equally difficult to believe that any European Union or NATO nation would on its own attack the assets of another member, especially the shared investments of Germany that for some time has dominated the governance of EU and the policies of European members of NATO.
More disturbingly, on the eve of the Ukraine war in January 2022, Under Secretary of State Victoria Nuland quite indiscreetly boasted, “If Russia invades Ukraine, one way or another, Nord Stream 2 will not move forward.” She did not say what she meant by “another” way. That was not an isolated threat. Joe Biden reiterated the same warning a month later. “If Russia invades,” he said, “then there will no longer be a Nord Stream 2 . . . We will bring an end to it . . . I promise you; we will be able to do it.” His choice of “end” implied more than voluntary German disconnection from an otherwise intact Russian pipeline.
More recently, Nuland post facto expressed glee in an exchange with Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas) that her earlier threat had been reified, “Senator Cruz, like you, I am—and I think the administration is very pleased that Nord Stream 2 is now, as you say, a pile of metal at the bottom of the ocean.”
Apparently, the position of the Biden Administration was not just belated official disapproval of the pipeline—as President Trump had made abundantly clear during his own tenure with sanctions. Rather, this government was pledged (“I promise you”) to “bring an end to it,” and had the ability to do just what it promised (“We will be able to do that”).
When the pipeline was actually bombed, the U.S. government expressed satisfaction with that violent act: “Very pleased that . . . Nord Stream 2 is now . . . a pile of metal at the bottom of the ocean.” It would be hard to think Nuland was praising Putin for purportedly destroying his own multibillion-dollar investment, given that Germany did stop much of its deliveries of natural gas without the ruin of the pipeline. Even if we put aside the question of who destroyed the pipelines (and they could be rendered useless if seawater continues to erode the interior linings), it was highly unusual for the president of the United States and an under secretary of State publicly to hint at a preemptive attack against a key asset of its ally Germany and a formidable power with over 6,500 nuclear weapons.
Nor do NATO nations destroy, preemptively and stealthily, the property of other NATO nations—especially given that Germany was facing the onset of autumn and winter, and did not have the wherewithal to keep its 80 million citizens warm without the full gas deliveries through the pipeline. There are no suggestions that the German government might have winked and nodded at the explosion—given Berlin might have been otherwise afraid voluntarily to close down the pipeline given public support for the deliveries.
If the United States took extra measures—alleged in detail by Hersh—to evade legal responsibilities to apprise a select group of senators and representatives of a planned major covert operation, then that too might well be an impeachable offense.
As of now the story remains unproven, if not wild. But unfortunately it dovetails with the prior statements of the highest American officials, and the apparent strategic agenda of the United States, better than do current competing narratives—as the Washington Post reminded us in the case of Russia. But even a slight chance that the story rings true is terrifying in its implications—preemptively attacking a nuclear power, destroying the multibillion-dollar investment of an ally and its ability to bring fuel to its strapped citizenry, and deliberately breaking federal laws to avoid congressional compliance.“
Though we must note, if and when justice is ever served on Biden, an illegal attack on the Nordstream 2 would be one of the lesser charges he faces in this world…and the least of his problems in the next.
Since we mentioned “next”, NRO‘s Stan Kurtz records how, in an ill-advised reversal…
“Facing a torrent of criticism from customary allies on the left for having caved to Ron DeSantis on the AP African-American Studies (APAAS) curriculum, the College Board issued an attack on Florida’s governor at the unlikely hour of 8 p.m. Saturday night. What can account for so oddly timed a salvo? Friday’s calls from the National Black Justice Coalition, among others, for the resignation of College Board CEO David Coleman may have had something to do with it.
Despite winning a considerable victory on the curriculum front, DeSantis has not yet formally accepted APAAS as a for-credit course in Florida. The governor rightly wants to learn more about the College Board’s newly announced plans to include and highlight critical-race-theory-based readings in APAAS’s “AP Classroom” digital platform.
The College Board appears to have calculated that it has no further political leeway either to reduce the radical readings that will now be made available in its AP Classroom portal, or to balance them with more moderate and conservative voices. Knowing that DeSantis is therefore unlikely to greenlight APAAS, the College Board has gone to war with Florida. Attacking DeSantis is the College Board’s best hope for downsizing the tsunami of outrage threatening to engulf it from the left. Yet the College Board’s attack on Florida’s governor risks driving away the red states, particularly states that have laws barring the promotion of Critical Race Theory (CRT) in K–12.
Against all appearances — and against common sense — the College Board continues to claim that several months’ worth of expressions of concern by Florida about CRT-based content had nothing to do with the radical revisions to APAAS announced on February 1. These denials continue in the face of the timeline released by the Florida Department of Education (FDOE) detailing its contacts with the College Board.
The College Board now claims that those extensive communications with FDOE were merely “transactional.” Supposedly, all the College Board wanted from Florida was a “course code” that would have allowed students to take the pilot APAAS course for credit. Yet by its own account, the College Board understood that Florida was withholding such credit until it was confident that the course did not promote CRT, in violation of Florida law.
The College Board’s Saturday-night missive goes on to claim that Florida’s concerns couldn’t possibly have affected its February APAAS curriculum revisions. After all, Florida’s feedback was “vague” and “uninformed.” All Florida offered, according to the College Board, were questions such as “What does the word ‘intersectionality’ mean?” and “Does this course promote Black Panther thinking?”
Actually, “promoting Black Panther thinking” is an excellent summary of the problems with APAAS. As I explained in September, in my critique of the then-secret curriculum, the Black Panther Party’s Marxist worldview and policy platform were the unifying feature of APAAS’s controversial concluding unit. The topic on the Black Panthers connected everything from radical psychiatrist Frantz Fanon’s musings on the healing power of violence, at the outset of the unit, to Marxist professor Robin D. G. Kelley’s meditations on the revolutionary history of black studies, at unit’s end.
The College Board laughably pretends not to have understood what Florida was getting at. How could Florida have influenced APAAS’s curriculum revisions when Florida couldn’t even make its own concerns clear?Come on. The College Board knew exactly what Florida was worried about. It can’t even maintain a consistent pose of naïveté throughout the text of Saturday’s letter. Toward the end of that letter, the College Board actually makes fun of Florida for acting as though it needs to explain the controversy over terms such as “intersectionality” and “systemic” racism. The idea that you have to explain this controversy to us is ridiculous, says the College Board. Exactly. The College Board understood Florida’s concerns perfectly well from the start. It needed no detailed roadmap to curriculum revision from FDOE.
The College Board played dumb with Florida for months because it understood perfectly well that FDOE would never approve APAAS if it knew what was actually in it. APAAS is thick with advocacy for CRT and radical Marxism. The trick is that this radicalism was buried by the initial curriculum, which mentioned authors without listing specific assignments or concepts. You had to read extensively in the work of various authors, and guess which essays and books would actually be assigned, to catch the drift of all the advocacy. The College Board backtracked in February, not because it didn’t understand Florida concerns, but because it understood them all too well.
The College Board’s real problem was its failed attempts at secrecy and deception. Only when it realized that Florida wouldn’t be fooled by a vague and confusing curriculum framework did the College Board modify APAAS…”
Kinda sorta sounds like the FBI disavowing it’s internal memo detailing the threat posed by orthodox Catholicism only after it became public:
All of which is why, as Jeff Tucker writes at The Epoch Times…
“…In the sweep of history, the past three years have been the most successful exercise of power on a global scale ever seen—if by successful, we mean dramatically intensifying the wealth transfer from the peasants to elites and control of a ruling class over the whole population in the shortest possible amount of time.
In that, what began in disease panic has been more successful than any heresy hunt in the Middle Ages, sedition purge in the early modern era, or war in our times. It was brilliant and spectacularly effective. Therefore, of course, they will try it again, building from this episode to do ever more. Whatever victories we seem to have won—the rollback of vaccine mandates, the successful court cases, the opinion polls showing that people are angry—need to be understood in this light.
There will be more and they will be institutionalized. The World Health Organization is working right now to institutionalize and codify the worst of the lockdowns and mandates, adding global disease surveillance through technology. The world’s central banks are working on a digital currency for the sole purpose of controlling all finance and economics. The World Economic Forum is the open conspiracy to dismantle much of the progress of hundreds of years and replace it with a dystopian vision of universal despotism.
As a result, the distance between what we see and what they see has never been more vast. Back in the days of the Occupy Wall Street movement, protesters got some traction with the claim that most of the wealth in society is controlled by the 1 percent. The intuition was good but the specifics were wrong. The problem isn’t the wealth as such. It’s the power over our lives that the very rich have. The people and institutions that seek to control the world today—occupying our lives and liberties in every respect—are the real 1 percent…”
“New York City Mayor Eric Adams, during an interview with Caribbean Power Jam Radio’s “The Reset Show,” defended the rescinding of a COVID vaccine for city workers and that there may be a time that mandates will be in place again.
…“I know what COVID looked like, and I know that if we didn’t have those mandates – I take my hat off to Bill de Blasio. That was a tough call, because you know New Yorkers…No New Yorker wants anyone telling them anything,” Adams said during the interview. “That’s who we are. We don’t want to be mandated. We don’t want anyone to tell us to put on a mask.”
The mayor continued to talk about a cultural mind shift of fighting a dangerous and deadly virus, adding that he went to the hospitals and saw trailers of bodies. He also said he saw nurses and doctors at hospitals wearing makeshift masks and plastic bags to protect themselves.
“This was real. If we didn’t have that vaccine and we didn’t have those mandates, we would have lost so many more lives,” Adams said. “And so, those who made the determination that, no, I still want to come into a work environment and I’m not going to be vaccinated, no, I want to still ride the trains. I want to do whatever I want. That just wasn’t right. That wasn’t right.”…”
Here’s the juice in response to Adams’ assertions:
Power does indeed corrupt, but something tells us Eric Adams was rotten to the core long before he was elected mayor of the Big Apple.
Then there’s this from Townhall.com, as Derek Hunter cautions…
“It happens all the time: someone famous, either fully or mildly, says something remotely conservative and the conservative establishment goes absolutely crazy for them, then it all falls apart. It’s time to stop.
…That brings us to Joe Rogan.He’s the world’s most popular podcaster, a comedian and MMA commentator. He’s also not a conservative. Yet, on the occasions he says something we like, the establishment rushes to cheer and hype him, which makes everyone look like morons or puts our movement on the hook when he says something stupid. And he has exceedingly long conversations with liberals while stoned, so he’s going to say something stupid often.
How many times have you seen people sucking up to Rogan over a 30 second clip from a 3-hour show? You own all of it when you kiss the rear end the way they do, all because they hope to get on his show to sell their books, pimp their shows or simply raise money for themselves.
I’m not saying the occurrences of some celebrity or liberal “getting it” for a moment, or saying something right (if only by accident) shouldn’t be highlighted, but you can point out what someone said that is correct without touting the person saying it as some kind of messiah.
It’s true that a stopped clock is right twice a day, but it’s wrong the other 23 hours and 58 minutes. The conservative movement would be better off with leaders less interested in lining their bank accounts than they are in advancing conservatism, but until that can happen maybe they could stop elevating the wrong people or building up leftists simply because they accidentally told the truth for a minute.“
And in today’s installment of the EnvironMental Moment, a forward from the Cowboy State Daily via Speed details…
Why Modern Civilization Isn’t Possible Without Fossil Fuels
“A Wyoming map of carbon dioxide emissions in the state shows what one would expect to be the primary sources of greenhouse gasses – coal mines, coal-fired power plants, oil refineries and airports.
There’s one exception. According to Climate Trace, the Laramie cement plant produces 792,000 tons of carbon dioxide, about the same as the Rapid City cement plant in South Dakota. While there are efforts to shut down coal-fired power plants and replace them with non-carbon energy sources, it would be virtually impossible to power a cement plant with wind and solar. The same is true of plastics, ammonia and steel, all necessary for modern civilization, and all require the burning of fossil fuels to produce.
“There’s no credible path, no physical chemistry or energetics, to significantly replace that energy” with non-carbon sources, Mark P. Mills, senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, told Cowboy State Daily. Vaclav Smil, distinguished professor emeritus at the University of Manitoba, explains in his new book “How the World Really Works,” that modern societies require the four pillars of civilization: cement, steel, plastics and ammonia.
• Ammonia is the basis for all nitrogen fertilizers. Without the food produced with modern fertilizers, billions of people would starve.
• Plastics are found in everything from computers to furniture to clothes. As Smil explains in his book, they are also indispensable in nearly every aspect of health care — from incubators to artificial hearts.
• Without steel, there would be no skyscrapers or cars – including electric vehicles.
• Cement is the key ingredient in concrete, without which there are no modern cities, tunnels, dams, roads, runways or ports.
No viable replacement exists for these materials, at least not in the near future or on a global scale, Smil explains…”
Here’s a second shot of the juice in video form, as California Republican (talk about an endangered species!) Tom McClintock offers one of the most reasoned assessments of the insanity that is green energy:
Again, replacing these critical components of life as we know it wouldn’t just be hard, not merely difficult, but absolutely and totally…
Moving on, here’s another octet of items specially selected to sate the curiosity of inquiring Conservative minds:
…the group which helped funnel Collins’ and Faux Chi’s funds to the Wuhan Institute of Virology for gain-of-function research. Republicans have indicated refusals to attend voluntarily will be met with compulsory subpoenas. We’ll see.
(3). NRO revealed 46* has fired the U.S. architect of the Capitol, in part because he impersonated a police officer and regularly misused government vehicles to take personal trips. This after Joe taking Hunter for no apparent reason to China…
…and impersonating the President for over two years? Seriously?!?
“If you’ve worked hard to afford a suburban house with a patch of lawn where your kids can play, you’re under attack.” The Biden administration and Democrats in New York, Connecticut and other states are fighting local zoning laws in order to build high-rise apartment buildings with “affordable” units in tree-lined, single-family neighborhoods. All in the name of equity, meaning everyone can live in a tranquil suburb, whether they’ve earned the money to pay for it or not.“
Thus inflicting precisely the same havoc in suburban neighborhoods they’ve wreaked in Portland, Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, Baltimore, Chicago, Detroit, St. Louis and every other decaying urban enclave which has been subject to 50+ years of uninterrupted Progressive policies and governance.
(5). The New York Post revealed that in a recent fundraising email New York Dimocrat Jamaal Bowman said a Memphis man who was fatally beaten by Black police officers was “killed by white supremacy” and “America”:
“Tyre Nichols should be alive today. Instead, like so many others he was killed by police. Killed by white supremacy. Killed by America. This is Black terror. We feel it everyday. We feel it more today. Too many victims to name. Too much hurt to explain. Too many tears, too normalized, too numb. From 1619 to the present day we live in a constant state of terror.”
No, Jamaal: in a scene played out every day in decaying Dimocratic-controlled cities across the country they were killed by other Blacks raised in a culture of anger, resentment and violence.
A study from researchers at the University of Chicago and the University of California Berkeley reports:
This paper estimates consumer demand for firearms with the aim of predicting the likely impacts of firearm regulations on the number and types of guns in circulation… we find that bans or restrictions that specifically target “assault weapons” increase demand for handguns, which are associated with the vast majority of firearm-related violence.
(8). Then again, at least Kirby lies in cogent sentences. The first Black, lesbian who-identifies-as-a-woman White House spokeswhatever, on the other hand, can’t even describe the nature of NORAD without help…
Karine Jean-Pierre says the U.S. military shot an object over Canada “because it’s part of NORAD. There’s, uh, the NORAD is part of like a, part of a—it’s a, it’s a, what you call, a coalition, a consortium.”
…let alone pronounce the name of our neighbor to the north.
Which brings us, appropriately enough, to The Lighter Side:
And is there anything more worthless in the world than this?
Then there’s these from Balls Cotton…
…and the lovely Shannon…
…as well as a few direct from The Patriot Post:
Finally, we’ll call it a wrap with yet another sordid story straight from the pages of The Crime Blotter, courtesy today of a Wolverine state representative who didn’t bother learning the facts before issuing an asinine statement on the MSU shootings:
Michigan Democrat: F**k Your Thoughts and Prayers, We Need Gun Control
“…When Puri posted his “f**k your prayers, pass more gun control” statement, the public now knows the 43-year-old college shooter was arrested for carrying a pistol without a permit in 2019, with prosecutors dismissing the felony charge, which could have carried a five-year sentence. He pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge and completed his probation in 2021. Police had been called to his house for shooting out the back multiple times before the attack. MSU is also a gun-free zone…”
Hey, someone has to be the dumbest Asian-American in the country.
Here’s a second shot of the juice: While we’re reticent to use a tragedy to make a political point, such failures to enforce existing gun laws have unfortunately become a recurring aspect of mass shootings, and this one was no exception. We’d challenge Mr. Puri to name a single additional constitutional gun control measure (e.g., a total ban and confiscation doesn’t count) which would have prevented a shooting Michigan authorities almost seemed to invite.
Magoo
Video of the Day
Matt Walsh calls a spade a spade…or in this case, correctly identifies Libtards as Libtards. And yes, purple hair, you ARE a Libtard!
Tales of the Darkside
Jim Jordan hard at work. The real question is how he’ll manage to make meaningful changes to prevent such actual election interference again.
On the Lighter Side
Having just returned from a wheek in Mehico, where we enjoyed we many a plate of authentic Hispanic cuisine, we found this old SNL skit particularly appropriato!
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