A bomb threat was called in just as a judge in lower Manhattan was about to start a hearing over a $250 million lawsuit by New York Attorney General Letitia James against Donald Trump.
Tuesday’s 911 call was investigated, the courthouse at 60 Centre Street temporarily closed and searched, and the threat deemed unfounded, state court spokesman Lucian Chalfen said.
Why are leaders not supposed to be demagogues?
…Leaders are not supposed to be demagogues because it’s wrong, and leaders are not supposed to be demagogues because it’s usually a lousy and ineffective form of leadership in the long run. But perhaps the biggest reason leaders are not supposed to be demagogues is because the act represents a leader playing with fire — or maybe nitroglycerin is the more appropriate metaphor. Like a fire, fear and anger can flare up out of control, beyond the control of the leader. Like nitroglycerin, fear and anger can suddenly explode. People who are frightened or angry make impulsive, rash decisions. They’re not interested in a deliberate, measured, careful evaluation of the best course of action. There is a ticking clock counting down in their heads, and they see deliberation as inaction. They feel a sense of impending disaster and desperation, and all kinds of once-unthinkable actions now appear justified because of the dire stakes.
Does Donald Trump want people calling in bomb threats to the courthouse at 60 Centre Street in New York? Let’s be generous and assume the answer is no. The case is going to go forward one way or another; a bomb threat just delays the inevitable legal proceedings.
However, it is clear that Donald Trump wants to see widespread protests outside any courtroom where he is being tried, and he wants his supporters to feel as much fear and anger as possible. His messages on Truth Social are now borderline apocalyptic:
IT’S TIME!!! WE ARE A NATION IN STEEP DECLINE, BEING LED INTO WORLD WAR III BY A CROOKED POLITICIAN WHO DOESN’T EVEN KNOW HE’S ALIVE, BUT WHO IS SURROUNDED BY EVIL & SINISTER PEOPLE WHO, BASED ON THEIR ACTIONS ON DEFUNDING THE POLICE, DESTROYING OUR MILITARY, OPEN BORDERS, NO VOTER I.D., INFLATION, RAISING TAXES, & MUCH MORE, CAN ONLY HATE OUR NOW FAILING USA. WE JUST CAN’T ALLOW THIS ANYMORE. THEY’RE KILLING OUR NATION AS WE SIT BACK & WATCH. WE MUST SAVE AMERICA! PROTEST, PROTEST, PROTEST!!!
China, Russia, Iran, North Korea and other Nations of a less than friendly nature, are busy “CARVING UP THE WORLD” as our once great United States of America sits back and watches. We are a Failing Nation, with Open Borders, Fake Elections, and a horrible Inflation Riddled Economy. We no longer set the standard, the standard sets us. Our so-called “Leader” does NOTHING except Eat, Sleep, and S..t! Where have you gone Joe DiMaggio?”
Just as he did after the events of January 6, 2021, Trump will insist he only meant peaceful protest. But we know not everyone who listens to Trump hears or grasps any instruction to be peaceful. Some people think the best way to help Donald Trump is to send pipe bombs in the mail. Some think they can best help him by assaulting police officers. Some thought the best way they could help him was by bringing their guns to vote-counting sites. This is not a one-time occurrence; there is a recurring pattern of Trump supporters who believe they hear the president asking for their help, and then think the best way they can help is through violence.
Trump’s rhetoric has always had demagogic elements, but now his speeches and Truth Social feed are just a constant rant, designed to trigger your amygdalae. As I mentioned above, it is very hard to overrule when the fear of losing someone or something dear to us is so strong. And Trump is now telling us, over and over again, that our nation is being “killed,” we are “failing,” and we are in “steep decline”:
“WE JUST CAN’T ALLOW THIS ANYMORE. THEY’RE KILLING OUR NATION AS WE SIT BACK & WATCH. WE MUST SAVE AMERICA! PROTEST, PROTEST, PROTEST!!!”
Trump plays with fire, and he doesn’t particularly care who gets burned, as long as it isn’t him.
…Trump is not the only factor adding to the fear and anger in American daily life. If Trump were suddenly hit on the head and decided he wanted to spend the rest of his days in soft-spoken, gentle seclusion, we would still be tormented by those who see personal benefit in stirring up fear and anger in order to gain power. (“Gonna put y’all back in chains!”) But right now, Trump is a powerful accelerant to the bonfires of dread and rage.
A good leader recognizes the periodic need to communicate risk and potential danger to the public, but sets out to do it in a way that minimizes the fear. Sometimes, like during an event such as the Cuban Missile Crisis, fear is inevitable. (Or to contemplate a more recent example, the president should not blurt out that the world “faced the prospect of Armageddon” during a Democratic Party fundraiser.) And a good leader may wish to harness American anger over an event such as 9/11 and turn it into action, something productive and constructive.
Speaking of a lack of responsibility, in an ABSOLUTELY must-read commentary which deserves inclusion in full, writing at The Epoch Times, Jeff Tucker relates…
“An epic disaster like the COVID response, one might suppose, should inspire some humility and rethinking on how public health could have gone so wrong. They had their run at it but created a global disasterfor the ages. This is more than obvious to any competent observer. The next step might be to see if there are any places where matters went rather well, and Sweden comes first to mind. The educational losses were non-existent because they didn’t close schools. In general life went on as normal and with very good results.
One might suppose the Swedish way would be vindicated. Sadly, our leaders care nothing for evidence, apparently. Their concern is for power and money at any cost. As a result, we are witnessing a concerted effort not only to double down on errors the next time but make them even worse.
Gates deploys his privileged place at the New York Times to agitate once again for a Global Health Emergency Corps, ensconced at the World Health Organization and managed by the same people who created the pandemic response this time around. In other words, it would be the core of the global government pushing more lockdowns for the world—lockdowns to wait for another round of vaccines. If you can believe it, he has learned nothing from the last mess that he created. Indeed, he is completely shameless about it. In his view, the only problem is that we didn’t lock down fast enough, get vaccines out fast enough, and conduct enough research ahead of time to craft the perfect vaccine. And yes, this necessarily requires gain-of-function research.
In other words, in Gates’s view, we need to have research continue to fiddle around in labs with tricks that anticipate pathogens of the future, thus again raising the risk of lab leaks that then necessitate fixes that can only be produced and distributed by the pharmaceutical companies in which he has such heavy investments. As a result, we have this hellish loop in play: gain-of-function research to anticipate the next pathogen by creating it and thus risking a lab leak that releases the pathogen that then has to be fixed by the vaccines themselves but the world has to lock down until they can be put into billions of arms.
And keep in mind that Gates isn’t just another bloke writing an op-ed. He is the de facto owner of the World Health Organization himself, so his push for a permanent pandemic bureaucracy carries a lot of weight. His dream bureaucracy would override national sovereignty to make sure that never again would there be another Sweden. “It’s difficult for any one country to stop a disease from spreading on its own,” he writes “Many of the most meaningful actions require coordination from the highest levels of government.”
The model is always the same and it is taken from the world of computer science. There is a clean hard drive, analogized to the human body or whole societies. They are working fine but then an exogenous threat comes along in the form of malware. In order to defeat it, we need software that is updated. You clearly should not turn on your computer until you can get the hard drive cleaned up.
I’m serious here: Gates’s understanding of viruses is no more sophisticated than that. He has learned absolutely nothing in years. He is still repeating the ridiculous lines from his TED Talks from years ago.
In reality, this has nothing to do with biological viruses, which we evolved to manage through the immune system, a concept that is entirely lost on him. He finds it inconceivable that the best strategy for healthy people is to meet the virus and train the immune system. Indeed, he is appalled by that idea, favoring only more injectable substances designed to fight diseases. Also lost on him is the way in which viruses—whether from labs or nature—all must obey the natural epidemiological dynamics of pathogenic spread. The more deadly they are, the less likely they are to spread. And the reverse is also true: the more prevalent they are, like COVID, the less severe they are.
The reason is simple: a pathogen needs a living host. Yes, there are other variables such as latency, which is how long the virus lives in the host before debilitating symptoms appear. Other than that, a lab cannot create anything that games its ways out of this matrix.
If you can understand that paragraph, I can promise you this. You now know far more about viruses than Bill Gates. And yet it is he who has the decisive influence over pandemic policy the world over. The reason is extremely crude: it’s his money. It certainly isn’t his intelligence. In fact, it is rather shocking how his money alone has managed to buy the silence of scientists the world over, who have shown themselves to be appallingly obsequious and deferential to the crankism that Gates has been peddling for decades.
A good example comes from Tom Frieden, the author of the above mentioned piece in the Wall Street Journal. For all the problems of the pandemic response, he writes, we know what works: masking, lockdowns, and vaccines (ideally mandated). The piece is infuriating to the point that it is frustrating even to write a response. And this is because his conclusion is already baked into the prose. He throws out a flurry of links to other studies in case you doubt his veracity, while carefully avoiding the huge numbers of studies that show otherwise.
So, yes, I spent too much time over the week actually looking at the evidence for his thesis. On masks, he cites preposterous studies from three years ago. One looked at masking in Arizona over three weeks and came up with a difference in infection rates. But that study was during the smallest initial wave from 2020 and is entirely invalidated by subsequent analyses of the same two counties, not to mention the many hundreds of quality studies that have shown absolutely no difference in viral spread contingent on masking.
Another study comes from a Navy ship in which people were asked to self-report. It’s not even serious science and yet this former head of the CDC cites it. That same study was pushed by the CDC to justify its own push for masks. It appeared in the MMWR series over three years that included some of the worst science ever distributed by a modern bureaucracy.
On the business closures, Frieden doesn’t even bother to cite a study in defense of them. He just asserts the right of governments to shut businesses if they want to. What these people never mention is that business closures also include the government’s right to shut your home to house parties and your church to worship services. In other words, this amounts to a massive attack on human rights hard won over 1,000 years.
Finally, on matters of vaccine efficacy, every study he cites is based on bogus computer models that can generate any conclusion one desires based on the parameters of the input variables. (You know,…like the anthropogenic global warming models!) They are the types of models that serious scientists working, for example, in economics stopped using many decades ago. And yet the epidemiologists are still wallowing in them in order to make a case for their preferred policies. Of course he ignores the many hundreds of studies from the United States and the world that show no relationship at all between government interventions and good health outcomes during the pandemic.
There is a reason to be deeply alarmed by these two articles. The authors speak for some of the world’s most powerful people. They are explaining exactly what they want to do. They are completely impervious to evidence. And they reveal every ambition to override, reverse, and effectively abolish everything once known as freedom.
Incredibly, they have the chutzpah to write this stuff in the midst of the carnage they created from last time. All of which reminds me of the famous summary of the Roman empire as written by the great historian Tacitus, paraphrasing Calgacus:
“These plunderers of the world, after exhausting the land by their devastations, are rifling the ocean: stimulated by avarice, if their enemy be rich; by ambition, if poor; unsatiated by the East and by the West: the only people who behold wealth and indigence with equal avidity. To ravage, to slaughter, to usurp under false titles, they call empire; and where they make a desert, they call it peace.”
Bill Gates and Tom Frieden have made a desert and call it health.“
Babu Bhat assessment of Jerry…
…is even more applicable to the likes of Gates and Frieden. Jerry was just trying to help without any expectation of reward; Gates, Frieden and Fauci, as well as the Obamas, Bidens, Clintons, Kerrys, etc.,etc., etc., ad nauseam, ad infinitum, are more than happy to inflict pain and misery on an entire planet in exchange for personal power and financial gain.
Oh,…did we forget to mention, as again recorded by Jeff Tucker at The Epoch Times…
“Well, she said it. No legislation, no vote, no court decision, and not even an executive order. It was only one announcement from a lifetime bureaucrat. But it changes everything.
Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen has told the American Bankers Association that the government is there for any bank that is facing a run, presumably for up to 100 percent of deposits. Concerning her bailout of Silicon Valley Bank (SVB), and completely ignoring the dangerous moral hazard this represents, she says:
“Our intervention was necessary to protect the broader U.S. banking system. And similar actions could be warranted if smaller institutions suffer deposit runs that pose the risk of contagion.”
Let’s be clear. There will be more banks. Soon. They will be small, medium, and big. The SVB bailout sets a bad precedent. And now the secretary of the Treasury has flat-out said that it’s a precedent. That means that the current limit of $250,000 in insurance per account is a fiction. It will not be enforced. All deposits are hereby guaranteed to their existing market value.
Every bank that gets in trouble in the coming months and years will be able to scream to the feds that they need a bailout too, or else the country will face grave contagion, and they will get it. The government already arranged for the Federal Reserve to add $300 billion in Treasury purchases to its balance sheet last week. That was just for a few rescues.
If it’s just the beginning, there will be no end to the bailouts. And whatever Fed policy says otherwise concerning tighter money and a more hawkish policy is thereby made moot.
This is truly a turning point in the modern history of American finance and even the world economy. It commits the U.S. government to a liability that could be as high as $20 trillion, probably more, and makes it clear that there will be no more failures resulting from the mistakes of the banking system itself.
…F.A. Hayek spent a lifetime thinking about issues of money and banking, concluding in the end that governments can’t be trusted with the management of money. No rule, no legislation, no regulation can finally prevent them from using and abusing the system for their own benefit. After he received the Nobel Prize, he decided to let loose with his private opinions. He came to believe that the only real solution to a government monopoly of money was to take it completely away from governments.
At the time, the only technologies available to achieve that were gold and other commodities, and he speculated that they could be used to fashion a newly privatized currency. That did not happen in his lifetime. But finally bitcoin did come along to give us a look at what a truly private currency for the digital age could look like.
Governments for years called this technology a scam. Now that it is obviously not, we see government attempting to nationalize the technology for themselves and take it over. The result for society would be the certain doom of privacy and even freedom itself. Might people such as Yellen be working in a destructive way for the ruination of the current systems so as to implement their nightmarish vision of a totalitarian future? Anything is possible.
Certainly, Yellen’s incredible promise of endless bailouts regardless of existing law doesn’t bode well for the future.“
Money may not grow on trees, but it can be printed in unlimited quantities given the time, materials and
Since we’re on the subject of things which don’t bode well for the future, in today’s installment of the EnvironMental Moment, Mark Foster forwarded the following informing us…
“A scratched or slightly damaged electric battery might be enough for some insurers to write off entire cars, as for many electric vehicles there is no way to repair battery packs after collisions. As a result, the consumer — who likely acquired an electric vehicle wanting to reduce monthly costs — faces higher premiums and some countries are starting to see electric vehicle batteries piling up in scrapyards, according to Reuters.
Matthew Avery, research director at automotive risk intelligence company Thatcham Research, said the goal of electric vehicles was sustainability, but the inability to be repaired is creating a whole new problem. “We’re buying electric cars for sustainability reasons,” Avery said, Reuters reported. “But an EV isn’t very sustainable if you’ve got to throw the battery away after a minor collision.”
These battery packs can also cost tens of thousands of dollars, representing as much as 50% of an EV’s price tag. This also makes replacing batteries uneconomical. These cars also pile up in scrapyards, usually with low mileage, exacerbating the problem…”
…unleashing a swarm of bees against law enforcement.
(2). In a must-view video, Tucker reveals the truth behind the latest IPCC report predicting…for the umpteenth time…global armageddon. Spoiler alert: It has NOTHING to do with science and EVERYTHING to do with advancing the interests of the ChiComs and the Progressive politicians they’ve own.
“SVB collapsed because instead of focusing on the unglamorous, unforgiving business of banking, its management and board wanted to be part of the “in crowd”.
In this hip, virtue-signaling, social-justice, progressive-wannabe miasma, SVB lost track of the gritty, unglamorous nuts and bolts of banking. In 2021, the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco cited the bank for liquidity risks and in 2023 initiated a review of its risk management. During this period, as SVB’s communications consistently featured its parties, contributions, and chief DEI officer, for eight months, it had no chief risk officer. Nothing could more clearly illustrate SVB’s misplaced priorities.“
DOOCY: “House Oversight has bank records showing a Chinese energy company paying three Biden family members… What were they paid for?”
KJP: “I’m just not gonna respond to that from here. We have heard from House Republicans for years and years the inaccuracies and lies.” pic.twitter.com/JKKPtVop2O
“…James and Jennifer Crumbley are facing four involuntary manslaughter charges each following the November 2021 attack outside Detroit, which left four students dead and another seven injured. Their son Ethan, who was 15 at the time of the shooting, pleaded guilty last year to 24 charges – including counts of murder and terrorism – and is awaiting sentencing. He could face life in prison without parole.
The appeals court, in a 3-0 opinion, said Thursday that the murders would not have happened if Crumbley’s parents hadn’t purchased a gun for him or if they had taken him home from Oxford High School on the day of the shooting, when staff became alarmed about his extreme drawings.
Judge Michael Riordan said parents shouldn’t be hauled to court for “subpar, odd or eccentric” care of their kids. But the evidence against the Crumbleys, he added, is much more serious. “The morning of the shooting, EC drew a picture of a body that appeared to have two bullet holes in the torso, apparently with blood streaming out of them, which was near another drawing of a handgun that resembled the gun his parents … had very recently gifted to him,” Riordan said Thursday, according to The Associated Press. Riordan reportedly described the drawings as “visual evidence” that Ethan was weighing shooting someone with a gun.
Oakland County prosecutor Karen McDonald revealed in 2021 that school officials had met with Crumbley and his parents to discuss violent drawings just hours before the deadly rampage. The 15-year-old suspect was able to convince school officials during the meeting that the concerning drawings were for a “video game.” His parents “flatly refused” to take their son home.
…Defense lawyers have argued that the Crumbleys couldn’t have known what their now 16-year-old son was planning and therefore cannot be held criminally responsible for his independent acts. “The Crumbleys did not counsel EC in the commission of the school shooting or act jointly with EC in any way,” attorney Shannon Smith said in a court filing, using Ethan Crumbley’s initials. “To the contrary, the Crumbleys had no knowledge that their son intended to commit multiple homicides.”“
No, they just bought an obviously disturbed young man a firearm and turned him loose on a school.
Magoo
Video of the Day
ICYMI, here’s Polk County, FL Sheriff Grady Judd’s response to a reporter questioning why police don’t try to steer young kids away from gangs.
Tales of The Darkside
You have to love it when a random D.C. resident puts the MSM’s darling in his proper place. Is it any wonder this video, like the contents of Hunter’s laptop, was suppressed until it could do no harm?!?
On the Right Side
You also have to love Jim Jordan as he destroys a pudgy Alexander Vindman look-alike in his zealous defense of the 2nd Amendment and law-abiding Americans.
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