Ukraine gave up nukes 30 years ago. Today there are regrets.

“We gave away the capability for nothing,” said Andriy Zahorodniuk, a former defense minister of Ukraine. Referring to the security assurances Ukraine won in exchange for its nuclear arms, he added: “Now, every time somebody offers us to sign a strip of paper, the response is, ‘Thank you very much. We already had one of those some time ago.’”

 

Observation O’ The Day
“What is the likelihood that a consequence of Joe Biden’s presidency is that many technologically advanced nations are going to obtain nuclear weapons. I look forward to the same folks who were surprised at how quickly Afghanistan fell expressing surprise at this new development.”–Chuck Finley

Yep. As the Pax Americana ends, that’s the rational thing to do.

Biden acts much more like Putin’s puppet than Trump ever did.

Vladimir Putin is rolling over the United States.

The Biden administration botches relations with Russia while its experts tell each other flattering fictions

Vladimir Putin doesn’t need to send troops into Ukraine. He has already achieved his strategic goals — for now.

The leading European Union powers, France and Germany, are competing against each other for Putin’s ear, while Britain is competing against them by shipping arms to Ukraine. The United States is exposed as an unreliable protector, unable to defend its overextended position on Russia’s doorstep in Ukraine. NATO is divided and powerless, a shadow of imperial overreach.

A decrepit caste of corrupt leaders is incapable of managing a controlled retreat from imperial overreach. America today, or Russia the day before yesterday? Vladimir Putin witnessed the decay and collapse of the Soviet Union, and the subsequent expansion of NATO up to Russia’s borders. He is now returning the favor. He is pushing American and European influence out of Ukraine, and unpicking the already frayed bonds of NATO and the EU.

Geopolitics is not about morality. It is about the effective use of power. For thirty years, the smart opinion in Washington was that post-Soviet Russia was no threat to anyone because it had an economy the size of Portugal and its economy ran on carbon fuel exports. That these statistics were true shows how well Vladimir Putin has played his limited hand — and how arrogantly the US has mishandled relations with Russia while its experts tell each other flattering fictions.

When George Kennan, the architect of Cold War containment, reviewed the American diplomacy of the 1890s, he noted an “overestimation of economics, of trade, as factors in human events and the corresponding underestimation of psychological and political reactions — of such things as fear, ambition, insecurity, jealousy and perhaps even boredom — as prime movers of events.” Kennan habitually decried the crusading idealism of Wilsonian foreign policy. Here, he detects idealism’s shadow, the tendency to overemphasize material interest, as an obstacle to understanding what we are dealing with.

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North Korea Hacked Him. So He Took Down Its Internet

For the past two weeks, observers of North Korea’s strange and tightly restricted corner of the internet began to notice that the country seemed to be dealing with some serious connectivity problems. On several different days, practically all of its websites—the notoriously isolated nation only has a few dozen—intermittently dropped offline en masse, from the booking site for its Air Koryo airline to Naenara, a page that serves as the official portal for dictator Kim Jong-un’s government. At least one of the central routers that allow access to the country’s networks appeared at one point to be paralyzed, crippling the Hermit Kingdom’s digital connections to the outside world.

Some North Korea watchers pointed out that the country had just carried out a series of missile tests, implying that a foreign government’s hackers might have launched a cyberattack against the rogue state to tell it to stop saber-rattling.

But responsibility for North Korea’s ongoing internet outages doesn’t lie with US Cyber Command or any other state-sponsored hacking agency. In fact, it was the work of one American man in a T-shirt, pajama pants, and slippers, sitting in his living room night after night, watching Alien movies and eating spicy corn snacks—and periodically walking over to his home office to check on the progress of the programs he was running to disrupt the internet of an entire country.

Just over a year ago, an independent hacker who goes by the handle P4x was himself hacked by North Korean spies. P4x was just one victim of a hacking campaign that targeted Western security researchers with the apparent aim of stealing their hacking tools and details about software vulnerabilities. He says he managed to prevent those hackers from swiping anything of value from him. But he nonetheless felt deeply unnerved by state-sponsored hackers targeting him personally—and by the lack of any visible response from the US government.

So after a year of letting his resentment simmer, P4x has taken matters into his own hands. “It felt like the right thing to do here. If they don’t see we have teeth, it’s just going to keep coming,” says the hacker. (P4x spoke to WIRED and shared screen recordings to verify his responsibility for the attacks but declined to use his real name for fear of prosecution or retaliation.) “I want them to understand that if you come at us, it means some of your infrastructure is going down for a while.”

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Quip O’ The Day
“I’ll believe Brooks’ “end of individualism” schtick when he gives up his NYT byline and replaces his name with “Staff Writer.” —Professor Reynolds

Comment O’ The Day
“We are a nation of individuals with unique dreams and liberties. Stop it.”–Brian Gutherman

DAVID BROOKS IS PARTYING LIKE IT’S 1919!

Flashback to a century ago, when attacks on individuality were all the rage among collectivist-obsessed “Progressives:”

[Woodrow] Wilson was merely one voice in the progressive chorus of the age. “[W]e must demand that the individual shall be willing to lose the sense of personal achievement, and shall be content to realize his activity only in connection to the activity of the many,” declared the progressive social activist Jane Addams.

“New forms of association must be created,” explained Walter Rauschenbusch, a leading progressive theologian of the Social Gospel movement, in 1896. “Our disorganized competitive life must pass into an organic cooperative life.” Elsewhere, Rauschenbusch put it more simply: “Individualism means tyranny.”

Or as Mies van der Rohe, the last director of Weimar Germany’s socialist-oriented Bauhaus design school said in 1924:

The individual is losing significance; his destiny is no longer what interests us. The decisive achievements in all fields are impersonal and their authors are for the most part unknown. They are part of the trend of our time toward anonymity. Our engineering structures are examples. Gigantic dams, great industrial installations and huge bridges are built as a matter of course, with no designer’s name attached to them. They point to the technology of the future.

Curiously, Mies would have no problem building for wealthy individuals who wished to commission his work — not to mention having his name firmly associated with his designs — after he fled the Weimar Republic’s much more punitive successors for America.

Exit question:

Some of its shakier proponents fell in love with fine trouser creases over substance. As did others who knew better, but hated missing out on all the best cocktail parties on both ends of the Northeast Corridor. Not to mention, the green room at MSNBC.

Hypocrisy O’ The Day

Enjoy this compilation of powerful Democrats gleefully going maskless while their lowly subordinates are forced to cover their faces.

It seems, after two years of pandemic mania, that there exists two different sets of coronavirus rules throughout the country—one for Democrats, one for the rest of the rabble. Think Gavin Newsom’s maskless, social distance-less Michelin starred dinner, or Deborah Birx’s multigenerational Thanksgiving dinner.

One genre that never gets old—at least for Democrats—is the Democratic habit of going without masks while the lesser classes around them are forced to mask up. This appears to be the rapidly coalescing new order of things, where powerful liberals are permitted to take their masks off while the rest of the rabble must continue to cover their faces.

Here are some of the greatest hits of that catalogue:

☝️A beaming AOC getting her bespoke Met Gala dress tailored by a masked underling.

Just dazzling!

☝️Stacey Abrams grins amid a classroom full of children forced to cover their mouths with cloth.

This is the look of a true leader right here.

☝️The governor of New York and her crew of flunkies pose maskless before a group of masked-up children.

Only in New York!

☝️A maskless Nancy Pelosi courting dozens of maskless high-dollar donors being served by masked waitstaff.

You wouldn’t want any coronavirus on those $100-per-plate dinners, would you?

☝️President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris enjoy a breath of fresh air while their governor friends keep their faces tightly sealed.

That’s a royal prerogative if I ever saw one.

Keep it up through the midterms, Democrats, this isn’t making you look like contemptuous aristocrats in the slightest!

US Government Left As Many As 9,000 American Citizens In Afghanistan After Withdrawal, Senate Report Reveals

As many as 9,000 American citizens were left in Afghanistan when the U.S. military withdrew from the country Aug. 31, according to a report released Thursday by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
In public statements, Biden administration officials, including Secretary of State Antony Blinken, claimed that only 100-150 Americans remained in Afghanistan and had contacted the U.S. government with a desire to leave. The State Department and Defense Department officials stuck to that number, even as the government publicly admitted that large numbers of American citizens were still leaving the country.
The report, signed by Foreign Relations ranking member Jim Risch of Idaho, reveals that State Department officials believed that between 10,000 and 15,000 Americans were in Afghanistan as late as Aug. 17. In the next two weeks, only 6,000 Americans were able to escape the country ahead of the Taliban takeover. In testimony in front of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, however, Blinken claimed that “approximately 100-150 remained in Afghanistan who still wished to depart.”

While there’s disagreement over the policy to leave Afghanistan, Americans share outrage over how the admin. withdrew, & what that failure has done to America’s reputation. This morning I released a report that details what went wrong & why.

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“The democrats defund the police, fail to prosecute criminals, and then tell us they are going to increase restrictions on firearms. This isn’t stupidity or ignorance. This is evil”--Joe Huffman

Biden’s ‘guns first’ approach to violent crime ignores basic facts
Over 92% of violent crimes in America do not involve firearms

With violent crime increasing over the last two years, Americans want a solution. But President Joe Biden constantly frames violent crime as only a gun problem. Again, it was the sole focus of Biden’s speech in New York City on Thursday. Even when he mentions police or prosecutors, it was in terms of enforcing gun control laws.

But this “guns first” approach ignores a basic fact – over 92% of violent crimes in America do not involve firearms. And while Biden blames guns for the increase in violent crime, the latest data show that gun crimes fell dramatically.

Biden’s proposal yesterday to “work to take those shooters off the streets as quickly as possible” is great, but with over 92% of violent crime not involving guns, why not promise to do this for all violent criminals?

Andy McCarthy: What Biden can and cannot do about crime

The U.S. Department of Justice’s National Crime Victimization Survey, in the latest year available (2020), shows that there were 4,558,150 rapes, robberies, and aggravated assaults, and the FBI reports 21,570 murders. Of those, 350,460 rapes, robberies, and aggravated assaults (see Table 8) and 13,620 murders involved firearms. Adding those numbers up, 7.9% of violent crimes used guns.

Relying on public health researchers, Democrats blame increasing gun sales as the cause. But while violent crime reported to police rose 5% in 2020, you can’t blame that increase on guns because gun crimes actually fell by 27%. The National Crime Victimization Survey also finds a similar 27% drop.

All this is consistent with academic research by myself and others showing that criminals are less likely to carry guns when civilians have them for protection. If a criminal pulls out a gun against an armed victim, he is more likely to be shot.

Gun ownership didn’t fuel the increase in crime over the last couple of years. Rather, people worried about violent crime and decided to arm themselves for self-protection.

It’s not hard to explain the increased violence. Many urban areas saw more than half of prison inmates released because of the pandemic, and the releases still continue. Newly convicted criminals weren’t going to prison. Nationwide, there were over 340,000 fewer inmates in jails and prisons in 2021 than in 2019. Cities cut police budgets and ordered officers to stand down in many places. New York City cut its police budget by $1 billion.

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NBC flops in primetime to open Winter Games.

If the first night of coverage is any indication, NBC will have a tough time in the ratings with the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics.

Thursday’s primetime coverage of the Beijing Winter Olympics averaged 7.25 million viewers on NBC, marking the smallest primetime Olympic audience ever on the network. The previous low was 8.5 million for the final night of competition at last year’s Tokyo Summer Olympics.

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‘enemies foreign and domestic’ all rolled into one too!

Biden Waives Sanctions on Iran’s ‘Civilian’ Nuclear Program in Bid to Restore 2015 Deal

President Joe Biden’s administration has lifted sanctions on Iran’s ‘civilian’ nuclear program in a desperate bid to restore the 2015 nuclear deal. “Secretary of State Antony Blinken signed several sanctions waivers related to Iran’s civilian nuclear activities,” The Associated Press reported Friday. “The move reverses the Trump administration’s decision to rescind them,” the news agency added.

President Biden’s waiver paves the way for private companies and state-owned players from Russia, China, and Europe to help Iran build up its nuclear infrastructure, news reports confirm.

The sanctions waiver will enable Iran to develop its Arak heavy-water reactor, Bushehr nuclear power plant, and Fordow nuclear enrichment plant, Reuters noted. All these sites are deeply involved to Iran’s rogue nuclear weapons program.

With its nuclear facilities working towards a bomb, Tehran dismissed Biden’s latest concession as “insufficient.” Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian declared on Saturday that the waiver “is not enough” for the regime to abandon its nuclear weapons program.

Reuters reported the Biden administration’s massive concession to Iran:

President Joe Biden’s administration on Friday restored sanctions waivers to Iran to allow international nuclear cooperation projects, as indirect American-Iranian talks on reviving the 2015 international nuclear deal with Tehran enter the final stretch.

The waivers had allowed Russian, Chinese and European companies to carry out non-proliferation work to effectively make it harder for Iranian nuclear sites to be used for weapons development. The waivers were rescinded by the United States in 2019 and 2020 under former President Donald Trump, who pulled out of the nuclear agreement. (…)

The State Department has sent a report signed by Secretary of State Antony Blinken to Congress explaining that restoring the waivers will help the talks in Vienna on returning to the deal reached between Iran and a group of countries including China, France, Germany, Russia, Britain and the United States. The agreement is formally called the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA).

“The waiver with respect to these activities is designed to facilitate discussions that would help to close a deal on a mutual return to full implementation of the JCPOA and lay the groundwork for Iran’s return to performance of its JCPOA commitments,” according to the report, a copy of which seen by Reuters. (…)

The activities, according to the report, include redesign of Iran’s Arak heavy-water reactor, the preparation and modification of its Fordow facility for stable isotope production, operations, training and services related to its Bushehr nuclear power plant, among several other things.

Senator Ted Cruz called out the Biden White House for continuing to misinform the public. “President Biden and Biden-Harris officials are lying to journalists and the American people,” Sen. Cruz wrote on Twitter. “They informed Congress that they are dismantling sanctions on Iran’s nuclear program, and allowing Russia and China to help the Ayatollah build up his nuclear weapons program,” he added.

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ESPN Guy Says China’s Genocide is No Worse Than Red States Requiring Voter ID.

The U.S. declared last year that the actions against Uyghur Muslims in the Xinjiang region of China as genocide. But according to ESPN’s J. A. Adande, committing genocide against Uyghurs is no worse than red states requiring voter ID.

This moron actually said this on Friday’s Around the Horn. Adande said Americans should not question what these modern-day Nazis are doing to Uyghurs:

This creep is comparing voter ID to genocide, slave labor, concentration camps, forced abortions and forced sterilizations.

ESPN should fire this guy not for his incendiary comments, but for being this dumb on national television. Keep in mind, the city in which Adande lives, Chicago, has required ID to enter restaurants, bars and gyms.

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Homeowner shoots, kills man inside home

CHOCTAW COUNTY, Okla. (KFOR) – Agents with the Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation are looking into the death of a Hugo man.

Just before midnight, dispatchers received a 911 call about a shooting near Sawyer, Oklahoma.

Choctaw County deputies and Choctaw Tribal police responded to the scene and found 29-year-old Lonnie Cole dead outside of the home.

Choctaw County asked the OSBI for assistance.

Based on the initial investigation, authorities say the homeowner arrived at the house and found Cole in his home.

Investigators say there was an altercation between the two men before the homeowner shot Cole.

So far, no arrests have been made.

The report will be sent to the Choctaw County District Attorney’s Office, who will then determine if charges will be filed or not.

Your Crap-For-Brains and Hypocrisy O’ The Day all rolled into one senile idiot.

Biden Tells the Most Shameless Lie Yet and Descends Into Babbling

Not only did he get them from China, and is now telling us a bald-faced lie, he entered into contracts directly with a Chinese company to get the tests, paying them more than $1.28 billion dollars for millions of the tests. So, after all they did with COVID, China is being enriched by Biden.

BlabbleAbbleDabble

Ron Perlman is right about one thing. I really don’t want to live with leftists who smear insults like this, whether they actually believe it, or are simply trying to be inflammatory for political purposes.

MSNBC guest: ‘Make America Great Again’ supporters want to ‘lynch or murder’ Black people

An MSNBC guest claimed Thursday on “The ReidOut” that supporters of the political slogan “Make America Great Again,” a phrase coined by former President Donald Trump, want to “lynch or murder” Black People in the United States.

Brittany Packnett Cunningham, a Missouri-based progressive political activist and host of the “Undistracted” podcast, joined Joy Reid’s show to discuss a new bill, SB666, which would revamp the state’s self-defense laws. Critics of the bill have dubbed it the “Make Murder Legal Act” and have argued that it will make criminal or civil prosecution of individuals who use deadly force difficult.

An excerpt from the bill reads in part as follows: “[Law enforcement agencies] may use standard procedures for investigating the use or threatened use of force, but the agency may not arrest the person for using or threatening to use force unless the agency determines that there is probable cause that the force that was used or threatened was unlawful.”

When discussing the bill, Joy Reid began the conversation by mentioning the case of Mark and Patricia McCloskey, a married couple that brandished firearms at Black Lives Matter protesters in front of their home in 2020.

“The ReidOut” host asserted that Mark McCloskey, who is running for an open Missouri Senate seat, recently praised bill SB666 because it means that he and his wife “could have been in their slippers” and shot “every single Black Lives Matter” protestor that walked by “legally” and without subsequent detainment.

Reid then asked Cunningham what the bill would mean for her and other Black activists. Cunningham said that for people like the McCloskeys that “Black skin is weapon enough,” and claimed the bill was “designed” to “legitimize seeing Blackness as a weapon” and “justify” the murder of Black Americans.

“I also want to set the proper historical context, because back in the day, by 1950, Missouri had the second-highest number of lynchings outside of the Deep South,” added Cunningham. “So when folks talk about ‘making America great again,’ that’s the kind of Missouri grand ol’ tradition that they want to return to. They want to return to days when you could lynch or murder Black folks and there would be absolutely no retribution for it. That’s not hyperbole. I’m telling you as a Black Missourian and as a protestor, that is reality.”

Joy Reid nodded her head and concurred that the bill was “Fugitive Slave Act-territory” and essentially “legalizing lynching.”

As often is the case with those who oppose this, Chief Gemboski is wrong about the 2nd amendment. It ‘gives’ nothing. It restricts goobermint as eloquently explained in the Bill Of Rights own preamble. Either they’re stupid, or purposely misleading, as the subject has been covered for many years, thus ignorance is no excuse.

Georgia Senate moves forward with proposed ‘constitutional carry’ gun law

SAVANNAH, Ga. (WTGS) — The Georgia Senate is moving forward with legislation that would concealed-carry licensing requirements for Georgia gun owners.

On Tuesday, 31 of Georgia’s 56 state senators co-sponsored the bill, which, if passed, will make Georgia the 21st “constitutional carry” state in the U.S.

Gary Glemboski, a retired Savannah police officer and Chief of Police at Hunter Army Airfield, said the second amendment is at the heart of this debate.

 “It basically says that you have the right to defend yourself, to protect yourself from harm. The second amendment gives us the right to own something that allows us to do that. Right now, in The State of Georgia, you have to get a concealed carry license from the county that you reside in. With constitutional carry, you won’t have to do that,” Glemboski explained.

Brett Curry, a professor of political science at Georgia Southern University, said the legal debate surrounds the government’s ability to limit personal rights.

“A right can be subject to limitations, you know, in terms of, the right to free speech isn’t going to allow someone to shout ‘fire’ in a crowded theater, for example,” Curry said. However, Curry said this legislation would expand the state’s interpretation of the second amendment and would withstand a constitutional challenge. “If The Bill of Rights, including the right to bare arms, is the floor that you can’t go lower than, the state, here, is not trying to go through the floor,” Curry said, “It’s trying to actually ratchet up protection for the rights in question, as they see it.”

Background checks are one way that the government limits legal who can purchase a gun.

If passed, this legislation would mean that prospective gun owners still have to go through a federally mandated background check prior to purchasing a firearm, but they would not have to go to their county courthouse for a second background review and licensure. Glemboski said he doesn’t believe Georgia’s licensing process adds to gun owner safety.

“The way I understand it- it’s coming from basically the same database, the same information source, whether you’re purchasing your handgun or whether you’re doing a background check for a license,” Glemboski said.

Glemboski, also a firearms safety instructor, said he is a strong advocate of gun safety training. While Georgia’s neighbors, Florida and South Carolina, require between eight and 16 hours of training in order to obtain a license, Georgia doesn’t require any training.

Glemboski said a license to carry would be more meaningful if it had training requirements. “I wouldn’t want to give a 15-year-old or a 16-year-old a diver’s license without some type of driver’s training,” he said. “With firearms it’s the same thing, maybe even a little more serious because of the nature of what we’re dealing with.”

Senators Want EARN IT Bill to Scan All Online Messages.

People don’t want outsiders reading their private messages —not their physical mail, not their texts, not their DMs, nothing. It’s a clear and obvious point, but one place it doesn’t seem to have reached is the U.S. Senate.

A group of lawmakers led by Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) and Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) have re-introduced the EARN IT Act, an incredibly unpopular bill from 2020 that was dropped in the face of overwhelming opposition. Let’s be clear: the new EARN IT Act would pave the way for a massive new surveillance system, run by private companies, that would roll back some of the most important privacy and security features in technology used by people around the globe. It’s a framework for private actors to scan every message sent online and report violations to law enforcement. And it might not stop there. The EARN IT Act could ensure that anything hosted online—backups, websites, cloud photos, and more—is scanned.

New Internet Rules, From Juneau to Jackson

The bill empowers every U.S. state or territory to create sweeping new Internet regulations, by stripping away the critical legal protections for websites and apps that currently prevent such a free-for-all—specifically, Section 230. The states will be allowed to pass whatever type of law they want to hold private companies liable, as long as they somehow relate their new rules to online child abuse.

The goal is to get states to pass laws that will punish companies when they deploy end-to-end encryption, or offer other encrypted services. This includes messaging services like WhatsApp, Signal, and iMessage, as well as web hosts like Amazon Web Services. We know that EARN IT aims to spread the use of tools to scan against law enforcement databases because the bill’s sponsors have said so. In a “Myths and Facts” document distributed by the bill’s proponents, it even names the government-approved software that they could mandate (PhotoDNA, a Microsoft program with an API that reports directly to law enforcement databases).

The document also attacks Amazon for not scanning enough of its content. Since Amazon is the home of Amazon Web Services, host of a huge number of websites, that implies the bill’s aim is to ensure that anything hosted online gets scanned.

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If this doesn’t confirm just who actually the anti-American seditionists who are bought by the chinese commies are…….

Things demoncraps will defend or encourage athletes doing:
Kneel during the National Anthem? √
Disrespect the American flag? √
Call America “Amerikkka” and a racist, white supremacist country? √
Call the former President “orange Hitler?” √
Criticize China’s many documented human rights abuses? Ohhh Nooo.
That will cause the Speaker of the House to warn you to shut up and play ball.

Pelosi Encourages American Athletes to Keep Their Mouths Shut About ‘Ruthless’ China

The 2022 Winter Olympics are officially underway in communist China. A number of athletes chose to boycott Friday morning’s opening ceremonies in an effort to highlight the country’s ongoing human rights abuses and responsibility for the Wuhan coronavirus pandemic.

“Olympic athletes from multiple countries who want to show solidarity with the victims of the Chinese government’s human rights abuses have been quietly preparing to boycott the Opening Ceremonies, according to human rights activists who have been helping to educate and organize them,” The Washington Post reports. “For several months, U.S.-based activists have been meeting with Olympic athletes from several Western countries to urge them to speak out on the Chinese government’s mass atrocities and severe repression of Uyghurs, Tibetans, Hong Kongers and other groups inside China. The athletes, facing the threat of punishment from the Chinese government if they talk about human rights, have almost all avoided addressing the subject in public.”

But back in the United States, Democratic politicians are urging athletes to keep their criticism of the regime to themselves. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is advising athletes to keep their mouths shut for fear they will be punished.

“You’re there to compete. Do not risk incurring the anger of the Chinese government because they are ruthless,” Pelosi said.

Baumann: Four egregious gun-control lies straight from Biden’s mouth

During a Thursday press conference on “gun violence,” President Joe Biden regurgitated numerous lies about firearms and the Second Amendment.

CLAIM: No Amendment is absolute.

“…making sure the people who are not allowed to have a gun don’t get a gun in the first place. And again, any of the press, any of the press listening, this doesn’t violate anybody’s Second Amendment right,” Biden said. “There’s no violation of a Second Amendment right. We talk like there’s no amendment that’s absolute.”

FACT: The Founding Fathers wrote “shall not be infringed” in the Second Amendment, making the 2A an absolute right.

CLAIM: Gun regulations existed when the Second Amendment was added.

“When the amendment was passed, it didn’t say anybody could own a gun and any kind of gun and any kind of weapon,” the president said.

FACT: Limitations on the Second Amendment came down the road, first through legislation and then decided at the Supreme Court.

CLAIM: Citizens were barred from owning cannons.

“You couldn’t buy a cannon when this amendment was passed and there’s no reason you should be able to buy certain assault weapons, but that’s another issue,” Biden said.

FACT: Americans had the ability to purchase cannons when the Second Amendment was added to the Bill of Rights.

Americans can still purchase and own cannons, although the National Firearms Act makes that extremely expensive and virtually impossible for the average person.

CLAIM: Magazine capacity determines if a firearm is a “weapon of war.”

 “…a magazine with 40 rounds is a weapon of war,” Biden said.

 FACT: The number of rounds a magazine holds doesn’t change its functionality. A semi-automatic pistol or rifle could hold five rounds or 50 rounds. It still functions the same, with one round fired with one pull of the trigger.

Anti-gunners use these claims because they don’t know the difference between full-auto and semi-auto. This makes them sound more educated on firearms basics – and their proposed legislation – when they’re not.