Helpless Laughter

Larry Correia has already warned the Left about getting what they seem to wish for;  and now some creature named Michael Anton done an article, only to be brutally Fiskicated by Ian Gruene.  (Insty already linked to it, but I can’t resist piling on.)  A sample, talking about the great “right wing militant” trope:

But this question also depends on what you consider “right wing insurrection”. If you are talking about a half-dozen fruitcakes with an underpants-gnomes plan then no there won’t be many. Mostly because troublesome fruitcakes are a very small problem no matter what the subject is.

On the other hand if you are talking about people who think most or all of the U.S. government need to be killed, I have bad news for you. A large swath of the country considers that question settled and are now concerned with the doctrinal issues of whether it is best to follow the teachings of St. Augusto of the Whirling Blades, or St. Tepes of the Artificial Forest.

For those to whom the latter references are unfamiliar (and bless your innocent little hearts), allow me to represent them in pics:

It’s loonnggg, but still, RTWT
Warning, there is some amount of foul language used.

FISKING ANTON – BY IAN BRUENE

== BREAKING NEWS: Journalist maintains high word-to-knowledge ratio! More at 11… ==

A couple weeks ago an article was posted by a certain Michael Anton which contains one true and interesting point, drenched in enough manure to solve the coming phosphate supply issues before they ever get started. I meant for this to go up much sooner, but was busy and then caught Xi’s Death Rot.

Let’s dive straight in:

Regime propaganda is so ubiquitous that even if, like me, you make no effort to seek it out and even take steps to avoid it, you can’t help but notice that our masters have fastened onto a new narrative: the coming “civil war.”

This was the crux of all the maudlin, dishonest January 6 retrospectives, of several “think pieces,” and at least three new books: America is facing a second civil war and it will be started by the Right.

These first two paragraphs are the true and interesting part. The Enemy does indeed want a war, and wants us to fire the first shot to provide them with their casus belli.

But this is not new. Anyone who lived through or has read history of the 80s and 90s remembers the hysteria which was stirred up about “right wing militias”, where every policy and action seemed tuned perfectly to piss off the barely stable loose cannons on the right which the Enemy was *sure* existed in large numbers.

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BLUF:
It’s become axiomatic that inside every leftist is a totalitarian screaming to get out. So if there’s one positive thing Covid has done is identify those people for all to see: the slave-muzzle wearers, proudly exhibiting their servile natures..

No matter which office they hold, high or low or none at all, these people are your enemies and should be treated accordingly.

Sic Semper Tyrannis.

And so we near the end of the Great Pandemic Hoax of 2019-22, an unprecedented and breathtaking power grab by governments around the world to seize powers far beyond their constitutional allotments and to transform a relatively minor flu virus — however originated and for what ill purposes — into a weapon of mass economic and emotional destruction whose effects will be felt for years and decades to come. It has been a textbook example of tyranny.

Consider it a warning shot, though, because while Covid may finally have been exposed for the non-apocalyptic event it always was, such tyranny is only the beginning until we put a stop to it. Put a stop to extra-legal “emergency” measures that are transparently and insultingly fraudulent, and which are invoked in the name of the “greater good.” Put a stop to the notion of judicially sanctioned “protected classes” in a formerly classless society. Put to stop the notion of a “New Normal” of privation, deviancy, and spiritual and material penury imposed by Leftists as they continue their centuries-old task of undermining every tenet of Western Civilization in the name of “equity” — in a world in which equality is aspirational at best and equity is impossible.

And, once and for all, put paid to the notion that “when you’ve got your health you’ve got everything,”  the motto of a nation of neurotic hypochondriacs that is fundamentally at odds with every principle of the moral and socially productive life. For under this seemingly anodyne contention lies a wealth of mischief, chief among them the idea that your fellow citizens pose an existential threat to you by their refusal to conform, and thus can and should be restricted, incarcerated, or even killed as the need arises. And all in the name of Socialism, whether National or international.

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US Defense Database DMED Tracked Exploding Number of Vaccine-Related Injuries

When US Senator Ron Johnson (R-WI) held a hearing on vaccine safety in January this year, a number of DOD whistleblowers stepped forward with alarming data. They shared data from the Defense Medical Epidemiology Database (DMED) which tracks every illness of military members.

The purpose of gathering such data is expressly to spot adverse health trends that could affect combat readiness. It is therefore accurate, complete and designed for early detection.

Lawyer Thomas Renz reported on five years of data during the hearing which showed an alarming rise in medical problems related to Covid vaccines. The whistleblowers stepped forward because their superiors had ignored the problem. Renz plans to pursue the matter in a US federal court.

Arguably, the DMED is the best epidemiological database in the world and since neither Pfizer nor Moderna is able to provide better data, this upward trend related to vaccine injury must be cause for great concern.

In a declaration under penalty of perjury, the three military physicians Samuel Sigoloff, Peter Chambers, and Theresa Long, exposed the 300 percent increase in DMED codes registered for miscarriages in the military in 2021 over the five-year average. The five-year average has been 1499 codes for miscarriages per year, but during the first 10 months of 2021, it shot up to 4 182.

The same trend was seen in spiking cancer cases, from a five-year average of 38 700 per year to 114 645 in the first 11 months of 2021, coinciding with the vaccine. And reported neurological disorders increased by an incredible 1000 percent.

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Filed, of course, by a demoncrap representative name of Brad Witt (again nice they provide a photograph for positive ID)

 The bill text doesn’t – yet – specify the minimum value of each ‘luxury good’ to have the 3% tax applied, but I’ll wager the price of a gun will be “any price”.

 

Oregon bill increases tax on luxury items to help those in need

A new House Bill aimed at helping some of the state’s most vulnerable will receive a public hearing next week.

HB 4079, known as the Oregon Freedom Pilot Program, would increase taxes on luxury items. The money collected would be given out to low-income pregnant women and adults who have aged out of the foster youth program. Those who qualify would receive $750 a month for up to three years, but only if they agree to the requirements of completing a financial literacy class and letting purchases made with the $750 be tracked for analytical purposes.

“We believe those two accountability measures are going to lead to success, not only for the individuals that we enroll in the program but the program itself, as well as the taxpaying public” said Rep. Brad Witt, demoncrap-Clatskanie. “What will be required here, is that folks that choose to participate in the program and want to avail themselves to the $750 monthly payment, be required to take a financial education course and also to agree that their purchases will be monitored by an independent third party anonymously. That way we can then have a system of constant improvement on the financial literacy course, knowing what it is that we need to be instructing folks on to achieve the best results that we possibly can out of the program.”

The $750 would come on a debit card. Witt says there are no restrictions on what that money can be spent on.

Taxes would be increased to 3% on items deemed a luxury. Examples outlined in the bill include airplanes, expensive watercrafts, high-end cars, jewelry>>>>> and guns<<<<<. Witt says once each item goes over a certain price, it will be taxed.

“Jewelry would be a $20,000 threshold; we have a $15,000 threshold for items like snowmobiles,” said Witt. “Each item, the threshold pricing point was determined by what is the average cost of that item in the marketplace and we tried to get it at the very high end of that market to make sure it was luxury and not an everyday purchase price.”

HB 4079 will be heard on Tuesday in the Human Services Committee. KATU reached out to Oregon House Republicans about the bill. No one was available for an interview or to provide a statement on Friday, but a spokesperson says this bill is something they are paying attention to.

Witt says if it passes, this bill will make Oregon the first state in the country to provide such legislation.

The Perfect Label to Destroy Gun-Grabbing Democrats’ Credibility

It is a basic principle of psychological warfare and propaganda that the assignment of a name that sticks to somebody or something can make or break that person or entity.  A fictional example from the Game of Thrones series exemplifies this.  If you’re a slave in Meereen, and somebody called the “Mother of Dragons” and “Breaker of Chains” is outside your masters’ walls with an army, you’ll probably pick up anything you can use as a weapon to join a slave revolt.  If we look at a real historical example, serfs who had previously been willing to do almost anything to avoid service in the Russian Army, including knocking out their front teeth so they could not bite open musket cartridges, were eager to follow Aleksandr V. Suvorov, also known as “The Russian Hannibal.”  He took good care of his soldiers and tended to win lopsided victories with minimal losses to his own side.

Suppose instead that you’re a German soldier during the Second World War, and the Allies have named your general, Fedor von Bock, “Der Sterber” (“Let’s go get killed”) because he said the greatest thing a German soldier could do is die for Germany.  You’d probably want to surrender at the earliest opportunity, especially if you also learned that General Patton had meanwhile told his soldiers that the idea of war is to make the enemy (i.e., you) die for his country.  When your general and the opposing general have the same agenda, you have a real problem.

“Tricky Dick” stuck similarly to Richard Nixon, but not enough to keep him from becoming president in 1968.  We now have “Krazy Kamala” Harris, and “President Houseplant” (courtesy of conservative talk show host Ben Shapiro) Biden.  I came up, meanwhile, with “Hamas-American Bund” to equate the entire anti-Israel boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement to Hitler’s useful idiots of the late 1930s.

Call Them Firearm Quacks or Anti-Gun Quacks

Supporters of the Second Amendment have depicted their adversaries as “gun-grabbers,” but swing voters who do not own guns, much less hoplophobes who would probably like all the guns to be grabbed, do not care about “our” Second Amendment rights.  Everybody, however, has nothing but contempt for medical quacks — fake doctors who take desperate patients’ money and deliver worse than useless remedies in return. A quack is worse than a fraud, who merely steals money; the quack’s remedies are harmful and divert the patient from life-saving medical treatment until it is too late.

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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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