Welcome to West China.

Did you ever wonder what it’s like to live in a one-party state?

Well, wonder no more. You’re living in one. The major means of communication—in today’s terms that means social media—have now been taken over completely by the left.

Not only has Donald Trump—still the president of the United States—been permanently banned from Twitter, its rapidly growing, open-to-all substitute Parler has almost simultaneously been de-platformed by Google.

You can’t get their app for Android anymore.

Apple threatens to be next, demanding Parler kowtow (by Saturday!) to Cupertino’s vision of what the world should be.

I suppose that’s a social-justicey-politically-correct totalitarianism led by left-leaning… or so they want us to believe… tech billionaires.

Sound Chinese?

More than a bit.

Think this was planned?

Just the other day I wrote of the “false flag” (left-wing provocateurs) behind the mayhem in the Capitol. Many in high places pooh-poohed what I and others were saying. I wasn’t too sure of it myself.

But let’s review what’s happened since:

Josh Hawley’s forthcoming book… on Big Tech, no less… is “canceled” by Simon & Schuster. Senator Hawley had been among the most outspoken about investigating the possibility of election fraud.

Twitter permanently blocks General Flynn. I guess they don’t think he has had enough already.

Twitter permanently blocks Lin Wood, the well-known attorney working to unmask possible fraud. Ditto for the courageous Sidney Powell.

Not to be outdone, Facebook blocks President Trump’s account. (Not sure who was first—Facebook or Twitter—not that it matters.)

More insidiously, Facebook starts to delete groups or forums of people who publicly stepped away from the Democratic Party because of its scandals. 

(Elsewhere it’s revealed that Facebook banned accounts at the behest of Hunter Biden.)

YouTube announces it will no longer distribute videos investigating election fraud and that producers of such videos will be punished if they do.

All this in a couple of days, the excuse being, in almost all cases, that the conservatives involved were instigating violence, the “outrage” that occurred at the Capitol.

This from the people who ignored exponentially more violence and destruction for months all across urban America.

Sense a strategy here? A plan?

I know—I’m one of those conspiracy mongers. Everything has been “debunked.” Indeed, it was “debunked” before it happened.

Only I’m not a conspiracy monger, my friends. I’m one of those guys who is perfectly willing to admit it was Lee Harvey Oswald working alone from the Texas Schoolbook Depository.

I’m the opposite. I’m a Occam’s Razor guy—what you see is what you get.

And Occam’s Razor tells me the United States is turning into a near clone of the People’s Republic of China.

Dan Wos, Imagine An America Where All The Good Guys Had Guns

“An armed society is a polite society. Manners are good when one may have to back up his acts with his life.” ~ Robert A. Heinlein

Did you hear about the Indiana man who was shot and killed by a good guy with a gun after attempting to kill multiple people in broad daylight during a deranged rampage that started in Brownsburg Cemetery on Thursday July 16th, 2020? Probably not.

Joshua Hayes chased down Seth Robertson and killed him in the street. According to police, the motive was unknown. He then turned his attention to Robertson’s friend and chased him through a residential neighborhood while shooting at him. Hayes caught up with his victim and a physical altercation ensued. As Hayes had his gun pointed at the head of the second victim, a good guy with a gun reminded Hayes of his “manners” and ended his deadly rampage. How many more people would Hayes have killed that day had he not been stopped? The good news is, we will never know, because a good gun was close by.

“This tragic event could have been much more disastrous. So, victim three not only saved victim two’s life, but he saved potentially the lives of many others,” BPD Capt. Jennifer Barrett. “Victim three did exactly what anybody would have wanted him to do at that scene that day.”

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Pentagon Moves Forward With Renaming of Bases Named After Confederate Leaders

The Pentagon announced Friday it is moving forward with plans to rename military bases named after Confederate leaders by appointing four members to lead the effort.

Acting Defense Secretary Christopher Miller has appointed Sean McLean, a White House associate director, Joshua Whitehouse, a White House liaison to the Defense Department, Ann Johnston, acting assistant secretary of defense for Legislative Affairs, and Earl Matthews, who is principal deputy general counsel for the Army.

The four will serve on the ponderously-named Commission on the Naming of Items of the Department of Defense that Commemorate the Confederate States of America or Any Person Who Served Voluntarily with the Confederate States of America.

The commission is mandated under a $740 billion defense policy bill that went into effect when Congress voted on New Year’s Day to override Trump’s veto.

President Trump has argued in the past that stripping Confederate names from military bases means washing away history. Meanwhile, President-elect Biden supports removing the names.

Boston Marathon Bomber Files $250K Suit Over Treatment in Prison

Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev is suing the federal government for $250,000 over his treatment inside the Colorado supermax prison where he is serving a life sentence — claiming his baseball cap was confiscated and he has been restricted to only three showers a week, according to a new report.

In the handwritten suit, Tsarnaev accused guards and the warden at the Federal Correctional Complex Florence — called the “Alcatraz of the Rockies” — of being “unlawful, unreasonable and discriminatory,” The Boston Herald reported.

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“If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles.” —Sun Tzu

Here’s another presentation of the anti-gun/anti-civil rights (except for their pet rights) academics infesting our colleges and universities. Knowing the direction of attack by these over educated morons are coming from, is simply due diligence.

The professor’s idea is to have the FDA regulate guns and ammunition. If you take the time to read through his paper, you’ll find he makes the same error, purposefully or not, that the Bill of Rights gives rights to the people, as opposed to restricting goobermint.

 

Lets do some arithmeticking, shall we?
There were a total of just 74,222,958 votes cast in the last election for Trump.

Lets round down to 74,000,000 to keep things conservative.
My calculator (check yours out to see if you get the same result) shows 45% of that to be 33,300,000, Thirty Three Million Three Hundred Thousand.

Think on that. Somewhere about 20 % of the voting population is just fine and dandy with letting Congress & the rest of TPTB in D.C. be told exactly where to go and how to get there.

Lets go with the old “3%”  Revolutionary War conjecture of Mike Vanderboegh and that gets you just under One Million (999,000) who might be of the age, physical condition and with the intent and resolve to actually be on the pointy end of the stick with millions more in support positions.

With yesterday’s kinetics, the new administration tries much of anything and there’s a high probability that events can spin off everywhichway imaginable.

We do live in interesting times.

45 Percent of Republican Voters Support Storming of Capitol Building: Poll

Almost half of Republicans support the pro-Trump protesters who stormed the U.S. Capitol on Wednesday, putting them at odds with Democrats who largely oppose the actions of the demonstrators, a poll has found.

The survey released by YouGov on Thursday morning found that 45 percent of Republican voters backed the attack on the Capitol building, while 43 percent said they “strongly or somewhat” opposed the protesters’ behavior.

Six percent of Republicans were unsure while a further 6 percent said they were unaware of the events.

And people wonder why I’m not going to take this stuff until there’s a lot more research into not just long term effects.

Help wanted translating article about coronavirus vaccines

A 2012 scientific study about mRNA vaccines for coronaviruses seems to suggest problems down the line that nobody is talking about now.

Someone sent me to this article, which seems to say that mRNA vaccines against coronaviruses can actually make you dangerously vulnerable to subsequent coronaviruses by triggering cytokine storms:

An early concern for application of a SARS-CoV vaccine was the experience with other coronavirus infections which induced enhanced disease and immunopathology in animals when challenged with infectious virus [31], a concern reinforced by the report that animals given an alum adjuvanted SARS vaccine and subsequently challenged with SARS-CoV exhibited an immunopathologic lung reaction reminiscent of that described for respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) in infants and in animal models given RSV vaccine and challenged naturally (infants) or artificially (animals) with RSV [32], [33]. We and others described a similar immunopathologic reaction in mice vaccinated with a SARS-CoV vaccine and subsequently challenged with SARS-CoV [18], [20], [21], [28]. It has been proposed that the nucleocapsid protein of SARS-CoV is the antigen to which the immunopathologic reaction is directed [18], [21]. Thus, concern for proceeding to humans with candidate SARS-CoV vaccines emerged from these various observations.

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Rashida Tlaib’s New Office Neighbor to Fly Israeli Flag.

Rep. Rashida Tlaib’s (D., Mich.) new neighbor in her congressional office building intends to fly an Israeli flag as a statement against Tlaib’s anti-Israel stance.

Freshman Rep. Kat Cammack (R., Fla.), who has been given the office next to Tlaib’s for the 117th Congress, says she hopes Israel’s flag will send a message to Tlaib, a frequent critic of Israel who has a history of anti-Semitic comments.

“[Tlaib] has some very strong opinions about Israel, and I have some very strong opinions about Israel, so I have made a pledge that I’m going to be planting the flag of Israel outside my door right next to the American flag,” Cammack told a Gainesville, Fla., ABC affiliate. “I think it’ll be very helpful as she walks past it every day.”

Tlaib did not respond to a request for comment before press time.

Gators for Israel, a Jewish student advocacy group, will provide the flag for display, Cammack said.

Cammack became the representative for Florida’s Third Congressional District following the retirement of her former boss, Rep. Ted Yoho (R., Fla.), for whom she served for six years as deputy chief of staff. Cammack’s support for Israel and Israeli sovereignty was a major plank of her campaign platform.

 

Taking Stock Of A Record-Setting Firearm Year

Twenty-one million. Let that number sink in for a moment.

That’s a very big number. If I told you at SHOT Show® last year that the industry would see 21 million background checks for the sale of a firearm in 2020, you would have thought I was crazy. One year later and with the benefit of hindsight, this was truly a remarkable year for the industry across the board.

The final figures for the National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS) put all of this year’s hard work into perspective. Twenty-one million background checks were conducted for the sale of a firearm over the past 12 months. That topped 2019’s totals of 13.2 million by 60 percent. It also shattered the previous record from 2016, when 15.7 million background checks were conducted for the sale of firearms. This year’s 21 million total surpassed 2016 by 5.3 million, or 34 percent.

Here’s one more incredible number to witness. NSSF estimates that 8.4 million people bought a firearm for the first time in 2020. That’s 40 percent of all purchases. This year’s buyer is increasingly diverse too. Forty percent of 2020’s buyers were women and the biggest increase of any demographic category was among African Americans, who bought guns at a rate of 58 percent greater than in 2019.

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Suspected car burglar shot, killed after homeowner catches him in the act

HOUSTON – A suspected car burglar is dead after the homeowner caught him in the act and shot him late Wednesday night.

The shooting happened around 9 p.m. at a home on Theta Street and Marleen Street in Southeast Houston.

Police said the homeowner heard a noise in his driveway, looked out and saw a man breaking into his car. The homeowner grabbed his gun and confronted the burglar. At some point, the homeowner shot the suspect.

The suspect was pronounced dead at the scene. The homeowner called police and is cooperating with investigators. No word on if the homeowner will face any charges.

 

Enough with the outrage.

Like pretty much all conservatives, I have consistently criticized riots and other forms of political violence for many years. That includes yesterday’s Washington, D.C. riot. You can’t say the same about liberals, however. Until yesterday, one might have thought that liberals consider rioting and other forms of political violence to be as American as apple pie.

You could write a book in support of that proposition, but for now let’s cite just a few examples. Do you remember when President Trump was inaugurated on January 20, 2017? Leftist Democrats rioted in Washington that day. That riot was arguably worse, more violent and more destructive, than what happened in D.C. yesterday. The liberal rioters destroyed stores, set vehicles on fire and battled with the police. Six police officers were wounded.

I don’t recall a single Democratic office-holder denouncing the Democrats’ Inauguration Day riot, and the Associated Press came perilously close to praising the rioters.

Over the ensuing four years, Antifa and Black Lives Matter rioted countless times, bringing devastation to cities like Portland, Seattle, Kenosha and Minneapolis. Did any Democrats denounce these riots? Not that I remember. Many Democrats endorsed them, or seemed to do so. Kamala Harris, for example, said about the riots in June:

They’re not going to stop. They’re not going to stop. This is a movement, I’m telling you. They’re not gonna stop. And everyone beware because they’re not gonna stop. They’re not gonna stop before Election Day and they’re not going to stop after Election Day. And everyone should take note of that. They’re not gonna let up and they should not.

This was after 12 people had been killed in Democrat-sanctioned rioting, and billions of dollars in destruction committed. Have any Democrats denounced Black Lives Matter for its role in the riots? Not one. Has any Democrat denounced Antifa? Not that I know of, and some, like Keith Ellison, have specifically endorsed Antifa’s political violence.

Democratic Party journalists have joined the party’s politicians in excusing riots. The New York Times, for example, published an admiring profile of Antifa. The Washington Post, likewise, has carried water for Antifa.

The litany could go on for a long time. Yesterday’s assault on the Capitol was outrageous, but let’s not forget that last time out-of-control demonstrators interrupted business at the Capitol, shouted down senators and pounded on the doors of the Supreme Court, it was Democrats objecting to the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court.

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From last May, but as on point now, as then.
RTWT (Read The Whole Thing)

The Great UnReason of 2020: The ‘Curious, but Quite Authentic, Inability to Think’

Upon the Nazis’ rise to power, Hannah Arendt, a Jewish woman who would go on to become a considerable 20th century philosopher, had to flee with her family from her native Germany.

Once the war was over and some prominent Nazis were brought to justice, Arendt attended the trial in Jerusalem of Adolph Eichmann, the architect of the Holocaust.

The experience left an indelible impression upon her, one that would shape the trajectory of her philosophical thinking.  What she observed was that, much to her surprise, Eichmann wasn’t the incarnation of evil that she expected to encounter.  His actions were monstrous, yes; but he was remarkably ordinary or “banal,” to use Arendt’s term of choice.

What struck Arendt was Eichmann’s “curious, but authentic, inability to think.”

“However monstrous the deeds were, the doer was neither monstrous nor demonic, and the only specific characteristic one could detect in his past as well as in his behavior during the trial and the preceding police examination was something entirely negative: it was not stupidity but a curious, quite authentic inability to think.” 

Eichmann didn’t subscribe to any “theory or doctrine,” exhibited no “particularity of wickedness, pathology, or ideological conviction;” his “only personal distinction was a perhaps extraordinary shallowness.”

Note, Arendt did not intend her characterization to be interpreted as commentary upon Eichmann’s IQ.  Nor, for that matter, did she mean to suggest that he was literally incapable of thinking critically.  Rather, her point was that Eichmann showed no will to think beyond the clichés—the memes, bumper sticker slogans, and hashtags—of his day.

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Welcome to Banana Republic, USA.

Out of all the crazy, strange, and unbelievable news items Insanity Wrap has brought you over the previous 119 editions of this column, “guns drawn in the Capitol” is the craziest, the strangest, and the most unbelievable — all in one item of just five words.

It’s difficult to be glib about the news after a day like yesterday, so today’s Insanity Wrap will be less of a wrap-up and more of a lament.

Four people are dead.

So many of us told you something like this was inevitable after Antifa/BLM was allowed for months to get away with their anarcho-communist brand of street thuggery.

Not that you, gentle reader, needed to be told.

Still, the timing and location came as a shock.

It remains to be seen whether yesterday’s deadly riot represents a one-off venting of political frustration or a sea-change in that the Right will from now on operate more like the Left does.

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Record Gun Sales and Diverse Ownership Mean Rocky Prospects for Restrictions
New gun owners are unlikely to embrace disarmament schemes from a government they distrust.

Joe Biden will enter the White House this month at the head of a political party that in recent years has been overtly hostile to self-defense rights, even to the point of advocating impossible-to-enforce bans on popular firearms. But the opportunity has passed for the restrictions he peddles as “common sense reforms.” In an era of political instability and distrust in government, Americans of varying political beliefs are purchasing guns in record numbers. And those millions of new weapons and their owners are bound to remain beyond the reach of politicians’ wish lists of restrictive laws.

Nine of the ten busiest weeks ever for the FBI-administered National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS)—which performs background checks for most firearms purchases from licensed dealers—occurred in 2020. While background checks don’t directly correspond to gun sales since they can be used for other purposes or for multiple simultaneous purchases, they’re an important indicator. The year ended with a total of 39.7 million background checks, the highest annual count recorded.

The “why” of the surge in firearms purchases is no secret in a year that seems drawn from the plot of an apocalyptic novel. January of 2020 opened with a politically polarized population and the news that “nearly six in ten Americans agree that there will be protests or rioting in the United States over the next year in response to how the country is being run,” according to Ipsos pollsters. They were right, though for unpredictable reasons.

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Okay, as requested:

Think what it says about the nation when half the people give the rioters who loot and burn private property a pass, even after more than $2 billion in damage is done to homes and businesses.
The left and its antifagoon blackshirts occupied city blocks and still control two “autonomous zones”, but when a government building that is the seat of power was infiltrated and occupied, it’s the worst day in modern history.

Leftist rioters attempted to burn down a Federal building in Portland. Leftist rioters vandalized statues and Federal monuments.
When Trump deployed federal law enforcement to protect the Lincoln Memorial and Portland Federal Courthouse, he was literally called the new incarnation of Hitler.

When the right breaks into the Capitol, and doesn’t set one fire or throw one Molotov cocktail, spray paint one slogan, or destroy one statue, the call is unanimous to arrest and prosecute them to the end of the earth them lock them up and throw the key away.

We cannot have two sets of laws and two codes of behavior in this country. It didn’t work in France in the 1790s, Russia in the 1910s, or what used to be Yugoslavia in the 1990s.

We have to return to one standard or this will happen again.

What we saw yesterday was as much a ‘People’s Revolt’ as anything else.

If you want to stop such, you have to stop treating standard operational people like dirt, and the first step there is to listen to them and not just blow them off as rednecks who live in ‘flyover country’.

Seen online:

Two groups of people (call them A and B) both see themselves as victims and have grievances they feel aren’t being heard.

Both resort to violence.

Dem reactions to group A:
“People will do what they do”
“Tell me where it says protests have to be peaceful”
“Don’t judge a whole group by the actions of a few”
“America is racist”

Dem reactions to group B:
“They are traitors”
“Violence is never acceptable”
“Arrest any people who agree with them in Congress”

This doesn’t go unnoticed.

Republican and Conservative Leaders Condemn Capitol Hill Violence

Contrast with leftist justification for Antifa/BLM violence all summer.

One thing that stands out at this early stage about the violence on Capitol Hill is that the right—from Republican Congressmen to prominent media personalities—is calling with one voice for the violence to stop.

The contrast between the right’s immediate calls for an end to the violence and the months-long Democrat, media, and leftist sugar-coating (remember the antifa “summer of love”?), down-playing (mostly peaceful arson), and refusing to condemn antifa and BLM violence as it swept the nation’s cities in 2020 is stark.

President Trump issues a strong request that the violence stop. He reminds the rioters, if they turn out to be Trump supporters, that “WE are the Party of Law & Order.”