Jts5665

By Andy May The SOHO Forum Debate began at 5:30PM (Central Time) on August 15, 2022 in the New York Sheen Center, as I announced here. Koonin won the Oxford…

Curiously this 24-hour rainfall total, what should be recognised as a new 24-hour rainfall record for Lismore of 467 mm, has not been entered into any of the official reports or into the official Australian Data Archive for Meteorology (ADAM).

ANOTHER LIBSOFTIKTOK SCOOP: Children’s hospital admits to performing hysterectomies on trans minors. “Children’s National must have seen the negative coverage about Boston Children’s Hospital because they modified their website the day after I took screenshots of it.”

JUST SAY NO: Warren’s corrupt and ignorant pitch: We have to bail out Academia because it’s too damn expensive, or something.

OH THE HUMANITY: A podcasting conference issued a pathetic multiple-tweet apology because Ben Shapiro happened to swing by for a few minutes.

More reaction to a podcast conference getting the vapors over Shapiro here: Blue-checked podcasting consortium apologizes ‘for the harm done’ by Ben Shapiro showing up at expo where ‘dangerous’ Daily Wire had booth.

UPDATE: Trigger warning: Someone got a photo of the dangerous Ben Shapiro inside podcasting convention. “If you were wondering what reason the Ben Shapiro meltdown is over, check this thread,” whose creator has since gone into lockdown mode:

“As a trans person, as a queer person, as someone with a uterus, this does not make me feel welcome. This does not make me feel safe.”

As a person of pronouns:

Exit quote: “@starplanes, if someone’s opposing viewpoints or mere presence makes you feel unsafe, then you are, by definition, a weak person. And, your weakness does nothing to help the LGBTQ+ community. The gays at Stonewall stood up to the cops, you can’t stand up to a fast talking Jew?”

And yet…how frightening was Shapiro’s appearance? So horrific that his own company is warning viewers before they watch video of it:

 

Absolutely terrifying https://t.co/m2nt6cgnBn

— Ben Shapiro (@benshapiro) August 25, 2022

(Updated and bumped.)

CHRISTOPHER CALDWELL: Why Are We in Ukraine?

Never has an official non-belligerent been more implicated in a war. Russia and its sympathizers assert that the U.S. attempt to turn Ukraine into an armed anti-Russian camp is what the war is about in the first place. Even those who dismiss this view will agree that the United States has made itself a central player in the conflict. It is pursuing a three-pronged strategy to defeat Russia through every means short of entering the war—which, of course, raises the risk that the United States will enter the war. One prong is the state-of-the-art weaponry it is supplying to Ukraine. Since June, thousands of computer-guided artillery rockets have been wreaking havoc behind Russian lines. A second prong is sanctions. With western European help, Washington has used its control of the choke points of the global marketplace to impoverish Russians, in hopes of punishing Russia. Finally, the U.S. seeks to rally the world’s peoples to a culture war against an enemy whose traditionalism, even if it does not constitute the whole of his evil, is at least a symbol of it.

It would be foolish to bet against the United States, a mighty global hegemon with a military budget 12 times Russia’s. Yet something is going badly off track. Russia’s military tenacity was to be expected—bloodying and defeating more technologically advanced armies has been a hallmark of Russian civilization for 600 years. But the economic sanctions, far from bringing about the collapse Blinken gloated over, have driven up the price of the energy Russia sells, strengthened the ruble, and threatened America’s western European allies with frostbite, shortages, and recession. The culture war has found few proponents outside of the West’s richest latte neighborhoods. Indeed, cultural self-defense may be part of the reason India, China, and other rising countries have conspicuously declined to cut economic ties with the Russians.

There have been signs for years that a new Iron Curtain was about to drop on the European continent. In 2008, the U.S. announced plans to bring certain non-Baltic republics of the former Soviet Union—notably Ukraine and Georgia—into NATO and the American sphere of influence. Should Ukraine prevail in this proxy war the U.S. will have succeeded, in a way. But it will have done so at an almost unspeakable price. It will have undermined the international economic architecture on which rests its control of global markets (and its ability to safely run government deficits). It will have carried out a shotgun wedding of Russia and China, forcing the most natural-resource-rich country on the planet into the arms of the West’s most dangerous adversary. Should Ukraine fail, the Ukraine policy of the Bush, Obama, Trump, and Biden administrations will be counted among the significant foreign policy blunders in American history.

Read the whole thing,

IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE PROPHECY: Hard-Working Plumber Looking Forward To Paying For His Neighbor’s Gender Studies Degree.

WHISTLEBLOWER: FBI Officials Instructed Agents Not Investigate Hunter Biden’s Laptop Before 2020 Election.

Amos Miller runs an organic farm in Bird-In-Hand, Pennsylvania, using farming methods used for, well, thousands of years.

Today, Joe Biden announced a plan to write off $10,000 in student loans for most people who haven’t paid off their student loans — and $20,000 in student loans for people who received Pell Grants. Biden’s plan will increase inflation, inequality, tuition, and the national debt. News articles have estimated the cost of Biden’s plan […]

The post Biden student loan write-off plan will cost over a trillion dollars, not $300 billion appeared first on Liberty Unyielding.

The possibility of US lockdowns – never attempted on this scale in the history of pandemics – was already in the air in early March 2020. The theory of lockdown had been floating around for 15 years but now China was first to try it, and claim enormous success, however fraudulently. 

Incredibly, the US was set to try it out too but getting Trump on board was going to take some doing. The federal government had the quarantine power since 1944. That much we knew. But just how expansive could its exercise be? Would they dare quarantine the well with the sick? How far would this go?

Thanks to several journalistic accounts, we have a better idea of what went on in the White House before the dreadful March 16, 2020, press conference of Donald Trump, Anthony Fauci, and Deborah Birx in which the lockdowns were announced. Along with that came a flier with tiny print about which the ever-trusting Trump apparently knew nothing: “bars, restaurants, food courts, gyms, and other indoor and outdoor venues where groups of people congregate should be closed.”

Read those words again. Has anything like this ever been issued by any government in the history of the world, before China did it? I cannot think of a case. It shuts not only the places where people do “congregate” but also everywhere where they might congregate. Churches. AA meetings. Civic clubs. Libraries. Museums. Homes! And this happened under Trump’s watch right here in the US! There ought to be a word to describe something more extreme than totalitarian. 

There were a number of people in Trump’s circle in those days who proved panicked and confused enough to embrace the idea. But who precisely wrote those words in the sheet handed out to reporters? 

We cannot say for sure but Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner played an important role. He had enlisted two close friends from college to help: Nat Turner and Adam Boehler. Both were graduates from the Wharton School, like Trump. Jared somehow believed that they knew something about pandemics because they worked in health-care delivery. So he called them. 

Boehler headed the $60 billion US International Development Finance Corporation and still does. It’s one of those many agencies that throws contracts and cash to big shots within industry. Before that job, he was head of Landmark Health delivery services, which means that he knew business and finance, not public health. He is among those high-finance execs who were drawn to healthcare not for the science but for the money. 

As for Turner, he is a serial entrepreneur who got his start selling snakes from his parents’ garage. Truly. He founded an ad agency that he eventually sold to Google 10 years ago, Invite Media, for more than $70 million. His company Flatiron – oncology-related electronic record software – sold to Roche in 2018 for $1.9 billion. His page at the Wharton School describes him as “Young, Entrepreneurial and Google-Owned.” He is now a billionaire investor at an implausibly young age. 

And Google-owned! 

The book Nightmare Scenario (2021) explains what happened next. On March 13, 2020: 

Boehler and Turner burrowed into a room in the basement of the West Wing and started calling people who grasped both the scale of the crisis but also the politics. Over that weekend, they put together recommendations and then circulated them with Birx and Fauci. The guidelines were refined further before being presented to Trump in the Oval Office. They wanted to recommend shutting down in-person education at schools. Closing indoor dining at restaurants and bars. Canceling travel. 

Birx and Fauci saw the guidelines as a crucial pause that would buy them some time to better understand the pandemic. Shutting down flights was not enough, they said; more would have to be done. …. Boehler, Kushner, Birx, Fauci, and other aides presented Trump with the recommendations several days later, anxious over what he might say. Kushner had been preparing Trump for the possibility that they were going to need to take more “draconian” actions.

This account was not speculative. Kushner himself in his new book tells a very similar story:

On my way to the White House early the next morning, March 12, my [billionaire investor] brother Josh called from New York City. He described the worrisome signs: the city had canceled its annual Saint Patrick’s Day parade, thousands of people were self-quarantining, and millions more were leaving the city. When I told him that I was asked to jump into the response, he made a suggestion: “You should call Adam.”...

Call Adam! 

Why not call, oh, for example, a public health scientist? Someone with some expertise in viruses? A medical doctor? Universities are packed with them. Someone, anyone, with actual knowledge and experience? Nope. It was entirely a crony operation, privileged fools about to take over the private lives of hundreds of millions of people.

Boehler was the perfect person to help us with the federal government’s COVID response, especially because he had the skills to overcome the fierce rivalries among the administration’s health-care team….After the meeting, Boehler and I huddled in my office and began sketching out how we could help with testing and supplies. To get additional support, we called our mutual friend and successful health-care entrepreneur Nat Turner. … 

As we dealt with the shortage of cotton swabs and other supplies, we faced another problem: the need to develop public health guidelines. 

Let’s just stop right there and consider this realization. Oh, they needed guidelines for the rest of us to follow, for reasons of politics and public relations. After all, they are surely the masters of the craft. Continuing: 

Given that people across the country were confused and concerned, Birx and Fauci had been discussing the need for a unified set of federal standards to help Americans understand what they should do to keep themselves safe and slow the spread of the virus. They insisted that these guidelines would help prevent hospitals from becoming overwhelmed. Despite all the talk over the past week, no one had taken steps to produce a document. When Nat Turner flagged the issue, 

Again, let’s stop the tape there. Nat Turner pointed out that no one had yet issued any orders? Good call, dude. Someone needs to get right on that. Just open up a Google doc and get to work on writing a central plan for the whole country. You have a two-hour deadline. 

I asked him to coordinate with Derek Lyons to produce a draft and encouraged him to call Dr. Scott Gottlieb, the former head of the FDA and a renowned public health expert [and Pfizer board member]. I had been trying to persuade Gottlieb to come back into government for a short-term stint to help us better organize our response and support our effort to develop a vaccine. 

When we called Gottlieb, he was grateful that we were preparing guidelines. “They should go a little bit further than you are comfortable with,” he said. “When you feel like you are doing more than you should, that is a sign that you are doing them right.”

Look, this whole scene truly just boggles the mind. Phone calls. Rushed documents. Friends of friends. Pharma executives. People in the know! 

The result was a document that shut down the US and the world, all banged out by rank amateurs with ungodly privilege, with nary a thought of asking disinterested experts. Whatever they typed would affect the lives of 333 million people coast to coast. Did they think about that? Did they even care? Did the even once think about people not of their class and pedigree?

The result: Trump agreed to the “guidelines,” which led to the most momentous lockdown decision in the history of public health and even in the whole of human history. It locked down hospitals, nursing homes, and every commercial establishment in the country except those called essential. Homes too: the CDC said no more than ten can come to your house for dinner. 

So let’s get this straight. This decision, which wrecked life in the US and all over the world, and eventually caused the loss of the presidency and the Congress, was made by a handful of well-connected tech entrepreneurs with ZERO experience in infectious disease, epidemiology, immunology, pandemic history, or anything other than management and business classes at the Wharton School. With close Google connections. And they did this in cooperation with one name board member of Big Pharma that ended up making billions in profits from mandated vaccines that were forced on the American people. Also, Google made a mint. 

Apparently, the above is a true story, based on one first-hand account and one journalistic account. The world was wrecked by a literal snake salesman, the Google-funded inventor of DoorDash for medicine, a big pharma executive, some bureaucrat who lived off AIDS largess, an octogenarian media star who had been in government for 40 years, plus the son-in-law of an easily bamboozled name-brand purveyor who imagined from his years as a CEO that he could just shut down a country and turn it back on! They constitute a plethora of elites who scammed their way to the top and deployed their new-found power in grossly immoral ways that wrecked this country and many others. 

Now, to be clear, there is surely much more to this story. For one thing, even as these birds were deliberating, the Department of Health and Human Services had already issued on March 13 a lockdown order marked as classified. So it was already in the cards. Maybe these bozos only believed they were in charge when the real power was higher up. I do not know. But I would like to. It’s like a kaleidoscope that never stops turning. What we know now is enough of a scandal. 

Ohio Republican says agents are being encouraged to label everything "extremist" for political purposes.

THE VERSION OF THE MATRIX THAT TOM WOLFE PROGRAMMED SHORTLY BEFORE HIS DEATH IS STILL WORKING PERFECTLY:

Sweet irony of ironies — and in California, no less!

Team Biden may not have known of the "raid" in advance, but their fingerprints are all over this. John Solomon: "the Biden White House worked directly with the Justice Department and National Archives to instigate the criminal probe into alleged mishandling of documents, allowing the FBI to review evidence retrieved from Mar-a-Lago this spring and eliminating the 45th president's claims to executive privilege."

The post Mar-a-Lago Raid: Trump Seeks Special Master As Leaked Docs Show Biden Helping FBI Just Prior To Raid first appeared on Le·gal In·sur·rec·tion.

SCIENCE! Chicago children’s hospital admits reliance on ‘anecdotal evidence’ for treatment of ‘trans’ youth.

The poll found Americans are largely split on whether loans should be forgiven.

UGH:  It turns out homicide is the top cause of death among pregnant women. I didn’t know that when I submitted my dissent to the Commission on Civil Rights’ 2021 report on maternal mortality.  If I had, I surely would have pointed it out to my progressive colleagues.  I’m not sure it would have changed their view that the top fear for African American mothers should be racist doctors and nurses.  But it would have given them something to chew on.

Many progressives don’t want to think about how crime affects African American victims.  They regard it as racist to even bring the issue up.  So far, the progressives on the Commission have been unwilling to conduct a study of the crime increase and its disproportionate effect on minorities.  I could say they don’t give a damn, but that may not be precisely true.  It may simply be that they care more about preventing bad publicity for Democrats.

I’ve written several times about federally subsidized flood insurance, mostly to complain that it is terrible policy.

People are encouraged to build homes in low-lying areas, which then leads to needless destruction during floods.

The monetary cost is significant, but I get even more upset that responsible people are forced to finance other people’s irresponsible choices.

It’s such a bad policy that even Bernie Sanders favors reform.

And it’s such a bad policy that politicians in Hawaii decided it is worth copying. But they chose to subsidize building homes that are vulnerable to volcanic eruptions.

I’m not joking. Joe Kent of the Grassroot Institute wrote about this foolish system.

…the state originally encouraged the building of homes in this dangerous area by offering lava insurance where no private company would. …In response to the absence of private insurance, the state Legislature created the Hawaii Property Insurance Association (HPIA), whose job is to provide coverage for homes in areas that private insurance won’t touch. The law requires private insurance companies to pool their money to subsidize the expense of offering insurance in high-risk lava zones. …This resulted in a boom in the housing market below the active Kilauea volcano. …The moral hazard of this new insurance program gave a false sense of security to homebuilders in Leilani Estates.

And where, pray tell, can you find Leilani Estates?

In the most dangerous path of the most active volcano in Hawaii.

Given my libertarian sympathies, I think people should have the right to build in dangerous areas.

But I also think that they should bear the risks. Including what happened a few years ago.

…that hazard is very real for families watching their homes be engulfed by magma. What was seen as a “market failure” was really a warning sign to those building in Lava Zones 1 and 2. If the state had stayed out of the situation, probably fewer families would have built in the area, and today there might be less housing destruction.

The obvious moral of the story is that we should not have government-subsidized moral hazard.

That’s not a proper role of the federal government, and it’s not a proper role of state governments.

P.S. The same is true for subsidized terrorism insurance.

P.P.S. For more on government-created moral hazard, click here.

A year later, administration's handling of first major foreign policy crisis echoes across the globe, with consequences.

QUESTION ASKED AND ANSWERED:

Shot: The Baltimore City Council eliminated $22 million from the police budget. What does that look like?

—The Baltimore Sun, June 17^th, 2020.

Chaser: Baltimore On Pace For Possible Record Murders As Local NAACP Asks Governor To Deploy National Guard.

—ZeroHedge, today.

NEVER FORGET: A Twitter thread on the worst “science”-driven craziness of 2020:

Including: Black day at blue lagoon: Picture shows picturesque lake turned completely black after UK police put dye in it to stop Instagrammers break virus lockdown.

Sen. Tim Kaine, 2016 Democratic vice presidential nominee, serves on Senate Armed Services and Budget committees, both of which are involved in funding and oversight for the border enforcement agency.

SAUCE, MEET GANDER: Google workers hilariously petition to have their search data protected.

A recent scenario at the Ford Motor Company is the perfect way to explain what Democrats are doing to this country when they pass bills for our “benefit.” On August 9, Senate Democrats passed a bill they praised, which included a $7,500 federal electric vehicle tax credit.

Shortly after, Ford raised the price of its electric car. By how much? $7,000. What a coincidence. “The base model of the 2023 F-150 Lightning pickup will now cost $47,000, up from it’s original price of $40,000, according to CNN.”

Daily Caller News Foundation reports ”More expensive models, such as the XLT High/Extended Range and the Lariat Extended Range have increased in price by $8,500, while other F-150 Lightning designs vary between $6,000 to $7,000 in price increases, according to the Detroit Free Press.”

The price change was attributed to “significant material cost increases and other factors,” CNN noted. Despite the changes, the increase will not impact those currently waiting for delivery of their vehicles, but impacts those who have reserved but not yet ordered the truck, CNBC reported.

But don’t just blame Ford for being forced to dance with the Democrats. General Motors also just announced it will increase the price of its electric model of the GMC Hummer. The cost will go up by $6,250, CNN reported.

The Daily Caller adds:

With eligibility and tax credit rules preparing to change under new legislation, including the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act, certain modules of the vehicle may qualify for the credit this year, according to Consumer Reports. It is unclear if the truck will be eligible in the future, according to CNN.

These awful, detestable hacks have already received generous prison sentences for their crimes, but frankly this feels wholly appropriate as well:

USING OPPRESSION TO JUSTIFY OPPRESSION: New York Uses Historic Gun Bans Against Native Americans, Catholics to Justify Current Restrictions in Court Filing.

CHILD ABUSE: Libs of TikTok Pointed Out Boston Children’s Hospital’s Trans Surgery Policy. Then the Fact-Checkers Got Involved. “Well, funny thing about that. PolitiFact is correct about the ’18 and older’ language, but it’s quite possible the site did not include it when Libs of TikTok tweeted about it on August 11. The archives from the Wayback Machine website show that at some point between July 31 and August 14, that language was added to the site.”