Jul 06

Today’s News 6th July 2024

  • The Hidden History Of Robert Mueller's Right-Wing Terror Factory, Part 2
    The Hidden History Of Robert Mueller’s Right-Wing Terror Factory, Part 2

    Authored by Ken Silva via Headline USA,

    The first article of this series chronicled the FBI’s mid-2000s program to stage neo-Nazi rallies around the country as a means to conduct surveillance and recruit potential informants.

    FBI motorcycle group. PHOTO: ChatGPT

    Those rallies were just the beginning of a sweeping multi-state investigation, Headline USA can reveal.

    Indeed, after an FBI informant was exposed in 2007 for organizing a Nazi rally in Orlando the year before, the bureau launched another operation in the same area. Dubbed “Primitive Affliction,” the FBI set up a neo-Nazi motorcycle front group to infiltrate Florida’s right-wing underground.

    Federal agencies are known to have used motorcycle front groups cases against targets such as the Hells Angels for drug- and gun-trafficking investigations. However, Headline USA is unaware of such a tactic being employed in a politically charged domestic terrorism case until Primitive Affliction.

    This publication has also found that then-FBI Director Robert Mueller had a personal interest in Primitive Affliction, which ran from about 2007 to 2012. Indeed, Mueller was briefed daily on the operation during its final stages, according to a newly unearthed performance review of one undercover cop on the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force.

    https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

    Because Primitive Affliction collapsed with no terrorism convictions, the case never grabbed the national spotlight. However, a deeper look at the case reveals infiltration and entrapment techniques used by the FBI in 1990s investigations against the Aryan Nations, as well as more recent cases such as the 2020 militia conspiracy to kidnap Michigan’s governor.

    Mueller did not respond to an email about Primitive Affliction. The FBI declined to comment.

    Reviving the Aryan Nations

    In the 1980s and 90s, the Aryan Nations rivaled the Ku Klux Klan as the face of “white hate” in America—and for good reason, having been linked to numerous bank robberies, the assassination of a Jewish radio host and the Oklahoma City bombing, along with other crimes.

    But by the mid-2000s, the Aryan Nations was largely decimated by numerous arrests and civil litigation. The group had splintered into various factions around the country. One of its remaining leaders, August Kreis, was desperate to consolidate power.

    Working out of a South Carolina mobile home with a man named Joshua Caleb Sutter—who was a known FBI informant since 2003—Kreis attempted several publicity stunts to put his name on the map.

    For example, at one point Kreis pledged allegiance to Osama bin Laden and claimed to seek an alliance with Muslim jihadists. Sutter, who was Kreis’s “minister for Islamic liaison,”  also reportedly posted a “message of solidarity and support” to Saddam Hussein on the Aryan Nations Web site. (If Sutter’s name sounds familiar, it’s because he made headlines in 2021, when it was revealed that he earned more than $100,000 from the FBI while running a Satanic publishing house.)

    When that didn’t work in attracting new members or donations, Kreis began plotting with another Aryan Nations member, Robert Killian. Like Sutter, Killian turned out to be undercover law enforcement—Killian an undercover cop on the FBI’s JTTF.

    An avid motorcyclist living in Orlando, Killian had been hanging out at a local Outlaw biker bar while posing online as a member of the Aryan Nations. Using the name “Doc,” by 2007 he had risen to become the Aryan Nations Florida state administrator—which, ironically, gave him power to vet applicants. The Orlando Sentinel later described Killian as the Aryan Nations’ “top recruiter.”

    Apparently, someone in the FBI had the idea of merging a domestic terrorism case with a biker case. Killian planted the idea in Kreis’s head to start a neo-Nazi motorcycle club, the 1st SS Kavallerie Brigade Motorcycle Division—named after a horse-mounted unit of Nazi Germany’s Waffen-SS.

    For Kreis, a biker gang posed the opportunity to attract publicity, gain members and increase revenue for the Aryan Nations.

    But first, they needed bikers. To that end, Killian convinced an Outlaw biker named Brian Klose to become the leader of the 1st SS Kavallerie. According to people familiar with the matter, Killian was able to convince Klose to leave the Outlaws by playing to his ego. Keeping with the neo-Nazi theme, Klose was named “Fuhrer” of the new group.

    Klose would come to regret his decision to leave the Outlaws for what turned out to be an FBI front group.

    With Klose surrounded by a gaggle of informants and undercover cops, the 1st SS Kavallerie clubhouse was open for business. According to internal law enforcement records, there were at least four undercover employees and an untold number of informants who infiltrated the group, along with numerous wiretaps and other “sophisticated techniques.”

    Kelly Boaz a.k.a. ‘Kevin Post’

    One of the key undercover agents from Primitive Affliction was Kelly Boaz, a local Orange County cop who, like Killian, had earned a spot on the FBI’s JTTF—receiving specialized training from the ADL and SPLC, according to their personnel records.

    Boaz earned a JTTF assignment despite a scandal-plagued career with the Orange County Sheriff’s Office, where he was the subject of more than a dozen internal investigations since joining in 1989, several involving allegations of excessive force.

    https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

    In December 1999, for example, Boaz was involved in a predawn raid where another officer shot a suspect. Months later in August 2000, Boaz was at the center of another controversy when he shot and killed an unarmed thief at a shopping center.

    He was cleared of wrongdoing in both incidents, but his supervisor was reportedly demoted and his racketeering squad was disbanded. A civil lawsuit was filed against him and the Orange County Sheriff’s Office over the December 1999 incident, but the case was eventually dismissed.

    Despite Boaz’s controversial past, the FBI relied on him to build a complex case against a supposed network of white supremacist terrorists.

    Boaz, who declined an interview request, entered Florida’s neo-Nazi scene sometime after the Orlando neo-Nazi rally organizer, FBI undercover operative David Gletty, had his cover blown in the media—as detailed in Part 1 of this series.

    According to court records, Boaz was introduced to the Outlaw bikers and the 1st SS Kavallerie in 2009 by his colleague, Killian. By then, Boaz had already infiltrated the Black Pistons biker gang and was posing as one of its members, a renegade bomb maker named “Kevin Post.”

    For nearly the next three years, Boaz and the FBI built their case.

    During his investigation, one of his informants purportedly learned about another right-wing group in the area called the American Front. Operation Primitive Affliction eventually expanded to the Russia-linked American Front, which will be the subject of Part 3 of this series.

    In both cases, Boaz made extravagant claims of the drug deals and terroristic plots he witnessed in his roughly three years as an undercover biker/bomber. He also claimed that his life was threatened when an Outlaw biker put a firearm to his head and accused him of being law enforcement.

    Mueller likely heard similar reports. A glowing performance review for Boaz said the case “was briefed to the FBI Director daily during the executions of the disruptions.”

    But a deeper look at the evidence produced in court casts doubt on Boaz’s claims, as well as the FBI’s entire case.
    Kavallerie Collapse

    “Biker Gangsters Busted after Three-Year Probe,” the Orlando Sentinel reported on March 31, 2012.

    Two nights earlier, Boaz and the FBI had rounded up the targets of Primitive Affliction. One of those arrested was a woman named Deborah Plowman, who was at her home near Chicago when more than a dozen armed agents swarmed her on March 29, 2012. According to Boaz, he saw Plowman take pills at an Outlaw bikers party several years earlier.

    After spending the night in jail, Plowman was told she needed to travel to Florida to face drug-trafficking charges—or else, she’d face extradition. Baffled, Plowman professed her innocence.

    She was telling the truth.

    On April 19, 2012, Plowman turned herself into law enforcement in Florida to be interviewed by Boaz. It didn’t take long before Boaz realized that he had the wrong person arrested.

    “Boaz asked [Plowman] if she has ever used the nickname or has ever been called ‘Sin,’ to which she replied with a ‘no,’” Plowman said in a lawsuit she filed later over the wrongful arrest.

    “Defendant Boaz immediately began to break out into a sweat upon viewing and questioning [Plowman], realizing he caused the wrong person, [Plowman], to be arrested in his undercover operation, instead of ‘Sin’ [Kristy Pryzbylla].”

    It turned out, Plowman was married to someone Boaz had been investigating, and the undercover agent somehow confused her with Pryzbylla. Plowman quickly hired a lawyer, who blasted Boaz in the Orlando Sentinel for his carelessness.

    “Had Boaz pulled her drivers license, he would have known it wasn’t her, and he’d made a huge mistake,” Plowman’s then-attorney, Jerry Theophilopoulos, said at the time. “In all my 20 years of practice, I’ve never seen anything like what they did to Deborah Plowman.”

    Plowman had her charges dropped in May 2012, and she eventually won $30,000 from Boaz in a civil lawsuit.

    Boaz’s sloppy police work would continue to rear its ugly head as the fruits of Primitive Affliction moved through the courts.

    The other defendants—including the “Fuehrer” Klose, Ronald Cusack, Carlos Eugene Dubose and Harold Johnson Kinlaw—were initially charged with violent crimes, such as bomb-making and soliciting murder. However, prosecutors later dropped most of the charges related to violence, instead reaching deals with the defendants to plead guilty to drug charges.

    Assistant State Attorney Steven Foster reportedly said at the time that prosecutors were willing to strike plea deals with alleged white supremacist extremists because they were following the “Al Capone theory of prosecution”—referencing how federal authorities jailed the notorious mobster for tax evasion instead of his countless violent crimes.

    “We decided to strike against the Kavallerie Brigade by bringing these heavy-duty drug charges to shut the active members down,” Foster reportedly said, bragging about shutting down an FBI front group.

    However, one of the Outlaw biker defendants, Dubose, fought his charges.

    It was a good thing he did.

    A retired U.S. Marine, Dubose’s crime stemmed from when he cracked his skull in a motorcycle accident. Down and out on his luck and looking for cash, Dubose took another blow in life when an FBI informant arranged for him to sell his prescription painkillers to an undercover officer.

    Outlaw biker Carlos Dubose was originally charged with trafficking enough pills to land him in prison for the rest of his life, but an FBI 302 shows he only sold a misdemeanor amount. Had Dubose not noticed this, he might still be in prison.

    Initially charged with selling more than 28 grams of Oxycodone pills, Dubose could have spent the rest of his life in prison. But when he started receiving pre-trial discovery, he noticed something: An FBI report showed he only gave the undercover officer 9 grams of pills—a crime that carried the far lesser max sentence of seven years imprisonment.

    After successfully diminishing the severity of his drug charge, Dubose decided to plead guilty to that lone count. But he continued to vociferously deny any involvement in a bomb plot—a charge that stemmed from a conversation he had with Boaz, aka renegade bomb maker “Kevin Post,” nearly three years earlier in 2009.

    To Dubose’s point, the Feb. 27, 2009, conversation he had with Boaz/Post never developed any further over the next three years. And a transcript of the conversation shows Dubose choosing his words carefully when talking about “hypothetically” building a pipe bomb: “We’re not lookin’ to do anything. It’s just a matter if we start to go to war with somebody,” Dubose told Post/Boaz at the end of the discussion.

    Florida prosecutors admitted that Boaz’s one recorded conversation didn’t contain smoking-gun evidence of bomb plots, but they claimed there were other discussions where Dubose made such plans.

    Even though there were no recordings of those other purported conversations—and even though Dubose never possessed or attempt to build a bomb—the judge accepted the narrative of Boaz and the government. He tossed the motion to dismiss, and Dubose took a plea deal soon thereafter.

    Gun to the Head?

    Boaz’s credibility would be challenged once more at Dubose’s April 21, 2014, sentencing hearing, where the undercover agent claimed to have had a weapon pointed at his head.

    During the hearing, defense attorney Harold Uhrig asked Boaz the obvious question: If Dubose pointed a gun at him, why didn’t the government mention that before?

    “I’ve gone through about 600 pages of transcripts, reports, supplemental reports, I don’t find it anywhere mentioned in there. Are you telling me that there’s some information that y’all did not disclose to us?” Uhrig asked Boaz.

    Boaz insisted that he did report the gun-pointing incident to the FBI for “intelligence gathering,” but he didn’t tell the Orange County Sheriff’s Office. Boaz also admitted that he didn’t have any documentation proving that he reported the alleged incident to the FBI.

    After Boaz’s dubious testimony, the judge still sentenced Dubose to five years imprisonment for both the drug trafficking and bomb solicitation charges.

    The judge did admit that the available evidence “somewhat” supported Dubose’s version of events.

    However, the judge noted that Dubose did talk about having a bomb “in the event of a war.” Therefore, “the Court finds, viewing the evidence in its totality, that [Dubose intended] to obtain a destructive device for the purpose of injuring or causing damage to persons or property,” the judge said, allowing the government to somewhat save face after a disastrous case.

    The judge sentenced Dubose to five-year concurrent sentences for the drug and bomb charges.

    While prosecutors were able to secure some convictions from the 1st SS Kavallerie investigation—Klose is still in prison on felony drug trafficking charges—they fared even worse in the American Front case, thanks in part to more Boaz blunders.

    Bizarre developments would continue to occur outside the courtroom, too. As they prepped for trial around 2013, Boaz and several other government officials would begin receiving strange threats, purportedly from a neo-Nazi fugitive on the run in Mexico—the subject of Part 3 of this series.

    Stay tuned…

    Ken Silva is a staff writer at Headline USA. Follow him at twitter.com/jd_cashless.

    Tyler Durden
    Fri, 07/05/2024 – 23:10

  • Visualizing The Growth Of (Legal) US Sports Betting
    Visualizing The Growth Of (Legal) US Sports Betting

    The global sports betting industry has grown exponentially over the last few years, with a significant share of that growth coming from the United States.

    This graphic, via Visual Capitalist’s Marcus Lu, shows annual gross gaming revenue (GGR) from sports betting in the U.S., with data coming from the American Gaming Association.

    What is GGR?

    GGR is the total amount of money wagered minus winnings. For example, if a player wagers $1,000,000 at a casino and wins $900,000, GGR would be $100,000.

    Sports Betting Still a Young Industry

    Sports betting in the U.S. was first legalized in May 2018, after the Supreme Court struck down the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act (PASPA) of 1992. PASPA had effectively outlawed sports betting nationwide.

    Since 2018, gross gaming revenue has jumped from $400 million to $11 billion in 2023.

    Betting is particularly big in Nevada, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania due to early legalization, robust regulatory frameworks, and strong sports cultures.

    Nevada, boosted by Las Vegas, generated over $5 billion in commercial gaming revenue (including other casino revenue streams) over the first four months of 2024, while New Jersey and Pennsylvania each generated over $2 billion.

    According to the American Gaming Association, 38 states (and DC) have legalized sports betting to date.

    If you enjoyed this post, be sure to check out this graphic, which shows the top NFL teams by revenue.

    Tyler Durden
    Fri, 07/05/2024 – 22:45

  • HuffPo Encourages Biden Campaign To Openly Push Disinformation Using AI
    HuffPo Encourages Biden Campaign To Openly Push Disinformation Using AI

    Authored by Jacob Bruns via Headline USA,

    In a bizarre op-ed, Huffington Post writer Kaivan Shroff suggested that the President Joe Biden and his campaign should consider using artificial intelligence to dupe the American people into voting for him.

    Joe Biden does his daily workout. / IMAGE: Fotor AI (Editor’s note: this photo has been generated using artificial intelligence and is not actually Joe Biden.)

    Shroff began by noting that “the stakes” of the election “cannot be overstated” because the future of democracy “hangs in the balance,” rhetoric which, he assured the reader, “is not hyperbolic.”

    https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

    It is “the greatest moral and ethical imperative for those who care about American democracy” to defeat former President Donald Trump, he opined.

    As a result, the ends justified the means, even if that entailed continuing the campaign’s ongoing efforts to gaslight low-information voters into thinking Biden is fitter and healthier than he is, but with additional assistance from AI to more “effectively reach the voting public.”

    It is not entirely clear that the campaign hasn’t already been relying on this tactic in what have appeared to be the president’s more lucid moments on camera.

    While admitting that using AI to present a smoother, more well-spoken Biden could be deceptive, Shroff ultimately concluded that such deception would be worthwhile if it led to a Biden victory.

    “We must ask the question, are augmented AI videos that present Biden in his best form―while sharing honest and accurate information―really more socially damaging than our information ecosystem’s current realities?” Shroff wrote. “I think not.”

    Such conversations seem to be inevitable for the left after Biden’s disastrous debate performance last month, for which his defenders have thrown out every excuse in the book as Trump surges in swing state polls.

    On Wednesday, for instance, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre blamed Biden’s jet lag from a flight weeks before the debate, along with a cold that he allegedly had.

    https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

    “It’s the jet lag and also the cold–it is the two things that occurred,” Jean-Pierre told reporters at a Tuesday press conference.

    Biden cronies have also used AI as an excuse in the past—but for the opposite end, to accuse Republicans of the threat of spreading disinformation by altering the audio in Biden’s special counsel interview with Robert Hur.

    It was the basis of that interview that prompted Hur not to pursue charges, concluding Biden was unfit to stand trial for the felonies.

    However, Attorney General Merrick Garland cited executive privilege in insisting that he was under no obligation to release the audio file. House Republicans held him in contempt of Congress and subsequently filed a lawsuit that could result in legal consequences for Garland under the next administration.

    Leftists afflicted with Trump Derangement Syndrome have become increasingly unhinged when faced with the prospect of a Biden candidacy, proposing ever more drastic, dangerous and anti-democratic courses of action to counter the will of the people.

    A Pennsylvania lawmaker named Matthew Croyle went viral for all the wrong reasons on Wednesday after authoring a post on X that suggested leftists with Trump-supporting relatives kill them now before they have the chance to strike first.

    https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

     

    Tyler Durden
    Fri, 07/05/2024 – 22:20

  • "Self-Created Hole": Education Reforms Push Maryland Toward Financial Cliff
    “Self-Created Hole”: Education Reforms Push Maryland Toward Financial Cliff

    Fitch, Moody’s Ratings, and S&P Global Ratings recently reaffirmed Maryland’s coveted triple-A credit rating. However, Moody’s downgraded the state’s outlook from stable to “negative,” citing significant concerns about looming structural deficits due to Annapolis’ out-of-control education spending. And while education spending soars, test scores are going in the wrong direction.

    “The negative outlook incorporates difficulties Maryland will face to achieve balanced financial operations in coming years without sacrificing service delivery goals or adding to the weight of the state government’s burden on individual and corporate taxpayers,” Moody’s wrote in the report last month. This is the first time the credit rating agency has issued a negative outlook for the state since 2011, several years after the GFC meltdown. 

    A looming fiscal cliff is primarily driven by edu programs, including the Blueprint for Maryland’s Future education reforms. When the reform was passed, the genius progressive lawmakers in Annapolis did not pass a funding mechanism. 

    “It’s a self-created hole,” Republican State Senator Justin Ready told investigative journalist Chris Papst of Fox45 News’ Project Baltimore late last month, adding, “I’m disappointed but not surprised that we were downgraded to negative.”

    Senator Ready’s district includes Carroll and Frederick Counties, located west of Baltimore. Several years ago, he attempted to warn leftist lawmakers in Annapolis that education spending would spark fiscal turmoil. However, his warnings were ignored while progressives were more focused on pushing woke policies. 

    “We have a very high-taxed state and local governments, and so we were concerned. We saw this as being unsustainable, an unsustainable increase,” said Ready.

    He continued, “Education spending was always increasing. This is just putting a rocket ship on it without the kind of accountability that’s needed.” 

    Maryland’s fiscal projections show an expected $1 billion budget deficit by 2025, $1.3 by 2027, and more than $3 billion by 2028. Soaring deficits are a function of the Blueprint for Maryland’s Future, also called the Kirwan Plan, which pumps $30 billion in taxpayer funds into public education over ten years and then adds $4 billion per year after that.

    Papst offers some very troubling news for residents:

    “In order to pay for it, according to those statistics, the state would have to either increase the personal income tax rate by 39% or raise the sales tax by 89% or increase property taxes by 535%.” 

    For years, Democrats in the state have advocated for increased education spending but rarely address test score performances that are heading in the wrong direction, an issue even the Washington Post could no longer ignore: 

    Over the years, Papst’s team has led an effort to uncover fraud and corruption in the state’s public school systems. 

    Fox News picked up on Papst’s reporting last year.

    https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

    Some folks on X have called soaring education expenses a grift by the Democratic Party that loots taxpayers and enriches teachers’ unions that only fund progressive causes.

    https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

    https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

    https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

    Why more Marylanders aren’t demanding accountability from progressives in Annapolis transforming the state into what could soon be the next Illinois is troubling. 

    Tyler Durden
    Fri, 07/05/2024 – 21:55

  • Philippines Says US Will Pull Out Controversial Mid-Range Missile System
    Philippines Says US Will Pull Out Controversial Mid-Range Missile System

    Authored by Dave DeCamp via AntiWar.com,

    On Thursday, the Philippines said the US was pulling out a new missile system it deployed to the Southeast Asian country for annual military exercises.

    The US sent the Typhon missile system for the Balikatan exercises, which were held in April and May. The Typhon is a controversial launcher since it would have been banned by the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, a treaty between the US and Russia that the Trump administration withdrew from in 2019.

    Image: US Army

    The INF prohibited land-based missile systems with a range between 310 and 3,400 miles. The Typhon can launch nuclear-capable Tomahawk missiles, which have a range of about 1,000 miles. It can also fire SM-6 missiles, which can hit targets up to 290 miles away.

    Philippine Col. Louie Dema-ala told AFP that the US planned to withdraw the Typhon from the Philippines following the military exercises.

    “As per plan… it will be shipped out of the country in September or even earlier,” he said. “The US Army is currently shipping out their equipment that we used during Balikatan and Salaknib (exercises).”

    China strongly condemned the deployment of the Typhon system, which US officials have acknowledged was developed to prepare for a future conflict with Beijing over Taiwan or the South China Sea.

    Russian President Vladimir Putin also recently mentioned the deployment. He made the comments when calling for Moscow to follow the US and develop missile systems previously banned by the INF.

    “We need to start production of these strike systems and then, based on the actual situation, make decisions about where — if necessary to ensure our safety — to place them,” Putin said last week.

    “Today it is known that the United States not only produces these missile systems, but has already brought them to Europe for exercises, to Denmark. Quite recently it was announced that they are in the Philippines,” the Russian leader added.

    Tyler Durden
    Fri, 07/05/2024 – 21:30

  • Rivian's Amazon Delivery Vans Keep Mysteriously Catching Fire
    Rivian’s Amazon Delivery Vans Keep Mysteriously Catching Fire

    Amazon delivery vans, manufactured by Rivian, keep catching fire.

    That was the topic of a new report from Quartz.com this week which highlighted that the blue Prime vans seen all over the country keep catching fire at Amazon distribution centers.

    “One starts to wonder why,” QZ.com asked. 

    The report notes that footage from Third Coast Drone reveals Rivian vans ablaze outside an Amazon facility in Houston.

    While the video doesn’t show how the fire started, it captures firefighters working to control the flames. Importantly, the footage also reveals that each van was parked at a charging station.

    This isn’t the first time Rivian vans have caught fire at an Amazon location, the report notes.

    Last August, a similar incident occurred in Salt Lake City, where vans burned in a distribution center parking lot. Posts in Amazon worker subreddits revealed that drivers have reported issues with the vans charging in high heat and suspected the chargers as the cause of the blaze.

    Chargers have been blamed for fires before, either due to improper home wiring or inadequate cooling.

    What’s still unclear is whether professionally-installed chargers, like these Rivian units, are prone to the same issues as Level 2 chargers plugged into home dryer outlets.

    Heat-related issues with electric vehicles are likely to become more common as global temperatures rise.

    The transition to EVs still remains worthwhile according to QZ—just, maybe consider charging in the shade until these issues are resolved.

    Sure thing. We’ll be back to diesel powered delivery trucks in no time!

    Tyler Durden
    Fri, 07/05/2024 – 21:05

  • Sex, Lies, & Racial Hysteria: The Quiet J6 Killing Of Rosanne Boyland
    Sex, Lies, & Racial Hysteria: The Quiet J6 Killing Of Rosanne Boyland

    Authored by Jack Kashill via American Greatness,

    One wonders what thoughts passed through the fevered mind of Officer Lila Morris as she struck the seemingly lifeless Rosanne Boyland over the head with a branch, then struck her again, and then struck her a third time so hard that the branch snapped in half.

    If Morris thought Boyland a hateful white supremacist who deserved her fate, one could, if not forgive her, at least understand how she came to think that way. For the last two years, Morris had heard little else about these MAGA minions and the monster who led them.

    President-elect Joe Biden had set the tone when he launched his presidential campaign in April 2019, implying President Donald Trump had called the neo-Nazis involved in the Charlottesville dust-up “very fine people.” No major candidate has ever begun a presidential campaign with a more divisive and slanderous opening gambit (one that Snopes conceded was false just this past week).

    Biden continued the slander throughout the campaign. Just four weeks before the 2020 election, he weighed in on the well-timed bust of an FBI-massaged plot to kidnap Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer. “There is a through line from President Trump’s dog whistles and tolerance of hate, vengeance, and lawlessness to plots such as this one,” fumed Biden. “He is giving oxygen to the bigotry and hate we see on the march in our country.”

    If Morris feared the depredations of these Hun-like hordes, she was in good company.

    “Just remember, we’re on the right side of history,” Rep. Val Demings told a colleague as they huddled fearfully in the House gallery on January 6.

    “If we all die today, another group will come in and certify those ballots.”

    “White supremacy and patriarchy are very linked in a lot of ways,” congressional drama queen Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez told CNN’s Dana Bash.

    “There’s a lot of sexualizing of that violence. And I didn’t think that I was just going to be killed. I thought other things were going to happen to me as well.”

    When Bash asked AOC if she thought she was going to be raped, AOC answered, “Yeah, yeah. I thought I was.”

    The left has been feeding its base a steady diet of racial fear and loathing for generations.

    Ocasio-Cortez is Puerto Rican. Demings and Morris black. Also black is Michael Byrd, the Capitol Police lieutenant (now captain) who shot and killed January 6 protestor and Air Force veteran Ashli Babbitt.

    Babbitt and Boyland were both white.

    The phrase “had the races been reversed” is such a manifest truism that pundits on the right no longer bother to complete the thought

    If the shooting death of the attractive 35-year-old Babbitt was too public to ignore, the death of the obscure 34-year-old Boyland was not.

    Biden’s incoming Department of Justice preferred to keep it that way. The nature of that death raised troubling questions not only about race but also about sex.

    In the cause of equity, the DC Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) saw fit to put a small, slight woman at the front of a contested police line. In the DEI-drenched precincts of Washington, no one dared protest this madness either before January 6 or after.

    In the days following Morris’s meltdown, all parties fell in line to preserve both the myth of heroic police resistance and the imagined role women played in that resistance. Consider this tweet from WUSA news anchor Lesli Foster on February 7, 2021:

    “You MUST hear about Ofc. Lila Morris. MPD Acting Chief Contee says Morris ‘fought like hell’ in the tunnel of death…. Morris was injured, then got back in the melee. Women, too, fought hard to reclaim the #Capitol.”

    Foster’s tweet included a photo of Morris being feted for her heroism at the Super Bowl, one of just three officers so honored.

    A high percentage of the selected video footage that entertained Democrats for the last three years was shot in and around this “tunnel of death.” While protestors were freely walking into the Capitol through multiple other entrances, the police defended the tunnel as though it were the Alamo.

    Caught in a scrum, Boyland found herself unwillingly pushed to the tunnel entrance. At this point, the MPD, now in riot gear, made a concerted surge to drive back the scrum. The chemical irritant sprayed by the MPD displaced the oxygen in the tunnel, causing people to feel faint. Rosanne collapsed, and as many as 30 people were shoved on top of her.

    Once the others were pulled off, Rosanne lay momentarily lifeless and exposed at the tunnel entrance. That’s when Morris went after her. “I was horrified,” said use-of-force expert Stan Kephart upon seeing the video. “We don’t train officers to hit people in the head with a blunt object.” Added Kephart, “It was definitely a crime.”

    To protect Rosanne from both the crowd and the police, Texan protestor Luke Coffee stood over the dying woman, holding a crutch horizontally above his head. For his efforts to save Rosanne, he was charged with a felony for striking Morris. Not until Coffee’s January 2024 trial was Morris forced to testify about January 6.

    Under oath, Morris conceded that Coffee never hit her. She also admitted that a baton or stick, was only to be used with a hand on either end as a way to push crowds back. “Are you ever trained to hold it like a bat and strike over somebody’s head?” asked Coffee’s attorney, Carol Stewart. “No,” said Morris.

    To preserve the narrative of heroic police resistance, the DC medical examiner’s office sat on Boyland’s autopsy report for the maximum 90 days and then attributed her death to “acute amphetamine intoxication.” Amphetamine was the active ingredient in the Adderall that Boyland had been taking by prescription for ten years to deal with her ADHD.

    The Boyland family was stunned. Boyland’s brother-in-law Justin Cave had reached out to childhood friend and MSNBC anchor Ayman Mohyeldin to help the family get to the bottom of Boyland’s death, but Mohyeldin was stonewalled by the medical examiner at every turn. “All our requests were denied,” admitted the surprised MSNBC anchor. “The trampling, the riot, the video evidence, none of this was even mentioned in the official autopsy report.”

    Morris remained an unquestioned hero until September 2021, when that damning video surfaced of her striking Rosanne. Disturbed by what he saw, J6 video expert Gary McBride filed a police brutality complaint with the DC Metropolitan Police Department. McBride believes Rosanne was still alive when Morris struck her. “When she takes that second hit to the head, watch her left arm, her left arm straightens up and lifts off the ground,” he told the Epoch Times.

    Morris need not have worried. Two months after McBride filed his complaint, he was informed via email, “The use of force within this investigation was determined to be objectively reasonable.” Morris would remain on the force and would face no criminal charges. The DOJ never investigated.

    If the Boyland family had any hope of clearing Rosanne’s name, that hope lay with the House Select Committee. Before finishing its work, the committee would interview more than a thousand witnesses but none who witnessed Boyland’s death, not even Lila Morris. The eight-hundred-page final report, released in December 2022, goes into great detail about the two-hour battle at the “tunnel of death” but does not mention the name of the woman who died there, not even in the footnotes.

    *  *  *

    Jack Cashill’s new book, Ashli: The Untold Story of the Women of January 6, is now available in all formats.

    Tyler Durden
    Fri, 07/05/2024 – 20:40

  • Disney World Stealthily Reduces July 4 Flags As Theme Park Attendance Remains Low
    Disney World Stealthily Reduces July 4 Flags As Theme Park Attendance Remains Low

    The Walt Disney Company has become one of America’s wokest companies, injecting left-wing diversity, equity and inclusion or DEI agenda into nearly every aspect of its business, from theme parks to video content. Consequently, Disney is no longer the babysitter for American parents, with families increasingly avoiding theme parks and movies. Bob Iger’s recent return as CEO sent wokeism into warp speed. 

    The website blogmickey shares an interesting account of Walt Disney World Resort, located about 20 miles southwest of Orlando, Florida, on July 4, indicating that “Disney may have forecasted as much—shortening typical holiday period park hours and not decorating as much as they have in the past.” 

    Blogmickey previously “covered some of the cutbacks in hours” at the theme park but also “noticed that Disney has scaled back on some of the patriotic decors.” 

    Let’s take a view of what Main Street USA looked like on the Fourth of July in 2023 versus this Thursday: 

    Source: Blogmickey

    Notice how Disney stealthily removed patriotic flags. 

    Source: Blogmickey

    Source: Blogmickey

    Source: Blogmickey

    “This year, it is only installed in Town Square. Not groundbreaking by any means, but when details matter, details should matter,” Blogmickey said. Considering DEI is rooted in Marxism, as per Real Clear Education’s findings, it should make sense why US flags are being scaled down at the theme park during the holiday. Clearly, Disney has not received the memo like the rest of corporate America (read: “Backlash Is Real”: DEI Exodus Gains Steam Across Corporate America)… 

    A 1989 video shows that on July 4, there was a lot of ‘America’ throughout the theme park.

    Let’s not forget that wait time ride tracking website Thrill Data shows that this year’s July 4 recorded wait time averages at Walt Disney World to be underwhelming, with some of the lowest times over the past decade.

    Putting woke ideology ahead of entertainment has destroyed an American institution. Iger’s long list of failures is piling up. 

    Tyler Durden
    Fri, 07/05/2024 – 20:15

  • The Absurdity Of "Open Borders"
    The Absurdity Of “Open Borders”

    Authored by Llewellyn Rockwell via The Mises Institute,

    Some libertarians argue that libertarianism requires support for “open borders,” but this is a mistake. “Open borders” is the view in the existing world of states, the state ought to admit as many people who want to come to the United States as possible. Of course, you don’t have the right to occupy property that is privately owned. But much of the property in the United States is “public,” which means that it is up to those who run the state to decide what to do with it. Of course, this is an unsatisfactory situation and we should do what we can to bring about a world with no “public” property and no state, but for now the question is what to do: open borders or not?

    The answer is quite clear. “Open borders” would be a. disastrous mistake. The policy would subject the United States to hordes of people with alien ideologies and cultures. As the great Ludwig von Mises pointed out, it would have made no sense to allow immigration from Germany and Japan during World War II. “Neither does it mean that there can be any question of appeasing aggressors by removing migration barriers. As conditions are today, the Americas and Australia in admitting German, Italian, and Japanese immigrants merely open their doors to the vanguards of hostile armies.” We face exactly the same situation today. We have a hard enough problem coping with the alien ideologies and cultures that are already here. Why compound our problem?

    The situation is even worse than we have so far portrayed. Because of the “woke” control that now prevails, members of “protected” groups such as racial minorities are immediately eligible for reparations, “set-asides,” affirmative action, and other schemes to mulct the American people. Why should our hard-earned tax money go to support people who have no ties to our country? As I said in 2015, “In other words, it’s bad enough we have to be looted, spied on, and kicked around by the state. Should we also have to pay for the privilege of cultural destructionism, an outcome the vast majority of the state’s taxpaying subjects do not want and would actively prevent if they lived in a free society and were allowed to do so?”

    Aside from the “woke” problem, there is something else. Those who come here because of “open borders” can immediately benefit from the welfare state. A massive number of people could come here just to live from welfare payments. Why bankrupt our economy? The well-known free market economist Milton Friedman, hardly an extremist, said, “You cannot simultaneously have a free market and a welfare state.”

    You might counter this by pointing out that welfare benefits aren’t very lavish. But this is true only if you are thinking of the standards of living of the American upper and middle classes. (Actually, though, these benefits are quite substantial and give the lie to claims that America has been marked by rising “inequality” in recent decades.) Because America is much more prosperous than the places the immigrants are coming from, living from American welfare payments would be a good deal for millions of potential immigrants.

    Some fanatical libertarian supporters of “open borders” have come up with a response to this point that has to be characterized as one of the worst arguments in the past few decades.

    Robert Rector mentions this argument here:

    “The grant of citizenship is a transfer of political power. Access to the U.S. ballot box also provides access to the American taxpayer’s bank account. This is particularly problematic with regard to low-skill immigrants. Within an active redistributionist state, as Friedman understood, unlimited immigration can threaten limited government.

    “Many libertarians respond to this dilemma by asserting that the real problem is not open borders but the welfare state itself. The answer: dismantle the welfare state. The libertarian Cato Institute pursues a variant of this policy under the slogan, ‘build a wall around the welfare state, not around the nation.’. . . Borders should be open, but immigrants should be barred from accessing welfare and other benefits. , , . In a recent debate with Dan Griswold of the Cato Institute, I pointed out this paradox. Griswold replied that the key was to grant amnesty and open borders now and work on ‘building a wall around welfare’ at some point in the future.”

    See this.

    It has to be said that this is utterly stupid. It would be like saying that you need to take two medications. If you take only one, you’ll die. Therefore, you should take one of them and worry about getting the other one later.

    There is yet another problem with “open borders,” that gets to the root of why we support the free market. As Mises again and again pointed out, the free market replaces the Darwinian struggle of the natural world, in which some animals survive at the expense of others. In the free market, people can benefit without harming others. There is a harmony of long term interests among people.

    But with open borders this is no longer true.

    Immigrants will take jobs by undercutting American workers, because even very low paying American jobs are better than what they are getting in their home countries. This process will take place until wages reach a common level, and given the vast number of potential immigrants compared with American workers, the wage that results will be close to the immigrants’ standard.

    American workers could rightly say, “What about us? Your “free market” makes our condition worse.” But of course it isn’t the “free market” that does this. It’s “open borders,” which is an anti-market principle, that does this. Insisting that “open borders” makes everybody better off makes libertarianism seem ridiculous, because a great many people are hurt by the policy.

    Some “left libertarians” will object that the free market does indeed mandate “open borders”. But it doesn’t.

    The libertarian non-aggression principle leaves it up to us to determine what to do in a society with so-called “public” property.

    We need to confront another objection.

    Wouldn’t an attempt to close the border require that we lock up illegal immigrants in concentration camps? Wouldn’t this be a drastic infringement on their liberty? But a closed border doesn’t require this. All that we need to do is to build a wall and prevent immigrants from entering. We don’t have to jail them. All we need to do is to turn them away.

    Also, building a wall would be easier if states can build walls around their own territory. This greatly reduces the cost of building a wall. Closing the border gives the people in each state or local community a choice about accepting immigrants. Closed borders and secession go hand-in hand

    Let’s do everything we can to end the hoax of “open borders.” Doing so is a step in the preservation of Western civilization and the American heritage.

    Tyler Durden
    Fri, 07/05/2024 – 19:50

  • These Are The 10 Highest Paid CEOs In America
    These Are The 10 Highest Paid CEOs In America

    The median pay for S&P 500 CEOs soared to an all-time high of $15.7 million in 2023, as a strong stock market boosted executive compensation.

    Some of the highest paid CEOs in America earned nine-figure pay packages, with the vast majority of CEO compensation tied to stock awards. Overall, executives in the index earned on average 196 times more than the median S&P 500 employee, up from 185 in 2022.

    This graphic, via Visual Capitalist, shows the top 10 highest paid CEOs of S&P 500 companies, based on analysis from The Wall Street Journal and MyLogIQ.

    The Highest-Earning S&P 500 CEOs in 2023

    Here are the S&P 500 chief executives who received the highest compensation packages last year:

    Total pay includes equity awards and cash pay.

    Hock Tan, CEO of chipmaker Broadcom, tops the list, with an annual compensation of $161.8 million in 2023.

    Like Nvidia, the company has benefited from surging demand for AI technologies. Broadcom supplies the networking chips used in data centers for big tech companies, including Microsoft. Between 2022 and 2023, Tan’s salary doubled, earning 510 times the median pay of employees.

    Ranking in third is Stephen Schwarzman, who runs the biggest private equity firm in the world, Blackstone. The executive’s $119.8 million pay package was bolstered by a 83% rise in its share price last year. The firm is the world’s largest owner of commercial property, with approximately 12,500 real estate assets overall.

    Meanwhile, Apple CEO Tim Cook received $63.2 million in 2023—a sharp decline from the $99.4 million earned in the prior year. This rare pay cut was the result of shareholder pushback and requests from Cook himself.

    Overall, four of the top 10 highest paid CEOs in America are in the tech sector, with each experiencing double-digit share price gains over 2023.

    CEO Pay Has Doubled Over the Last Decade

    Below, we show the increasing magnitude of executive earnings since 2013:

    Total pay includes equity awards and cash pay.

    As we can see, the median total compensation of S&P 500 CEOs jumped over 8% between 2022 and 2023.

    Going further, this figure has grown by twofold over the last 10 years as the U.S. stock market surged during a period of low interest rates. Overall, CEO pay is rising faster than median employee pay and this gap between CEOs and workers has continued to widen over many years. For perspective, the median pay of S&P 500 employees stood at $81,476 in 2023.

    Often, CEO compensation is linked to the company’s financial performance, which is measured through share price movements and dividend payouts. In addition, the rise in CEO pay can be largely driven by stock awards granted to CEOs.

    A separate analysis from Equilar found that on average, 70% of S&P 500 CEO compensation stemmed from stock awards, averaging a striking $9.4 million in 2023.

    Tyler Durden
    Fri, 07/05/2024 – 19:25

  • Pfizer Infringed On Moderna Patent With COVID-19 Vaccine: Court
    Pfizer Infringed On Moderna Patent With COVID-19 Vaccine: Court

    Authored by Zachary Stieber via The Epoch Times,

    Pfizer and BioNTech’s COVID-19 vaccine infringed on a patent held by rival Moderna, the High Court in London, England, found in a decision released on July 2.

    The Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna COVID-19 vaccines both utilize messenger ribonucleic acid (mRNA) technology.

    Moderna patented mRNA processes that replace the nucleoside uridine with N1-methylpseudouridine, a modified RNA. The patent is titled, “ribonucleic acids containing n1-methyl-pseudouracils and uses thereof.”

    The patent “is valid,” the court stated, adding that it was infringed “given that Pfizer/BioNTech conceded that it would be infringed if valid.”

    The court rejected arguments made by Pfizer and BioNTech, including the argument that Moderna’s patent was not novel. It said parts of the patent were novel, from a method developed by the University of Pennsylvania.

    The District Court of the Hague in 2023 found the patent to be invalid due to lack of novelty versus the method, but the London court said it weighed other evidence and found some factors persuasive that the Hague did not.

    Moderna in 2020 said it would not enforce patents related to COVID-19 against rival manufacturers. However, in 2022, it revoked the declaration, meaning Pfizer and BioNTech came into violation of the patent, the high court said in a related decision.

    Justice Jonathan Richards wrote in the ruling, that “Even if the pledge was an express waiver of rights, it was validly retracted by the March 2022 statement since Pfizer/BioNTech had not by that date materially changed its position in reliance on the pledge.”

    The court also ruled that a second patent held by Moderna was invalid.

    Possible Appeals

    All three companies said they disagreed with the parts of the court’s decision on which they lost, and it is expected that all parties will seek permission to appeal.

    Pfizer and BioNTech said in a statement:

    “These proceedings have no bearing on the safety and efficacy profile of our vaccine, as established by regulators worldwide.

    “Irrespective of the outcome of this legal matter, we will continue to manufacture and supply the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine in line with our agreements and established supply schedules.”

    A spokesperson for Moderna said the company was pleased the court “recognized the innovation of Moderna scientists by confirming the validity and infringement” of one of its patents.

    Pfizer, BioNTech, and Moderna are also involved in parallel proceedings in Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, and the United States, much of which has been put on hold, as well as at the European Patent Office.

    The London ruling comes at a time of financial strain for Moderna, whose shares have plummeted by more than 70 percent since the peak of the pandemic as demand and sales for Spikevax have fallen. Shares of Pfizer, meanwhile, are down about 29 percent since mid-2021.

    Tyler Durden
    Fri, 07/05/2024 – 19:00

  • Texas Beach Terrorized By Shark: 4 People Attacked Within Two-Hour Span
    Texas Beach Terrorized By Shark: 4 People Attacked Within Two-Hour Span

    It’s a nightmarish scenario which seems straight out of Jaws and which has never happened before at a Texas beach: four people were attacked by a shark within a mere two hour period in waters off South Padre Island.

    South Padre is a hugely popular vacation destination in south Texas, and it happened as beaches were packed for the Independence Day holiday. A horrific video showed people screaming and bawling as one woman is pulled from the ocean with a large gash in her leg, and apparently in a state of shock, and with blood filling the water…

    https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

    “Details at this time indicate that two people were bitten and two people encountered the shark but were not seriously injured,” the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department said in a statement. Two victims were taken to Valley Regional Medical Center in Brownsville, with one being in more serious condition.

    A third victim was injured, but not seriously, while trying to save another victim. A fourth person reportedly fought off a potential attack by kicking and punching the shark. “One [victim] was grazed and another injured fending off the shark,” according to local news station KRGV.

    One eyewitness said, “We never saw the shark ‘til he was right there with them” and described that “It wasn’t choppy water, and the seas were calm. He showed up out of nowhere.”

    “How is this actually happening right now? It was very surreal,” another said. One person was actually pulled under by the shark but survived the ordeal:

    Rayner Cardenas told KRGV his son-in-law was pulled underwater by the shark.

    “Started swimming towards him, and he jumped out of the water and started saying, ‘Shark! Shark!’ And that’s when adrenaline kicked in, and I went right after him.”

    The bite to the man’s leg was described as “severe”. Texas Game Warden Captain Chris Dowdy said that authorities at this point believe all of the attacks were the result of the same shark, which lingered in the area of the last attack for some 20 to 30 minutes, and was caught on film. The woman in the above footage also appears to have suffered extensive injuries to her leg.

    One account was particularly harrowing:

    Nereyda Bazaldua told CNN her daughter was one of those bitten Thursday. Bazaldua said her two teenage daughters were in shallow, knee-deep water near the shore playing on boogie boards when they began screaming, “Shark!”

    When her 18-year-old daughter Victoria came out of the water, Bazaldua said she “could see some blood coming down her leg,” Bazaldua said. Thankfully, she said, Victoria’s injuries were minor.

    “The shark pushed into her, five to six of his teeth scratched her leg,” Bazaldua said. “The wounds aren’t deep.” She said the shark lingered in the water for 20 to 30 minutes before moving along.

    Swimmers had been evacuated from the ocean, with DPS buzzing the waters with helicopters and providing a lookout, until the shark was reportedly observed swimming out to deeper waters.

    Footage of the shark believed to have been behind the July 4th attacks:

    “Local game wardens and members of the Texas Game Warden Marine Tactical Operations Group assisted in patrolling the beach by boat and land patrol while DPS patrolled the area by helicopter and SPI PD and Cameron County rangers assisted with crowd control on the beach,” a statement said.

    “Shark encounters of this nature are not a common occurrence in Texas,” Texas officials said in a statement. “When bites from sharks do occur, they are usually a case of mistaken identity by sharks looking for food.”

    This incident is unprecedented and ultra-rare, given that in all of recorded history fewer than 50 total documented shark attacks have occurred in Texas since 1911.

    Tyler Durden
    Fri, 07/05/2024 – 18:40

  • World's Largest Fusion Reactor Is Finally Completed, But…
    World’s Largest Fusion Reactor Is Finally Completed, But…

    Authored by Mike Shedlock via MishTalk.com,

    Scientists have done some amazing things but not all of them have practical application, at least yet. Fusion is a great example.

    Live Science reports the World’s Largest Nuclear Fusion Reactor is Finally Completed.

    The International Fusion Energy Project (ITER) fusion reactor, consisting of 19 massive coils looped into multiple toroidal magnets, was originally slated to begin its first full test in 2020. Now scientists say it will fire in 2039 at the earliest.

    ITER contains the world’s most powerful magnet, making it capable of producing a magnetic field 280,000 times as strong as the one shielding Earth.

    The reactor’s impressive design comes with an equally hefty price-tag. Originally slated to cost around $5 billion and fire up in 2020, it has now suffered multiple delays and its budget swelled beyond $22 billion, with an additional $5 billion proposed to cover additional costs. These unforeseen expenses and delays are behind the most recent, 15-year delay.

    Scientists have been trying to harness the power of nuclear fusion — the process by which stars burn — for more than 70 years. By fusing hydrogen atoms to make helium under extremely high pressures and temperatures, main-sequence stars convert matter into light and heat, generating enormous amounts of energy without producing greenhouse gases or long-lasting radioactive waste.

    But replicating the conditions found inside the hearts of stars is no simple task. The most common design for fusion reactors, the tokamak, works by superheating plasma (one of the four states of matter, consisting of positive ions and negatively charged free electrons) before trapping it inside a donut-shaped reactor chamber with powerful magnetic fields.

    Impressive But …

    Assuming the reactor originally scheduled for 2020 is finally operable by 2039, I will be impressed.

    Heck, I am impressed at what we have already scientifically achieved. But I wonder what is the practical application of this.

    Keeping the turbulent and superheated coils of plasma in place long enough for nuclear fusion to happen, however, has been challenging. Soviet scientist Natan Yavlinsky designed the first tokamak in 1958, but no one has since managed to create a reactor that is able to put out more energy than it takes in.

    One of the main stumbling blocks is handling a plasma that’s hot enough to fuse. Fusion reactors require very high temperatures (many times hotter than the sun) because they have to operate at much lower pressures than is found inside the cores of stars.

    The core of the actual sun, for example, reaches temperatures of around 27 million Fahrenheit (15 million Celsius) but has pressures roughly equal to 340 billion times the air pressure at sea level on Earth.

    Cooking plasma to these temperatures is the relatively easy part, but finding a way to corral it so that it doesn’t burn through the reactor or derail the fusion reaction is technically tricky. This is usually done either with lasers or magnetic fields.

    Question and Answer on Temperatures

    How a reactor could produce temperatures of 27 million degrees without the operation melting is likely a puzzle to anyone who has been thinking clearly.

    The article provides an answer. But what is the cost and how long can the reaction be sustained without a meltdown? Are there any other issues?

    For those questions, let’s turn to a 2022 article. also from Live Science.

    A Step Closer to a New Source of Power

    Please consider A Step Closer to a New Source of Power

    In the new experiments, the Joint European Torus (JET) in Culham near Oxford, England, produced blazingly hot plasmas that released a record-setting 59 megajoules of energy — about the same amount of energy unleashed by the explosion of 31 pounds (14 kilograms) of TNT.

    Nuclear fusion — the same reaction that occurs in the heart of stars — merges atomic nuclei to form heavier nuclei. Nuclear physicists have long sought to produce nuclear fusion in reactors on Earth because it generates far more energy than burning fossil fuels does. For example, a pineapple-size amount of hydrogen atoms offers as much energy as 10,000 tons (9,000 metric tons) of coal, according to a statement from the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) project.

    “It took us years to prepare these experiments. And in the end we have managed to confirm our predictions and models,” Athina Kappatou, a physicist at the Max Planck Institute of Plasma Physics in Garching near Munich, Germany, told Live Science. “That’s good news on the way to ITER.”

    JET, which began operating in 1983, now uses the hydrogen isotopes deuterium and tritium as fuel. Whereas a normal hydrogen atom has no neutrons in its core, a deuterium atom has one neutron and a tritium atom has two. Currently, it is the only power plant in the world capable of operating with deuterium-tritium fuel — although ITER will also use it when it comes online.

    However, deuterium-tritium fusion poses a number of challenges. For example, deuterium-tritium fusion can generate dangerous amounts of high-energy neutrons, each moving at about 116 million mph (187 million km/h), or 17.3% the speed of light — so fast they could reach the moon in under 8 seconds. As such, special shielding is needed in these experiments.

    For the new experiments, the previous carbon lining in the JET reactor was replaced between 2009 and 2011 with a mixture of beryllium and tungsten, which will also be installed in ITER. This new metallic wall is more resistant to the stresses of nuclear fusion than carbon, and also clings onto less hydrogen than carbon does, explained Kappatou, who prepared, coordinated and led key parts of the recent experiments at JET.

    Another challenge with deuterium-tritium fusion experiments is the fact that tritium is radioactive, and so it requires special handling. However, JET was capable of handling tritium back in 1997, Kappatou noted.

    Also, whereas deuterium is abundantly available in seawater, tritium is extremely rare. For now, tritium is produced in nuclear fission reactors, although future fusion power plants will be able to emit neutrons to generate their own tritium fuel.

    In January, scientists at the National Ignition Facility in California revealed that their laser-powered nuclear fusion experiment generated 1.3 megajoules of energy for 100 trillionths of a second — a sign the fusion reaction generated more energy from nuclear activity than went into it from the outside.

    The copper electromagnets that JET used could only operate for about 5 seconds due to the heat from the experiments. “JET simply wasn’t designed to deliver more,” Kappatou said. In contrast, ITER will use cryogenically cooled superconducting magnets that are designed to operate indefinitely, the researchers noted.

    Questions Beget Questions

    These are amazing achievements. But we must do much better than sustain a reaction for a world-breaking 100 trillionths of a second.

    Something in this story is missing, like why does it take at least 15 years to do a test of something that is already built?

    Also, the proposed process seems so much like a perpetual motion machine.

    The reactor will use fusion to produce the deuterium-tritium that it needs to produce the fusion and also the energy to cryogenically cool the magnets the system needs to protect itself from itself, otherwise the whole thing melts down at 27 million degrees Fahrenheit.

    It that’s not the basic proposal, then someone please explain the proposal to me. If that is the proposal, additional questions surface.

    Assuming the theory works to perfection, how long can the process be sustained? How much of the energy produced is needed to protect the system from the heat produced?

    Tests of ITER were scheduled for 2020 but have been rescheduled for 2039 with no explanation why.

    However, I am pleased to report we have made progress on target dates. By that I mean targets that forever always seemed just a few years away are now a more reasonable 15 years minimum away, and that’s only for a test.

    Fusion will not save the planet anytime soon, if ever.

    A Rebuttal

    One person commented that I don’t understanding how science works. False. I know full well how science works.

    Do I expect useful ideas out of this whether or not it solves our alleged existential threat?

    Yes I do. But that has little to do with the point I was making.

    We have a test in 2039 and alleged existential threat underway that supposedly is too late to fix by 2050.

    Today, we have practical, believable, information that fusion will not be the holy grail that many hoped for. That fact does not imply I think nothing useful will come out of this.

    The Futility of Wind and Solar Power in One Easy to Understand Picture

    Meanwhile, let’s discuss where we are staring with The Futility of Wind and Solar Power in One Easy to Understand Picture

    Morocco is the ideal place for both wind power and solar power. It is sunny and windy. But how do we get energy from Morocco to where it’s needed? At what cost?

    Net Zero Is a Very Unlikely Outcome

    More importantly, please consider Sorry Green Energy Fans, Net Zero Is a Very Unlikely Outcome

    Let’s discuss the Kyoto Protocol climate objectives and dozens of reasons why a net zero by the 2050 target has virtually no chance.

    If you disagree, or even if you don’t, please read the above article and tell me what we are supposed to do, how we are going to do it, and who will bear the costs.

    Realistically, what should we expect other than total failure of existing goals?

    I suggest we are better off pursuing that line of thought than focusing on the mythical unobtanium.

    Tyler Durden
    Fri, 07/05/2024 – 18:20

  • New York Beats California In List Of 50 Most Affluent U.S. Suburbs
    New York Beats California In List Of 50 Most Affluent U.S. Suburbs

    A new study from GoBankingRates.com revealed the most affluent suburbs in the United States for June 2024.

    The key finding was that New York suburbs beat out California. The No. 1 and No. 2 wealthiest suburbs in America are both just outside New York City: Scarsdale, NY (average income of $569K) and Rye, NY (average income of $405K).

    Additionally, the study found:

    • Outside of NYC, just one northeastern suburb cracks the top 10. Wellesley, MA ranked No. 10 overall with an average household income of approximately $368,000.
    • Texas ranks higher than Florida. Two Texas suburbs ranked among the 10 wealthiest in America (West University Place and University Park), while the highest ranking Florida suburb was Palm Beach, at No. 11.

    The study’s methodology included GOBankingRates looking at all cities with 5,000 households or more. They then isolated the 50 cities with the highest average household income as sourced from the 2022 American Community Survey. ‘

    Then, they were able to find which metro area they were a suburb of as well as the 2024 typical home value for the city as sourced from Zillow. All data was collected and is up to date as of June 18, 2024.

    Moving to the southern regions, West University Place in Texas, a suburb of Houston, stands out with an average household income of $403,845 and home values around $1.6 million. This area exemplifies the economic growth and the appeal of Texan suburbs, blending high-income living with relatively more affordable housing compared to some northeastern counterparts.

    Similarly, University Park in the Dallas-Fort Worth area shows the economic dynamism of Texas, with average incomes of $381,235 and home values of $2.3 million, highlighting the state’s burgeoning affluence.

    On the West Coast, Los Altos, California, within the San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara region, showcases extreme wealth with average household incomes at $400,817 and home values reaching a staggering $4.5 million, the report says. The Silicon Valley effect is palpable here, as tech-driven prosperity pushes real estate prices to astronomical heights.

    Another Californian suburb, Paradise Valley in Arizona, part of the Phoenix metropolitan area, combines high incomes averaging $385,643 with home values of $3.4 million, marking it as a premier destination for the wealthy seeking luxurious living with scenic desert landscapes.

    The suburbs around the nation’s capital also feature prominently on this list. Great Falls and McLean in Virginia, part of the Washington-Arlington-Alexandria metro area, both boast average household incomes well above $360,000, with home values hovering around $1.5 million.

    These suburbs are notable for their proximity to the political power center of Washington D.C., providing a residential haven for high-income professionals and government officials.

    From the Midwest to the Southeast, affluent suburbs like Hinsdale, Illinois, and Palm Beach, Florida, also make the list. Hinsdale, part of the Chicago metro area, reflects the blend of historical charm and modern wealth, with average incomes of $380,479 and home values over $1 million.

    Palm Beach, a renowned enclave within the Miami metropolitan area, tops the charts with home values averaging an astonishing $11.5 million, fueled by its status as a playground for the ultra-rich. This diversity in geographic locations among the wealthiest suburbs illustrates the widespread nature of wealth across different regions of the United States.

    The full study and full list of top 50 suburbs from GoBankingRates can be found here.

    Tyler Durden
    Fri, 07/05/2024 – 18:00

  • The Paradigm Shift Of The New Populism
    The Paradigm Shift Of The New Populism

    Authored by Jeffrey Tucker via The Epoch Times,

    The Supreme Court last week reversed a decision from 1984 that was responsible for a dramatic turn in American life. The precedent was called Chevron deference. It said that judges should allow executive-department agencies to make rules that affect commercial and civil life, effectively giving them broad discretionary authority that displaced Congressional and judicial oversight.

    The previous rule was designed to unclog the courts from endless litigation over legislative interpretations that was making life difficult for business. The unintended consequence of the shift in 1984 was to increase interventions but not from Congress or judges but from agencies, which blew up in size and authority over the course of 40 years. This was ripe for a hard challenge, and the Supreme Court certainly stepped up.

    The new rule (from Loper Bright v. Secretary of Commerce) is that agencies cannot interpret laws as they wish but rather are restrained by the words of legislation from the people’s representatives.

    The implications are profound.

    Above all else, it means transferring responsibility back to the people and their representatives. It is part of a new form of populism that has come about in response to obvious calamities.

    Think back to four years ago when agency deference was riding high, imposing an astonishing number of instant laws about medical matters, social distancing, business closures, masking, and even mail-in voting. It was all pushed through by agency authority having nothing to do with Congressional mandate.

    Americans suddenly found themselves ruled by a system of government they did not know they had. Consider the declaration that essential workers could work but nonessential workers would need to stay home. Was that a law? Not really. It was more like an edict. No one knew who would enforce it or what the penalties were for noncompliance.

    We know now that the declaration came from the Cybersecurity and Information Security Agency, a division within the Department of Homeland Security created in 2018. Its declaration was even more powerful and decisive over national life than the Department of Labor, which was never even consulted.

    Again, this was not law and not legislation. It was edict and no one really knew how it came to be that this agency, about which no one knew anything, possessed this kind of power. The offending legal basis was precisely this Chevron deference, which tempted every agency just to go rogue and test out its powers whenever it wanted to.

    In those months and years, we came to be ruled by credentialed experts, not all and not even most but those experts who had close access to powerful agencies. They overrode scientific consensus, popular will, and even settled law. It all happened so suddenly. The goal of crushing the virus through force was never plausible and neither was the notion that we could vaccinate our way out of a fast-moving respiratory infection.

    For those still suffering from those days, and that includes nearly everyone, the Supreme Court’s decision in Loper (reversing Chevron) should provide some sense of relief. It will take time for the court decision to have a practical impact but the reality is that if the new rule had been in force four years ago, the nation would have been spared the pain of lockdowns and closures, and probably even the forced vaccination campaign.

    The new rule is also consistent with a new governing ethos that is sweeping the world today, against arbitrary rule by powerful elites and toward more democratic accountability. That one idea is now unsettling political systems in the United States, UK, and EU, and beyond. It provides no light to describe this movement as “far-right,” as the New York Times says daily. It is something different.

    We might call the ethos the new populism. It is neither left nor right, but it borrows themes from both in the past. From the so-called “right,” it derives the confidence that people in their own lives and communities have a better capacity for wise decision-making than trusting the authorities at the top. From the old left, the new populism takes the demand for free speech, fundamental rights, and deep suspicion of corporate and government power.

    The theme of being skeptical of empowered and entrenched elites is the salient point. This applies across the board. It is not only about politics. It hits media, medicine, courts, academia, and every other high-end sector. And this is in every country.

    This really does amount to a paradigmatic shift. It seems not temporary but substantial and likely lasting. What happened over four years unleashed this mass wave of incredulity that had been building for decades before. The final straw was the coercive pandemic response in which governments in the world issued stay-at-home orders, closed small businesses, restricted travel, forced masks on the population, and then mandated shots of an experimental technology.

    All of this was generally celebrated by most large media outlets, endorsed by academia, and cheered by all respectable opinion. But this was not actually “common-sense public health.” It was radical and far-reaching, and there never was a clear statement of the end goal. Many jurisdictions locked us down until vaccination became available, and then made an effort to innoculate most everyone in the population.

    That’s a big plan and it all turned on one key assumption, namely that the shot would work to end the pandemic. It did not work particularly well. It stopped neither infection nor transmission. Nor did the experts anticipate the levels of injury that would result from repeated uses of the same shot, even though the existing literature warned against that exact strategy.

    Here’s the problem with blaming all experts for this fiasco. Many people with high credentials were warning against this approach the entire time. They were shouted down and censored. Many others believed that this was the wrong approach but they were prevented for career reasons from telling the truth.

    This is the reason why the new populism is strongly committed to free speech. Without the opportunity to discuss and consider the evidence, we miss important truths and find ourselves blindly following the opinions of the most powerful.

    To be sure, the word populism has something of a sordid history in the 20th century, mostly due to the political upheavals in the interwar period that profoundly affected industrialized economies. FDR spoke like a populist but so did emergent leaders in fascist Europe. This form of populism was very different from that in our own time. It rallied around the ability of experts to plan the economy and manage the culture.

    For example, FDR’s first inaugural address struck populist notes by denouncing “the rulers of the exchange of mankind’s goods” and “the unscrupulous money changers” who “stand indicted in the court of public opinion, rejected by the hearts and minds of men.” In practice, he drew on credentialed expertise and agency power to remake many features of the U.S. economy, imposing price controls, industrial subsidies, tight rules on all commercial transactions, all with the goal of lifting prices under the mistaken belief that low prices were causing the depression.

    The grand theory that drove the response to the Great Depression was rooted in the emergent thoughts of John Maynard Keynes, who flipped many features of classical economics on their head. In essence, his theory was that government itself should be empowered to manage the whole through careful manipulation of aggregate supply and demand, a dream that was never realizable or desirable.

    In many ways, the New Deal ended up not as a populist effort but one that empowered an elite class of social and economic managers. The pattern grew worse and worse through the decades. The Chevron decision of 1984 codified it into law. But we saw the same patterns in the UK and in European countries. The movements were called populist but they all drew on scientistic schemes for improved economic and social management by imposition from the top.

    We’ve been told to “trust the science” for the better part of a century. The push back against that paradigm had to wait until the apotheosis of central planning with the pandemic lockdowns, which were followed very quickly by efforts to use government power to control the climate. Together with that, and all over the world, the mass migration crisis unfolded as governments shifted from their core duties to aspirations of virus and climate control.

    Now we find ourselves in the midst of a dramatic paradigm shift, a new populism that rejects the idea that a powerful elite knows what is better for societies than the people themselves. In this view, the new populism is not a return to the interwar variety but something much earlier.

    What comes to mind in the American context is the movement by President Andrew Jackson in the 1830s. He stood against the National Bank, fought for the rights of the states against the federal government (except on the tariff), and generally sided with the people over elites. In other words, he embraced the original idea of democracy. If you want to understand what’s happening in the world today in light of American history, that’s a great place to begin.

    Tyler Durden
    Fri, 07/05/2024 – 17:40

  • Netanyahu, Biden 'Likely' To Meet As Progressives Plan Boycott Of Congressional Speech
    Netanyahu, Biden ‘Likely’ To Meet As Progressives Plan Boycott Of Congressional Speech

    The White House has announced that President Joe Biden will ‘likely’ meet with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu later this month, when he’ll be in Washington to address a joint session of Congress on July 24.

    His invitation to address Congress by Republicans has already proven divisive, given a number of Democrats have declared they intend to boycott it. Likely dozens will not be in attendance, similar to what happened when the Israeli premier addressed Congress nearly a decade ago.

    Flash90/Reuters

    On Wednesday a White House official told The Times of Israel that “The president has known Prime Minister Netanyahu for three decades. They will likely see each other when the prime minister is here over the course of that week, but we have nothing to announce at this time.”

    But tensions have been soaring, given just last month the White House canceled a meeting with an Israeli national security delegation after Netanyahu issued a video chastising the US for withholding some weapons shipments. The White House was left furious.

    At the time, Biden press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre called into question the Israeli leader’s narrative. “We genuinely do not know what he’s talking about. We just don’t,“ she told reporters.

    She had noted that “there was one particular shipment of munitions that was paused, and you’ve heard us talk about that many times.” Jean-Pierre then emphasized, “There are no other pauses — none — no other pauses or holds in place.”

    Biden has over the last months on various occasions gone negative against the ‘far right’ Netanyahu government, despite Israel having long been a very close US ally, over human rights abuses and mass killings in Gaza.

    The US administration has on the one hand continued to approve of major weapons and aid packages to Israel, but on the other has highlighted the soaring civilian death toll due to the IDF offensive. Progressive Democrats have made their anger known, with many vowing to not vote for Biden in November.

    Newsweek has recently highlighted Congressional Democrat discontent with Biden’s Gaza policy in the following: 

    The AP reported that interviews with more than a dozen Democrats revealed the discontent over Netanyahu’s upcoming speech, and how some feel it is a Republican ploy to divide Democrats.

    Some Democrats have said they will attend Netanyahu’s speech to show support for Israel, but others are clear that they won’t be attending.

    Rep. Lloyd Doggett, a deputy whip for the Congressional Progressive Caucus, has stated that Netanyahu “needs to be staying in Israel and working for the peace that he has been unwilling to support in the past.”

    https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

    The “indiscriminate bombing that he has encouraged… has led to loss of lives that should never have happened. He has not prioritized the hostages; he ought to be doing that instead of coming here,” he told The Hill days ago.

    Tyler Durden
    Fri, 07/05/2024 – 17:20

  • Nashville Trans Shooter Left Over 100 GB Of Evidence, All To Be Kept Secret
    Nashville Trans Shooter Left Over 100 GB Of Evidence, All To Be Kept Secret

    Authored by Ken Silva via Headline USA,

    Nashville Judge I’Ashea Myles has decided that none of Nashville school shooter Audrey Hale’s writings should be made public, accepting the dubious argument that Hale’s victims have copyrights to the material—even though the victims haven’t registered with the federal copyright office.

    “The materials created by Hale are exempted from disclosure based on the federal Copyright Act,” Myles said.

    “Whether or not an original work of authorship has been registered with the federal copyright office is germane to the amount of recoverable damages in a copyright infringement action, but it has no bearing on whether or not this state law is preempted by federal copyright law,” she said.

    The judge also ruled that disclosing Hale’s writings could inspire copycat killers, disregarding the testimony of an expert psychologist who said that there’s no evidence to support that copycat theory.

    Myles is the same judge to trample on the First Amendment by threatening a newspaper that’s already published some of Hale’s writings. According to Myles’s Thursday ruling, the evidence held by law enforcement includes more than 100 gigabytes of data.

    https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

    Police have said the writings that they collected as part of their investigation into the March 27, 2023, shooting at the Covenant School that killed three 9-year-old children and three adult staff members are public records. However, they have said they cannot be released until their investigation is concluded.

    Despite law enforcement’s attempts to keep the manifesto secret, the first three pages the purported manifesto were leaked to conservative broadcaster Steven Crowder last November. The Nashville Police Department reportedly suspended seven detectives over the leak.

    The portion of the manifesto that was leaked purportedly revealed Hale, who identified a transgender, had been planning the school shooting for years, and that she deliberately targeted “white privileged” “cr*****s” and “f****ts.”

    “Can’t believe I’m doing this but I’m ready… I hope my victims aren’t,” Hale wrote. “My only fear is if anything goes wrong. I’ll do my best to prevent any of the sort. God let my wrath take over my anxiety. It might be 10 minutes tops. It might be 3-7. It’s gonna go quick. I hope I have a high death count. Ready to die.”

    The more recent excerpts published by The Star reveal Hale’s transgender ideation.

    “2007 was the birth of puberty blockers and a newfound discovery for treatment of non-conforming transgender children,” Hale reportedly wrote. “I’d kill to have those resources.”

    It appears that the vast majority of Hale’s writings have yet to be released.

    Ken Silva is a staff writer at Headline USA. Follow him at twitter.com/jd_cashless.

    Tyler Durden
    Fri, 07/05/2024 – 17:00

  • US Bank Deposits Fell Ahead Of Stress Tests; Fed Bailout Facility Stuck At Massive $107BN
    US Bank Deposits Fell Ahead Of Stress Tests; Fed Bailout Facility Stuck At Massive $107BN

    Heading into the bank stress tests, money-market fund total assets rose by a de minimus $5BN while seasonally-adjusted bank deposits fell $18BN to $17.594 TN…

    Source: Bloomberg

    And, on a non-seasonally-adjusted basis, deposits also fell (for the second straight week) by $14.8BN

    Source: Bloomberg

    Excluding foreign deposits, total domestic deposits fell on both an SA and NSA basis (-$15BN and -$5BN respectively)…

    Source: Bloomberg

    Small banks and Large banks both saw $7.5BN outflows (SA) each, while on an NSA basis, Small banks saw $5.9BN outflows as Large banks saw around $1BN of deposits inflows.

    Usage of The Fed’s bank bailout facility shrank a tiny amount – but still remains at an extremely high $107BN that the banks do not want to repay any time soon…

    Source: Bloomberg

    On the other side of the ledger, loan volumes shrank overall with a $630MN increase at large banks offset by a $3.7BN loan volume shrink at small banks…

    Source: Bloomberg

    Finally, US equity market capitalization remains drastically decoupled from its historically tight relationship with bank reserves at The Fed…

    Source: Bloomberg

    But globally, central bank balance sheet shrinkage continues as stocks soar…

    Source: Bloomberg

    Now that would be quite recoupling…

    Tyler Durden
    Fri, 07/05/2024 – 16:40

  • Who Turned Off The Gaslight?
    Who Turned Off The Gaslight?

    Authored by James Howard Kunstler via Kunstler.com,

    “Things were bad, and they knew things were bad, and they knew others must also know things were bad, and yet they would need to pretend, outwardly, that things were fine. The president was fine. The election would be fine.”

    – Olivia Nuzzi, NY Magazine

    There’s a reason that the fable of The Emperor’s New Clothes is so potent: it describes a mentally ill society that retreats into abject unreality, to avoid contending with truth.

    Alas, this archetypal human quandary shoves such a society towards nemesis: downfall and punishment.

    And that is exactly the consequence of our news media’s craven, dishonorable, degenerate behavior the past decade.

    They have disordered our nation’s consensus about reality with peremptory lying about everything, in service to a political party that lies to its citizens about everything. The big question is: who or what recruited them into serving the Party of Chaos, and why did they go along?

    You can explain the media’s initial repugnance to Donald Trump going back to his 2015 debut in politics. Much about him had a low-class odor, despite all the gold-plating — his origins in tawdry Queens, his career as a builder in Manhattan where the trades are mob-controlled, the Atlantic City casino debacle, bankruptcy, ditching Ivana and his mid-life playboy reputation, the tacky TV show, the increasingly mystifying hair-doo, his rough, jumbly manner of speech. Everything about him repelled the Ivy Leaguers who increasingly filled the ranks of national-level journalism.

    Despite all that, Mr. Trump raised five kids successfully. The grown ones had careers and they all visibly loved him. With that and his overt masculinity, he assumed the lineaments of the archetypal Daddy, which enflamed the enormous cohort of feminists who had taken over the Democratic Party behind their avatar Hillary Clinton. And when he squeaked out an electoral victory over her in 2016, they were sure it was a cheat. The menace of Daddy in da (White) house pushed them over the edge psychologically.

    Daddy was all about setting boundaries, which was the antithesis to the “progressive” (and transgressive) agenda of the Dems, and was probably the reason that his talk of “building the wall” along the Mexican border drove them nuts. It signaled patriarchal control of a whole lot of other things, too. Boundaries galore!

    Now, it happened that the Democratic Party was also the favored party of the DC permanent bureaucracy, which had been growing and growing for decades and had become overtly politicized during the eight years of Barack Obama. Mr. Trump threatened to downsize this leviathan government, meaning many patronage jobs might be lost. (Boundaries would be imposed!) The warrior branch of this Deep State was the Intel community. The FBI, the DOJ, the CIA, the State Dept, and elements of the military were commissioned by the Democratic Party to destroy Mr. Trump.

    They used the machinery of the law to lay one trip after another on the president and effectively hog-tied him — RussiaGate, the Ukraine phone call impeachment, the George Floyd anarchy — and when those operations failed to oust him, they ran the Covid-19 caper (with enormous collateral damage to the people and their economy), which enabled rigging the 2020 election with mail-in ballots. Once Mr. Trump was squeezed out-of-office, the FBI turned the J-6 protest at the Capitol into a riot, which Nancy Pelosi then converted into an “insurrection” using the House J-6 committee. The J-6 incident, they dearly hoped, would rid them of Mr. Trump once and for all.

    The news media went along with every bit of that, year after year, converting each mendacious act of the party and the bureaucracy into consumable narrative, and lying either overtly about all the ops, or just omitting to report on the dark truth behind it all. Any reality-based thread that happened to leak into public view from independent alt-news reporters was branded by CNN, The New York Times, the WashPo, and many others as “misinformation” — a newish concept produced by a cadre of language Stasi skilled at inverting the meaning of anything to bamboozle the public. It appears that the news media became so invested psychologically in its own dishonest product that it began to believe its own bullshit.

    Or, at least, they wanted to pretend to believe it. One of the big problems was that absolutely everything they labeled “misinformation” or “conspiracy theory” turned out to be truthful, and that was becoming an inescapable embarrassment. And then the biggest blunder they made was going along with the Deep State’s selection of “Joe Biden” in the very sketchy Super Tuesday primary of 2020. The old grifter had next-to-zero support in all the preceding preliminaries and somehow (abracadabra !) he swept the field.

    By then, the Democratic Party, and its public relations arm in the mainstream media, had descended into florid mental illness. Everything they stood for post-World War Two flipped to its opposite. Suddenly, they were against free speech. They weren’t coy about it. They just made-up some new bullshit about free speech being “hate speech.” Similarly, they were against a free press. They went along with all the misinfo / disinfo bullshit the government cooked up and supported its role in suppressing the news. They were no longer anti-war, the party-of-peace. They were now pro-segregation and pro-discrimination (white people need not apply) according to Critical Race Theory (a childishly sketchy doctrine). Most of all, they were no longer skeptical of anything that the leviathan establishment wanted to do, including abridging the liberties of American citizens.

    Then there was the campaign to use the most powerful human instinct, sexuality, as a weapon to disorder the minds of American children, leading even to the mutilation of their bodies — a program that unmistakably tipped toward genuine evil, suggesting that actual psychosis lay behind the Cluster-B crypto-Marxism used to justify it.

    “Joe Biden” was fine with all of that, and the news media was fine with “Joe Biden” and whoever was using him as a front. Of course, it was evident during the 2020 campaign that “Joe Biden” was not up to a job as demanding as Chief Executive of the US government — and that was even apart from the dense criminal web of influence peddling discovered around him and his family, which the news media ignominiously ignored. But now the years have gone by and there’s no hiding “Joe Biden’s” rather gravely diminished mental abilities.

    Last week’s debate gave away the game. It had the effect of finally turning off the gaslight that the news media has been shining over the republic lo these many years.

    They can no longer pretend that this president is anything close to okay in body and mind. They can’t annul the gaslighted public’s delayed realization that they’ve been subject to a concerted program of deliberate lying for a long long time.

    So now, inveterate pretenders and liars, such as Jake Tapper of CNN and Maggie Haberman of The New York Times — and many others — have to pretend that they were innocently duped into supporting all the turpitudes of the Democratic Party / Deep State axis-of-evil. It is really hard to imagine that they can successfully rehabilitate their reputations. They have done immense harm to our country. It’s hard to see how the Democratic Party might survive, too, no matter who they finally put up for election this year. Of course, there’s still plenty of time left for them to destroy the country altogether. Just keep giving American missiles to Ukraine to fire into Russia and see what happens.

    *  *  *

    Support his blog by visiting Jim’s Patreon Page or Substack

    Tyler Durden
    Fri, 07/05/2024 – 16:20

Digest powered by RSS Digest