Whistleblowers Charge FBI with Labeling Evidence Against Hunter Biden as “Misinformation.”

Wethinks Social Media doth protested too much about “misinformation”

“Facebook Jail” was where social media users were sent if they dared to post information that went against the official narrative regarding, well, just about everything:  The origins of the Wuhan Flu.  Giving Covid-19 that name.  Warnings about the subsequent mRNA vaccines.  Refusal to obey the Mask Mandate.  Criticism of shutting down the economy during the pandemic.  Accusations that the 2020 Election was stolen.  Criticism of Critical Race Theory.  Criticism of transgenderism and homosexuality.

In April 2019, the proprietor of a computer repair shop in Wilmington, Del., informed the F.B.I. that an abandoned laptop computer, belonging to Hunter Biden, contained potentially criminal information, including photos of the former vice president’s son smoking crack and consorting with prostitutes.

The Media and Social Media sat on the story until after the 2020 Election.  Later, many voters who had voted for Joe  Biden stated in polls that they never would have voted for him had they known about this information.  The information also allegedly indicated that Joe was complicit in Hunter’s business deals in the Ukraine, China and other countries, involving billions of dollars in exchange for face-time with the Vice President

Former New York City Mayor Rudolf Giuliani, an attorney, took possession of the laptop and he and his team assisted in the investigation of the laptop.  Since Biden had abandoned the machine, Giuliani had a perfectly legal right to purchase it.

Since then, it seems, the F.B.I. has been doing everything it can to impede or mislead the investigation.  According to a July 28, 2022 article in The Federalist by Margot Cleveland:

The recent charge leveled by multiple whistleblowers that FBI headquarters falsely labeled verifiable evidence of wrongdoing by Hunter Biden “disinformation” raises the specter that agents also impeded the separate investigations run by the Pittsburgh and Delaware U.S. attorneys’ offices.

On Monday, Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, announced that “multiple FBI whistleblowers, including those in senior positions” had accused Washington Field Office assistant special agent in charge Timothy Thibault and other FBI officials of “falsely portray[ing] as disinformation evidence acquired from multiple sources that provided the FBI derogatory information related to Hunter Biden’s financial and foreign business activities, even though some of that information had already been or could be verified.”

The whistleblowers, Grassley explained, had further claimed that “in August of 2020, FBI supervisory intelligence analyst Brian Auten opened an assessment, which was used by a team of agents at FBI headquarters to improperly discredit and falsely claim that derogatory information about Biden’s activities was disinformation, causing investigative activity and sourcing to be shut down.”

“The FBI headquarters team allegedly placed their assessment findings in a restricted access subfolder, effectively flagging sources and derogatory evidence related to Hunter Biden as disinformation while shielding the justification for such findings from scrutiny,” according to Grassley.

This explosive revelation conflicts with the storyline leaked by law enforcement officials to the New York Times shortly after Joe Biden’s election — just as news of the investigation into the financial dealings of his son reached a fever pitch.

Soon after Hunter Biden disclosed that the Delaware U.S. attorney’s office was investigating him and had served multiple subpoenas on him and his business associates, the Times published a story discussing the separate investigation run out of the Pittsburgh U.S. attorney’s office.

“As federal investigators in Delaware were examining the finances of Hunter Biden during his father’s campaign for president, a similar inquiry ramped up this year in Pittsburgh, fueled by materials delivered by President Trump’s personal lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani,” the Times article opened. “Attorney General William P. Barr had asked the top federal prosecutor in Pittsburgh, Scott W. Brady, to accept and vet any information that Mr. Giuliani had on the Biden family, including Hunter Biden,” the December 14, 2020, article continued, claiming that “Brady hosted Mr. Giuliani for a nearly four-hour meeting in late January to discuss his materials.”

The Times article then proceeded to paint the then-Pittsburgh U.S. attorney as a partisan hack and, relying on unnamed sources, claimed that Barr’s decision to direct Brady to oversee an “intake process for information about Ukraine to ‘assess its provenance and its credibility,’” was “highly unusual because prosecutors in Delaware had already been scrutinizing Hunter Biden for more than a year.”

Barr made clear at the time, however, that investigators had to be careful about any information originating from Ukraine because “there are a lot of agendas in the Ukraine, a lot of crosscurrents.”

“We can’t take anything we received from Ukraine at face value,” Barr stressed. And the Times — while spinning the narrative that there was something nefarious about Barr’s decision to task Brady with oversight of information provided by Giuliani, claiming “the arrangement immediately raised alarms within the F.B.I. and the Justice Department” — even acknowledged in its article that Barr “has farmed out other politically-sensitive investigations to trusted U.S. attorneys outside Washington.”

Then, relying “on interviews with five current and former law enforcement officials and others with knowledge of F.B.I. interactions with the Justice Department,” the Times reported that Brady sought “to take aggressive steps,” including having the F.B.I. interview a list of potential witnesses, which supposedly “prompted a tense confrontation with F.B.I. officials at the bureau’s headquarters in Washington.”

Significantly, the Times reported that “the F.B.I. viewed the investigative steps into Mr. Biden that Mr. Brady sought as unwarranted because the Delaware inquiry involving money laundering had fizzled out and because they were skeptical of Mr. Giuliani’s material.  For example, they had already examined a laptop owned by Mr. Biden and an external hard drive that had been abandoned at a computer store in Wilmington and found nothing to advance the inquiry.”

The Times had previously reported that “as part of the F.B.I.’s closely held money-laundering investigation into [Hunter] Biden, agents working with federal prosecutors in Delaware authorized a federal grand jury subpoena and obtained the laptop and an external hard drive.”  In seizing the laptop and external hard drive from the Delaware repair store, the FBI’s receipt confirming the seizure “included an F.B.I. code, 272D, the bureau’s internal classification for money laundering investigations, and ‘BA’ for its Baltimore field office.” (The FBI’s Baltimore field office supports the Delaware’s U.S. Attorney’s office.) But, according to the Times’ sources, “the F.B.I. examined the laptop but that its contents did not advance the money-laundering investigation.”

But now, some two years later, we know that the Times reporting is factually incorrect, which even the New York legacy outlet’s coverage earlier this year confirms, in two respects. First, the “money laundering” aspect of the Delaware inquiry into Hunter Biden had not “fizzled out,” but according to their sources remains a part of the Delaware U.S. attorney’s grand jury investigation.  And second, the laptop contained evidence supportive of the money-laundering probe and potentially other crimes.

Yet in 2020, five officials told the Times a different story, and some further claimed that in response to the Pittsburgh U.S. attorney’s investigation, FBI agents “found ways to ostensibly satisfy Mr. Brady,” raising questions of how precisely they thwarted his investigation.

When coupled with what the multiple whistleblowers, including some in senior positions, told Grassley, it appears the F.B.I. headquarters either improperly withheld information or presented inaccurate information to the U.S. attorney’s office in Pittsburgh and possibly also Delaware.

And what better way to hide that fact than for FBI headquarters to leak to the New York Times that the laptop held nothing nefarious and to portray any investigative findings coming from the Pittsburgh U.S. attorney’s office as politically suspect?  With that narrative in place, other FBI agents, including those supporting the Delaware U.S. attorney’s office investigation, would have no reason to question FBI headquarters’ claims that evidence was “disinformation.”

What other purpose would the leaks to the Times serve?  With a Biden election, a new slate of U.S. attorneys would soon be on the job, so the political hit on Brady made no sense at that late date.  Similarly, many of the complaints aired in the December 2020 piece by the Times’ sources concerned fears that Brady or his team would influence the November 2020 election by leaking details of the investigation, but with the election over and without any leaks, that criticism rang hollow.

But if the five unnamed officials knew they had withheld information from the Pittsburgh and Delaware U.S. attorney’s offices related to the investigation into the Biden family and/or had improperly closed down sources and evidentiary trails as alleged by the whistleblowers, then creating the public perception that there is “no there, there” would help hide this reality.

So as Grassley proceeds with his investigation into the whistleblowers’ allegations, he should also assess whether FBI headquarters withheld or provided inaccurate information to the two U.S. attorney’s offices that had been charged with investigating Hunter Biden and his family business dealings.  More significantly, with the Delaware U.S. attorney’s office still investigating Biden, it is imperative that prosecutors there — or better yet, a special counsel — review all evidence gathered by the Pittsburgh office and any files touched by FBI headquarters to ensure the integrity of the investigation.

Former U.S. Attorney Scott Brady and Delaware U.S. Attorney David C. Weiss both declined to comment in response to inquiries by The Federalist. Grassley’s office, however, confirmed to The Federalist that the senator has not spoken with either the Pittsburgh or the Delaware U.S. attorney’s offices about the whistleblowers’ allegations.

The discovery of the Biden laptop was no “October Surprise.”  It was found in April 2019, long before the election.  That was when the investigation should have begun and the information revealed.  If there is credible evidence – which this was – that a potential President of the United States has been implicit in some truly serious crimes – money-laundering, influence peddling – the public has a right to know. 

You’re darned right it would have affected the outcome of the 2020 Presidential Election – voters who were polled said so.  What does this say (that we don’t already know) about our press, broadcast and social media?  What does it say about the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which comes under the auspices of the Department of Justice, whose had is appointed by the President himself?

The FBI was a Progessive Era creation by President Theodore Roosevelt, which originated from a force of Special Agents created in 1908 by Attorney General Charles Bonaparte during the Presidency of Theodore Roosevelt. When the two first met in 1892, Roosevelt, then Civil Service Commissioner, boasted of his reforms in federal law enforcement. This was a time when law enforcement was often political rather than professional. Roosevelt spoke with pride of his insistence that Border Patrol applicants pass marksmanship tests, with the most accurate getting the jobs.

The two men shared the conviction that efficiency and expertise, not political connections, should determine who could best serve in government. When Roosevelt became President of the United States in 1901, he appointed Bonaparte to be Attorney General. In 1908, Bonaparte applied their Progressive philosophy to the Department of Justice by creating a corps of Special Agents. It had neither a name nor an officially designated leader other than the Attorney General. Yet, these former detectives and Secret Service men were the forerunners of the FBI.

Today, most Americans take for granted that our country needs a federal investigative service, but in 1908, the establishment of this kind of agency at a national level was highly controversial. The U.S. Constitution is based on “federalism:” a national government with jurisdiction over matters that crossed boundaries, like interstate commerce and foreign affairs, with all other powers reserved to the states.  Throughout the 1800s, Americans usually looked to cities, counties, and states to fulfill most government responsibilities. However, by the 20th century, easier transportation and communications, through which Progressive politicians convinced average Americans that they were in danger of being over-powered by Big Monopolies with irresponsible labor management attitudes, had created a climate of opinion favorable to the federal government establishing a strong investigative tradition.  They’d convinced the American people that Big Government was the answer to Big Corporations.

The impulse among the American people toward a responsive federal government, coupled with  an idealistic, reformist spirit, characterized what is known as the Progressive Era, approximately 1900 to 1918. The Progressive generation believed that government intervention was necessary to produce justice in an industrial society. Moreover, it looked to “experts” in all phases of industry and government to produce that just society.  Ordinary people were told that they could not be expected to govern the ever-growing countyr.

President Roosevelt personified Progressivism at the national level. A federal investigative force, consisting of well-disciplined experts and designed to fight corruption and crime, fit Roosevelt’s Progressive scheme of government.  Attorney General Bonaparte shared his President’s Progressive philosophy. However, the Department of Justice under Bonaparte had no investigators of its own except for a few Special Agents who carried out specific assignments for the Attorney General, and a force of Examiners (trained as accountants) who reviewed the financial transactions of the federal cour ts. Since its beginning in 1870, the Department of Justice used funds appropriated to investigate federal crimes to hire private detectives first, and later investigators from other federal agencies. (Federal crimes are those that were considered interstate or occurred on federal government reservations.)

By 1907, the Department of Justice most frequently called upon Secret Service “operatives” to conduct investigations.  These men were well-trained, dedicated — and expensive.  Moreover, they reported not to the Attorney General, but to the Chief of the Secret Service.  This situation frustrated Bonaparte, who wanted complete control of investigations under his jurisdiction. Congress provided the impetus for Bonaparte to acquire his own force. On May 27, 1908, it enacted a law preventing the Department of Justice from engaging Secret Service operatives.

The following month, Attorney General Bonaparte appointed a force of Special Agents within the Department of Justice. Accordi ngly, ten former Secret Service employees and a number of Department of Justice investigators became Special Agents of the Department of Justice.  On July 26, 1908, Bonaparte ordered them to report to Chief Examiner Stanley W. Finch.  This action is celebrated as the beginning of the F.B.I.

Both Attorney General Bonaparte and President Theodore Roosevelt, who completed their terms in March 1909, recommended that the force of 34 Agents become a permanent part of the Department of Justice. Attorney-General George Wickersham, Bonaparte’s successor, named the force the Bureau of Investigation on March 16, 1909.  At that time, the title of Chief Examiner was changed to Chief of the Bureau of Investigation.

When the Bureau was established, there were few federal crimes. The Bureau of Investigation primarily investigated violations of laws involving national banking, bankruptcy, naturalization, antitrust, peonage, and land fraud.  Because the early Bureau provided no formal training, previous law enforcement experience or a background in the law was considered desirable.

The first major expansion in Bureau jurisdiction came in June 1910 when the Mann (“White Slave”) Act was passed, making it a crime to transport women over state lines for immoral purposes.  It also provided a tool by which the federal government could investigate criminals who evaded state laws but had no other federal violations.  Finch became Commissioner of White Slavery Act violations in 1912, and former Special Examiner A. Bruce Bielaski became the new Bureau of Investigation Chief.

Over the next few years, the number of Special Agents grew to more than 300, and these individuals were complemented by another 300 support employees.  Field offices existed from the Bureau’s inception.  Each field operation was controlled by a Special Agent in Charge who was responsible to Washington.  Most field offices were located in major cities.  However, several were located near the Mexican border where they concentrated on smuggling, neutrality violations, and intelligence collection, often in connection with the Mexican revolution.

With the April 1917 entry of the United States into World War I during Woodrow Wilson’s administration, the Bureau’s work was increased again.  As a result of the war, the Bureau acquired responsibility for the Espionage, Selective Service, and Sabotage Acts, and assisted the Department of Labor by investigating enemy aliens.  During these years Special Agents with general investigative experience and facility in certain languages augmented the Bureau.

William J. Flynn, former head of the Secret Service, became Director of the Bureau of Investigation in July 1919 and was the first to use that title.  In October 1919, the passage of the National Motor Vehicle Theft Act gave the Bureau of Investigation another tool by which to prosecute criminals who previously evaded the law by crossing state lines. With the return of the country to “normalcy” under President Warren G. Harding in 1921, the Bureau of Investigation returned to its pre-war role of fighting the few federal crimes.

The years from 1921 to 1933 were sometimes called the “lawless years” because of the many gangsters and the public disregard for Prohibition, which made it illegal to sell or import intoxicating beverages. Prohibition created a new federal medium for fighting crime, but the Department of the Treasury, not the Department of Justice, had jurisdiction for these violations.

Attacking crimes that were federal in scope but local in jurisdiction called for creative solutions. The Bureau of Investigation had limited success using its narrow jurisdiction to investigate some of the criminals of “the gangster era.” For example, it investigated Al Capone as a “fugitive federal witness.”

A federal investigation of a resurgent white supremacy movement also required creativity. The Ku Klux Klan, dormant since the late 1800s, was revived in part to counteract the economic gains made by African Americans during World War I.  The Bureau of Investigation used the Mann Act to bring Louisiana’s philandering Ku Klux Klan “Imperial Kleagle” to justice.

Through these investigations and other more traditional investigations of neutrality violations and antitrust violations, the Bureau of Investigation gained stature.  Although the Harding Administration suffered from unqualified and sometimes corrupt officials, the Progressive Era reform tradition continued among the professional Department of Justice Special Agents.  The new Bureau of Investigation Director, William J. Burns, who had previously run his own detective agency, appointed 26-year-old J. Edgar Hoover as Assistant Director. Hoover, a graduate of George Washington University Law School, had worked for the Department of Justice since 1917, where he headed the enemy alien operations during World War I and assisted in the General Intelligence Division under Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer, investigating suspected anarchists and communists.

After President Harding died in 1923, his successor, Calvin Coolidge, appointed replacements for Harding’s cronies in the Cabinet.  For the new Attorney General, Coolidge appointed attorney Harlan Fiske Stone who, on May 10, 1924, selected Hoover to head the Bureau of Investigation.  By inclination and training, Hoover embodied the Progressive tradition.  His appointment ensured that the Bureau of Investigation would keep that tradition alive.

When J. Edgar Hoover took over, the Bureau of Investigation had approximately 650 employees, including 441 Special Agents who worked in field offices in nine cities.  By the end of the decade, there were approximately 30 field offices, with Divisional headquarters in New York, Baltimore, Atlanta, Cincinnati, Chicago, Kansas City, San Antonio, San Francisco, and Portland.

He immediately fired those Agents he considered unqualified and proceeded to professionalize the organization.  For example, Hoover abolished the seniority rule of promotion and introduced uniform performance appraisals.  He also scheduled regular inspections of the operations in all field offices.  Then, in January 1928, Hoover established a formal training course for new Agents, including the requirement that New Agents had to be in the 25-35 year range to apply. He also returned to the earlier preference for Special Agents with law or accounting experience.

The new Director was also keenly aware that the Bureau of Investigation could not fight crime without public support.  In remarks prepared for the Attorney General in 1925, he wrote, “The Agents of the Bureau of Investigation have been impressed with the fact that the real problem of law enforcement is in trying to obtain the cooperation and sympathy of the public and that they cannot hope to get such cooperation until they themselves merit the respect of the public.” Also in 1925, Agent Edwin C. Shanahan became the first Agent to be killed in the line of duty when he was murdered by a car thief named Martin J. Durkin.

In the early days of Hoover’s directorship, a long-held goal of American law enforcement was achieved: the establishment of an Identification Division.  Tracking criminals by means of identification records had been considered a crucial tool of law enforcement since the 19th century, and matching fingerprints was considered the most accurate method.  By 1922, many large cities had started their own fingerprint collections.

In keeping with the Progressive Era tradition of federal assistance to localities, the Department of Justice created a Bureau of Criminal Identification in 1905 in order to provide a centralized reference collection of fingerprint cards.  In 1907, the collection was moved, as a money-saving measure, to Leavenworth Federal Penitentiary, where it was staffed by convicts. Understandably suspicious of this arrangement, police departments formed their own centralized identification bureau maintained by the International Association of Chiefs of Police. It refused to share its data with the Bureau of Criminal Investigation.  In 1924, Congress was persuaded to merge the two collections in Washington, D.C., under the Bureau of Investigation administration. As a result, law enforcement agencies across the country began contributing fingerprint cards to the Bureau of Investigation by 1926.

By the end of the decade, Special Agent training was institutionalized, the field office inspection system was solidly in place, and the National Division of Identification and Information was collecting and compiling uniform crime statistics for the entire United States. In addition, studies were underway that would lead to the creation of the Technical Laboratory and Uniform Crime Reports.  The Bureau was equipped to end the “lawless years.”  It was in 1935 that the organization added the word “Federal” to its name, and became the “FBI.”

The Volstead Act created Prohibition on January 16, 1919.  Prohibition deprived the states of being able to make their own decisions about whether or not to ban alcohol.  It was also instrumental in the government creating, essentially, a government police force.  Prohibition was repealed on December 5, 1933.  But by then, the damage had been done.  Now the sale of alcohol was permitted nationwide.  States were still left with the same dilemma; they could not decide for themselves whether or not to allow the sale of alcohol.

And a national police force had been established, one which had the legitimacy to override municipal and state police forces.

The Progressives swore that they created such agencies to prevent political patronage.  But they had to know that was a lie.  As we’ve seen, the F.B.I. can be incredibly corrupt, particularly when its head officials are appointed by Marxist or Progressive-oriented politicians.

We don’t like to take anything away from any law enforcement agency.  The men and women serving in the F.B.I. are just as brave and patriotic (for the most part, we assume) as any cop on the beat or in a patrol car or any county detective or state trooper.  Anyone who puts themselves in the line of fire has to have the heart of a lion.  In this Progressive Age of “criminal reform,” which allows criminals to go free while law enforcement is put on trial, the job is all that much more difficult.

But something must be done about the partisanship that some investigators are displaying, with obvious contempt for the rule of law and specific rules for the handling of evidence. 

If the F.B.I. has become a political arm of the Democrat Party, then the agency needs to be reformed or disbanded, sending its rank and file back to the states, with only a very small, federal agency to be held more strictly accountable to the public.  We elect our county sheriffs, after all.

This points to a larger problem with our Progressive bureaucracy.  Our government has become so enormous that it considers itself above the laws of the United States.  In fact, they’ve been dismantling as much of Constitutional law as possible and the F.B.I. is part of that wrecking crew, letting the criminals destroying our Constitution get away with it.  They’re giving false witness to innocent candidates, like President Trump, and giving a pass to those who have clearly broken the laws.

When the Federal Bureau of Investigation needs to be investigated, we have a problem as a nation.

Swimming with the Trans-Fishes: Iniquity Has Triumphed

Until recently, we’ve not only NOT rescued our lambs from the well of Hell; we’ve jumped in with them to drown in the murky waters of Humanism.

Moral relativity is that philosophy that says everyone’s point of view is valid, from their point of view.  According to moral relativists there is no truth.  We shouldn’t judge the ancient tribes who threw their children under the wheels of Juggernaut or into the fires of Moloch because they would be saved from drought or flood if they made that sacrifice.

All that changed with Jehovah’s challenge to Abraham to sacrifice his first-born son, Isaac, to test his faithfulness.  Isaac was strapped to the timber and Abraham was ready to set his son ablaze when God sent him a ram to sacrifice, instead.

Jesus Christ was the last blood sacrifice for Man’s sins.  But in the last few decades since that sacrifice, we’ve been rolling backwards, downhill, performing the very same rites and practices that God abhorred and condemned us all sinners for.

Homsexuality.  Adultery (“free love”).  Orgies.  Pedophilia.  Drugs.  Murder.  Stealing.  Rape.  Divorce.

We’ve managed to outdo our ancient ancestors with the sex-change operation.  Now, a man can be declared a woman, or a woman, a man.  Men can claim to be pregnant.  Men can compete in women’s sports.  Or become the Secretary of the Navy.

God was so fed up with humanity in Noah’s time that He flooded the Earth.  Rain poured down from the sky and up from the ground until only Noah and his immediate were left.  The rest of sinful humanity was left to swim with the fishes.

Somehow, though, some of them survive and their back with a vengeance to defy God’s word.  They’ve even usurped His rainbow.  The rainbow was God’s promise not to flood the Earth again.  He regretted killing all the animals that were killed in the flood.  He didn’t say he was sorry He put the wicked to death.

Lia Thomas has become the new Poster “It” for the transgender movement.  This movement seems to have gained crowd among the college age.  At least, they’re pushing their distorted faces into ours via such web apps as Tik-Tok and Zoom.

Thomas, 23, grew up in Austin, Texas.  He began swimming at the age of five, and was sixth in the state high school swimming championships, competing for Westlake High School.  In 2017, he started attending the University of Pennsylvania.  Thomas graduated in 2022 and plans to attend law school, pursuing a career as a civil rights attorney.

Towards the end of high school, Thomas began to question his gender identity.  After his freshman year at college, during the summer of 2018, he came out as to his.  “She” began using “her” new name on New Year’s Day in 2020. In an interview with Sports Illustrated she said, “In a way, it was sort of a rebirth, for the first time in my life, feeling fully connected to my name and who I am and living who I am. I am Lia.”

Here’s the problem:  Thomas’ swimming career.  Thomas didn’t change his sex to female and become a hairdresser.  He/she continued swimming.

Thomas began swimming on the men’s team at the University of Pennsylvania in 2017, and during his freshman year, recorded a time of 8 minutes and 57.55 seconds in the 1,000-yard freestyle that ranked as the sixth-fastest national men’s time, as well as 500-yard freestyle and 1,650-yard freestyle times ranked within the national top 100.  On the men’s swim team in 2018–2019, Thomas finished second in the men’s 500, 1,000, and 1,650-yard freestyle at the Ivy League championships as a sophomore in 2019.  During the 2018–2019 season, Thomas recorded the top university men’s team times in the 500 free, 1000 free, and 1650 free-style.

Thomas began transitioning using hormone replacement therapy in May 2019, and came out as a trans-woman during “her” junior year to her coaches, friends, and the women’s and men’s swim teams at the University of Pennsylvania.  She was required to swim for the men’s team in the 2019–2020 academic year as a junior while undergoing hormone therapy and then swam on the women’s team in 2021–2022 after taking a year off school to maintain her eligibility to compete while competitive swimming was canceled due to the Covid-19 pandemic.  Thomas has followed all of the NCAA’s gender-related policies to be eligible to compete as a woman in NCAA swimming.

Thomas lost muscle mass and strength through testosterone suppression and hormone replacement therapy.  Her time for the 500 freestyle was over 15 seconds slower than her personal bests before medically transitioning.  Thomas’s event progression peaked in 2019 for distance swimming, with a drop in times during the 2021–22 season. Her event progression for sprint swimming reflected a dip at the start of 2021–22 season before returning to near-lifetime bests in the 100 free and a lifetime personal best in the 50 free in 2021.

In the 2018–2019 season she was, when competing in the men’s team, ranked 554 in the 200 free-style, 65 in the 500 freestyles, and 32 in the 1650 freestyle. In the 2021–2022 season, those ranks are now, when competing in the women’s team, 5 in the 200 freestyle, first in the 500 freestyle, and eight in the 1650 free-style.  According to an archived page of the swimming data website Swimcloud, Thomas was ranked 89th among male college swimmers for that season.

In a race during January 2022 at a meet against UPenn’s Ivy League rival Yale, Thomas finished in 6th place in the 100m freestyle race, losing to four real women and Iszac Henig, a transgender man, who transitioned without hormone therapy.

In March 2022, Thomas became the first openly transgender athlete to win an NCAA Division I national championship in any sport, after winning the women’s 500-yard freestyle with a time of 4:33.24; Olympic silver medalist Emma Weyant was second with a time 1.75 seconds behind Thomas.  Thomas did not break any records at the NCAA event, while Kate Douglas broke 18 NCAA records.  Thomas was 9.18 seconds short of Katie Ledecky’s NCAA record of 4:24.06.  In the preliminaries for the 200 free-style, Thomas finished second. In the final for the 200 free-style, Thomas placed fifth with a time of 1:43.50. In the preliminaries for the 100 free-style.  Thomas finished tenth. In the finals for the 100 free-style, Thomas placed eighth out of eight competitors in 48.18 seconds, finishing last.

The March 2022 NCAA championship was Thomas’s last college swimming event.  By the conclusion of Thomas’s swimming career at UPenn in 2022, her rank had moved from 65th on the men’s team to 1st on the women’s team in the 500-yard freestyle, and 554th on the men’s team to 5th on the women’s team in the 200-yard freestyle.  According to the swimming data website Swimcloud, Thomas is ranked 36th among female college swimmers in the United States for the 2021–2022 season, and 46th among women swimmers nationally.  According to Sports Illustrated, she has applied for law school and planned to swim at the 2024 Summer Olympics trials.

In June 2022, the International Swimming Federation (FINA), an organization that administers international aquatic sports competitions, voted to bar all transgender athletes from competing in professional women’s swimming, with the exception of athletes who “can establish to FINA’s comfortable satisfaction that they have not experienced any part of male puberty beyond Tanner Stage 2 (of puberty) or before age 12, whichever is later”, barring Thomas from competing in the women’s competition at the 2024 Paris Olympics as she had planned.  In response to the decision, Thomas said: “The new FINA release is deeply upsetting. It is discriminatory and will only serve to harm all women.”^[36]

In July 2022, the University of Pennsylvania nominated Thomas for the 2022 NCAA Woman of the Year Award.

“Noah’s Flood” was a calamity for human beings and the birds and mammals on land.  But was a great day for the fishes.  If you were megalodon shark, dinner was on the table.  Subsequently, once Noah’s Ark landed and the Earth was repopulated, some of his descendants cursed Noah and his God.

Yet today, a mere ten years ago, Microsoft owner Bill Gates was propounding “Depopulation Theory.”  Ten years later, the lab-created bioweapon, Covid-19, is unleashed.  Whoever the virus didn’t kill, it turns out that the vaccine is.  The spike, lipid protein found in the mRNA “vaccine” – which doesn’t “prevent” anyone from getting or giving the virus – is especially found of men and women’s reproductive organs.

More people have died since the vaccine was mandated than died during the actual period of the pandemic.  Men and women of child-bearing age are experiencing greater rates of infertility than they were a year ago.  Is the Covid-19 actually a sterilization agent?

Parents are beginning to wake up and pulling their children back from the brink.  But that is still a crumbly, slippery slope of progressive statism.  The government used the pandemic to determine just how much “statism” we were willing to endure. 

We’ve proven, over a number of decades, how much we’re censorship we’re willing to undergo in order to receive a paycheck.  We’ve been put through “Sensitivity Training” for racism, sexism, genderism.  We check our American liberties at the door of private corporations enacting government doctrine.

We even embrace it willingly through our culture.  Smoking pot, a known, brain-damaging hallucination?  Legalize it!  Even though it can and does affect innocent people who want nothing to do with it, via its collective nature in the form of a cigarette (or “bong” as it advocates like to call it).

Legalize abortion.  Legal homosexual marriage.  Legalize pornography.  Legalize illegal immigrants.  Legalize transsexual participation in sports.  Allow people who were born men and still retain most of their masculinity to compete with female athletes.

“Lia” Thomas is still 6’1” tall.  “She” towered over the actual female swimmers.  She’s the Big Fish in the Little Pond.  What did they think was going to happen but that she was going to out-swim her female competitors?  How is that “fair”? 

Women athletes have not taken this assault on their sports lightly.  This sort of funny, in an ironic way, because they fought to be able to participate in male sports once upon a time, which was just as unfair to the male participants, especially in sports that involved bodily contact, like football.

Still, unfair is unfair, and transgender “women” shouldn’t be allowed to insert themselves into female sports.

It’s time for us to put aside moral relativity and compare “Lia” Thomas’ size to that of the second and third-place winners in that competition.  It’s time to open our eyes to the dangers of legalizing drugs.  To the dangers of allowing children to be sexualized.  To the dangers of “protecting” our teenagers from parental guidance.

Jesus said (Matthew 12:11), “If you had a sheep that fell into a well on the Sabbath, wouldn’t you work to pull it out?”

Heck, we don’t even recognize the Sabbath as a day of rest anymore.  We do everything on the Sabbath – shop, golf, go the movies, go to the beach, etc.  Even work.  We would do ourselves a favor by observing the Sabbath, a day of rest.  We need it.

Not only have our lambs fell into the well of government and even private schools, but we’ve been throwing them in.  We don’t bother to monitor what they watch on television.  We sit there and watch the garbage with them!  We laugh at celebrities twerking.  We ignore them and tell them to go play, while we watch smutty soap operas (Mom hated them).

We listen to government and academic officials with advanced university degrees tower over us and tell us what to think, how to live our lives, and how to raise our children.

We sing the worst rock n’ roll songs with them.  Parents teach them those songs and dance with them!  But we’re horrified when we discover their teachers are teaching them that stuff.  We shouldn’t be.  Our teachers taught us the same way.  We were the children of the Sixties, Hippie Generation.  Some of my own classmates look back on those days with fondness.

They’ve got to be kidding!  Weren’t they paying attention at all or did their first snuff of pot wipe all sense of right and wrong from their memories?  A good friend, a classmate from those days asked why I wasn’t interested in the upcoming 45^th Class Reunion.

I told her it was because I disowned them after they changed the high school alma mater as the “Class Gift” to future generations.  It was their version of the “End of History,” which I wrote about yesterday.  I told the class secretary, when she called about the first reunion, to take me off the list and never call me again.

“Why didn’t I speak against it at the time?” she asked.

“I DID protest it at the time!  You ignored me!”  The teacher who served as class advisor even agreed with me – we had no right to erase history.  There were still plenty of graduates who showed up on Homecoming Day expecting to sing the original Alma Mater song.

Instead, they flung themselves into the well, so to speak.  And most of their parents were intimidated by the “spirit of the age” and the “media” to let them express their “freedom.”  They never bothered to consider the difference between “freedom” and “license.”  If their sons wanted to grow their hair long, well, that was just okay.  Don’t worry about it.

My parents weren’t “okay” with it.  They teamed and chased my brother up and down the levels of our split-level house with a pair of scissors, ready to cut his hair.  Mom finally tackled him on the lower staircase leading up to the kitchen.  Then, Dad sat on him while Mom cut his hair off.

Now that was great parenting!  When my parents went off on a much-needed couples’ vacation, that same brother had the “great idea” of having a beer party.  Fearing what would probably come of it, alone in the house with a bunch of teenaged goons, I called my parents and pleaded with them to come home again.

I hated to do it.  I knew they needed some time off.  But I was just frankly really scared – and so was our younger brother.

They did the grown-up thing and came home.  Dad especially wasn’t happy.  But they came home.

Today, parents figure it’ll be okay if they let their kids have the beer party as long as Mom and Dad stay home to “supervise.”

No.  Wrong!  That’s throwing your sheep into the well yourself!

It’s not okay for your kids to get falling down drunk.  It’s one thing to gradually introduce them to alcohol.  Mom always said that one day we’d be grown ups and we didn’t want to make fools of ourselves in front of bosses at office parties.  I opted to drink at all.  The boys eventually learned how to drink properly.

It’s not okay for your second-grade daughter to decide she wants to be a boy and for you, as parents to say, “Okay” and make the appointment with the doctor!  It’s really not okay for you to dress your son in pink and give him dolls to play with, whether he wants to or not.  But especially if he doesn’t want to.

It’s not okay for the government to use your children as guinea pigs for experimental vaccines, white-guilt games, or slave auctions.  It’s not okay for you to smoke pot with your teenager, something Debbie Reynolds did with 13-year-old Carrie Fisher.  The results turned out, in the end, extremely tragic for both of them.

It’s not okay for teachers to tell your children that there’s no God, that prayer is wrong, and that homosexuality is okay.  Jesus told us we shouldn’t judge.  But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t celebrate it, either.

Parents became more and more reluctant to disown their homosexual children, especially when the AIDS epidemic was at its peak.  It was a horrible disease and no one could blame the parents for going to their childrens’ sides in their last moments.  We had friends whose son had AIDs.  They said his death was horrific.  His doctor had gone on vacation over the weekend when the son took a turn for the worse.  The parents said you could hear his screams all the way down the hallway.

Queen Elizabeth II, at the behest of her son and heir, Prince Charles, and his son and heir, Prince William, curtailed her second son Andrew’s participation in royal activities down to nothing when his exploits with the pedophile Jeffrey Epstein were revealed in detail (Prince Andrew even had the nerve to bring Epstein and his “madame” Ghislaine Maxwell to Balmoral, the Queen’s official retreat in Scotland).

Yet the elderly queen can’t quite bring herself to cut off all familial ties to Andrew, who is said to be her favorite son.  At the first anniversary tribute to Prince Philip (Elizabeth’s now-deceased husband), she even allowed Andrew to escort her down the aisle of the church, although he was obliged to take a seat far removed from the rest of the royal family.

Perhaps Elizabeth still holds out hope that, having rescued her son from the well, that he’ll repent and receive salvation.  Prince Charles and Prince William are convinced he’s wholly unrepentant.  But there will be a time for them to deal with him in whatever way they decree.  For now, it’s Elizabeth’s call, as his mother, if not as his queen.

Do we obey the secular, which appears to have more potency?  Or do we obey the Word of God, where our ultimate salvation lies, through Jesus Christ?  We fear to lose our jobs, our homes, our families, our friends, even in the face of things we know very well are wrong.

We don’t seem fear of losing our souls.  Judging by how seldom we consult God, since we consider ourselves successful and self-sufficient, we don’t even seem to be aware that we have souls.  We’ve taken Jesus’ advice to let tomorrow’s worries be sufficient for themselves a little too seriously and not worried about tomorrow at all.

So, we throw not just ourselves but our lambs into the well, or the wolves, and don’t even cry out because we’re told it’s all relative, that it’s all okay. 

Lia Thomas towers over all of us, like a perverted, muscle-bound Statue of Liberty, as a symbol of moral relativity’s triumph over God.

The End of History: Woodrow Wilson’s Progressivism is the Long Covid for America

What did Wilson mean by “the end of history” and who was he (or Obama) to declare it?

We don’t associate the phrase “the end of history” with our 28^th President, Woodrow Wilson, but with our 44^th President, Barack Obama and his media acolytes.  Phrases like that were constantly during Obama’s campaign and administration, all borrowed from Wilson.

Obama declared that the U.S. Constitution was “a document of negative liberties”  and the Constitution “is a living document.”   These were main principles of Wilson’s beliefs. 

“The Constitution was not made to fit us like a straitjacket.  In its elasticity lies its chief greatness.”

“Living political constitutions must be Darwinian in structure and in practice.  Society is a living organism and must obey the laws of life, not of mechanics; it must develop.  All that Progressives ask or desire is ‘permission-in’ in an era when ‘development,’ ‘evolution,’ is the scientific word to interpret the Constitution according to Darwinian principle.  All they ask is recognition of the fact that a nation is a living thing and not a machine.’”

“The trouble with theory [of limited and divided government] is that government is not a machine, but a living thing.  This is where the living and breathing constitution comes from.  It is modified by its environment, necessitated by its tasks, shaped to its functions by the sheer pressure of life.”

“The Constitution of the United States is not a mere lawyers’ document.  It is a vehicle of life, and its spirit is always the spirit of the age.  Its prescriptions are clear and we know what they are but life is always your last and most authoritative critic.”

“Hope is the belief that destiny will not be written for us, but by us, by the men and women who are not content to settle for the world as it is, who have the courage to remake the world as it should be.”

The last quote was by Obama, a nearly direct lift from “Philip Dru:  Administrator,” written in 1920.  “The spirit of the age” was originally a term coined by British essayist William Hazlitt in 1824.

Historicism, which had its roots in early 19^th Century German philosophy, holds that history is not something to be read but to be created, that our duty is to create history and revise any history that doesn’t conform to a contemporary society. 

That we should no longer have to abide by laws that say, for instance, we can’t hitch our wagon to the post after sunset (or some such thing), is obvious.  But the Constitution was a set of rules for guiding the United States into the future, to protect its citizens from future (some say, inevitable) tyranny.  It was trying to protect future history.

Historicism had its roots in early 19^th Century German philosophy (the Germans; why is it always the Germans?  Maybe because they were first to be conquered by the Roman Empire and inherited their ways?)

Wilson’s professors, according to Ronald J. Pestritto, author of “Woodrow Wilson:  Roots of Modern Liberalism, at John Hopkins University were all educated in Germany.  Some of his professors, Pestritto writes studied under Johann K. Bluntschli, a prominent Hegelian philosopher.  These philosophers believed that you could only understand “past doctrines” in the light of their environments and times.

The Founding Fathers believed that the only way to avoid tyranny was through a legal separation of powers, articulated in the U.S. Constitution.

Prestitto writes:

It was the separation of powers that, among all of Wilson’s criticism [of] the Founder’s Constitution, caused him the greatest distress and occupied much of his attention.  For Wilson, the separation of powers, and all of the other institutional remedies that the founders employed against the danger of faction, stood in the way of government’s exercising its power in accord with the dictates of progress.

Like the flaw in the Death Star in Star Wars, the authors of the Constitution planted the seeds of its own corruption (Article I, Section 5, Paragraph 2):  “Each House may determine the Rules of its Proceedings.”  Essentially, the Constitution set its Congress above its own laws.  The very next paragraph gave Congress the right to keep any portion of its Journal of Proceedings secret.

Alexander Hamilton was the Big Government Guy of the Founding Fathers, supported by George Washington.  Washington really wasn’t fond of the common people, even though he earned their adoration.  He felt they weren’t educated enough to govern themselves without the help of a higher class of people.

Still, while Hamilton advocated for a class of civil servants to assist the legislators in making laws, he meant for the legislators to delegate those tasks.  The legislators would be accountable to their constituents for the failures or misdeeds of these servants.

This, however, led to political patronage in this ‘”civil service.  the federal civil service was established in 1871 under Pres. Ulysses S. Grant.  The Civil Service is defined as “all appointive positions in the executive, judicial, and legislative branches of the Government of the United States, except positions in the uniformed services.” (5 U.S.C. § 2101).

In the early 19th century, government jobs were held at the pleasure of the president — a person could be fired at any time. The spoils system meant that jobs were used to support the political parties. This was changed in slow stages by the Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act of 1883 and subsequent laws.  This act made the Civil Service a part of the Federal Government.  Congress still preferred political patronage and disbanded.  But Chester A. Arthur reinstated it in 1883, by this Congressional Act.  Subsequent presidents kept expanding its power.  By 1909, almost two thirds of the U.S. federal work force was appointed based on merit, that is, qualifications measured by tests.  Certain senior civil service positions, including some heads of diplomatic missions and executive agencies, are filled by political appointees. Under the Hatch Act of 1939, civil servants are not allowed to engage in political activities while performing their duties.

At least, that’s what government-sponsored hacks would have us believe.  Woodrow Wilson wanted – and helped enshrine – a completely separate, “professional” army of civil servants working not in the service of the people, but of the federal government.

The idea of a civil service originally came from China, where for a thousand years positions in Imperial service were filled through difficult examinations covering Confucian doctrines, poetry, and calligraphy, which while not directly relevant to most bureaucratic work, at least selected for competence in writing and thought. While in theory such exam systems would allow anyone of any class to demonstrate merit and move into a powerful position, in practice only the children of the landed gentry had the time and resources to study for the exams, but at least their system kept out those whose only qualification was a powerful patron.

Wilson was an advocate of a federal, administrative civil service long before he sought the presidency:

According to writer Jeb Kinson, at jebkinnison.com,:

Before he was elected president, the Progressive academic Woodrow Wilson wrote “The Study of Administration,” an essay setting forth his ideas on how public agencies should be organized.  In 1886, his ideals of eternal, professional bureaucracies expanding enlightened government control over every service may have sounded achievable:

There is scarcely a single duty of government which was once simple which is not now complex; government once had but a few masters; it now has scores of masters. Majorities formerly only underwent government; they now conduct government. Where government once might follow the whims of a court, it must now follow the views of a nation.

And those views are steadily widening to new conceptions of state duty; so that, at the same time that the functions of government are every day becoming more complex and difficult, they are also vastly multiplying in number. Administration is everywhere putting its hands to new undertakings. The utility, cheapness, and success of the government’s postal service, for instance, point towards the early establishment of governmental control of the telegraph system. Or, even if our government is not to follow the lead of the governments of Europe in buying or building both telegraph and railroad lines, no one can doubt that in some way it must make itself master of masterful corporations. The creation of national commissioners of railroads, in addition to the older state commissions, involves a very important and delicate extension of administrative functions. Whatever hold of authority state or federal governments are to take upon corporations, there must follow cares and responsibilities which will require not a little wisdom, knowledge, and experience. Such things must be studied in order to be well done. And these, as I have said, are only a few of the doors which are being opened to offices of government. The idea of the state and the consequent ideal of its duty are undergoing noteworthy change; and “the idea of the state is the conscience of administration.” Seeing every day new things which the state ought to do, the next thing is to see clearly how it ought to do them.

This is why there should be a science of administration which shall seek to straighten the paths of government, to make its business less unbusinesslike, to strengthen and purify its organization, and to crown its duties with dutifulness. This is one reason why there is such a science.

Wilson looked to European models (as Progressives still do):

But where has this science grown up? Surely not on this side [of] the sea. Not much impartial scientific method is to be discerned in our administrative practices. The poisonous atmosphere of city government, the crooked secrets of state administration, the confusion, sinecurism, and corruption ever and again discovered in the bureaux at Washington forbid us to believe that any clear conceptions of what constitutes good administration are as yet very widely current in the United States. No; American writers have hitherto taken no very important part in the advancement of this science. It has found its doctors in Europe.

It is not of our making; it is a foreign science, speaking very little of the language of English or American principle. It employs only foreign tongues; it utters none but what are to our minds alien ideas. Its aims, its examples, its conditions, are almost exclusively grounded in the histories of foreign races, in the precedents of foreign systems, in the lessons of foreign revolutions. It has been developed by French and German professors, and is consequently in all parts adapted to the needs of a compact state, and made to fit highly centralized forms of government; whereas, to answer our purposes, it must be adapted, not to a simple and compact, but to a complex and multiform state, and made to fit highly decentralized forms of government. If we would employ it, we must Americanize it, and that not formally, in language merely, but radically, in thought, principle, and aim as well. It must learn our constitutions by heart; must get the bureaucratic fever out of its veins; must inhale much free American air……in spite of our vast advantages in point of political liberty, and above all in point of practical political skill and sagacity, so many nations are ahead of us in administrative organization and administrative skill. Why, for instance, have we but just begun purifying a civil service which was rotten full fifty years ago? To say that slavery diverted us is but to repeat what I have said — that flaws in our constitution delayed us.

Of course, all reasonable preference would declare for this English and American course of politics rather than for that of any European country. We should not like to have had Prussia’s history for the sake of having Prussia’s administrative skill; and Prussia’s particular system of administration would quite suffocate us. It is better to be untrained and free than to be servile and systematic. Still there is no denying that it would be better yet to be both free in spirit and proficient in practice. It is this even more reasonable preference which impels us to discover what there may be to hinder or delay us in naturalizing this much-to-be-desired science of administration.

We may find his technocratic idealism tragic and misguided, since we know his efforts did not result in that decentralized, responsive American-style civil service he had envisioned. Wilson [ironically] admired the Prussian social welfare state, and the implementation of many of its features — government healthcare, government pension schemes, and centralized public schools to train good workers amenable to state guidance — became the Progressive program for the succeeding decades, with today’s Progressives continuing to promote universal pre-K and government-run healthcare as central goals over a hundred years later.  Wilson blamed that stodgy old Constitution for holding back progress, which he thought could be achieved through “scientific administration” of government which would leave citizens “free in spirit and proficient in practice.”  Where, in practice, implementation of his ideas created an underclass of citizens so unproficient as to lose their freedom to dependency and addiction.

Wilson responded to critics who argued civil servants would be unaccountable:

And let me say that large powers and unhampered discretion seem to me the indispensable conditions of responsibility. Public attention must be easily directed, in each case of good or bad administration, to just the man deserving of praise or blame. There is no danger in power, if only it be not irresponsible. If it be divided, dealt out in shares to many, it is obscured; and if it be obscured, it is made irresponsible. But if it be centred in heads of the service and in heads of branches of the service, it is easily watched and brought to book.

I know that a corps of civil servants prepared by a special schooling and drilled, after appointment, into a perfected organization, with appropriate hierarchy and characteristic discipline, seems to a great many very thoughtful persons to contain elements which might combine to make an offensive official class, — a distinct, semi-corporate body with sympathies divorced from those of a progressive, free-spirited people, and with hearts narrowed to the meanness of a bigoted officialism.  Certainly, such a class would be altogether hateful and harmful in the United States. Any measure calculated to produce it would for us be measures of reaction and of folly….

But to fear the creation of a domineering, illiberal officialism as a result of the studies I am here proposing is to miss altogether the principle upon which I wish most to insist. That principle is, that administration in the United States must be at all points sensitive to public opinion.  A body of thoroughly trained officials serving during good behavior we must have in any case: that is a plain business necessity.  But the apprehension that such a body will be anything un-American clears away the moment it is asked, What is to constitute good behavior? For that question obviously carries its own answer on its face. Steady, hearty allegiance to the policy of the government they serve will constitute good behavior. That policy will have no taint of officialism about it. It will not be the creation of permanent officials, but of statesmen whose responsibility to public opinion will be direct and inevitable.

Bureaucracy can exist only where the whole service of the state is removed from the common political life of the people, its chiefs as well as its rank and file. Its motives, its objects, its policy, its standards, must be bureaucratic. It would be difficult to point out any examples of impudent exclusiveness and arbitrariness on the part of officials doing service under a chief of department who really served the people, as all our chiefs of departments must be made to do. It would be easy, on the other hand, to adduce other instances like that of the influence of Stein in Prussia, where the leadership of one statesman imbued with true public spirit transformed arrogant and perfunctory bureaux into public-spirited instruments of just government…

The ideal for us is a civil service cultured and self-sufficient enough to act with sense and vigor, and yet so intimately connected with the popular thought, by means of elections and constant public counsel, as to find arbitrariness of class spirit quite out of the question.

Only the elite, from wealthy, aristocratic families were considered eligible for the civil service, in Wilson’s view.  The legislature and the bureaucracy had to be completely separated.  He offered to “free” legislators from the drudgery of writing laws in order to make speeches to their constituents and other figure-head duties while the actual legislating was put in the hands of men specifically educated in “political science.”

Today, we call them “lobbyists,” lawyers who might represent some entity whose interests are supported by a Big Government (i.e., Planned Parenthood) or by Big Corporations who need legislators who will pass legislation favoring their industry or even their companies, or even foreign nations, represented by “cultural enterprises” (i.e., the Asia Society) whose task is to influence those in power via “soft power.”

Wilson and Roosevelt fought one another in the 1912 Presidential campaign.  Roosevelt fought William Howard Taft’s candidate, Elihu Root, in the Republican primary.  After a close fought, the contest came down to a convention fight, which Root one.  Roosevelt walked out, creating a new, Third Party:  The Progressive, or “Bull Moose Party.”

Wilson and Roosevelt basically held the same Progressive tenets.  But since Roosevelt had planted the Progressive flag on his hill, Wilson, the Democrat candidate took a different tack, siding with Jefferson’s notions of democracy and limited government.

According to Perritt, Wilson’s campaign theme was essentially, “The history of liberty is the history of the history of the limitation of government power.”  This was a very sly take on the Founders’ “interpretation” of the Constitution, not necessarily his own.  That was why he inserted the word “history” into his statement.  His actual intention was to change history as much as possible to “unshackle” the government from the chains of history.

Wilson won, and he used a number of executive orders, Congressional amendments to the Constitution, and federal agencies to recreate a federal government.  He used Big Corporations (with whom he and Roosevelt enjoyed cozy relationships) as bogeyman to inveigle the American people to pass the 16^th Amendment (proposed by Congress in 1909 under Taft and vetoed by him and passed in 1913 by Wilson, telling the public that it was a tax on the “rich”; the 17^th Amendment, also proposed by Congress, giving the election of Senators to a state’s general population instead of its own legislature, which eliminated state representation at the Federal level; very popular with the misguided, ignorant people Wilson despised); and even the 18^th Amendment, which prohibited liquor; also proposed by Congress – Wilson was appealing to the anti-immigrant stance of the day against the Irish and Italian immigrants coming into the country.  The result was an enormous rise in crime and a black market economy in which many wealthy men made their fortunes, including (allegedly) Joseph P. Kenney, the father of Pres. John F. Kennedy).

Up until that time, states had the right to determine whether liquor could be consumed or not.  Wilson was heavily against states’ rights.

Two weeks after his New York Press Club speech, in which he seemed to defend the history of Jeffersonian liberty, he clarified his stance:

While we are followers of Jefferson, there is one principle of Jefferson’s which no longer can obtain [have relevance] in the practical politics of America.  You know that it was Jefferson who said the best government is that does as little governing as possible…But that time is passed.  America is not now and cannot in the future be a place for unrestricted individual enterprise.”

To struggling Americans then that sounded like it meant that “unrestricted” freedom could not be granted to businesses.  Big businesses.  They had to be regulated for the good of the country as a whole.  The administrative state he criticized, during the 1912 campaign, Roosevelt for criticizing, he now embraced and expanded.  He was enacting not the “separation of powers’ but the “separation of politics and.”

Wilson argued that “life is so complicated that we are not dealing with the old conditions [of Jefferson’s era].”  He used the treatment of labor as an excuse for expanding the rights of government.  Laborers were under paid.  But they could always find another job somewhere.  However, the labor market was tight, what with all the new immigrants legally entering the country.  Employers had the upper hand.  The time was ripe for an uprising by the little people Wilson deplored against the powerful commercial interests whom he was secretly backing.

What Wilson was working towards was socialized health care, to be put upon the backs of industry first and when the market could no longer sustain it, taken up by the states and then the Federal government.

Wilson, frankly, didn’t trust the average American with the running of the government.  It belonged in the hands of the educated elite.  Does that sound familiar?  It should.

Yet Wilson favored public, or government, schools.  The schools kept adolescents from competing with adults for a place in the labor market, for one thing.  They spoke of the plight of children, but what was meant was that children generally aged ten and up were apprenticed out to a tradesman to learn a trade (boys) and girls for housekeeping or some sort of servants work.

Secondly, he wanted to make sure that all Americans were educated in favor of the State and away from the family.  And their church.

“The purpose of education is to make sons as unlike their fathers as possible,” he famously said.

In turn of 20^th Century America, it was uncommon for students to “progress” beyond the 8^th Grade.  My grandmothers didn’t.  My paternal grandfather and his brother did because they possessed above-average intelligence.  They graduated high school, which was extremely unusual for the times.  Eventually, my great-uncle became a doctor, although his wife insisted that he drop his Italian name because Anglo-Saxon Protestants, who could pay him more, would shun him.  He did and it caused him a great deal of trouble later.

At this time, a flood of Eastern Europeans and Russians were fleeing the Czars programme and landed in Boston and New York.  When the Bolshevik Revolution overthrew the Czar in 1918, they celebrated.  But they stayed in New York.  They turned Evander Childs High School in the Bronx, where they mainly settled, into one of the most Marxist high school in the United States at the time.

By the end of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s presidency in 1945, the government was so mired in bureaucracy that average citizens considered it useless to try to fight the government – on any level.  “You can’t fight city hall,” was the saying, an unattributed saying said to have come from 18^th Century England.  Parents were still too keen for their children to have a college education; that was considered the best path to success – the difference between wearing a bow tie and a straight tie, a suit instead of overalls.

By the 1930s, the Progressives had a plan in place to indoctrinate all Americans through the public schools – Wilson’s government schools – by indoctrinating the teachers of the teachers first.

We’ll go into that (yet again) another day.  The point is people have had a tendency to ignore politics.  Wilson knew this and wanted to take advantage of it.  He believed the average citizen had no business sticking his nose in the government’s business. 

The income tax whetted their appetite for getting even with the rich.  But that, and the minimum wage, also kept them poor and unlikely to be ever seek public office, or even afford to go to college.  My father graduated college in 1937 – the first in his family to do so.  Families considered it a badge of honor.

Today, graduating college is a permanent economic burden and that’s the Progressives want it.  The top schools are for the elites to send their progeny to the top of the ladder, to become elites themselves.  If you expect to succeed in a government career – or one in journalism or broadcasting for that matter – you have to go to a school like Harvard or Yale.  Syracuse or Columbia.  MIT or Stanford.

Most schools offer degrees in Political Science.  It’s the recommended curriculum for budding journalists.  Not journalism – political science.  Those who want to succeed in broadcast journalism must also have a law degree.

This is why a moron like Biden can rise to the top of the garbage heap, because he has a political bureaucracy and government media supporting him.  Glenn Beck played one of his messages to his son, in a documentary about the on-going, father-and-son scandal.  In the video, Senior leaves a message for junior to the effect:  ‘I’ve seen the article [about you with some garbling] online…before it’s published tomorrow and it seems [garbled]…you’re good.”

What!?  Beck apparently didn’t even catch the problem there.  Since when does someone in Biden’s position get to “review” a journalist’s article about his son before it’s published?!  Since when does a “president” get to review any newspaper article or broadcast segment before it’s published or aired?!!

Where’s the outrage?  Even Beck didn’t notice it!!  We really have come to a sad pass as a country when even a…Beck is a Libertarian but we’ll say Conservative…Conservative broadcaster misses the abuse of power.

People don’t read.  They don’t like to read.  They don’t want to read.  They can’t be bothered.  They’re too busy.  They’re satisfied with sound bytes or maybe an hour’s news from the generally trustworthy Tucker Carlson, who has apparently become Rush Limbaugh’s heir apparent in Conservative opinion, the guy Conservatives tune into every night.

I can’t because I canceled my cable.  I’ll see if his broadcast is on Pluto TV, although I doubt it.  At least there’s someone out there we can rely upon to tell us the truth and hold the Progressives’ feet to the fire (from what I hear, Carlson is a literal fire-breathing dragon of Conservatism).

You people out there need to read up!  You need to do what you can do, especially on the local.  We need to bring our government down to the local level again and take it out of the Federal government.  President Trump has vowed to take a hatchet to the federal, administrative bureaucracy.

That’s very good news.  We know he always keeps his promises, so we know he’ll do it.  There are good reasons for electing him to do it.  2024 would be a second term for him, unlike his Republican opponents.  He has nothing to fear politically (not that that guy was ever afraid of anyone or anything – that’s why he was elected in 2016) unlike other first-termers.

You may object to him because of his age.  But just compare him to Biden.  Who looks more vigorous?  You may blame him for inflicting the vaccine upon us.  This is true – he’s responsible for implementing the vaccine program.  However, according to a lengthy report by Glenn Beck, the government’s agreement to such a vaccine, to be created and administered by specific pharmaceutical companies, goes all the way back to 2003 and the Bush Administration, when it was suggested that the federal government was “unprepared” for widespread, contagious epidemic.

We believe Trump was following an already laid-out plan.  Trump has always been an advocate of American enterprise, that it’s American business that gets the job done.  We’re not surprised that he congratulated those companies on developing the vaccine quickly.  It was a huge mistake.

But we’re not surprised.  Trump is the old school that we were discussing above, when people still had faith in American enterprise, before they learned that Wilson and the Progressives had set the fuse for its destruction.

We’re a bit surprised that Trump didn’t lend an ear to the so-called “conspiracy theorists” who were clamoring that the virus was a Chinese construct (which he believed, remember) and that the pharmaceutical companies were part of that machination (which he either didn’t believe or didn’t realize – we would advise President Trump to listen to Glenn Beck’s broadcast tonight on the virus hoax and request from Beck a copy of his team’s report on the lengthy history of the COVID-19 virus).

Even Presidents have to do their homework for themselves sometimes.

The Constitution was intended to limit the Federal government for some very good reasons – and we’re all learning what they are right now.  We need laws upon which we can depend; not laws the change every time the wind blows.

Clearly, Wilson and his German professors were influenced by Karl Marx.  Let’s go back in history (before it’s “ended”) to the writings of a contemporary of Marx’s:  Charlotte Bronte.

In her novel, Jane Eyre, her titular heroine, Jane, is having a discussion with her employer, Mr. Rochester, in his study (he’s hired Jane as a governess to his ward, Adele).  He’s engaged her in a philosophical discussion, throwing bits of his mysterious past into the mix as well as trying to draw the shy 18 year-old out.  He tells her that he’s made up his mind about some action that, after an unhappy existence due to some mistake he admits he made, he means to take; if he can’t get happiness, which he tells her he’s been permanently denied, then he’ll seek pleasure instead, “no matter the cost.”

She tells him that doing that is a mistake in itself and will only make his lot worse, not better.

“…you intimated to me that to have a sullied memory was a perpetual bane.  It seems to me, that if you tried hard, you would in time find it possible to become what you yourself would approve; and that if from this day you began with resolution to correct your thoughts and actions, you would in a few years have laid up a new and stainless store of recollections, to which you might revert with pleasure.”

“Justly thought; rightly said, Miss Eyre;” Rochester (the employer) pronounces.  “and at this moment, I am paving hell with energy.”

“Sir?”

“I am laying down good intentions, which I believe durable as flint.  Certainly, my associates and pursuits shall be other than they have been.”

“And better?”

“And better – so much better as pure ore is than foul dross [the residue from the iron ore process].  You seem to doubt me; I don’t doubt myself:  I know what my aim is, what my motives are; and at this moment I pass a law, unalterable as that of the Medes and Persians, that both are right.”

“They cannot be, sir, if they require a new statute to legalize them.”

“They are, Miss Eyre, though they absolutely require a new statute:  unheard-of combinations of circumstances demand unheard-of rules.”

“That sounds a dangerous maxim, sir; because one can see at once that it is liable to abuse.”

“Sententious sage!  So it is:  but I swear by my household gods not to abuse it.”

“You are human and fallible.”

“I am:  so are you – what then?”

“The human and fallible should not arrogate a power with which the divine and perfect alone can be safely entrusted.”

“What power?”

“That of saying of any strange, unsanctioned line of action, ‘Let it be right.’”

“’Let it be right’ – the very words:  you have pronounced them.”

“May it be right, then,” I said, as I rose, deeming it useless to continue a discourse [a conversation] which was all darkness to me…”

You may ask, ‘Why were they quibbling over the words “Let” and “May”?  What’s the difference?”

I learned this lesson in my course of being an officer on that community band I’ve often written about.  This is why people need to learn English grammar.  In the formerly literate world, “Let” meant, in this case, to cause something to happen.  It’s an imperative command:  “Let there be light.”

“May” is an intransitive verb that implies “permission to have power.”  In modern times, we confuse “may” (permission) with “can” (ability).

Jane is telling him, in our secular vernacular, that you can’t just do anything you want.  Actually, it’s “may not do” anything you please.  As she was a contemporary of Marx, perhaps she knew of his writings.  Or perhaps not.  Bronte herself was in love with her French tutor in Belgium.  She probably would have liked very much for that teacher to do what Mr. Rochester did, instead of sending her home to her father.  But then Bronte, rhetorically-speaking, cuts Mr. Rochester’s hand off at the end of the novel.

Hell hath no fury.

Nevertheless, Bronte spells it out as clearly as anyone has why laws and governments “shouldn’t be changed for light and transient causes.”  Thomas Jefferson, the Declaration of Independence.

We are in the grip of tyrants, “iron-bound and triple-chained.”  We can’t remember where the phrase is from – but it’s a great phrase.  Yet we still have the power to break those chains, if only we, as the people, have the will to do so.

Our nation’s history does not have to “end” here.  Not as long as we’re here to tell it.

Inflation Creation: How the Federal Reserve and U.S. Treasury Use Inflation to Steal Our Money

In God We Trust.  In Government We Go Bust.

Many people think that the Federal Reserve Band is an official department of the U.S. Government.  It is not.  The Federal Reserve is a privately-run consortium consisting of the heads of major U.S. Banks.  There are 12 boards of governors and their connection with the U.S. government is that they loan money to the United States.

Our paper money carries their imprimatur, not that of the U.S. Treasury, which is an actual government agency.

In watching Obama and then his minion, Biden, rip our country apart, with the help of a Democrat-run Congress, I remembered how Glenn Beck suggested reading up on Woodrow Wilson.  Theodore Roosevelt, too, but mainly Wilson.  I bought the books ten years or more ago.  But I only recently got around to actually reading them.

The Wilson/Obama and FDR/Biden connection has to wait because in this period of the worst inflation ever, I read the first book, “Woodrow Wilson and the Roots of Modern Liberalism,” (Pestritto, Ronald J.  Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.  2005) and was onto the second book by Judge Andrew J. Napolitano, “Theodore and Woodrow:  How Two American Presidents Destroyed Constitutional Freedom,” Thomas Nelson Publishers.  2012.

The fourth chapter of this second book stopped me cold.  I had to read it three times (at least):  “The Government’s Printing Press:  The Federal Reserve.”

A group of prominent bankers, “donning disguises and using fake names,” boarded N.J. Senator Nelson Aldrich’s train in Hoboken, N.J. in November 1910 for a secret trip to the appropriately-named Jekyll Island, Georgia.  The trip was so secret that they only boarded Aldrich’s car after all the other passengers were on the train.  Only after that was the senator’s car attached to the rest of the train, Napolitano tells us, and it was detached in Georgia and the secret passengers disembarked only after all the other passengers were gone.

Napolitano writes:

These bankers and politicians were meeting in secret because if the truth of their rendezvous were exposed to the world, their master plan would certainly be defeated.  In a quest for global dominance, these few men conspired…to form an otherwise illegal cartel through a partnership of government and banking. 

They needed to maintain this incredible secrecy because they knew that the organization they would eventually set up and have blessed by the [U.S.] government was to become a dominating force in the world not only financially but also politically.

These men, in their quest for power and money, would now solidify what had failed twice before, a central bank in America.  The Federal Reserve Bank is a tool by which banks make great profits and America can exert its dominance as a global power.  But the bank’s money is legally counterfeited and stolen.

“Stolen.”  From us.

Napolitano writes that Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson favored the creation of a central bank, with Roosevelt declaring, “The issue of currency is fundamentally a government function.

Currency is hard money, ostensibly with a value measured in some precious metal, like gold or silver, not paper money.  Paper money, today (thanks to President Nixon), has no value at all, since he took America off the gold standard in 1971.

In order to facilitate this government-business partnership, Congress passed and Wilson signed, the Federal Reserve Act on Dec. 23, 1913.  In lobbying for passage of the bill, Wilson addressed Congress in June 1913, stating:

It is absolutely imperative that we should give the business men of this country a banking and currency system by means of which they can make use of free enterprise and of individual initiative which we are about to bestow upon them.

Napolitano takes us through a brief history of money (i.e., bartering, etc.) up to the use of what is called “commodity money.”  The early Americans tried paper money, giving the power of each state to create its own currency; it was a disaster.  Merchants in one state would refuse to accept the currency of another state.  The first, federal paper money came about with Lincoln and the Civil War.  The word “greenback” came from the color of the paper on which the currency was printed.

“A commodity,” Napolitano explains, “is something that people can agree to trade because it has inherent value.”  Jewelry, precious metals, cigarettes, nylons and even candy are examples of “commodity money.”

In the typical case, commodity money is something that is not only valuable but durable, Napolitano writes.

“The ability to last throughout time makes a commodity trusted and an easily recognizable medium of exchange.”  Gold is an example of a valued commodity that has been valued by humans since ancient times.  “Consistent and lasting.”

In an economy where money is a commodity that has inherent value, the goods or services are paid for with the commodity.  Using our example from before, I may agree to sell you food for one ounce of gold.  You may agree to mow my lawn for one-quarter of an ounce.  The free market determines the true price one can charge for a good or service.   Therefore, if you are an exceptional landscaper, and people value your services, you may be able to charge someone more gold than a landscaper of lesser quality.  The main point is that when using commodity money, rather than trading the actual services or goods with one another [bartering], we agree to use some other [mutually agreed-upon] medium of exchange; in our example, not paper money, but gold.

Napolitano goes on to explain:

Once people deal in commodities, another system known as receipt money quickly dominates the financial markets.  With receipt money, rather than trading the actual commodity, we agree to trade a piece of paper, a receipt that carries the value of the commodity because the receipt can be exchanged for the commodity at any time.

The value of the receipt money was the amount of the precious metal (in this case, gold) that the receipt promised (a promissory note) in exchange.

“Once commodity money was used, it was natural to want to protect that commodity; in our case, gold,” Napolitano says.

Metalworkers such as goldsmiths or white-smiths stored large amounts of valuable in metals in their vaults as a necessity of their business.  Thus, these artisans provided a safe and secure place for one to store commodity money.  These artisans began storing other people’s commodities, such as gold, in their vaults for a fee.   One would deposit commodity money into the artisan’s vault and receive a receipt, also called a note [the promissory note].  The receipt allowed the depositor to go back at any time and withdraw the money from the vault.

This system of money quickly became popular because people trusted those vaults.  According to Napolitano, they began to trade “the notes as though they were commodities.”

They understood that at any time they could take the note to the storage vault and receive the commodities the note represented.  Using our example, you could simply give me a note that allowed me to go to your bank and pull out the amount of gold you “paid” me for the food I sold you.

But then the new “bankers” got ideas about how to make a profit from all of that gold you had stored in their vaults.

Eventually, a system of banking developed call fractional reserve banking.  Those who stored the commodity, in our continuing example, the gold, realized that most of the time the commodity laid unused in their vaults.  The owners of these vaults starting lending those dormant commodities to other customers.  Thus, at any time in the vaults there was only a small fraction of the commodities compared to the notes people were trading.  The owners of the vaults were becoming bankers, and they could do this because there was rarely a time when people demanded all their commodities – their gold – from the vaults in sufficient quantities for anyone to notice what the lenders were doing.  The banks transferred the gold to other customers in return for interest payments on the loan, thereby creating a profit for the banks; profit that was derived from someone else’s stored commodity.

Remember that scene from “It’s A Wonderful Life,” when Mary and George are about to go on the honeymoon when they discover that there’s some sort of trouble involving banks closing their doors.  There’s been a “run on the banks” meaning the depositors wanted all their money immediately and of course, they didn’t have it.

The Bailey Building & Loan has closed its doors.  The Building & Loan owed money itself to Mr., Potter’s bank.  Uncle Billy has given the bank all the money on hand and it still isn’t enough.  George’ reopens the Building & Loan and lets the depositors in.  They immediately demand all their money.  But George doesn’t have it, either.  What hasn’t already been given to Potter is in the loans George has made to various homeowners.

‘The money isn’t here,’ he tells the angry depositors.  “Andy, your money is in Joe’s house.  Tom, your money is Bill’s house [we’re paraphrasing here].  You’ll get your money back when they’ve paid off their loans.  What do you want to do?  Foreclose on them?”

George resolves the crisis by loaning the depositors his own money until Potter’s bank reopens and they can pay him back.  Meanwhile, Potter takes over most of the businesses in Bedford Falls.  That is what happened during the Great Depression.  Short-sellers borrowed money from the banks to bet on stocks winning in 1929.  Instead, the stocks lost and they couldn’t pay back the loans.  Now the banks couldn’t meet their depositors’ demands.  Many banks went “bankrupt” and families (including my mother’s) lost all their savings, their jobs, and their homes.

Could this happen today?  Well, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation was created in 1933 in response to the thousands of bank failures that occurred in the 1920s and early 1930s.  The FDIC guarantees to protect any bank account up to $100,000.   However, the FDIC is also an enormous bureaucracy with an annual budget of $2.3 billion per year and growing.

In the 2008 financial crisis, Big Banks were bailed out to the tune of $700 billion.  But who gave them the money?  The Treasury or the Federal Reserve?  According to a blog that analyzed the Financial Crisis of 2008, with a bent towards the Democrat side: 

https://2008financialcrisis.umwblogs.org/analysis/the-federal-bailout/

On September 19, 2008 President Bush announced his financial bailout plan, the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008 to confront the financial crisis. This plan was initially rejected by the U.S House of Representatives on September 29. After a great deal of public lobbying, on October 1, the U.S. Senate passed an amended version of the bill, which was subsequently accepted by the House two days later. This legislation created the $700 billion Troubled Assets Relief Program (TARP).

Financial businesses (both commercial and investment banks) had invested heavily in mortgage-backed securities (CMOs) and credit default swaps. Since the market had collapsed and no one was trading mortgage-backed securities, no one could say what they were worth, though it seemed clear they were worth less than face value. As a result, financial firms began hoarding cash instead of lending it out.

The original TARP plan was for the Treasury to use the TARP funds to purchase CMOs from commercial banks in order to stimulate bank lending. While much business lending, perhaps a majority, had been conducted by the so-called shadow banks, many of those had converted (or were in the process of converting) to commercial bank holding companies, making them eligible for TARP funds.

The Treasury intended to buy mortgage-backed securities at a discount from banks, which hopefully would induce banks to start lending again since lenders would know where they stood financially and borrowers would no longer have the taint of toxic assets. The price offered by the Treasury would be less than face value of the CMOs but more than the depressed current market value, assuming one could even find a buyer. The trick was to find the right price.

One potential consequence of the plan was that bank sales of CMOs at a loss could lower bank capital below the levels mandated by regulation, requiring the government to close those banks. The banks, therefore, proved reluctant to take the capital loss, hoping they could get a better price in the future, when CMOs became more widely traded again. In a thinly traded market, prices don’t necessarily convey accurate information. When no transactions are taking place, the first trades are likely to occur at depressed prices, prices which don’t fully value the securities.

Over time as the market recovers, prices more accurately reflect the value of the securities. There was also concern that the first banks to sell to the Treasury would be perceived as desperate.

In any case, the Treasury began to back away from its original plan.  On October 14, the US Treasury introduced its $250 billion Capital Purchases Program (TARP II) in which banks could voluntarily sell equity to the Treasury to boost their capital, while still retaining their CMOs.  A month later on November 12, Secretary Paulson formally cancelled the original TARP plan in favor of the CPP, arguing that “the most timely, effective step to improve credit market conditions was to strengthen bank balance sheets quickly through direct purchases of equity in banks.”

What did Paulson mean by the “direct purchases of equity in banks”?  They were buying the stock of the banks.  They floated them as well as some insurance companies.  Some they allowed to fail.  They toughened the reserve requirements the banks had to have.

Banks participating in TARP II were the biggest institutions in the US banking system. They included (in order of their Treasury equity) Citigroup, Bank of America, JP Morgan Chase, Wells Fargo, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, PNC Financial, US Bancorp, GMAC, Capital One, Regions Financial, American Express, Bank of New York Mellon, State Street Bank, and Discover Financial.

None of this would have happened if Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson had not laid the foundations for federal control of the banking system, through its puppet, the Federal Reserve Bank.  How did all this come to pass?  Let’s follow Judge Napolitano back over a hundred years ago and continue his explanation of our “progressive” banking system.

The banks developed clever account tactwn.ics to handle this system. The money someone deposited for the banks to hold was counted as an asset.  An asset is something that the banks own.  In our example, where you are a landscaper, the tools and equipment that you own and operate to run your business would be your assets.  Banks also then lend out ‘their’ assets, which are really your monies, to someone else and count it as a liability.  A liability represents a debt that the banks owe. 

In our example, a liability in your landscaping business would be a loan you take out to finance the purchase of a new piece of machinery.  By counting the money, you deposit as an asset, and lending it to someone else and counting the loan as a liability on their books, the bankers’ books appeared balanced.  The bank derived profits from the interest payments on the loans, their liabilities, which were made with their assets, which were the mon[ies] of their depositors.  They did this while keeping only a small fraction of the overall commodities (gold) in their vaults.

In this system of banking, the incentive is to loan as much money as possible.  The more money a bank can loan, the more interest it will receive and the more profits can be generated.  This is termed leverage, meaning how highly one party, the bank, uses someone else’s money in the form of debt, to generate profits.  Banks that hold more money in the vault than a competitor are losing opportunities for profit compared to their competitor, but are in a much safer position and better able to weather a financial downturn should depositors wish to have their gold.

It was not until a lender of last resort was established that banks were free to make insanely risky loans.  Before that time, banks had to consider carefully the banking industry, the potential lender, and how highly they could leverage themselves without going out of business.

Today, the Federal Reserve, as the lender of last resort, takes care of this concern and allows banks to make loans that are riskier than they would otherwise be able to make.

The important effect of fractional reserve banking is in how it grows or shrinks the money supply.  In fractional reserve banking, banks accept deposits, lend out nearly all of that money, derive income from the interest on those loans and lend [that] interest to others.  The cycle repeats itself many times over, each time generating new money and therefore increasing the money supply.

This is true since whatever amount of money the bank has been given is used to generate more money in the form of interest, but there is no new commodity to back that interest.  The interest, therefore, is money from thin air.  At this point in the story, people have become comfortable trading in paper notes, [or] receipt money, but the commodity money really exists only in small quantities in the bank vaults.

If everyone who possessed a receipt note were to cash in his or her receipt money, it would quickly become apparent that the actual amount of receipt money in circulation far exceeds the amount of commodity money in the banks.  However, since the commodity money ultimately backs the money supply, if only by a small amount, there is still a limit on how much the receipt money can exceed the commodity money.  What is occurring is that the value of each note is decreasing, but the banks are gathering a greater share of the overall wealth through the interest by lending other people’s money.

The final development in our money system is fiat money. This is what we use today.  Fiat money is money that in and of itself has nothing backing it.  After President Nixon destroyed the gold exchange standard by unilaterally abrogating both a treaty and the innumerable contracts and agreements the federal government had in place to exchange gold for cash, there was no longer any commodity backing American dollars.

In fact, the Treasury stopped issuing American currency; the Federal Reserve now issues it. 

Between 1969 and 1971, not having a commodity with which to back it, the U.S. Treasury officially stopped printing money.  The Treasury stopped issuing larger denominations ($1,000) in 1946.  They began recalling these notes in 1971.  The Federal Reserve has actually been printing paper money since its inception in 191 and they charge the U.S. Bureau of Printing and Engraving 4 cents per note.

If you look in your wallet, you will see printed on any denomination of currency “Federal Reserve Note” on top (unless you have an old dollar which was issued the U.S. Treasury).  Through the magic of the Mandrake Mechanism, which is essentially a method by which the Federal Reserve creates money out of thin air, the Federal Reserve buys government debt and turns it into currency.  There is no gold; just debt.  This method was named after a 1940s comic book character, Mandrake the Magician, whose specialty was creating things out of thin air and then making them disappear again.

This is basically the same way the Fed creates and distributes money, by creating money out of nothing and getting it paid back in interest.  It may be shocking to hear, but all of our money is literally debt.  If we were to pay back all our debts, there would literally be no money; there would be no dollars.

The process sis quite complex and more smoke and mirrors than anything else.  Here’s how it works:  First, the Treasury issues a Treasury note to the Federal Reserve.  This note is a promise to pay money at some future date [to the Federal Reserve]. 

Then, at the Federal Reserve, the note becomes a securities asset.  This security is a promise made by the government to pay the Federal Reserve and it is backed by the “full faith and credit” of the U.S. government, meaning our tax dollars.

The Federal Reserve, now having a securities asset, creates for itself a liability by issuing a Federal Reserve check to the U.S. government.

Wait. What?!

However, there is nothing to back this liability because the Federal Reserve is issuing a check to the government which itself promises to pay back the money it lent to the Federal Reserve.  No commodity was deposited.  The only backing at this point is the full faith and credit of the United States, our tax dollars.  So, because the government promises to generate tax revenue [in order to]…pay back the Federal Reserve the money it owes to the Fed, the Federal Reserve gives a check to the government.  As we will see, this is complete nonsense because the latter steps of the Mandrake Mechanism result in the creation of dollars in the first place.  Literally, the Federal Reserve is creating money from nothing [and at a deficit to the taxpayer].  You and I cannot legally do this, but the Federal Reserve, a private bank, can.

The government now endorses the [Federal Reserve] check and sends it to one of the [12] Federal Reserve banks throughout the country where it becomes a government deposit.  This deposit is then used to pay government expenses in the form of government checks; those off-green ubiquitous checks bearing the image of [the Statue of Liberty].

These government checks create our fiat money.  Recipients of these checks deposit them into their own banks.  The banks then have commercial bank deposits.

Now, the banks use these deposits as assets within the fractional reserve banking system and lend out most of the deposits, thereby creating a liability.  The money kept in the vaults (although often just computers today) is called the bank reserves.  The Federal Reserve sets the amount of reserves the banks must maintain; currently, it is only 10%.  This means that a bank can lend up to 90 percent of its assets.  This is made possible by the system of fractional reserve banking discussed previously.

The deposits that the banks do not have to hold as reserves are called excess reserves and are lent out to earn interest as loans.  Those loans are made to you, me, companies, governments, other banks, anyone and everyone.   We then pay other people, and they then deposit the money into their banks.  Those banks then hold 10 percent of [that] money deposited and out the other 90 percent.  Through the Federal Reserve and fractional banking, nine times as many dollars are created than initially authorized.  Those initial dollars were simply exchanges between the Federal Reserve and the Treasury; no tangible asset backs any of this; [only pure] debt.

The reason to create such an elaborate system is for inflation.  Inflation is the increase in money supply, and it is simply a tax on the American people perpetrated by the government and the Federal Reserve.  Since there is nothing backing any of our money other than the government’s debt, the government is free to keep conducting this smoke-and-mirrors show as long, and as many times, as it wishes.

Americans have no idea that this is occurring; all they see are prices rising.  In reality, it is not prices rising but a loss of purchasing power.  The goods that could be purchased with one dollar only a year ago cannot be bought for one dollar today…All of this is to prove that the government is paying its expenses through creating money and inflating the currency using the Federal Reserve as its tool…Inflation is a tax because the government is extracting wealth from its citizens through inflation.

Confused?  So are we.  Flabbergasted.  We should be.  Infuriated.  If Americans understood the problem, they would be.  Only they don’t.  Napolitano probably made a decent profit on this book.  But since the average American dislikes reading, we doubt the people who most needed to know this information read it.  There are Tea Party people who have been inveighing against the Federal Reserve for years.  But the people to whom they rail don’t understand what they’re talking about.  They think those guys (they’re mostly fellows) are simply old, tin-foil hat warriors.

Um, no, they’re not.  Even my mother couldn’t explain the Federal Reserve so that I understood it.  I knew it was a group of private bankers.  I knew (for myself, because I was approaching teens in 1971) that Nixon took us off the gold standard, which meant our money was basically worthless.  What I really didn’t understand – until reading Napolitano’s book – the relationship between the U.S. Treasury and the Federal Reserve.

The relationship is an incestual one, being the creation of a Progressive president over 100 years ago.  The American people need to understand how this relationship works and how it “relates” to the historic rise in inflation we’re experiencing right now.

With all due deference and apologies to Judge Napolitano for borrowing so heavily from his book, we’re sharing that information with you here.  We hope you’ll share it with other Americans so they understand what’s going on, how we’re being robbed and why.

The COVID Vaccine Coverup: The Hoax is Up

The vaccine doesn’t work and now we’re seeing signs that the protein spike makes itself at home in men’s and women’s reproductive organs.  This table is taken from a report in Canada by Expose News, showing the number of cases, hospitalisations and deaths by vaccination status between in June 2022.

The first COVID vaccine roll-out began on in December 2020, during Pres. Trump’s final days in office.  He got COVID the previous August and recovered within days, thanks to the use of hydroxychloroquine and other treatments considered “controversial” by the medical establishment.  Former Vice President Biden got it and spent weeks zooming from his basement.

Now Biden has it again, we were told today.

A month later, WebMD.com, among other social media sites, was dispelling rumors that mRNA-based vaccines could pose long-term dangers to health.

Jan. 12, 2021 — There’s no evidence that the new vaccines against COVID-19 cause infertility, yet that’s a worry that’s been cited by some health care workers as a reason they’re reluctant to be first in line to get the shots.

Across the country, significant numbers of health care workers have balked at getting the new vaccines.

Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine said in a recent briefing that 60% of Ohio’s nursing home staffers had declined their shots. In Georgia, an infection prevention nurse who coordinates COVI vaccines for the 30,000 employees in her health system said that so far, fewer than 33% had gotten the shot. The rest had decided to “wait and see.” The nurse disclosed the numbers on the condition that we not reveal what hospital she worked for, as she was not authorized to speak to reporters.

None of this has surprised Jill Foster, MD, a pediatric infectious disease specialist at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis who has been studying vaccine hesitancy.

“With COVID, it was the perfect storm. With COVID, there was already a bunch of people out there saying there’s no such thing as COVID, it’s no worse than the flu,” she says. Many of those people gained substantial followings for themselves on social media. When the vaccines came along, they used those platforms to stir up conspiracy theories.

Where did this infertility myth come from?

“In early December, a German doctor and epidemiologist named Wolfgang Wodarg, who has been skeptical about the need for vaccines in other pandemics, teamed up with a former Pfizer employee to ask the European Medicines Agency (the European Union counterpart to the FDA) to delay the study and approval of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine.  One of their concerns was a protein called syncytin-1, which shares similar genetic instructions with part of the spike of the new coronavirus.  That same protein is an important component of the placenta in mammals.  If the vaccine causes the body to make antibodies against syncytin-1, they argued, it might also cause the body to attack and reject the protein in the human placenta, making women infertile.

Their petition was picked up by anti-vaccination blogs and websites and posted to social media.  Facebook eventually removed posts about the petition from its site for spreading misinformation.

The idea that vaccines could be deployed for population control was also woven into the plot of a recent, fictional miniseries on Amazon Prime Video called Utopia.  In that show — spoiler alert — a drugmaker obsessed with population control creates the illusion of a flu pandemic to convince people to take its vaccine, which doesn’t prevent infection, but human reproduction.

A spokesperson for Amazon Studios says the series is pure fiction.

“Utopia premiered on Amazon Prime Video on Sept. 25, 2020,” the spokesperson said in a statement to WebMD. “It was written 7 years ago, and was filmed prior to the COVID-19 pandemic.  The series is based off of the original U.K. version, which premiered in 2013, and shares much of the same plot, including the vaccine storyline.”

While the show is the stuff of creative writing minds, could something like that happen in real life?

The biological basis for this idea is really shaky, Foster says.

The coronavirus’s spike protein and syncytin-1 share small stretches of the same genetic code, but not enough to make them a match. She says it would be like two people having phone numbers that both contain the number 7. You couldn’t dial one number to reach the other person, even though their phone numbers shared a digit.

But did the Wuhan Lab and other facilities find a way to expand that stretch of genetic code?

“What we know is that they are similar on such a tiny level,” Foster says.

Even Wodarg, in his petition, writes “there is no indication whether antibodies against spike proteins of SARS viruses would also act like anti-Syncytin-1 antibodies.”

Indeed, data from the human studies of the Pfizer vaccine don’t bear out this theory. In the Pfizer trial, which included more than 37,000 people, women were given pregnancy tests before they were accepted to the study. They were excluded if they were already pregnant.  During the trial, 23 women conceived, likely by accident.  Twelve of these pregnancies happened in the vaccine group, and 11 in the placebo group. They continued to be followed as part of the study.

Paul Offit, MD, director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, says this idea really crumbles when you consider that more than 22 million people in the United States have been infected by SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. In fact, experts believe that number is much higher because 22 million is just the number who have been tested and found. Most think the real number is at least 3 times that high.

Offit says to consider that 70 million Americans have been infected, or about 20% of the population. If the infertility theory was true, he says, you’d expect that the bod y making antibodies against the natural infection would show up in our fertility statistics. It hasn’t.

“There’s no evidence that this pandemic has changed fertility patterns,” Offit says.

He says there are cases where vaccines have caused biological effects linked to a disease. Take measles, for example.  After a measles vaccine, you can get little broken blood vessels, called petechiae, as a result of a problem with blood clotting.  It’s rare, but it can happen. The vaccine causes that phenomenon, he says, because measles, the disease, can also cause it.

“If natural infection doesn’t alter fertility, why would a vaccine do it?” says Offit, who has been reviewing clinical trials behind the vaccines as an adviser to the FDA.

Offit admits that we don’t have all the long-term safety data we’d like on the vaccines.  That’s being gathered furiously right now, as the vaccines roll out to millions of people, and reported by the CDC.

But so far, he says the major issues seem to be a severe  allergic reaction that appears to happen very rarely — in about 11 people for every million doses given. If it’s going to happen, he says, people generally know right away, when they are still under observation by nurses and doctors. Offit says the reaction, while serious, is treatable. It’s one reason why the CDC has advised people who have allergies to any part of the vaccine, including PEG or a related compound called polysorbate, to avoid these first shots.

Bell’s palsy, which causes one side of a person’s face to droop temporarily, may be another rare risk.  In clinical trials, this temporary paralysis happened slightly more often in vaccinated people than in those who got the placebo, though cases of Bell’s palsy were not more common than you would expect to see in the general population.  Right now, it’s unclear whether it’s a side effect of the vaccines.

Offit says what people should know is that they might feel pretty crummy after their shots.  He says he had about 12 hours of fatigue and fever after his recent vaccine.  That’s not a side effect, but the body generating a protective shield against the virus.

“It was a hit,” he says, “but again, a small price to pay to avoid this virus.”

Then, on July 16, 2022, NBC News reported that studies were showing that women of child-bearing age who had been vaccinated were experiencing unusual menstrual symptoms.

When adults gained access to Covid vaccines last year, most knew to expect headaches, fatigue and soreness as side effects.

But some researchers think it’s time to add another common one to the list: temporary menstrual changes.

An analysis published Friday in the journal Science Advances found that 42% of people with regular menstrual cycles said they bled more heavily than usual after vaccination. Meanwhile, 44% reported no change and around 14% reported a lighter period. Among non-menstruating people — those post-menopause or who use certain long-term contraceptives, for example — the study suggests many experienced breakthrough or unexpected bleeding after their Covid shots.

The survey included over 39,000 people 18 to 80 years old who were fully vaccinated and had not contracted Covid. The study authors cautioned, though, that the percentages do not necessarily represent the rate of menstrual changes in the general population, since people who observed a difference were more likely to participate. The survey’s aim was simply to provide evidence for future studies, not to establish cause and effect. 

29, 202102:27

Still, other recent research also found that the Covid vaccine is associated with a small change in menstrual cycle length.

The new survey started in April 2021, around the time [women] began to report unexpected bleeding and heavier flow post-vaccine.  However, these anecdotes were at the time met with the rebuttal that there was no data linking menstrual changes to vaccination.

That was both true and indicative of a larger problem.  Individuals who took part in Covid vaccine trials were not asked if they experienced menstrual changes.

“Before the vaccinations came out, I would say our knowledge on the subject of the connection between immunization and menstrual changes, in general, was nil,” said Candace Tingen, a program director with the gynecologic health and disease branch of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. Tingen was not involved in the recent survey.

Overall, few studies assess the direct effect of vaccination on the menstrual cycle, and most pharmaceutical trials have not included questions about changes to menstruation.

Tingen views this as a mistake. Perhaps, she said, if Covid-19 vaccine trials had asked about menstruation, people would not have been surprised — or frightened — by this unexpected side effect.

“It was really this lack of information that I think caused confusion, fear and perhaps vaccine hesitancy,” she said.

Study co-author Katherine M.N. Lee said that overall, menstruation is understudied when it’s not relevant to pregnancy.

“It gets ignored because of the structure of science,” Lee, an assistant professor at Tulane University, said. “There are very few senior people in science and medicine who are not white men.  It’s just not something they are thinking about as part of their lived experience.”

Lee and her colleagues were inspired to ask people about their menstruation cycles after being vaccinated after seeing both friends and strangers online wonder why they experienced an unexpected change.

The survey group included more than 3,500 people who identify as gender diverse.  Approximately 84% of participants were white, and none were between the ages of 45 and 55 because the researchers didn’t want to include changes associated with perimenopause, when the body begins the transition to menopause.

The respondents were vaccinated with Pfizer, Moderna, AstraZeneca, Johnson & Johnson and Novavax.

Then there’s this report from The Epoch Times reporter and blogger Enrico Trigoso:

Vaccinologist and key contributor to mRNA technology Robert Malone testified to the Texas Senate committee on Health & Human Services on June 28, highlighting some administrative actions during the pandemic that he thinks were incorrectly handled and that should be taken into consideration for the future.

Malone is also a specialist in clinical research, medical affairs, regulatory affairs, project management proposal management, vaccines, and biodefense.

He said that prior to the Chinese Communist Party virus outbreak, the standard procedure would have been for the CDC (Center for Disease Control and Prevention), a federal agency, to give advice to state public health authorities in order to regulate medical practices.

“Up until the present, that’s always been acknowledged. The role of the federal government is in consultation and support and advice. This approach has not been implemented during the COVID crisis … during SARS-Cov2 COVID-19 outbreak, new policies and practices have been implemented,” Malone testified in the hearing.

Malone has been involved with previous outbreak responses, including AIDS, anthrax, smallpox, and has worked on the smallpox vaccine, influenza vaccine, Ebola, Zika, and now SARS-Cov2.

“The NIH and particularly NIAID have developed and propagated treatment protocols throughout the United States.

“Development of vaccine products have been accelerated and historic non-clinical, clinical development, and regulatory practices had been discarded in a quest for speed under specific pressure from the executive branch in the prior administration.  

“Development of repurposed drugs and treatment strategies have paradoxically been aggressively blocked or inhibited by both NIH and FDA, apparently due to requirements in the federal emergency use authorization statute language, requiring lack of available alternatives as a predicate, to granting emergency use authorization to a new product, including a vaccine product,” Malone said.

The mRNA pioneer believes that due to poor management, public health officials were not able to access up-to-date information about the safety of the vaccines.

“This has compromised the informed consent process. CDC has actively promoted and marketed vaccination with an unlicensed emergency use authorized product. With over $1 billion in U.S. federal funding expended to both market the products and to censor those who’ve raised concerns regarding vaccine safety and effectiveness. This is not an opinion. It is well documented through Freedom of Information Act document disclosure.” Malone said.

On June 26, Malone told The Epoch Times that expectant mothers should avoid the “experimental” COVID vaccines and that their infants should not be injected with them.

“These new VAERS data and analyses demonstrate that both reproductive-aged mothers and their infants have been damaged by accepting unlicensed, inadequately tested, emergency use authorized genetic vaccines,” Malone said.

The Epoch Times reached out to the CDC for comment.

Steve Deace, a host on Blaze TV, was thundering against President Trump for incompetence in ordering a vaccine that had not been thoroughly vetted, using a technology (mRNA) that had no gained approval of the FDA.

We understand his frustration.  The epidemic happened in the last year of Trump’s term.  Initially, Trump attempted to be cautious in reporting the development of this pandemic.  China was not exactly forthcoming with the information about the virus.  In fact, they did what they do best, as a communist country:  they lied and spread propaganda.

Scientists who spoke out either died from the disease themselves, or were never heard from again.  That was not a lot of information to go on.  The scientists didn’t know a whole lot about this disease.  Or, as we learned from Glenn Beck’s documentaries on COVID, had spent years developing it alongside pharmaceutical companies that would profit from a vaccine for it and certainly weren’t sharing that information.

All Trump had to go on was what the men in white coats told him.  Dr. Birx has now come out with a book, bragging about all the information she withheld from him.  Trump was between a rock and a hard place.  Thousands of people were certainly, although it was mainly due to mismanagement and a lack of preparedness among medical facilities to deal with such an emergency.

Trump did not close down states or their businesses; their governors did that.  He did not advocate a mask mandate; Joe Biden did.  For lack of a better option, he played into the radicals’ hands and ordered up a vaccine that did not prevent someone from getting the virus or giving it to others.

Yes, Steve Deace:  Trump was played.

Governors shutting down the states allowed the Democrats to proceed with their mail-in ballot initiative, causing huge irregularities in the crucial 2020 Presidential election, as well as implementing other election-fraud methods to give the election to Biden.

Ultimately, getting the vaccine or not was a personal choice.  Many people felt compelled to do so as a condition of employment.  Others steadfastly refused and even held protests against mask and vaccine mandates.  The Media branded them conspiratorial “Anti-Vaxxers.”

Only they were right.  The vaccine is worse than useless.  A female relative got four shots and got the virus every single time anyway.  Younger people weren’t supposed to be vulnerable to COVID.  They still got it.  Some young people got the vaccine and now we’re finding out just how dangerous it is.

For some of us over the age of 60 or so, getting the vax is no big deal.  But it certainly was a waste of time and tax-payer money.  To those of us over 60 who refused, we can now acknowledge that they were absolutely right.  Well, we thought so all along. 

We thought the whole thing was a scam by the Democrats and the Communists to throw the 2020 Election and bring about the Belt and Road Initiative for China and Russia’s (Putin’s) conquest of Eastern Europe.  Not to mention Climate Change regulation, transgender insanity, the continuation of the invasion of our Southern border by drug-dealing criminals, and the completion of the indoctrination of our children.

Deace complained that our own government was testing us, to see if we were obedient sheep.

Meanwhile, according to Canada’s exposenews.com, a very embarrassed Justin Trudeau had to reveal that in Canada:

The Government of Canada has confirmed that the vaccinated population account for 4 in every 5 Covid-19 deaths to have occurred across the country since the middle of February 2022, and 70% of those deaths have been among the triple vaccinated population.

The Government of Canada produces a daily Covid-19 Epidemiology update, in which they sporadically provide new data on Covid-19 cases, hospitalisations and deaths as and when they feel like it.

The following table is taken from their 14th June update, found here, and shows the number of cases, hospitalisations and deaths by vaccination status up to May 29th 2022 –

Unfortunately, the Government of Canada is attempting to deceive the public by providing a tally of cases, hospitalisations and deaths that stretches all the way back to December 14th 2020. By doing this they’re able to include a huge wave that occurred in January 2021 when just 0.3% of the population of Canada was considered fully vaccinated.

Canada recorded 429,335 Covid-19 cases between 14th Feb and 29th May 2022, and 376,451 of those cases were among the vaccinated population. With 11,211 cases among the partly vaccinated, 138,086 cases among the double vaccinated, and 227,154 cases among the triple vaccinated.

This means the unvaccinated population accounted for 12% of Covid-19 cases between 14th Feb and 29th May, whilst the vaccinated population accounted for 88%, 60% of which were among the triple jabbed.

But thanks to the ‘Wayback Machine‘, we’re able to look at previously published reports by the Government of Canada and do the simple math ourselves to work out the current situation surrounding Covid-19 by vaccination status.

Now, all we have to do is carry out simple subtraction to deduce who is accounting for the most recent wave of Covid-19 cases, hospitalisations, and deaths in Canada, and follow the results.

Canada recorded 429,335 Covid-19 cases between 14th Feb and 29th May 2022, and 376,451 of those cases were among the vaccinated population. With 11,211 cases among the partly vaccinated, 138,086 cases among the double vaccinated, and 227,154 cases among the triple vaccinated.

This means the unvaccinated population accounted for 12% of Covid-19 cases between 14th Feb and 29th May, whilst the vaccinated population accounted for 88%, 60% of which were among the triple jabbed.

In the space of nearly 4 months, Canada’s hospitals suffered an influx of 25,332 Covid-19 patients, and 19,717 of them were vaccinated. With 855 hospitalisations among the partly vaccinated, 6,489 hospitalisations among the double vaccinated, and 12,373 hospitalisations among the triple vaccinated.

This means the unvaccinated population accounted for just 22% of hospitalisations, whilst the vaccinated population accounted for 78%, 63% of which were among the triple jabbed.

The Canadian government is way ahead of ours in embracing Communism and Marxism.  Pierre Trudeau personally visited with Mao Tse Tung.  Ours isn’t far behind.  The Canadian people are not so keen to embrace government collectivism.  They rebelled against the mandated masking and the vaccine.  Trudeau Junior tried to put his big, heavy fascist boot on the necks of the protesting truck drivers.

But their protests didn’t go unnoticed.  Americans across the country protested the Media’s false COVID narrative, the censorship of the Social Media, and their state governments’ overreach in forcing their children to mask up and attend school from home.  We must not let them intimidate us into doubting our own common sense when it comes to our health and especially that of our children.

That’s where President Trump got steered onto the wrong road.  Not being a “medical expert,” he accepted their advice.  Fortunately, Americans said, “Stop!  Hold on.  We’re not doing this.  Take your government mandates and your triple masks and go to China!”

The government discovered that was scares Americans is the possibility that we might lose our jobs.

What scares the government is the ferocity with which we now defend our children.

They’ve learned how little we trust them.  And with good reason, as the statics demonstrate.

Governments may lie about the numbers.  But the numbers never lie about the government, once they’re made public.

Biden Putting the Tiger in China’s Tank from Our Oil Reserves

Source: Centre for Reserach on Clean Energy and Air

It’s enough to make your blood boil – and “The Big Guy” and Hunter Biden are working together

Elections have consequences.

Remember when Former Vice President Biden, as Obama’s Vice President, threatened Ukraine’s top investigator with financial sanctions if that prosecutor didn’t drop his investigation of Biden’s son Hunter regarding his involvement with the Ukrainian energy firm, Burisma?  “The Big Guy” was recorded making that boast.

Remember when Hunter traveled to China with his Pop on Air Force 2?  What was he doing there?  We know Senior was kissing Xi Jinping’s ring while he was there and toasting the Chinese dictator-for-life with champagne.  When Biden visited Israel, Israel’s Prime Minister had to guide this idiot to his seat?

Now that COVID has been overtaken in hysteria by the overturning of Roe v Wade and the heat wave in Europe (a poster child for Climate Change, except that the Sun has been extra-specially busy sending out its own “heat waves” since March (another one is due to reach us today and will take several months to dissipate, according to scientists at Spaceweather.com.), Biden is searching for other excuses to declare a national emergency, which is what one astrological friend suggests all the retrograde outer planets may signify.

He can’t make up his mind whether it will be National Climate Change, National Abortion Rights, or National Gun Control.  So many crises, so little brain-power.  There are only so many things about which a man who had to repeat the Third Grade can contemplate at one time.

His brain might even short circuit before the Mid-Terms trying to transition from illegally-elected president to dictator.  Woodrow Wilson’s did.

If the Republicans win in November, Biden is going to be in big trouble, especially for selling the United States’ Strategic Petroleum Reserves to China.  Republicans and even some Democrats like West Virginia’s Joe Manchin are hoppin’ mad and talking treason and sedition.

Here’s what has happened to cause your gas prices to skyrocket, then dip, and then slowly rise again.  As a sop to the American voter, Biden released some of the SPR to American oil companies.  But he released billions of gallons to other countries, chiefly China.

From the Institute for Energy Research, July 14, 2022

It is not enough that China is buying Russian oil at a discount due to western sanctions put on Russia because of its invasion of Ukraine, but now President Biden’s Department of Energy is selling China oil from the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR)—a source that is meant for national emergencies that Biden has been depleting since last November in hopes to lower gasoline prices that have been escalating due to his energy policies.

The SPR was established by the 1975 Energy Policy and Conservation Act to help the U.S. mitigate the impacts of future “severe energy supply interruptions.” But, Biden has sold more than five million barrels of oil from the SPR to European and Asian nations instead of U.S. refiners, compromising U.S. energy security.  Biden’s Energy Department in April announced the sale of 950,000 barrels from SPR to Unipec, the trading arm of the China Petrochemical Corporation, which is wholly owned by the Chinese government.  China purchased that oil from U.S. emergency reserves to bolster its own stockpile.  China has been buying large amounts of oil for its reserves since the early COVID lockdowns when prices were low due to demand destruction.

Biden ordered the Department of Energy to release a total of about 260 million barrels of oil stored in the SPR over the last eight months. The SPR’s level has fallen to about 492 million barrels of oil, the lowest level since December 1985, according to the Energy Information Administration.  The current level is 20 percent lower than its level recorded days prior to Biden’s first release in late November.

That is in contrast to President Trump, who in March of 2020, ordered the Department of Energy (DOE) to fill the SPR to its maximum capacity by purchasing 77 million barrels of American-made oil beginning with an initial purchase of 30 million barrels.

Other SPR Shipments Abroad

According to U.S. Customs data, about 470,000 barrels of oil from the Big Hill SPR storage site

in Texas was shipped to Trieste, Italy, which is the source of a pipeline that sends oil to refineries in central Europe.  Atlantic Trading & Marketing, an arm of French oil major Total Energies, exported 2 cargoes of 560,000 barrels each.  Cargoes of SPR oil were also exported to the Netherlands and to a refinery in India, and a third cargo was headed to China.  At least one cargo of oil from the West Hackberry SPR site in Louisiana was set to be exported in July, according to Reuters.

China Aids Russia through Energy Purchases

China spent $18.9 billion on Russian oil, gas and coal in the three months that ended in May—almost double the amount from a year earlier, according to customs data. The higher spending is helping make up for decreased purchases from the United States and other nations that have stopped or slowed buying Russian energy because of its invasion of Ukraine.  China is buying essentially everything that Russia can export via pipelines and Pacific ports, according to the Finland-based Center for Research on Energy and Clean Air that has tracked Russia’s energy flows since the start of the war.  

China is the world’s biggest energy importer and has dedicated pipelines for Siberian oil and gas.  It has also contracted for larger amounts, which new pipeline infrastructure will deliver.  Even as its energy consumption was curbed over the first half of 2022 mainly due to COVID-19 lockdowns, China spent far more on Russian energy due to higher prices and small increases in volumes. Russia has long-standing trade and strategic relationships with China, and along with offering steep price discounts is also accepting payments in local currency to help keep trade flows strong.

China’s imports of Russian oil increased 28 percent in May from the previous month, hitting a record high and helping Russia overtake Saudi Arabia as China’s largest supplier.  Although South Korea and Japan have cut back on Russian oil, those volumes are a fraction of what is being bought by China and India.  The shift has allowed Moscow to maintain its production levels. Despite Russian oil being sold at a steep discount, soaring energy prices have led to an increase in oil revenue for Russia, which took in $1.7 billion more in May than it did in April, according to the International Energy Agency.

Russian oil sales dropped by 554,000 barrels a day to Europe from March to May, while Asian refiners increased their take by 503,000 barrels a day — nearly a replacement of one for one.  Of those, 165,000 barrels are going to China from eastern Russian ports instead of the Baltic and Black Sea ports that traditionally supply Europe.  Russian sales to India reached a record 841,000 barrels a day in May, eight times the annual average from last year. J.P. Morgan commodities experts estimate that China can buy an additional million barrels of Russian oil a day as China recovers from COVID lockdowns and adds to its strategic oil stockpiles with cheap Russian oil.  Russian Urals oil is selling for a $30 discount to Brent oil.

Conclusion

The emergency reserves of oil that are in the Strategic Petroleum Reserve are designed for international crises or for natural disasters, instead of being used for mitigating bad energy policy as Biden is doing.  Some have suggested that he has transformed the SPR into the “Strategic Political Reserve,” implying his sales are political responses to his aggressive assaults against domestic energy production.  With Biden supplying global oil markets with U.S. oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, he is depleting our oil reserves and hurting U.S. national security, while China is adding to its national reserves by buying SPR oil from Biden’s Department of Energy and by also buying cheap oil from Russia.

From The Federalist, July 22, 2022

On Wednesday, Reuters revealed that more than 5 million barrels of oil from the nation’s Strategic Petroleum Reserves were sent overseas as part of President Joe Biden’s latest release initiated in March.

Some of that oil went to India, some to the Netherlands, and some was sent to China where the president’s son has engaged in years of potentially criminal business activity, embroiling the Biden White House in scandal since the 2020 campaign.

On Thursday, the Washington Free Beacon published new details about the Chinese oil shipments from the U.S. emergency reserves that Biden promised were tapped to “ease the pain that families are feeling” in the United States from high energy prices.

“The Biden administration sold roughly one million barrels from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve to a Chinese state-controlled gas giant that continues to purchase Russian oil, a move the Energy Department said would ‘support American consumers’ and combat ‘Putin’s price hike,’” the Beacon’s Collin Anderson reported. “Biden’s Energy Department in April announced the sale of 950,000 Strategic Petroleum Reserve barrels to Unipec, the trading arm of the China Petrochemical Corporation.  That company, which is commonly known as Sinopec, is wholly owned by the Chinese government.”

Sinopec is also tied to Hunter Biden, whose private equity firm, BHR Partners, bought a $1.7 billion stake in the company seven years ago.

Hunter Biden’s lawyer told the New York Times in November that the president’s son, “no longer holds any interest, directly or indirectly, in either BHR or Skaneateles.”

According to the Washington Examiner, however, Hunter Biden remained listed as a part-owner of the firm as late as March.

“Business records from China’s National Credit Information Publicity System accessed Tuesday continue to identify Skaneateles as a 10% owner in BHR, and Washington, D.C., business records continue to list Biden as the only beneficial owner of Skaneateles,” the paper reported. “The White House has routinely deflected questions about Biden’s business dealings to his attorneys, who have remained largely mum.”

“It’s possible that China’s business registry hasn’t yet been updated to reflect a potential transfer or sale of Skaneateles’s 10% stake in BHR to another party,” the Examiner added.

Meanwhile, Biden’s Energy Department has refused compliance with requests under the Freedom of Information Act probing the administration’s improper use of the nation’s strategic oil reserves maintained for emergencies. Last week, the Functional Government Initiative, a nonprofit government watchdog, filed a lawsuit to compel records concerning administration officials’ decision to tap the oil reserves in the absence of a sudden disruption in supply such as a hurricane or cyberattack.

By the end of Biden’s latest release from the emergency stockpile, the president will have depleted 260 million barrels from the nation’s reserves.  In May, the Department of Energy announced efforts to replenish only 60 million barrels of what’s been released, despite an authorized storage capacity of 714 million barrels.  The Energy Information Administration reported that just more than 492,000 barrels remained in storage on July 1, exactly one month into the six-month hurricane season.

The Washington Free Beacon story:

The Biden administration sold roughly one million barrels from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve to a Chinese state-controlled gas giant that continues to purchase Russian oil, a move the Energy Department said would “support American consumers” and combat “Putin’s price hike.”

Biden’s Energy Department in April announced the sale of 950,000 Strategic Petroleum Reserve barrels to Unipec, the trading arm of the China Petrochemical Corporation.  That company, which is commonly known as Sinopec, is wholly owned by the Chinese government.  The Biden administration claimed the move would “address the pain Americans are feeling at the pump” and “help lower energy costs.” More than five million barrels of oil released from the U.S. emergency reserves, however, were sent overseas last month, according to a Wednesday Reuters report. At least one shipment of American crude went to China, the report said.

The Biden administration also claimed the Unipec sale would “support American consumers and the global economy in response to Vladimir Putin’s war of choice against Ukraine” and combat “Putin’s price hike.” But as the war rages on, Unipec has continued to purchase Russian oil. In May, for example, the company “significantly increased the number of hired tankers to ship a key crude from eastern Russia,”Bloomberg reported. That decision came roughly one month after Unipec said it would purchase “no more Russian oil going forward” once “shipments that have arrived in March and due to arrive in April” were fulfilled.

The White House did not return a request for comment. Its decision to sell barrels from the country’s Strategic Petroleum Reserve to a Chinese conglomerate comes as the American public increasingly sours on Biden’s energy policies. According to a January Gallup poll, roughly three in four Americans are not satisfied with the federal government’s national energy policy, the highest level in roughly two decades.

Power the Future founder Daniel Turner admonished Biden for selling “raw materials to the Communist Chinese for them to use as they want.”

“We were assured Biden was releasing this oil to America so it could be refined for gasoline to drive down prices at the pump. So right off the bat, they’re just lying to the American people,” Turner told the Washington Free Beacon. “What they’re saying they did and what they did are not remotely related.”

Turner also said the decision highlights the Biden family’s “relationship with China.” Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, is tied to Sinopec. In 2015, a private equity firm he co-founded  in Sinopec Marketing. Sinopec went on to enter negotiations to purchase Gazprom in March, one month after the Biden administration sanctioned the Russian gas giant.

Biden campaigned heavily against the oil and gas industry in 2020, promising to “end fossil fuel.” He went on to cancel the Keystone XL pipeline and implement a moratorium on new gas leases on federal land during his first month in office. Biden’s energy secretary, meanwhile, is working with left-wing activists who want to eliminate fossil fuels, and in late October, House Oversight and Reform Committee Democrats pushed top oil executives to produce less gas due to climate change.

Gas prices have since soared to record highs.  In mid-June, the national average for a gallon of gas surpassed $5 for the first time ever.  Still, the White House has assured Americans that they need to pay high gas prices to support the “liberal world order.”

“What do you say to those families that say, ‘Listen, we can’t afford to pay $4.85 a gallon for months, if not years?'” CNN anchor Victor Blackwell asked Biden economic adviser Brian Deese in late June. “This is about the future of the liberal world order and we have to stand firm,” Deese responded.

Having reduced our oil reserves to dangerously low levels, he just won’t be able to release any more oil to assist the American public.  Gee, that’s just too darned bad, isn’t it, folks?  He may have to order us to stay home from work, close up our businesses again in order to “conserve” oil.  Workers will have to earn from home and their kids will have to learn from home.

In a National Gas Emergency, which we would guess would be at the top of Biden’s emergency powers list, we would be reduced to gas rationing, which is what Jimmy Carter did in the late 1970s.  As a result, our Capitalist economy would slide down even further than it has already.

Such a declaration would finish it off.  This old fuddy-duddy’s handlers don’t care if he’s not re-elected.  They don’t even care if he’s impeached.  They needed a useful idiot to perform the decidedly unpopular, unconstitutional, and unAmerican tasks that will bring our country down.

There’s still hope. Even out in California, there are Conservatives who are as hopping mad as Joe Machine.  In fact, he’s, their hero.  It could go either way, from an astrological standpoint.  It just depends on whether the Rosicrucians, who configured the astrologer’s most important resource, the Ephemeris, got their calculations right.

According to them, we’ll be entering the Age of Aquarius.  But according to astronomers, Pluto will enter the sign of Capricorn a mere two weeks after the 2024 election.

The optimist believes that the current resurgence of patriotism in America is a sign that Conservatives will be the revolutionaries and win the battle for the United States of America.  As I foresaw when I addressed by local TEA Party in 2009, mothers were the key to the future.  Fathers, too.   But it all came down to the children and who was teaching the children American history.

It sure wasn’t the teachers, I noted, and the Mothers of America would have to take charge.  Take up their rolling pins and defend their children and families.

The pessimist isn’t quite so sure.  If Pluto is really entering Capricorn, it means a brief, but miserable period of tyranny and oppression, when a wealthy elite class will govern the world without accountability.

Biden is making sure we run out of gas.  The Media is covering up his fraudulent and discouraging voters, even Conservatives, from voting for Trump again.  It’s a divide not of race or ethnicity but of education:  high school versus college.  The high school educated want to hear fighting words.  The college-education want to hear rhetoric.  Trump leans more towards the former but he was willing to do the latter, until his undermining, back-stabbing handlers realized what was happening.

Trump’s Fall 2016campaign speeches were pure gold.  The college-educated were surprised – and convinced.  Someone had given him tips on how to give good speeches and he won, much to the dismay of the Democrats – and the backstabbers.  They told whoever was helping him to back off.

If he wants help again, he’s going to have to establish a new line of communications to Conservative writers, free from the interference from those handlers.  His helper will always be there for him.

As for the gas prices and all the other Socialist programs Biden is implementing, we must remember that the next President of the United States can wipe them all out, just as Biden wiped out all of Trump’s executive orders.

Congress knows this and are desperately trying to codify their favorite Socialist policies.  Fortunately, they’re being opposed by the Senate.  Democrats are complaining that the Senate is being “obstructive.”  Well, no kidding. 

What we need to do is vote in more “obstructive” Conservative representatives and Senators into Congress.

Govt, ESG, Unions Driving Independent Truckers Out of Business

California leads the way in throwing roadblocks in front independent truck drivers.  Seen here:  Independent truckers protesting the passage of California’s AB-5 at the Port of Oakland

The supply chain crisis began with one manufactured crisis – COVID -and promises to end in another if Biden declares a Climate Emergency, one WHO claims will affect the health of millions, all because it’s hot in Texas.

Independent trucker are the classic symbol of freedom in America – and the Dems want to cancel them

Illinois truckers are worried draconian California trucking emissions regulations could spread to the Land of Lincoln, according to a report in Just the News.com.

“It’s across the board, the state economy would suffer immeasurably if we were to adopt some of these California regulations in Illinois,” said Don Schaefer of the Mid-West Truckers Association

The trucking industry is fragile enough now as is, said Don Schaefer, executive vice president of the Mid-West Truckers Association, and following California’s lead would be “catastrophic.”

With high fuel prices and labor shortages, some trucks are already parked, Schaefer said.

The Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) alongside the Union of Concerned Scientists commissioned a report supporting a move to no- and low-emission trucks and buses in Illinois.

“Freight is a major part of the Chicago area economy, but air pollution caused by diesel emissions disproportionately harms Black and Latino communities in the region,” Jose Acosta Cordova of the Little Village Environmental Justice Organization said. “This report shows how the Advanced Clean Truck (ACT) rule and the NOx Omnibus rule will set Illinois on the path towards achieving zero-emission freight and mitigating the negative impacts of diesel-powered vehicles.”

With high fuel prices and labor shortages, some trucks are already parked, Schaefer said.

The report evaluated three policy scenarios Illinois could adopt. Two resemble California regulations like requiring increased numbers of new trucks to be zero-emission vehicles.

Schaefer said the trucking industry supports moving toward cleaner energy, but it’s not there yet.

“Sooner or later, we’re going to get to that point, but it’s not going to be overnight,” Schaefer said. “We’ve made great steps in the last couple of years, and it’s going to take a couple of years more to get to the point where we can have a zero-emissions fleet.”

The NRDC report claims more environmental regulations will create more clean energy jobs.

“The strongest scenario would add over 14,000 new jobs by 2045,” NRDC said in a news release. “The largest number of added jobs are in electrical component manufacturing and charging infrastructure construction, requiring many well-paid electricians and electrical engineers.”

Schaefer said adding more regulations similar to heavily regulated California, as the NRDC report suggests, would do the opposite.

“It’s across the board, the state economy would suffer immeasurably if we were to adopt some of these California regulations in Illinois,” he said.

“It’s gonna be bad for California, but it’s also going to be something that every other state is going to look at and say, ‘If we do this, then the total trucking industry from the independent contractor standpoint will be in turmoil,’” Schaefer said.

Independent trucking contractors are able to haul, work in construction, and do other things mid- to heavy-duty trucks can do. Schaefer said California aims to get rid of that independence, forcing truckers to work in larger, union operations.

Then there’s this bad news for independent truckers from California’s San Francisco-Bay Area industry, in a report from CBS News-5 San Francisco:

OAKLAND – A law designed to force gig-economy companies like Uber, Lyft and DoorDash to accept workers as employees is also having a profound impact on the trucking industry. AB5 was intended to give transport workers more workplace protections, but for truckers who own and operate their own rigs, they said it may be the end of the road.

On Thursday, June 28th, the U.S. Supreme Court made news again, this time by refusing to hear a challenge by California truckers to the new law that requires truck drivers to be employees of the trucking companies they do business with.

“This ruling really took everybody off-guard, especially at the speed that they kicked this back and essentially made it law,” said Paul Brashier, Vice President of ITS Logistics, a commercial transport company.

The problem is, nearly all of the state’s goods are transported by truck, many of which are owned and operated by individual drivers.

That’s especially the case at the Port of Oakland.

“There’s 9,000 trucks that serve the port on a daily basis, and 90% of them are independent contractors.  So, this is a big, big impact,” said Bill Aboudi, owner of AB Trucking in Oakland.

Aboudi employs his own drivers, but also uses independent contractors to handle overflow business, which he just said became illegal.  Aboudi says he won’t be able to use trucks owned by the drivers anymore.

“It just doesn’t work.  You own your own truck, it’s your truck. I can’t take possession of it and start using it,” he said. “In a case like my company, we just eliminate owner/operators and just reduce the workload.”

That’s a disaster for Hedayatullah Abrahami, who just bought his own truck a month ago.

He, like other owner/operators, spent tens of thousands of dollars to not be someone’s employee, and feels a sense of pride in owning his own truck.

“Oh, yeah, why not?” said Abrahami. “Yeah. That’s my own truck, working for myself, that’s really good. I’m happy for that.”

Now his truck will be useless unless he wants to become his own trucking company, booking his own loads and dealing with the port bureaucracy. That kind of paperwork was always done for him by AB Trucking.

“They arrange everything,” he said. “They talk to the big companies, to the port and everything. They pick all the loads for us.”

Abrahami’s dream of being a truck driver just got a lot more complicated.

Brashier predicts many won’t stay in California, which, he said, will only make the supply chain problems worse and the cost of everything in the state even more expensive.

“It’s going to adversely affect everybody,” he told KPIX 5. “And at the end of the day, with where we are with inflation being as high as it is, this is going to put inflationary pressure on the consumer, right?”

Ironically, companies like Uber and Lyft were exempted from AB5 with the subsequent passage of Proposition 22.  But Brashier said he believes AB5 was always intended to force independent truckers into trucking companies, making them easier to unionize.

Now that it is law, no one seems to know how it will be enforced or who will enforce it.  But there isn’t much time to figure that out. By court order, it is supposed to go into effect seven days from last Thursday

The Supreme Court’s refusal to get involved in a state law is understandable, especially after the 50 year-battle over Roe v Wade.  At least they didn’t rule in California’s favor, or it would be the “law of the land” as Roe once was.  Still, it’s a disturbing trend that’s likely to extend to other Blue states.  What happens to those truckers, driving in from Red states to destination Blue states like New York and New Jersey?  Will they be denied the right to do business here?  Eventually, it may come to a Supreme Court decision regarding interstate commerce.  If they rule in favor of the unions, it could spell doom not just for independent truckers but all independent businesses.

Must every business eventually become a franchise of some corporate cartel?  Unions cite the nuisance of increasing paperwork, due to increasing state and federal regulations as a reason for joining a “company.”  Executives call it “shared services,” where a company will consolidate all its non-production, non-sales functions, such as human resources and accounting.

The supply chain crisis isn’t strictly an American dilemma – it’s happening globally and it’s not solely due to a COVID labor shortage.  Unions are on the march – and on strike – around the globe.  Companies involved in transnational trade are rumored to be paying extortion money overseas to get their cargo moved off the docks and they’re paying third-party entities to protect their shipments from piracy, especially in the South China Sea.

Extortion is as old as industry and pirates have raided ships since ancient times.  But the U.S. Navy was supposed to help protect our shippers overseas.  Obama and Biden have made sure that can’t happen any longer.  Our naval forces have been seriously depleted while China has been building up its naval forces.

Domestically, unions will not permit independent trucks to even leave their trucks once they’ve crossed onto port property.  Then, they’re kept waiting for up to 12 hours before their trucks are loaded.  Independent truckers are seriously affected by rising diesel prices, while unionized truckers have their fuel costs absorbed by the company.

Independent truckers, working by the load, not the hour, are motivated to deliver their cargo faster and more efficiently.  They can get the goods to market faster and for a lower price.  Unions, like the government, don’t do anything particularly well, nor do they want to.  It’s against their code to do more than the contracted work.  Unions do protect workers employed in dangerous trades and will back a worker who has a work-place issue with management.

But as for the rest, unions are a Marxist danger to our Capitalist economy.  And what’s more, they know it.  Union membership has seriously declined in the United States since the 1960s.  The higher prices they demanded drove many manufacturers out of business or overseas, leaving many unskilled American laborers out of work and money. 

Ironically, Communist China doesn’t care a whit about its workers.  Companies have many Asian workers here in America who say that the Chinese employ child and slave labor to make everything from computer chips to American flags and American military uniforms.  They work in the most deplorable conditions imaginable.

But no one seems to care.  ‘That’s China’s business.’

Just think of that as you thumb away at your Smartphone.

Companies are also having to explain ESG scores to their befuddled and ignorant American workers. 

‘Social justice?  What does that have to do with making widgets?’ employees involved have asked.  ‘Climate change?  But our widgets are made in Bangladesh.’

How does a company president explain to his accountants that their American company has to pay a fine – or lost its Big Bank financing – because their subcontracted factory in Bangladesh is belching out tons of smoke and will continue to do so because that country has absolutely no environmental regulations?  That in the new Great Reset, global Build Back Better environment, an American company is responsible for any infractions of global climate change rules (the Paris Accords) by their international subcontractors?  Or social justice rules.  Or governance rules (the fuzzy third rung on this triangular stool).

As for the last, how does a company executive explain the last when he or she probably doesn’t understand it, either – that their attorneys have to explain it to them?

Companies are only doing what they must in an increasingly hostile business climate in order to survive.  Business climate change, in other words.

So once the widgets are on-shore here in America, a truck must deliver the widgets to the company’s warehouse before delivery to their customers.  If the independent trucker runs his truck on diesel fuel, very soon, the company will be forced to find other means of transportation, putting the independent trucker out of business, or face ESG fines and possibly cancellation of their business loans.  But if the company uses a unionized trucking firm, their “infractions” will be forgiven, because the company is supporting “good union jobs.”

That’s how this racket works.  That’s what will increase your food prices and still delay shipments.  The independent truckers must submit to unionization – and extortion of part of their wages to support Marxists causes and candidates – or face unemployment.

Associations like the MWTA are begging the government for more time in order to “comply” with these ESG regulations.  They shouldn’t be begging for anything in a free country, especially when the rest of the world is totally ignoring these regulations.  America is the only nation being held accountable for “climate change.” 

This is the business version of Common Core’s “Narrowing the Achievement Gap,” whose goal was to lower the test scores of middle-class suburban students to the level of urban, minority students.  Their objective was planned failure.  That’s what we have here.  They call it “equity”.  But that’s what they mean.

They’ve already stated such determination in the past.  They want to lower America’s economic status to that of “other countries” around the world.

A rising tide raises all boats.  A lowering tide leaves them stuck in the mud to be ransacked by thieves.

And Now…The Rest of the Ohio Abortion Story: Using Innocent Children to Advocate for Abortion

Just when you think you’ve heard it all…

Ohio authorities have charged a 27-year-old illegal Guatemalan immigrant with rape of a minor under 13 years old in a case involving a 10-year-old victim that has made national headlines since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, Fox News has reported.

Gerson Fuentes was arraigned in a Franklin County court in Ohio last Tuesday, according to county records. He is being held in the Franklin County Correctional Center without bail.

“My heart aches for the pain suffered by this young child. I am grateful for the diligent work of the Columbus Police Department in securing a confession and getting a rapist off the street,” Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost said in a Wednesday statement. “Justice must be served and BCI stands ready to support law enforcement across Ohio putting these criminals behind bars.”

The case made national headlines [last] week after Dr. Caitlin Bernard, a physician based in Indianapolis who performs abortions, told The Indy Star that the victim in question was six weeks pregnant when she had to travel from Ohio to Indiana to undergo an abortion procedure.

The Columbus Police Department did not comment on the case or confirm Fuentes’ arrest, but Det. Jeffrey Huhn testified Wednesday that the victim underwent an abortion in Indiana on June 30, the Columbus Dispatch reported.

Ohio state law abortions sought six weeks bans after conception with an exception for cases that endanger or compromise the physical health of the mother.  However, it definitely makes exceptions in medical emergencies, which this rape, involving a 10-year-old, qualified as.

But there’s more to story than even revealing the name of the alleged rapist. 

According to Megan Fox of PJ Media, the man was living in the same house as the girl, who lives in Columbus, Ohio.  The Columbus Police refused to return Ms. Fox’s phone calls and ignored her FOIA requests.

Last week, she told Glenn Beck on his radio program that the story was even worse than people thought.  The girl was actually 9 when she was raped, not 10.  The rapist, the defense inadvertently revealed, lived with the family although he told the judge that the suspect had “someplace else” that he could go while he was on trial.  The suspect was arrested and let out on bail and returned to the home.  Then, after he confessed, he was returned to jail with no bail.

The rape was reported on June 22^nd, presumably by the first doctor the child saw.  But because the suspect was an illegal immigrant, the Columbus Police sat on the arrest and did nothing.  The mother refused to believe the child’s story because she was in a relationship with the suspect herself.  In fact, it has been reported that the mother herself is now pregnant by the suspect.  It hasn’t been confirmed, but it’s believed that the mother is also an illegal immigrant.

Dubbing the child, “Little Girl Lost,” RedState.com, a sister Conservative media platform reports:

Lead Detective Jeffrey Huhn testified at Fuentes’ Wednesday arraignment hearing:

At Wednesday’s hearing, during which bond was set, Huhn testified that when detectives spoke to Fuentes through an interpreter, he admitted to having sexual contact with the 10-year-old girl.  An interpreter was also used during Wednesday’s hearing.

The child also told police that Fuentes was the father of the pregnancy, Huhn testified.

Assistant Franklin County Prosecutor Dan Meyer said the girl had just turned 10 recently, meaning she was likely impregnated at 9 years old.

Huhn also testified that DNA from the clinic in Indianapolis is being tested against samples from Fuentes, as well as the child’s siblings, to confirm contribution to the aborted fetus.

According to Det. Huhn, the mother informed Franklin County Services that her daughter was pregnant on June 22. The Indianapolis doctor Caitlin Bernard performed the abortion on June 30. Why did the mother allow eight days to pass before obtaining the abortion?  Especially in light of the supposed concern about Ohio’s restrictive time window?

Ohio state law bans abortions sought six weeks after conception with an exception for cases that endanger or compromise the physical health of the mother.  The mother has not filed charges against Fuentes.  According to the Telemundo report, Fuentes confessed to vaginal contact more than once with Little Girl Lost. Then this 10-year-old had to endure a horrific medical procedure that she cannot begin to understand, let alone process.

According to Megan Fox, the child was given an abortion pill (which is certainly no fun).

As Megan Fox from our sister site PJ Media has been ably reporting, the Indiana doctor who performed the abortion, Dr. Caitlin Bernard, has lots of suspect behavior around her supposed advocacy for Little Girl Lost.

Dr. Caitlin Bernard, who alerted the media to the 10-year-old who was raped in Ohio in order to lobby against Republican abortion-restriction laws, is facing at least two investigations for her conduct.  Fox News reported that her employer, Indiana University, is investigating her for HIPAA violations for revealing information about her patient to the press.

Indiana Attorney General Todd Rokita is also launching an investigation into Bernard’s conduct.

If you think about states surrounding Ohio that are least restrictive on abortions, you would think the family would have gone 185 miles to Pennsylvania. Pittsburgh is just 185 miles away. Pennsylvania has pro-abortion laws already in place that do not have the ticking clock of Ohio. Instead, they chose to cross state lines to Indiana, where Dr. Bernard, a known abortion activist and doctor practiced.

Convenience?

Maybe coincidence?

Doubtful, since this same doctor rushed to share this information with the legacy media.  Not only is this suspect, it’s more than worthy of further investigation. But so far, aside from the Columbus Dispatch, there isn’t a peep from other media that ran with Dr. Bernard’s account. They would rather point fingers at Fox News and right-leaning media than actually report the facts about this tragedy and abuse.

Ms. Fox told Beck that she didn’t know the name of the first doctor.  In fact, there’s some confusion about the first doctor, a second doctor and Bernard.  Who referred the child to this Indiana doctor?  Beck retweeted Fox’s comment that “Ohio’s Attorney General confirmed the girl COULD have gotten an abortion in-state under exceptions for the life of the patient. Why was she told she had to go out of state?  Who gave this story to the Left before Ohio’s AG knew about it? Why did Columbus Police tell him they didn’t know anything? Did the doctor report the crime?”

Initially, the police investigated the suspect but didn’t arrest him.  The attorney general asked his Ohio county sheriffs and prosecutors whether anyone had a report of this rape.  They all told him no.  The court records state that they did not know who the rapist was on June 22.  The child told them on July 6, Megan Fox told Beck.

The Left may have overextended itself on abortion hysteria, as we have pointed out previously.  Women aren’t as worked up about it as The Media would have us believe for the simple reason that they have access to The Pill.  Before it was legalized, women could only get the Pill by a prescription from their doctors and doctor would only prescribe it if a woman was married.

There, women should have had the “choice” to prevent pregnancy.  Terminating one already progress – and we mean one that’s really far along – is another matter.

A friend was vacationing in Nashville, Tenn., when the Supreme Court ruling overturning Roe came down.  Their hotel was a block away from the state capitol building.  They were wondering whether they’d gotten themselves into the midst of trouble.  But when the day came for the “violence,” she said only about 30 people showed up.

According to various Conservative reporting, the push to send the girl to Indiana, instead of having the “matter” taken care of right there in Ohio may have been political, not medical.  She could have had the procedure right there in Columbus.  Or she could have gone to Pittsburgh, Pa., which was much closer to the Ohio border.  We suspect this prolongation was part of an activist attempt to highlight the ‘cruelty’ of anti-abortion laws (where applicable).

This was a protest against states’ rights as opposed to one, “unified” Wilsonian unified United States.  Progressivism is a matter for another blog post.  The unnecessary and unconstitutional ruling on Roe v Wade was a sample of Progressivism in progress.  What women really wanted – then – was access to The Pill.  What they got, over the years, was the tortuous abortion of full-term babies to serve the market for embryonic parts, a multi-million-dollar industry.

The overturning of Roe v Wade and the subsequent outcry of shrieking women and would-be women woke normal women up, who said to themselves, “Hey, wait a minute.  This is 2022, not 1972.  We don’t need to do this.  But any woman who does can travel to a number of states that do permit abortions.  What’s going on here?”

What’s going on is the attempted abortion of the U.S. Constitution.

And the nuking of the Nuclear Family.

Big Apple Prepping for Doomsday

What to do AFTER the Big Bomb explodes?  You should be thinking about what to do before it drops!

New York City issued a PSA to advise residents and commuters about what to do in the event of a nuclear blast.  Assuming the Russians (or North Koreans or Iranians) give enough notice, New Yorkers are told to go to the basement of the nearest building or innermost room of their apartment or office.

They are then to stay tuned to local media for further instructions.  Evidently, the New York authorities aren’t aware of the electromagnetic pulse that nuclear weapons give off, frying circuitry for miles.

Too bad about all those electric cars, although even gasoline-powered cars rely on an electronic ignition to start.  Just what medium are they going to use to communicate with New Yorkers?

Sephora signal flags (the flags the Navy uses).

We saw what happened when disaster struck on 9/11.  The collapse of the Twin Towers cut off all electricity to Lower Manhattan.  It took days – or was it weeks – to restore the power since the rubble from the buildings had to be removed before technicians could get to the cables.

This is why President Dwight Eisenhower encouraged people to move to the suburbs during the Cold War, to decrease the density of the population.  The bombs were big back then.  Now the Russians have tactical weapons that can target schools, apartment buildings, office towers – all in suburban Ukraine.

,

Like Hitler, Putin has warned that as long as we leave him alone to take over Eastern and Central Europe, we have nothing to fear.  Hitler was a liar.  He was also a fool, thinking he could invade a country that encompassed six time zones.

Now Russia is promising the reverse, with the help of China, Iran and North Korea. 

Although it’s callous to say so, he’d be doing us a favor if he destroyed our major cesspools – um, we mean “cities.”  They’re a drain on our economy.  They’re a haven for criminals and drug dealers.  They’re strictly Democrat.  Why he would want to destroy American Communists is beyond us.  That didn’t stop Hitler from murdering the Brown Shirts when he found it expedient to do so.

Our only known nuclear bomb casualty list is from August 1945:

Hiroshima   192,000

Nagasaki – 226,000

Only one percent of the fissile material in the Hiroshima bomb exploded.  The bomb exploded 1900 feet above the city.  The initial blast radius was one mile; the shock wave travelled about four miles.

The Nagasaki bomb exploded at 1650 feet or so.  The blast was contained to an industrial center in the Urukami Valle; because of the hills surrounding the city, it suffered less damage, even though this bomb was more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb.  Again, the radius was about one mile.  Many victims died later of their injuries.

This is not a lesson we should take from history.  Nuclear bombs were in their infancy then.  Scientists weren’t even sure they would work.

Today, they have much bigger bombs, as well as smaller bombs intended for precision targeted.  Putin might want to send a really big bomb to New York City.  But New York City is a deep-water port, one of six major ports on the East Coast (Boston, NY-NJ, Norfolk, Charleston and Miami).  Where is China going to berth its enormous cargo ships if Russia bombs the Port of New York-New Jersey?

Still, Putin is carpet-chewing, Hitler-crazy.  So, forget about warning time.  Bombs can be delivered from nuclear-powered submarines only 12 miles off of our coast.

If you’re in Manhattan, the presumed target, your first warning about the bomb will be the flash.  You’re not going to have time to get to a basement bomb shelter if you happen to be outside, say, at lunchtime.  In a nanosecond, you’re going to be a shadow on a wall, just like the Japanese who were unfortunate enough to be at Ground Zero.

“Let’s say a nuclear explosion just happened,” the announcerette says.  Are they kidding?  You’re already nuclear toast.  All this depends upon Putin being kind enough to warn us first.  Just before the bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, advance planes dropped warning leaflets.

Putin isn’t going to be dropping leaflets, people.  He has already warned us and there won’t be a second notice.

A shock wave may very well travel a considerable distance east, along Long Island, and south along the Jersey shore.  To the north and west, there are hills that may absorb some of the shock.  That is, if they haven’t been blasted away to make way for affordable housing.

Who’s the greater danger to the United States?  Putin and his nuclear arsenal.  Or Joe Biden and the Great Reset?  Biden, and his predecessor, Obama, have left us wide open for attack,

My most recent temp assignment had me traveling east towards New York City.  Over the hills, the New York City skyline loomed purple in the morning sunlight.  New Jersey commuters always get the worst of it – the sun is in their eyes in the morning when they go to work and it’s in their eyes when they go home.

The tallest building in Midtown is Central Park Tower at 1550 feet, 50 feet lower than the altitude at which the Hiroshima bomb exploded.  Also known as the Nordstrom Tower, it’s the tallest residential building in the world.  The building’s roof height is 1368 feet (the same as the original World Trade Center).  The Freedom Tower at Ground Zero is 1776 feet, which includes its enormous antenna.

So, you wouldn’t exactly be at eye level with The Bomb.  But if you happened to be looking up and out the window, you would see it just the way some World Trade Center survivors saw the planes approaching on 9/11.

In the event of such an attack, would the United States retaliate?

Well, they might.  If they could.  The problem is, the U.S. hasn’t tested nuclear weapons in decades.  They don’t even know if they’ll launch, much less explode.  They may have no more firepower than a firecracker.  At best, they may only have the same effect as the Hiroshima bomb.

According to an article The Week magazine, published on January 17, 2015, when Obama was still in office:

The Pentagon recently admitted there are “systemic problems across the nuclear enterprise.” Thanks to arms-control treaties and the end of the Cold War, the U.S. has reduced its stockpile of nuclear weapons from 31,000 to about 4,800 over the last 48 years.  But as fears of nuclear war eased, the government failed to adequately maintain and update this immensely dangerous arsenal, which still contains enough collective destructive force to lay waste to every country on Earth. The U.S.’s 450 intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) are stored in decaying 60-year-old nuclear silos in Montana, North Dakota, and Wyoming that look like a poorly maintained Cold War museum.  The demoralized Air Force personnel safeguarding the weapons have been plagued by scandals reaching to the very top of the command structure — including drug rings, mislaid missiles, and widespread cheating on readiness tests. Today, the real nuclear threat to America isn’t an enemy strike, says Air Force Lt. Gen. James Kowalski. It’s “an accident. The greatest risk…is doing something stupid.”

How old are America’s nukes?

The average age of a U.S. nuclear warhead is 27 years.  Many of the buildings where the nuclear missiles and bombs are stored date back to the 1950s — and it shows.  Blast doors on the country’s nuclear missile silos are too rusty to seal shut. The roof of a security complex in Oak Ridge, Tenn., that houses most of the U.S. supply of enriched uranium collapsed in March.  For years, the three ICBM complexes had just one working wrench available to tighten the bolts on the missiles’ warheads. When the wrench was needed, the workers would FedEx it from base to base. Today, the principal information technology used to operate and launch the ICBMs is an 8-inch floppy disk from the 1960s.

Is the staff demoralized?

That’s an understatement. The Air Force officers spend long shifts in a hole underground waiting for a launch order that will probably never come, while “their buddies from the B-52s and B-2s tell them all sorts of exciting stories about doing real things in Afghanistan and Iraq,” Hans Kristensen, director of the Federation of American Scientists’ Nuclear Information Project, told Mother Jones. That sense of frustration has led to trouble. In 2013, the Pentagon announced it was investigating a drug ring across six missile launch facilities. Then, when examining the phones of two Montana officers suspected of using ecstasy and amphetamines, Air Force commanders unwittingly uncovered a cheating scandal implicating 98 missileers. The officers had been texting one another the answers for the monthly exams, which test a missileer’s knowledge of security procedures and classified launch codes. The institutional rot has led to a number of frightening near-misses.

Such as?

In 2007, six nuclear missiles went missing from a North Dakota facility for 36 hours. It turned out they’d been accidentally attached to a plane’s wings and flown over several states to Louisiana, where they were left sitting unprotected on the tarmac for hours. A year before, four missile nose cones were accidentally sent to Taiwan instead of helicopter batteries. The most serious near-disaster occurred back on Jan. 21, 1961, when two nuclear bombs slipped from the belly of a B-52 flying over the North Carolina city of Goldsboro. Both bombs were set to detonate, and failed to do so after suffering minor damage to the parts needed to initiate an explosion — a stroke of luck that saved the city from annihilation.

What’s being done to improve the situation?

Before announcing his resignation in November, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel announced $7.5 billion in extra funding over five years to cover management changes, training, and weapons upgrades.  He was following the lead of President Obama, who has reversed his 2009 pledge to seek a “world without nuclear weapons.”  Not only has Obama overseen the slowest five-year reduction of warheads in the past 20 years, but the president has also called for $1 trillion in nuclear modernization over 30 years, with a commitment to 400 land-based missiles, 100 new bombers, and 12 new missile-firing submarines. Some defense experts think he’s foolish to try to maintain a vast nuclear force created for 20th-century superpower threats. “It’s not missileers who are at fault; it’s the mission,” says Joseph Cirincione, a global security expert and author of the book Nuclear Nightmares.

What do hawks say?

They point to recent world events — such as the standoff with Russia over Ukraine and the volatility of nuclear-armed North Korea — as a reason for America to maintain a strong nuclear deterrent. Still, former Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. James Cartwright thinks the U.S. should eliminate ICBMs entirely and focus on smaller “tactical” nuclear weapons, such as plane-carried bombs. But for the foreseeable future, says Pentagon adviser Joe Braddock, the U.S. will try to keep its existing arsenal from falling apart. “The interesting thing about a nuclear deterrent is that enough of it has to be visible to scare the living daylights out of the enemy,” he says. “But if you are not careful, you scare the living daylights out of yourself.”

The world’s most tedious job

Overseeing the country’s nuclear missiles sounds like a thrilling job — in theory. But the workday of an average missileer is, in fact, mind-numbingly tedious. Air Force personnel have to work grueling 24-hour shifts inside a cramped capsule buried 60 feet underground, completing checklist after monotonous checklist. The air in the capsule is recycled and stale, with only a tiny prison toilet shared between officers. When problems arise, the missileers have no choice but to improvise: When two sewer pipes ruptured at a Montana launch facility, officers were forced to defecate into a cardboard box lined with a plastic bag — a demeaning situation that went on for months. “You are sitting there being told you are operating the most vital system to the defense of the country,” a former missileer told Mother Jones, “and there you are s—-ing and pissing in a bag.”

That was in 2015, after seven years under the so-called “leadership” of an avowed Marxist, anti-Capitalist.  According to more recent reports, Obama did not keep his pledge and our nuclear arsenal is still in the same state as it was in 2015.

Then, mercifully, we got Trump.  But he was harangued for four years, undermined by his own staff and cabinet, and impeached not once but twice.  The Democrats used various underhanded and illegal methods to steal the 2020 election and now we have a moron sitting in the White House, a man who had to repeat the Third Grade.

According to a February 25, 2020 Newsmax Online article:

President Trump’s National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) is making heroic efforts to reverse decades of neglect by advancing Life Extension Programs (LEPs) for U.S. nuclear weapons — all designed and built 30-40 years ago.

But the U.S. nuclear scientific-industrial base is so “hollowed-out” that America may never be able to catch-up with Russia and China in modern, new=generation, offensive nuclear weapons that deter Moscow and Beijing and enforce peace.

U.S. nuclear weapons are Cold War relics, now long past their original service lives, being refurbished to serve as re-sharpened teeth of America’s nuclear deterrent:

• The B61-12 gravity bomb (variable yield 0.3, 1.5, 10, and 50 kilotons: 1968.)
• The W80-4 cruise missile warhead (variable yield 5-150 kilotons: 1979.)
• The W87 warhead for the Minuteman III ICBM (475 kilotons: 1986.)
• The W88 warhead for the Trident SLBM (475 kilotons: 1988.)
• The W76-1 warhead for the Trident SLBM (90 kilotons: 1978.)
• The W76-2 warhead (5-7 kilotons) modified from the W76-1 to serve as a tactical nuclear weapon for the Trident SLBM, entered service in February 2020.

President Trump’s greatest gamble to rescue the U.S. nuclear deterrent from obsolescence is the recently announced W93 warhead — which will be the first genuinely new U.S. nuclear weapon designed and manufactured in decades.

But Newsmax reported that by April of this year, Former Vice President Biden had reversed those planned updates to our nuclear arsenal.

That should give you a pretty good idea of where we stand in the resumed “Cold War.”  Why would Putin or Xi Jinping bother to send nuclear weapons at us when they know are our Fake President will surrender without a fight?  China doesn’t want New York harbor or the Port of Los Angeles-Long Beach bombed.  Plus, they have huge populations living in those cities.

Only they don’t give a rat’s behind about their people.  They’re expendable.

Nor will they bomb us, at least so long as there’s a Democrat in the White House and Democrats running Congress.  But if we defy them – well, that’s a different story.  They don’t want Trump back in office.  A nuclear bomb – probably a targeted strike – before the Mid-Terms might give the Democrats the “ammunition” they need to warn America:  “Vote Democrat:  Or Else!”

We think that if they do this, it will be some time after Labor Day.  They’ll probably follow the September 11^th plan – that’s when Congress is back in session after their Summer Break.  A Tuesday would be key for destroying New York City’s infrastructure (that’s when the trucks coming the farthest from out West arrive to make their deliveries).   That’s why the terrorists were so keen to target the Hudson River crossings.  Commuters are also making those crossings in the morning (from all directions) and are generally stuck in traffic jams and can’t flee.

So lots and lots of people will get to see the Big Show before it’s all over (if it happens at all, of course).  They won’t have to worry about starving or eating crickets, at least.  Just why the Marxists would want to kill so many Democrats is difficult to understand.  They claim the ends justifies the means.

Whatever.  They’re the ones who wanted to live in Big Cities, despite President Eisenhower’s warnings.  They want even more of us to live in high-density housing.  Tell them to go take a hike.

There was a 1964 movie, starring Peter Sellers, called “How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love the Bomb.”  It was a comic take on the Cold War, versus the somber films, “Fail-Safe” and “On the Beach.”  You can’t even find the latter movie anymore, it was so grim, although extremely good.

Some of us Conservative are so fed up, that is, those of us living within the New York Metropolitan perimeter that we hope we’re given enough warning so we can run underneath it.

Here’s the astrological take on things:  by early September, six planets will have gone retrograde (that is, they will seem to astronomers and astrologers to be traveling backwards in the sky – they’re not, but that’s the way it looks).  Five of those six are the big, outer planets:  Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune and Pluto.  As far as astrologers are concerned, Pluto is still a planet.

We have two more big planets to go:  Jupiter will go retrograde in Aries on July 29 (when I expected to be released from the temp position I hated.  Mercifully, they let me go two weeks early), Aries is ruled by the God of War, Mars.  I thought I heard the Putin is so found of Mars, the War God, that he erected a statue to him?

Uranus will go retrograde in Taurus on August 25^th.  Uranus is the planet of the unexpected.  Then, on September 10^th, Mercury will go retrograde in Libra.  Retrograde Mercury happens quite often, and that’s when miscommunications happen, people make more than the usual number of mistakes and errors, more car accidents happen.  Phones and computers go down.

I won’t be around to blame, you jerks.  I’ll be probably be at home.  Who are you going to blame for your mistakes and poorly written and badly-tabulated invoices then, huh?  Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

But with so many retrograde planets, it’s going to be a virtual mistake-o-rama.  Everything that can go wrong will go wrong.  And they won’t all be accidents, either.  Big things are to happen and retrograde Mercury is just the trigger being pulled.

Mom always said the wheels of justice grind slowly but they grind exceedingly well.  That goes for woke Liberals and punitive supervisors alike, of which businesses usually have a surplus.

I don’t really want to see millions of people killed, either initially or in the aftermath of a bomb.  That’s not me (but it certainly seems to be them).

But if their precious businesses are seriously messed up beyond repair, if their communications are totally garbled, their accounts come tumbling in an inscrutable form, and their race cars never start again (on Thursday, I was waiting for a green arrow light to turn onto a notoriously dangerous highway when a car came from my right, cut me off and drove into the oncoming accident which would have caused a five-star accident.  The oncoming cars were able to stop in time and the woman in the SUV sped merrily on her way), well, I’ll just be tremendously happy and great gratified.

Still, while I would feel vindicated, if Putin launched an EMP weapon at New York City, taking out the energy grid that powers this area, many innocent people would suffer.  Not only would bad drivers not be able to start theirs, neither would law enforcement or first responders.  Many innocent people would be affected if police cars, fire engines and ambulances be able to respond to calls.

In fact, there wouldn’t be any calls because communications would be down.  Surge protectors are supposed to help.  But are vehicles equipped with surge protectors?  Are they enough to protect vital home and community systems from such a massive wave?  Would our home communications be protected?  Would the cell towers upon which we depend be taken out?  We know our landlines would be.

In short, would our electronic grid be able to withstand an EMP attack?  Would we be able to recover and how long would such a recovery take?

Older cars (pre-1954) are supposedly less vulnerable to such an attack.  But the EMP effect was first discovered during the Hiroshima attack.  Apparently, the wave didn’t get very far because we see vehicles moving in the newsreels when the Americans came into the cities.

However, even if older cars can operate, the gas pumps holding the fuel run on electric.  We wouldn’t be able to pump the fuel out of the ground.  The military probably already has answers and solutions to these problems (at least we hope so).  We hope they share these answers with us.

Or must we wait for the cavalry to come to the rescue?

We haven’t been given much warning on such threats, much less what to do in the aftermath.  Martial law would probably be declared in such an event, which is both good news and bad news.  While our military are largely heroes, this would put the government – Biden’s government – squarely in charge of us.

Take it from those of living in the New Jersey suburbs – the government is worse than useless.  During Hurricane Sandy (or whatever they called it), they focused on the cities (their Democrat constituents) first.  The suburbs were left to dangle in the wind for up to two weeks before power was restore to the communities farthest out.

The federal and state did economic and physical triage and, this being a Blue state, they chose their urban, Democrat, illegal alien constituents first.

Hurricane Sandy was indiscriminate in her destruction.  Being in the wooded suburbs, flooding wasn’t the problem – downed trees were.  Residents here have their own power saws, which they weren’t permitted to use to clear the streets.  We can assume that in a nuclear or EMP emergency, the same restrictions would apply.

We wouldn’t be allowed to help ourselves.

And that’s scary.  That’s the lesson of Hurricane Sandy:  don’t depend upon the government to help you in such a huge emergency.  They either can’t or won’t.   So, fellow Jerseyans, assuming this is going to happen, you have about a month and half to prepare for this potential catastrophe.  Emergency services need to think about what they’re going to do if their vehicles don’t start.  And how to communicate with victims if electronic communications are all down.

Neighborhoods need to form Volunteer Watches.  If you have bicycles, get them ready and in good shape.  You may be needed.  Make sure you have enough of the basics – candles, lighters, matches, first aid kits, water, staple foods.  Make sure you have enough of your medications. 

Having enough medications is going to be an incredible problem for people with serious health issues.  Prescriptions are all dispensed electronically and monitored.  My own doctor is miles away.  Fortunately, the local hospital is a short ride away.  That’s not the case for everyone, though.

The enormity of such a crisis is almost beyond comprehension which is why we should prepare for it now, while we can, not react to it after it’s happened.

Here’s what you should do after the blast?

Seriously?

Filling in the Gaps on Fake Abortion Story

The Left gets another “F” for reporting Fake News

The Left gets another “F” for reporting Fake News

A news story about a 10 year-old Ohio girl being denied an abortion never passed the vetting process, even though numerous major news sources carried the second-hand story.  The investigation began with PJ Media’s Megan Fox questioning the source for the story.

Only one newspaper, The Indianapolis Star, published the story on July 1, based on the statement of one source, Caitlin Bernard, an Indianapolis obstetrician-gynecologist and abortion advocate.

None of the second-hand news sources mentioned the fact that Ohio bans such abortions in the case of rape or incest after six weeks.  The article claimed the girl missed the deadline by three days and was forced to travel to Indiana for the procedure. 

Former Vice President Biden used the story to further his condemnation of the Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v Wade and vow to issue an executive order to protect the “right” to abortion.  But Megan Fox of PJ Media and Glenn Beck and his Blaze News Team were soon on the trail of the story.  The Blaze published the facts (or lack thereof) in a report by Paul Sacca:

PAUL SACCA

July 09, 2022

SAMUEL CORUM/AFP via Getty Images

President Joe Biden spread a story of a 10-year-old rape victim who crossed state lines to get an abortion. However, some are questioning the veracity of the skeptically-sourced story.

During a gaffe-filled speech at the White House on Friday, Biden introduced an executive order to attempt to protect access to abortion.  President Biden also told the story of a 10-year-old Ohio girl who reportedly needed to travel to another state to get an abortion after she was raped.

“Just last week, it was reported that a 10-year-old girl was a rape victim — 10 years old — and she was forced to have to travel out of state to Indiana to seek to terminate the pregnancy and maybe save her life,” Biden declared.

White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre was asked about the young girl who had purportedly been raped on Friday. White House Real Clear Politics correspondent Phil Wegman asked Jean-Pierre if Biden’s Department of Justice had launched an investigation into the 10-year-old rape victim’s assailant.

“So, I’ll say this. Anything to do with the DOJ, that’s a – that’s a legal component,” Jean-Pierre replied.  “I would refer you to the DOJ.  I don’t have more to share on the identity of this young woman or the question that you just asked me.  The President spoke to that young woman just to show how extreme the decision on the Dobbs decision was and just how extreme it is now for American public, the American families when there is no exception at all.”

Biden cited an Indianapolis Star article that was published on July 1.

The Indianapolis Star depended on a single source for the article – Caitlin Bernard, an Indianapolis obstetrician-gynecologist and devout abortion advocate.

“On Monday three days after the Supreme Court issued its groundbreaking decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, Dr. Caitlin Bernard, an Indianapolis obstetrician-gynecologist, took a call from a colleague, a child abuse doctor in Ohio,” the article claimed.

The article highlighted how Ohio instituted a trigger law banning abortions after six weeks hours after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. The article noted that the girl missed the cut-off by three days.

The Indianapolis Star story garnered international coverage, and the story was picked up by the Daily Mail, The Independent, The Guardian, the Jerusalem Post, and MSNBC’s Maddowblog. CNN weaponized the story to confront South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem (R) on her pro-life opinions.

On Saturday, the Washington Post cast doubt on the story.

“The only source cited for the anecdote was Bernard. She’s on the record, but there is no indication that the newspaper made other attempts to confirm her account,” wrote WaPo fact-checker Glenn Kessler.   “The story’s lead reporter, Shari Rudavsky, did not respond to a query asking whether additional sourcing was obtained.”

Kessler pointed out, “Under Ohio law, a physician, as a mandated reporter under Ohio Revised Code 2151.421, would be required to report any case of known or suspected physical, sexual or emotional abuse or neglect of a child to their local child welfare or law enforcement agency.  So, Bernard’s colleague would have had to make such a report to law enforcement at the same time he or she contacted Bernard. Presumably then a criminal case would have been opened.”

However, no law enforcement agencies – on local, state, or federal levels – had reported a report or an arrest of the rape suspect of a 10-year-old girl.

Liberal-friendly fact-checker Snopes added, “As of this writing, Bernard had not returned our request for an interview, and we had not been able to independently corroborate the abortion claim.”

PJ Media writer Megan Fox raised suspicions about the child rape story in an in-depth Twitter thread posted on July 5.

“A pregnant 10-year-old is evidence of a heinous crime against a child but in every article (and there are SO MANY) there is no mention of criminal investigation, no police involvement, not even a town where this allegedly occurred,” Fox wrote.

Also this week, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) allegedly spread misinformation regarding abortions when she claimed that ectopic pregnancies are illegal when they are reportedly legal in the entire United States.

The Washington Post concluded, “This is a very difficult story to check.  Bernard is on the record, but obtaining documents or other confirmation is all but impossible without details that would identify the locality where the rape occurred.”

Kessler noted that with multiple international news outlets covering the alleged 10-year-old rape victim story, plus President Biden giving it credence that the story had acquired a “status of a ‘fact’ no matter its provenance.”

So, we learn that anti-abortion states do allow abortions in the case of rape and incest, at least up to a certain point – six weeks – which is generally time enough, especially in the case of adult women.  With little girls, it may take longer for the truth to surface.  In that case, get a bus ticket.  Because we also learn that women seeking abortions can travel to other states where the procedure is legal.  Indiana is right next door to Ohio.

Thank you, Megan  Fox and Glen Beck for revealing the facts.  Life always matters.  But so does the truth.