PP NewsBrief: 2021-05-07

We need to begin to reclaim control over the institutions which have such oversized roles in our lives. As you read this people work tirelessly to see to it that you are dumb and docile. Let's stop them.

========

Biden administration considers chat app surveillance

"According to CNN’s sources inside the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the plans would target private and encrypted messaging apps such as Telegram and involve “using outside entities who can legally access these private groups to gather large amounts of information that could help DHS identify key narratives as they emerge.”

Under existing law, the DHS is barred from assuming false identities to gain access to private groups and apps.

But according to CNN, some of the outside entities that are being considered by the DHS include researchers and non-profits that use covert identities...

...

One of the sources added that if the DHS can find willing external partners that provide access to private groups, federal partners such as the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) “would be able to legally identify potential domestic terrorists and access information that could inform investigative efforts.”

CNN notes that DHS officials insist that any data provided by these private companies would only contain “broad summaries or analysis of narratives that are emerging on these sites and would not be used to target specific individuals.”"

========

Biden won’t rule out ordering MANDATORY Covid-19 vaccinations for US troops amid reports of hesitancy in the ranks

"US President Joe Biden said all US military personnel may be forced to get Covid-19 vaccinations once the shots receive final approval by government regulators, either through an executive order or a Pentagon edict.

“I'm not saying I won't,” Biden said on Friday when asked by NBC News if he will order a military vaccination mandate himself. He said he prefers to leave the decision to military leaders, however.

The US reached a milestone of having more than 100 million people fully vaccinated against Covid-19 on Friday. But tens of thousands of American troops are reportedly declining inoculation. The Pentagon said earlier this month that nearly 40% of the 123,500 US Marines who had been offered the shots had chosen to pass. At Fort Bragg in North Carolina, less than 50% of Army troops were agreeing to be vaccinated.

...

It is common for the US military to require vaccinations, but only those that have been approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). The three Covid-19 shots currently being offered in the US have received only emergency use authorization, not full FDA approval."

========

Lab–grown Embryos and Human–monkey Hybrids: Medical Marvels or Ethical Missteps?

"In Aldous Huxley’s 1932 novel “Brave New World,” people aren’t born from a mother’s womb. Instead, embryos are grown in artificial wombs until they are brought into the world, a process called ectogenesis. In the novel, technicians in charge of the hatcheries manipulate the nutrients they give the fetuses to make the newborns fit the desires of society. Two recent scientific developments suggest that Huxley’s imagined world of functionally manufactured people is no longer far-fetched.

On March 17, 2021, an Israeli team announced that it had grown mouse embryos for 11 days – about half of the gestation period – in artificial wombs that were essentially bottles. Until this experiment, no one had grown a mammal embryo outside a womb this far into pregnancy. Then, on April 15, 2021, a U.S. and Chinese team announced that it had successfully grown, for the first time, embryos that included both human and monkey cells in plates to a stage where organs began to form.

...

Before the Israeli experiment, researchers had not been able to grow mouse embryos outside the womb for more than four days – providing the embryos with enough oxygen had been too hard. The team spent seven years creating a system of slowly spinning glass bottles and controlled atmospheric pressure that simulates the placenta and provides oxygen.

This development is a major step toward ectogenesis, and scientists expect that it will be possible to extend mouse development further, possibly to full term outside the womb. This will likely require new techniques, but at this point it is a problem of scale – being able to accommodate a larger fetus. This appears to be a simpler challenge to overcome than figuring out something totally new like supporting organ formation.

...

CRISPR – a technology that can cut and paste genes – already allows scientists to manipulate an embryo’s genes after fertilization. Once fetuses can be grown outside the womb, as in Huxley’s world, researchers will also be able to modify their growing environments to further influence what physical and behavioral qualities these parentless babies exhibit. Science still has a way to go before fetus development and births outside of a uterus become a reality, but researchers are getting closer. The question now is how far humanity should go down this path.

...

Human–monkey hybrids might seem to be a much scarier prospect than babies born from artificial wombs. But in fact, the recent research is more a step toward an important medical development than an ethical minefield.

If scientists can grow human cells in monkeys or other animals, it should be possible to grow human organs too. This would solve the problem of organ shortages around the world for people needing transplants.

...

After 15 days, the human stem cells had disappeared from most of the embryos. But at the end of the 20-day experiment, three embryos still contained human cells that had grown as part of the region of the embryo where they were embedded. For scientists, the challenge now is to figure out how to maintain human cells in chimeric embryos for longer.

...

...there seems to be an emerging consensus that the potential medical benefits justify a step-by-step extension of this research. Many ethicists are urging public discussion of appropriate regulation to determine how close to viability these embryos should be grown. One proposed solution is to limit growth of these embryos to the first trimester of pregnancy. Given that researchers don’t plan to grow these embryos beyond the stage when they can harvest rudimentary organs, I don’t believe chimeras are ethically problematic compared with the true test–tube babies of Huxley’s world.

...

without regulation, I believe researchers are likely to try these techniques on human embryos – just as the now-infamous He Jiankui used CRISPR to edit human babies without properly assessing safety and desirability. Technologically, it is a matter of time before mammal embryos can be brought to term outside the body.

While people may be uncomfortable with ectogenesis today, this discomfort could pass into familiarity as happened with IVF. But scientists and regulators would do well to reflect on the wisdom of permitting a process that could allow someone to engineer human beings without parents. As critics have warned in the context of CRISPR-based genetic enhancement, pressure to change future generations to meet societal desires will be unavoidable and dangerous, regardless of whether that pressure comes from an authoritative state or cultural expectations. In Huxley’s imagination, hatcheries run by the state grew a large numbers of identical individuals as needed. That would be a very different world from today."

The author's views are interesting. They express horror (rightfully imho) about babies outside the womb but turning monkeys into organ factories is not really an ethical minefield. I think we need to begin to seriously look at our treatment of animals given that humans & transhumans would have the same relative power imbalance.

@themorrigan1973 & @robertemmet are exploring these issues further in their own ways. Be sure to check them out as well.

========

Bucking Biden’s push for ‘equity,’ US states are outlawing critical race theory in schools and public agencies

"On Tuesday, Arkansas passed legislation banning critical race theory (CRT) “indoctrination” in public agencies and prohibiting the state from promoting collective guilt, segregation, racial stereotyping or scapegoating.

Idaho was the first state to ban public schools from promoting CRT last month, followed by Oklahoma. Similar proposals are currently being considered by state lawmakers in Texas and Tennessee.

...

Rockwood, a school district in Missouri, apologized last week after a teacher was caught urging colleagues to continue teaching the social justice curriculum without telling parents. This past weekend, opponents of CRT swept away the local leadership and school board in Southlake, Texas – a suburb of Dallas – that had championed the doctrine.

Insofar as they have noticed the conflict, US media outlets have framed it as a battle between progressives and conservatives. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, for example, reported on the Rockwood controversy as a matter of those who want to “counteract racism and build more equitable communities” clashing with people critical of “social justice and equity ideals” which they believe “amount to a Marxist takeover of schools.”

NBC News, meanwhile, framed its story on the Southlake race as “Opponents of anti-racism education win big in a bitterly divided election,” saying the victorious conservatives “rejected the school diversity plan” which only wanted to “make all children feel safe and welcome.”"

========

The Capture of Goodness

"One year ago, we were tempted from the well-trodden paths of goodness onto a seemingly higher road, emblazoned with slogans of sacrifice, decorated with rainbows and resounding with the clapping of people pulling together. But the road leads nowhere. It is a dead end.

In January, in the northern snow, I was saying hello to my neighbour over the low garden wall. So that she could find her key, she placed her little girl, ten months old and all wrapped up in her snowsuit, onto the soft ground. While my neighbour was searching in her bag, her baby slowly keeled over. Without thinking, I stepped across and leaned down to lift her. But it was the wrong thing to do. Her mother snatched her up and I retreated in vague apology.

What is now the right thing to do when a small baby falls sideways onto the snow? The answer: nothing. Goodness is cancelled. Or, rather, it is redirected through an idea so sublime that nothing follows from it for mere humans with their merely human faculties. Everyone means nothing to us. For the sake of everyone, we can do nothing.

But there is a problem about doing nothing. Because it may just be that human beings are only good insofar as they do good things. Goodness requires practice and wastes away from lack of practice. It is more like playing the piano than riding a bike; you have to keep it up or you can no longer really do it. How long before our good natures grow rusty and flake away? How long before we no longer know how to be good?

Which is why, I presume, we now have these badges of goodness: masks, certificates.

Our enthusiasm for both may have little to do with their dubious efficacy in stopping the spread of a respiratory virus, and much to do with our need for reassurance that, even though we no longer do good things, we still really are good people."

========

The Republicans Who Charge Box Canyons

"Speaking with Fox News host Maria Bartiromo on April 29, Trump said, “Mitch McConnell has not done a great job, I think they should change Mitch McConnell.” Later, on the same day, McConnell fired his rebuttal at Trump.

“We’re looking to the future, not the past,” he said. “And if you want to see the future of the Republican Party, watch Tim Scott’s response to President Biden last night. He’s the future,” McConnell added. “That’s where we’re headed. We’re not preoccupied with the past, but looking forward.”

Scott’s response indeed reveals where the GOP is heading: the same place it has been all along, lurking in the shadow of the Democratic Party. Scott praised criminal justice reform, spoke of America’s past as “original sin,” regurgitated “big government” talking points, argued against raising taxes on corporations hostile to Republican voters, and had a single, short throwaway line about immigration. No surprise on the last because Republicans are quietly working on an amnesty deal with Democrats, and the last thing the GOP wants is to alienate people who hate them.

Trump, of course, endorsed Scott’s reelection bid on March 2 as part of his grand plan to influence the 2022 elections. He took House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) as his wingman to that end in late January—just days before McCarthy saved Trump nemesis Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) from being ousted from the House Republican leadership.

...

Living up to the disgraceful Cheney name, she didn’t even have the courtesy to refrain from publicly humiliating McCarthy not once but twice. In late March, she broke with McCarthy by insisting that a 9/11-style commission to investigate the January 6 riot should not expand to include inquiries into left-wing political violence, such as Black Lives Matter riots.

“What happened on January 6 is unprecedented in our history, and I think that it’s very important that the commission be able to focus on that,” Cheney said.

...

But Cheney wasn’t alone in condemning Trump about the events of January 6. McCarthy reportedly engaged in a shouting match with Trump over the former president’s conduct that day. “Well, Kevin, I guess these people are more upset about the election than you are,” Trump said when pressed by McCarthy about not calling off protestors. Trump, however, never issued that kind of spirited defense while president. The day after the riot, he condemned his supporters for the “heinous attack” that left him “outraged by the violence, lawlessness, and mayhem.”

...

Now, in yet another turn, McCarthy is saying Cheney’s days are numbered. Not because she voted on impeachment, he says, but due to doubts “about her ability to carry out the job as conference chair, to carry out the message.” Trump subsequently endorsed New York Republican Rep. Elise Stefanik, putting her next in line for Cheney’s job. The dim lights at CNN flashed that the endorsement further confirms Trump’s “takeover of the GOP.” But that doesn’t mean what they think it does.

It’s true that Stefanik’s aligning herself with Trump fueled her rapid ascent, but her New Right bona fides are largely a put on. As political journalist John Zmirak notes, Stefanik is a Paul Ryan protégé and devotee. NumbersUSA, an immigration restriction group, rated her “D-” on immigration in the most recent Congress. She was one of 14 Republicans who voted with Democrats to end Trump’s declaration of a national emergency at the southern border, and has repeatedly voted against funding the construction of a border wall.

...

The GOP is more concerned with debates over partitioning the party, over who gets what, and what is due to whom than it is about formulating a response to the country’s leftward lurch. But perhaps that is even too charitable because the truth is that members of the Republican establishment—in which Trump must now be included—really don’t mind losing very much since the end of a Republican’s political career merely marks the beginning of a new life as a consultant, a lobbyist, a board member, and perpetual fundraiser. Trump himself raised millions of dollars after losing the November election, and is actively undermining the move he helped spark—whether he is aware of the fact is irrelevant.

There are good people within the Republican Party on the local and state level, but, as an institution, the party remains leaderless and deprived of a national vision."

========

Derek Chauvin’s Defense Team Requests New Trial

"Attorney Eric Nelson cited evidence of jury misconduct and “abuse of discretion” by the court, which ultimately prevented Officer Chauvin from receiving a fair trial. Nelson pointed to Judge Peter Cahill’s refusal to move the trial to another county, even though the case had received major media attention prior to the start of the trial, in a manner that tainted the jury selection pool. He also criticized Cahill’s decision to not sequester the jury for the entirety of the trial, which allowed them to be exposed to ongoing media coverage that was overwhelmingly biased against Chauvin.

“The publicity here was so pervasive and so prejudicial before and during this trial that it amounted to a structural defect in the proceedings,” Nelson explained in his filing."

========

Covid’s IFR just keeps DROPPING

"With every new study, with every new paper, the “deadly” pandemic gets less and less, well, deadly. The most recent data review, published in late March, puts the infection fatality ratio (IFR) at 0.15%.

That is, once again, pretty much the same as a normal flu season.

The new paper is the work of Dr John Ioannidis, whom you likely remember. He is an eminent epidemiologist and statistician who publicly urged the need for “good data” last spring.

...

That’s a reduction of 95% of the WHO’s estimate, in less than a year. It’s also right along the same lines as the WHO’s (accidental) admission, made last October, that around 10% of the world had likely been exposed to the virus, rendering an IFR of roughly 0.14%.

And remember to bear in mind the ridiculous way national governments collate their so-called “Covid deaths”. Even with the official death statistics being “substantial overestimates” the IFR is still low. Very low.

...

As the real IFR of Covid is revealed to be lower (and lower, and lower) than the original estimates, it moves further and further into line with the basic background risk of just being alive.

Still, don’t forget to take that experimental gene-therapy “vaccine”. We don’t know if they’re completely safe yet, because long-term trials won’t finish for two years, and the technology has never been used on humans before, but still…you’ve only got a 99.85% chance of survival without it."

========

Two-year-old Baby Dies During Pfizer’s COVID-19 Vaccine Experiments on Children

"Within six days of receiving a second injection of Pfizer’s experimental Wuhan coronavirus (Covid-19) vaccine, a two-year-old baby enrolled in the company’s clinical trials for children passed away, new reports indicate.

The ongoing trials include more than 10,000 children aging in range from five to 11 in one of the groups, and another 10,000 children as young as six months old in the other. These trials have been taking place since mid-March with the soon expectation that the jab will be “authorized” for use in children and babies.

Moderna is also running a similar series of clinical trials on children that it is calling “KidCOVE.” Johnson & Johnson (J&J) and AstraZeneca are also both running their own respective clinical trials on children to get them jabbed at “warp speed.”

As reported in the government’s Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS), the two-year-old girl received her second dose of Pfizer’s DNA-modifying mRNA injection on February 25. On March 1, she suffered some kind of serious adverse reaction. On March 3, she died. No further details were provided.

The VAERS report does indicate that the child had been hospitalized since February 14, which suggests she may have gotten sick from the first shot. Despite this, someone administered a second shot to the already sick and suffering child, which caused her to die."

========

Money Alone Can’t Fix Central America – or Stop Migration to US

"To stem migration from Central America, the Biden administration has a US$4 billion plan to “build security and prosperity” in Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador – home to more than 85% of all Central American migrants who arrived in the U.S. over the last three years.

The U.S. seeks to address the “factors pushing people to leave their countries” – namely, violence, crime, chronic unemployment and lack of basic services – in a region of gross public corruption.

The Biden plan, which will be partially funded with money diverted from immigration detention and the border wall, is based on a sound analysis of Central America’s dismal socioeconomic conditions. As a former president of Costa Rica, I can attest to the dire situation facing people in neighboring nations.

As a historian of Central America, I also know money alone cannot build a viable democracy.

...

No such transformation can happen without strong public institutions and politicians committed to the rule of law.

...

...the U.S. has unsuccessfully tried to make change in Central America for decades. Every American president since the 1960s has launched initiatives there.

During the Cold War, the U.S. aimed to counter the spread of communism in the region, sometimes militarily. More recently U.S. aid has focused principally on strengthening democracy, by investing in everything from the judiciary reform and women’s education to agriculture and small businesses.

The Obama administration also spent millions on initiatives to fight illegal drugs and weaken the street gangs, called “maras,” whose brutal control over urban neighborhoods is one reason migrants say they flee.

Such multibillion-dollar efforts have done little to improve the region’s dysfunctions.

...

To imagine a way out of Central America’s problems, the history of Costa Rica – a democratic and stable Central American country– is illustrative.

Costa Rica’s path to success started soon after independence from Spain in 1821.

It developed a coffee economy that tied it early to the developing global capitalist economy. While other Central American countries fought prolonged civil wars, Costa Rica adopted a liberal constitution and invested in public education.

Costa Rican democracy strengthened in the 1940s with a constitutional amendment that established a minimum wage and protected women and children from labor abuses. It also established a national social security system, which today provides health care and pensions to all Costa Ricans.

...

Today, Costa Rica invests nearly 30% of its annual budget in public education, from kindergarten to college. Health care represents around 14.8% of the budget.

The U.S. is not a draw for Costa Ricans. Instead, my country has itself received hundreds of thousands of Central American migrants.

...

The migrants are fleeing political systems that are broadly repressive and prone to militarism, autocracy and corruption. In large part, that’s because many Central American countries are dominated by small yet powerful economic and political elites, many dating back generations.

These elites benefit from the status quo. In the Northern Triangle, they have repeatedly proven unwilling to promote the structural transformations – from more equitable taxation and educational investment to agrarian reforms – that could end centuries of oppression and deprivation.

During the Cold War, they quashed popular revolutions pursuing such changes, often with U.S. support.

Biden’s Central America plan requires the active participation of this “predatory elite,” in the words of Biden adviser Juan Gonzalez."

Everywhere the elites cause problems. Their greed, their selfishness, their shortsightedness causes some to flee if they can and others to become tools of monsters in order to survive.

========

Hunter Biden Is the Unwitting Poster Boy for Our Sham Meritocracy

"By his own confession, Hunter Biden is a liar, a cheat and a sneak. The embattled youngest son of President Joe Biden — and the author of a hasty but not uncharming new memoir, Beautiful Things—is willing to deceive his loved ones and business partners while stretching his moral and financial credit to their limits.

Hunter is also almost entirely without guile. When he reapplies to Yale Law School after initially being rejected, he is convinced it was a poem he submitted with his application that ultimately sealed his acceptance. ​“Yale’s acceptance letter noted that my success and dedication … more than qualified me,” he writes, ​“but that my poem was unlike anything they’d ever received.” The idea that an admissions officer would reward a politically prominent admittee after he studied for a year at a slightly less august institution — in this case, Georgetown — simply never occurs to him. Ah yes, young man. Your poem. Quite unlike anything ever seen.

This premise — that Hunter is a liar but an honest one — makes Beautiful Things a fascinating glimpse into the life of America’s middling political aristocracy and, perhaps, a funhouse mirror reflection of his father’s own place in our crooked meritocracy. The book is an ungainly amalgam: part macho addiction memoir, part soppy tale of sibling grief, part new-age romance. Through it all, Hunter fails ever upward, convinced he has succeeded solely on his own merits. Hunter is not the first American scion to believe this, of course, but few have imbibed the ersatz, shirt-sleeve, blue-collar political identity his old man has used to such effect over the past half-century in Washington. Just as Joe Biden once infamously declared, ​“I’m not the senator from MBNA” — a Delaware-based bank that was once one of the largest credit card issuers in the United States, before it was swallowed up by Bank of America in a $35 billion acquisition — Hunter acknowledges his good fortune but earnestly (and incredulously) believes he is a self-made man.

...

...He owns that his family name has probably opened doors for him, but he genuinely seems to think he’s a man of charm, talent, ability and, yes, poetry. He does not mention the $100,000 retainer that MBNA reportedly gave him while his father was coincidentally hard at work on the bankruptcy bill.

...

These events and people have a jumbled and absurd quality; without consulting external sources, the precise timeline of events is hard to understand. Whether or not Hunter had a collaborator or ghostwriter, a certain literary and even cinematic pretense suffuses Beautiful Things: it moves forward and backward in time and space like an earnest but unsuccessful imitation of a Tarantino screenplay. (Hunter makes an explicit reference to the filmmaker late in the book when he’s camped out at the Petit Ermitage hotel in Los Angeles with a gaggle of hangers-on including a dealer named Curtis and a misfit former surfer and car thief fittingly named Honda.)

The book even toys with something resembling magical realism. At one point, driving on high mountain roads in the middle of the night, cracked out and possibly hallucinating after an extraordinary drug binge, Hunter writes ​“an enormous barn owl suddenly swooped over my windshield, as if dropped straight from the inky night sky.” This spirit guide flies just ahead of him through the night and finally leads him ​“straight into Prescott [Arizona]” and another stint in rehab. Through it all, Hunter is somehow always making money. He can ​“put work on pause” but still pay the bills ​“with the legacy pieces of contracts I still had.” He can ​“rejoin the world by consulting five or six major clients.”

...

What are we to make of this sometimes harrowing, sometimes picaresque tale of a man backing his way into wealth, albeit the kind that is only modestly absurd in an era of oligarchic billionaires? Hunter Biden is no billionaire; he is simply one of the many sons and daughters of wealth and power bumbling along in the United States, making do with merely millions or tens of millions of dollars. He’s a glorious dummy who is too beloved by his powerful family either to fail or to find a genuine opportunity to succeed on his own. In an older sort of feudal order, he’d have been trained for the clergy or sent off to an army. In today’s neofeudal order, he will simply sit on boards and provide vague advice to ​“clients,” forever convinced he’s really being paid for what he has to say.

The great stories of American graft and corruption tend to examine either the top or the bottom of the pyramid, either to the Madoffs who concoct the Ponzi schemes or the many tiny victims they ultimately grind up. Guys like Hunter occupy the layer below the bigger, richer scammers on top — the folks who sell just enough Amway, just enough Mary Kay, just enough subscriptions to keep themselves in scotch, gold watches and Cadillacs. It is usually the friends of their fathers, or their own clients, who are buying."

========

Digital vaccine passport bands have arrived

"Users have to upload their vaccination card and the Immunaband makes it easy for others to know about their status of vaccination. With little consideration for the implications in terms of civil liberties, the technology is already being adopted by various businesses.

A restaurant called El Merkury Sophia Deleon in the Reading Terminal market of Philadelphia has all its employees wearing the Immunaband, a simple blue bracelet that displays a QR code. By scanning the code, you can validate the status of vaccination of the individual wearing it.

...

Dr. Tashof Bernton, one of the two individuals behind Immunaband, said: “As we come back together as a society, it’s nice to have to have a way to tell each other I’m safe and I’ve been vaccinated. You get the Imunnaband, you upload your card, and it’s with you all the time if you want it. You just use the QR code.”"

========

Award-winning Journalist Julian Assange Languishes in a British Super Max Prison at the Behest of the Biden Regime

"In Mid February, the Biden regime indicated that it was carrying out an ‘inter agency’ review with a view to closing Guantánamo Bay by the end of the president’s term of office. Sounds eerily familiar. Barack Obama within days of taking office also promised to close the infamous prison which stills holds 40 people in detention.

The overwhelming majority of media outlets in the West carrying news of Biden’s promise fail their readers. They fail to remind their readers that the journalist, who exposed the violations of human rights committed by the US at Guantánamo Bay, is locked up in a British supermax prison.

...

Ten years ago WikiLeaks began its release of the infamous Gitmo files (Guantánamo Bay) for which Julian Assange faces a 40 year prison sentence if extradited to the United States.

The Gitmo files expose the systematic and routine violations of the Geneva Convention and the abuse and torture of nearly 800 prisoners at Guantánamo Bay. They reveal that the United States government knowingly imprisoned 150 innocent men and boys without charge. These prisoners ranged from an 89 year old Afghan man with dementia to a 14 year old boy who had been kidnapped.

...

Here we are 10 years later and the man who helped expose these crimes now resides in a British supermax prison full of convicted murders and armed robbers.

Julian Assange is kept in solitary confinement amidst incredibly restrictive and harsh conditions....

...

On 17 April Prof Meltzer spoke at the International Symposium of Parliamentarians in the case of Julian Assange. Special rapporteur Meltzer visited Julian in Belmarsh prison in May 2019 accompanied by two experts in physical and psychological torture. They each examined the WikiLeaks editor separately. The evidence gathered from these separate assessments led Professor Melzer to state unequivocally that Julian Assange was a victim of psychological torture at the hands of four states working in tandem.

...

Now more than ever it is vitally important that ordinary people across the world take actions to support a journalist who is threatened with 175 years in prison for exposing war crimes, torture and corruption."

========

Trump-baiting fail: Ex-House speaker Paul Ryan joins Republican pariah Liz Cheney to ramp up division within GOP

"Republican Rep. Liz Cheney, whose father helped push the Bush administration into two catastrophic, expensive wars, seems anxious to return to a “rules-based international order” in which the US starts more wars it can't finish.

Helping Wyoming Rep. Liz Cheney along the path from censured Republican back to fresh-faced presidential possibility was Paul Ryan, the former speaker who held a “virtual event” fundraiser in March charging $2,900 a plate – and $5,800 for the chance to co-host the event.

The Republican congresswoman took a blistering blow at Trump, despite his being out of office, insisting "we can't embrace the notion the election is stolen. It's a poison in the bloodstream of our democracy" at a conference on Sea Island, Georgia, two sources cited by CNN revealed. The comments were made during an off-the-record interview with ex-House speaker Paul Ryan, addressing an array of donors, academics, and other wealthy fundraiser types in front of the Heritage Institute.

...

Despite the fawning media coverage of Cheney – the third most powerful individual in Congress – inside sources told the Washington Post that she was nowhere near as popular as the media makes her out to be, boasting “less support than she thinks,” according to two individuals cited by CNN.

And another Republican source at the House had nothing but ill words for her after voting to strip her of her leadership roles in February, noting that House Republicans have accused her of dividing the conference and distracting from the party’s goals.” Nevertheless, she survived the vote.

Cheney, like her father, knows how to play the media well, and most outlets have positively covered her efforts to push the GOP back safely into establishment waters as a bulwark against further intrusions from Trump or the quasi-populist wing of the Republican Party. She distanced herself from Trump as one of the 10 Republican House members who chose to impeach him during the second round as soon as it was made clear the president would be sticking around, and made herself into a media martyr by sticking with those “principles” — avoiding any black marks on her record but grabbing at straws while knowing they wouldn’t keep her afloat —  making a show of #Resistance without actually having to “resist.”

...

Cheney’s limp political stand seems to echo other desperate mainstream media outlets, all sinking slowly as they struggle to remain relevant absent their Orange-Man-Bad-brand floaties. They are coming forward, but quietly, humble and shamed – though who knows how long that will offer when the elder Cheney and his ilk show up to the rescue..."

========

Persistent Leftists Aren’t Necessarily Persistent Marxists

"A question that has been batted about on this website is whether the woke Left is Marxist, albeit representative of a Marxism that stresses racial, gender, and expressive inequalities rather than socioeconomic divisions. My answer to this question is at least provisionally “no.” Unless I see evidence to the contrary, it seems to me the differences between traditional Marxism and the Left that is now oppressing onetime Western democracies are too great to warrant an affirmative response. Like another contributor to this website, I do not believe that the cultural and political struggle in which we are engaged is primarily about race. American blacks are expendable foot soldiers in a struggle that white elites are waging, mostly against white Deplorables.

In Germany the supposed Right, whom publishing houses and newspaper editors are now ostracizing, include former East German freedom fighters, like Vera Lengsfeld, Uwe Tellkamp, and Monika Maron, who should be hailed as friends of liberty. Such literary figures have dared to complain about censorship and government-encouraged violence against dissenters, particularly as regards immigration and COVID restrictions. In France, it is the Muslim population that the Left mobilizes to fight a “fascist” threat; and critics now refer to the French Left as “Islamo-gauchiste.”  In Germany, Turks, Syrians, and other descendants of Third World immigrants (only a minority of whom are black) are joining the government- and media-supported “Struggle against the Right.” Non-American elites are pushing the same anti-Western, anti-bourgeois, and totalitarian leftist agenda as their American counterparts but doing so mostly without black protesters.

...

Hitler claimed to be struggling for disadvantaged Aryans. Did that mean that the Nazis were Marxists? Mussolini, in declaring war on the English and French in July 1940, spoke of waging a crusade for his proletariat nation against “democratic capitalist plutocrats.” Was Mussolini then a Marxist because he appealed to a victimized nation against its supposed victimizers?  Calling for a struggle against enemies designated as victimizers does not by itself prove Marxist credentials.

Characterizing one’s enemies as Marxists, however, has become an established practice in the American Conservative Movement because that movement’s founders came out of the Cold War and the protracted battle against Communism. But that habit does not turn all the adversaries of American conservatives into Communists or Marxists. Although new enemies may be as pernicious as old ones, they are not necessarily the same."

========

Conserving Conservatism Is Conserving Defeat

"The first thing we have to accept about the culture war is that the Republican Party and the conservative movement have lost. As it is for a battered alcoholic with bottles clinking about his heels, the first step toward recovery is admitting we have a problem. Nowhere is this more evident than in the battle of the biological sexes, lost without a shot fired.

Even before the gubernatorial candidacy of Bruce “Caitlyn” Jenner in California became official, rumors swirled that Trump’s former campaign manager Brad Parscale would lend Jenner a hand. Sure enough, Parscale, currently one of Trump’s “top political lieutenants,” helped Jenner assemble a team, which reportedly includes Trump’s former pollster Tony Fabrizio and former White House communications aide Stephen Cheung. Jenner’s campaign’s website is now live and accepting donations without so much as a single policy issue listed—not that it would matter. The new GOP appears much the same as the old GOP.

Jenner will lose in California. But not before a pile of cash is incinerated in a distracting spectacle, and the GOP beclowns itself, graduating from “Democrats are the real racists” to chanting “Democrats are the real transphobes”—which appears to be the direction the conservative movement is traveling.

...

Nationally, Republicans like Arkansas Governor Asa Hutchinson and South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem have capitulated to the queer zeitgeist. Hutchinson vetoed a measure to ban castration for minors suffering from gender dysphoria, also known as “gender-affirming therapy.” Noem effectively killed a bill intended to restrict transgender participation in women’s sports. Even when they had the upper hand over Democrats in Florida and Texas, limp-wristed Republicans performed silent retreats from transgender sports bills, allowing Democrats to run the table.

...

Transgenderism “seems to be the issue on which many on the Right prefer to let loose their inner reactionary, which then further rationalizes petty tyranny on the Left,” warned J. J. McCullough, a columnist for National Review Online. In other words, McCullough thinks losing gracefully is preferable to a fight, a view often described as “prudence,” because calling it cowardice is too on the nose.

But they also lost because they started fights by accepting left-wing premises on issues. “I think it’s worth offering a conservative defense of transgender rights—which ought to be a conservative issue,” as Josh Gelernter argued illustratively in National Review.

...

Brown, National Review, and other conservatives accept the Left’s premise that transgenderism is normative and, therefore, something to be glorified and even celebrated when they speak of the “rights” of the transgendered. The alternative, in this view, is rank bigotry and perhaps even violence. But this is a false choice.

...

No one should suffer abuse, but rather than exalting the virtues of our transgender culture, the Right should reject the normalization of what is essentially a pathology connected to staggering suicide rates.

...

McCullough wrote in National Review that it is the duty of “cautious conservatives” to shepherd America “through the new and unexpected in the cause of preserving a social order as peaceful and free as the one that came prior.” But an order wherein underage boys can receive hormone blockers to hinder the growth of their penises, and have male genitalia “reconstructed” into female genitalia, is not worth preserving. In the case of teen trans star “Jazz” Jennings, hormone blockers had so reduced the growth of his penis that there wasn’t enough male genital tissue left to “construct” a vagina, so he likely underwent an experimental procedure that involved using his peritoneal lining to build a vaginal canal.

This is the order the conservative movement and Republican Party seek to preserve. They do not reject it but only protest that treatment should not be taxpayer-funded and that the bread and circuses of sports remain free of biologically unfair competition, blind or indifferent to the dishonor of it all. “The honour of a civilisation is not exactly nothing,” as French author Michel Houellebecq put it.

...

But transgenderism is only the latest failure of conservatism and the GOP, which has surrendered on everything including immigration, criminal justice, and reparations even as it continues to welcome the influence of progressive corporations to their states—influence that in time will reduce “red states” to a shade of purple and then blue.

...

There is, therefore, no reason to be “conservative,” because to be conservative in America today is to preserve an order that has lost its legitimacy, and the right thing is not to conserve but destroy it and institute something else. The Republican Party, as it stands, is and will continue to be an obstacle to this cause."

========

Want fun? GET VAXXED! Nagging Covid-19 ad campaign targets reticent Baltimore residents

"“Mimosas with the girls this weekend? It's a bad idea if you haven’t been vaxxed,” says one of the recent ads posted by the city’s health department, featuring a pouting woman being lectured by a male partner.

...

More than a few Baltimoreans recognized the ominous tropes from the much-panned UK ads, which seemed designed to instill fear rather than impart knowledge.

Meanwhile, the city “has taken a proactive approach, partnering with hospitals and pharmacies to create mobile vaccine teams to vaccinate those most at risk of severe Covid-19,” ProPublica reported on Saturday.

...

On Monday, the state of Maryland started offering its employees a $100 payment to encourage vaccination. Governor Larry Hogan announced that the government was “further encouraging state employees to get vaccinated to help keep themselves, their families, and their communities healthy and safe.”"

Offering $100 to participate in an experimental gene therapy trial seems like more of an insult than a gift...

========

Riot Games to start recording conversations in order to police “harassment”

"Developer Riot Games, owned by Chinese giant Tencent, is to begin recording in-game chats in Valorant to combat “harassment” and make its games “safe and inclusive for everyone.”

...

The developer insists that it will listen to a recording only when a complaint is filed; it will not actively listen to all recordings. Though, that does mean it will store recordings of player conversations.

...

The feature will be beta tested in North America before it is rolled out to other regions and expanded to support different languages."

========

Former FDA Chief Gottlieb says 10M+ teens could be vaccinated by beginning of school year

"On Sunday, Gottlieb said Pfizer is pressing the FDA to let them vaccinate minors between 12 and 15-years old. He estimated that around 5 million children would kick off the vaccine efforts and health officials would inoculate 7 million more before the beginning of the school year.

“There’s a lot of effort underway right now to try to break the vaccine down into units that can be distributed to doctors’ offices to allow pediatricians to provide those vaccinations,” Gottlieb explained. “And I think that’s ultimately the way we’re going to get more kids vaccinated.”"

========

Jeopardy! alumni say show may incite violence, unless it edits out 'white supremacist' OK gesture shown on air

"The letter, signed by over 500 “former Jeopardy! Contestants” at the time of this writing, dunks on current three-time winner of the game show Kelly Donohue. This week he committed two sins against woke sensibilities, according to the complaint.

The first minor infraction was responding to a clue using the word “gypsy” – “a term for the Roma that is considered a slur,” the letter reads.

Donohue’s bigger transgression, however, was the way he indicated it was his third game during an episode shown on Tuesday. During the intruduction of contestants, he made a sort of ‘OK’ gesture which, the letter stated, “has been coopted by white power groups, alt right groups, and an anti-government group that calls itself the Three Percenters.”

...

“Most problematic,” the complaint said, is Kelly not making a public apology “for the ramifications of the gesture.”

...

“We cannot stand onstage with something that looks like hate. We are ashamed to be associated with brands and identities that suffer the taint of hateful statements and actions – particularly if they go unchallenged by those at the top,” the letter stated.

The demand to Jeopardy! is quite simple – the show must digitally alter or reshoot the moments that signatories believe to be offensive. If this is not done, there will be “more attempts to disguise contempt as innocent gesturing” and potentially “backlash and ramifications should one of those moments ever become tied to real-world violence.”

...

After the letter was published, Donohue posted a statement on his Facebook page, saying he was “truly horrified” by the accusations and “absolutely, unequivocally” condemning “white supremacy and racism of any kind,” taking a note from critics. He said he hoped that made his position clear and it was “shameful to me to think anyone would try to use the stage of Jeopardy!” to promote bigotry."

Hilarious. Proof that wisdom is not required to become a Jeopardy contestant.