Tucker Carlson is another one who thinks America will be to blame for a Russian invasion of Ukraine, omitting certain uncomfortable truths

 https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2021/12/08/tucker_carlson_ukrainian_lobbyists_have_all_of_washington_heading_for_war.html

Tucker omits that Russia lost the Sevastopol naval base to Ukraine from 1991-2014 after the fall of the USSR, after which Putin took it back by force in the annexation of Crimea, an act of aggression unanswered by Obama. But Russia had paid rent to Ukraine for use of the base during that intervening period. It's not like they were or are entitled to it, Tucker.

George W. Bush set the precedent for all that in the first place by not answering Russia's aggression in South Ossetia in 2008.

Tucker also omits that Germany is hostage to Russian natural gas by choice, having embraced the madness of green ideology and abandoning their own sources of energy.

This spirit and habit of appeasement shouldn't be continued or encouraged, especially one in the service of a banal, libertarian, materialistic understanding of "American interests".

Flashback: SLATE finally called Obama a climate hypocrite in 2015 because he gave approval to Shell to drill off shore in Alaska, and then had the balls to go visit the Arctic Circle region right after

 The Obamas, you will recall, notoriously spent a lot of time and money jet-setting about the globe, spewing carbon everywhere. The travel was the thing, the issues just the pretext for it.

They are still at it, and Greta is growing increasingly fed up.

 

Flashback: When climate hypocrite Barack Obama called out for pizza right at the beginning of his presidency in 2009, the guy had to fly it in from St. Louis

 

The Grauniad: Barack Obama, poster boy for climate hypocrisy

 

The young people who were children when Obama took office did not clear the way for a 750% explosion in crude oil exports, as he did just a few days after the Paris agreement was brokered in 2015. Nor did they boast proudly about it years later, as ever-more research mounted about the dangers of continuing to invest in fossil fuels. Speaking at a Houston, Texas gala in 2018, the former president proudly took credit for booming US fossil fuel production. “Suddenly America is the largest oil producer. That was me people,” he boasted jokingly to an industry-friendly crowd. “Say thank you.”

More, lol.

Also today we learned that your receding shoreline is the canary in the climate coalmine

 The oceans are rising, or something, but not on Martha's Vineyard.

Receding hairlines remain unexplained.

“Now for the bad news: We are nowhere near where we need to be yet…Most countries have failed to meet the action plans that they set 6 years ago".

Civilian employment under Biden in October 2021 is at about the same level it was four years ago under Trump

How long will it take to recover? Seven years like it did under Obama-Biden?

Let's hope not.

The current trajectory looks like civilian employment will recover round about March 2023, a little more than three years after the Feb 2020 peak. That is slightly longer than the typical 2-3 years during recessions.

Foolish energy and vaccine policies could interfere with that, however.

Meanwhile Biden's nominee for Comptroller of the Currency is literally a commie

The Wall Street Journal Editorial Board:

The Cornell University law school professor’s radical ideas might make even Bernie Sanders blush. She graduated from Moscow State University in 1989 on the Lenin Personal Academic Scholarship. Thirty years later, she still believes the Soviet economic system was superior, and that U.S. banking should be remade in the Gosbank’s image.

“Until I came to the US, I couldn’t imagine that things like gender pay gap still existed in today’s world. Say what you will about old USSR, there was no gender pay gap there. Market doesn’t always ‘know best,’” she tweeted in 2019. After Twitter users criticized her ignorance, she added a caveat: “I never claimed women and men were treated absolutely equally in every facet of Soviet life. But people’s salaries were set (by the state) in a gender-blind manner. And all women got very generous maternity benefits. Both things are still a pipe dream in our society!”

Sure, there was a Gulag, and no private property, but maternity benefits!

Ms. Omarova thinks asset prices, pay scales, capital and credit should be dictated by the federal government. In two papers, she has advocated expanding the Federal Reserve’s mandate to include the price levels of “systemically important financial assets” as well as worker wages. As they like to say at the modern university, from each according to her ability to each according to her needs.

In a recent paper “The People’s Ledger,” she proposed that the Federal Reserve take over consumer bank deposits, “effectively ‘end banking,’ as we know it,” and become “the ultimate public platform for generating, modulating, and allocating financial resources in a modern economy.” She’d also like the U.S. to create a central bank digital currency—as Venezuela and China are doing—to “redesign our financial system & turn Fed’s balance sheet into a true ‘People’s Ledger,’” she tweeted this summer. What could possibly go wrong?

Ms. Omarova believes capital and credit should be directed by an unaccountable bureaucracy and intelligentsia. She has recommended a “National Investment Authority,” with members overseen by an advisory board of academics, to finance a “big and bold” climate agenda. Sounds like the green infrastructure bank the Senate rejected.

She’d also like a politically and structurally independent “Public Interest Council” of "highly paid” academics with broad subpoena power to supervise financial regulatory agencies, including the Fed. The Council, she explained, would not be subject to the “constraints and requirements of the administrative process.” Ivy League professors know best. 

As comptroller, Ms. Omarova would supervise some 1,200 financial institutions. While she couldn’t enact her People’s Agenda without legislation, she would have sweeping powers to punish banks that don’t follow her diktats. Recall how financial regulators during the Obama Presidency pressured banks to cut off credit to pay-day lenders. ...

Ms. Omarova is the wrong nominee for the wrong industry in the wrong country in the wrong century.

Notes from the future:

The overthrow overtook the former shining light on the hill almost by accident, and in broad daylight, when an aging, decrepit, Paul von Hindenburg-like leader acquiesced in his dotage to the revolutionary impulses swirling all about him, like vultures waiting for him to die.

The National Popular Vote Compact, an end run around the US Constitution which also creates faithless electors, is actually supported in Michigan by stupid Republicans and a Hillsdale college instructor

My lunatic former state senator, Dave Hildenbrand, was the chief Republican sponsor of the compact in 2018. He's a lobbyist now.

The former state GOP Chair Saul Anuzis is a huge supporter and consultant to the NPV organization.

You can read all about such fools here and here.

Because the Republican controlled lower chamber has blocked a bill to make it the law since 2018, supporters of NPV are now organizing an end run . . . around THEM.

They intend to make this a ballot initiative, which in Michigan has been the go-to method for deciding hot topics to which elected representatives don't want their names attached through legislation. The method has been the way they wash their hands of issues instead of having the courage to take a stand for or against them.

Ballot initiatives in Michigan should have been curbed long ago, but when you have a spine made of jello, you can't curb anything.

So, given the success of Democrats in 2018 sweeping state offices and a handful of left of center ballot initiatives with them, quietly promoted by Barack Obama's wingman,  Eric Holder, and backed by money from George Soros, it looks like a fait accompli already.

Michigan Republicans are too dumb and too libertarian to stop this.

The only hope is that the US Supreme Court will eventually rule the NPV unconstitutional, given the fact that it has already ruled that faithless electors must award their Electoral College votes to the certified winner of a state wherever such laws require it, not to whomever they want:

The U.S. Supreme Court has unanimously upheld laws across the country that remove or punish rogue Electoral College delegates who refuse to cast their votes for the presidential candidate they were pledged to support.

The decision Monday was a loss for "faithless electors," who argued that under the Constitution they have discretion to decide which candidate to support.

Writing for the court, Justice Elena Kagan, in a decision peppered with references to the Broadway show Hamilton and the TV show Veep, said Electoral College delegates have "no ground for reversing" the statewide popular vote. That, she said, "accords with the Constitution — as well as with the trust of the Nation that here, We the People rule." ...

Thirty-two states have some sort of faithless elector law, but only 15 of those remove, penalize or simply cancel the votes of the errant electors. The 15 are Michigan, Colorado, Utah, Arizona, Indiana, Minnesota, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, Washington, California, New Mexico, South Carolina, Oklahoma and North Carolina. Although Maine has no such law, the secretary of state has said it has determined a faithless elector can be removed. ... For centuries, almost all electors have considered themselves bound to vote for the winner of the state popular vote.

More.

Well that didn't take long: Pfizer brought down the cases in Israel, see, but then along came big bad Delta and cases went back up, see, meanwhile effectiveness fades after 5 months, see, so you need a booster of the same stuff that doesn't work, see

 AP Obama talks up the John Maynard C19 Booster Shot:

https://apnews.com/article/coronavirus-pandemic-science-middle-east-public-health-coronavirus-vaccine-9ee6e5d46d29c08bf7610b39713b025e

Most adults had received two doses of the Pfizer vaccine by March, causing infection levels to plummet and allowing the government to lift nearly all coronavirus restrictions.

But in June, the highly infectious delta variant began to spread. After studying the matter, experts concluded that the vaccine remained effective against the virus, but that its efficacy waned roughly five months after the second shot.

In late July, Israel began distributing booster shoots to at-risk citizens, including those over 60. Within weeks, it expanded the campaign to the general population.

More than 3 million of Israel’s 9 million citizens have gotten a third dose of the Pfizer vaccine, according to the Health Ministry. ...
 

The Israeli Health Ministry said the FDA decision “gave validity to the third vaccine operation” underway in Israel, which “decided to act responsibly and quickly in order to treat growing infections.” It said statistics show the booster dose has “restored protection.”

Israel tonight ranks 8th worst in the world for C19 cases per million, and about 50th for deaths per million (in the top 25%). There were just over 50 in hospital in mid-June, but tonight there remain well over 1000 hospitalized for C19 after peaking at 1444 at the end of August.

 

Huge COVID-19 outbreak among fully vaccinated Texas prison inmates mirrors huge Provincetown, MA, outbreak among fully vaccinated gay revelers July 4: The vaccinated are spreading the disease

 Story BURIED by AP Obama here (Drudge also buried the story last night, shown below):

NEW YORK — A new study of Texas prison inmates provides more evidence that coronavirus can spread even in groups where most people are vaccinated.

A COVID-19 outbreak at a federal prison in July and August infected 172 male inmates in two prison housing units, according to a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report released Tuesday.

About 80% of the inmates in the units had been vaccinated. More than 90% of the unvaccinated inmates wound up being infected, as did 70% of the fully vaccinated prisoners.

Severe illness, however, was more common among the unvaccinated. The hospitalization rate was almost 10 times higher for them compared with those who got the shots.

It echoes research into a July outbreak in Provincetown, Massachusetts, where several hundred people were infected -- about three-quarters of whom were fully vaccinated.

Such reports have prompted a renewed push by health officials for even vaccinated people to wear masks and take other precautions. They believe the delta variant, a version of coronavirus that spreads more easily, and possibly waning immunity may be playing a role.

The authors did not identify the prison, but media reports in July detailed a similar-sized outbreak at the federal prison in Texarkana.

Just look at that html:

https://apnews.com/article/business-health-education-florida-pandemics-9aa03a247c10215079cafff898b60ab7

 

 

The absolute number of nuclear warheads matters but their hard-target kill capability matters more, and we don't have it against the Chicoms

All presidents since Reagan/Bush have failed to prioritize US hard-target kill capability, including Trump, so our enemies both in Russia and China have been compensating for that.

Eroding the certainty of destruction erodes deterrence.

The Chicoms haven't been emphasizing concrete manufacturing just to build vacant buildings and roads to nowhere.

Mark B. Schneider:

In 1985, then-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General John Vessey briefed President Ronald Reagan about the need for improved hard-target kill capability, including the need for 100 MX (Peacekeeper) ICBMs. We actually got 50. Of the three U.S. hard target capable systems created by the Reagan administration, two (the Peacekeeper ICBM and the Advanced Cruise Missile) were eliminated by the George W. Bush administration. This left only the high-yield WW-88 Trident warheads. Reportedly, the U.S. produced only 400 of the high-yield WW-88 warheads for the Trident II missile. Obviously, they can’t all be used against Chinese silos even if one makes a number of best-case assumptions. Moreover, it is not clear that the 1990 accuracy of the Trident II will be adequate if the Chinese are building silos based upon the new 30,000 psi super concrete now commercially available. The 1970 accuracy of a Minuteman III, while a great achievement in 1970, is hardly the same today against really hard targets. Unfortunately, the Minuteman III life extension program did not aim to upgrade the accuracy of the Minuteman.[8] It is not comparable to the Peacekeeper. There are plenty of important targets, including hard targets, the Minuteman III can cover, but super hard targets are not among them.

Even before the discovery of the new Chinese silos, a case could be made from a targeting standpoint for a strategic nuclear force of 2,700-3,000 nuclear warheads. There is a great difference between target coverage (assigning a warhead to a target) and damage expectancy (the probability of target destruction). Claims by Minimum Deterrence advocates, such as the Global Zero "Commission" report that a small nuclear force can do effective counterforce targeting are bogus. Regarding China, the report’s targeting plan involved “(85 warheads including 2-on-1 strikes against every missile silo), leadership command posts (33 warheads), war-supporting industry (136 warheads).” With the new Chinese silos, this targeting approach would require almost 1,000 warheads. Moreover, the approach itself is flawed because it ignores the Underground Great Wall, which protects the Chinese mobile ICBM force, the Chinese Navy and Air Force, and the large Chinese force of nuclear-capable theater-range missiles. The Global Zero report also assigned two warheads against every Russian silo. The report talked about target coverage, not damage expectancy, because its recommended force structure would likely have performed very badly against the facilities it targeted.

Against the very deep hard, and deeply targets (HDBTs) [sic; should read "very hard deeply-buried targets] there is essentially zero chance that they can be destroyed with a single U.S. nuclear warhead. The 2018 U.S. Nuclear Posture Review only partially reversed the Obama administration’s decision to eliminate the two most effective U.S. bombs against HDBTs, the B61 Mod 11 and B-83. These bombs will be retained longer than planned but not be life extended. Once again, numbers matter, and we no longer have the numbers. Conventional weapons have little and declining capability against HDBTs.[9] As one report stated, “One GBUJ-57A/B [Massive Ordnance Penetrator] can only penetrate 8 meters of 10,000 psi rock or concrete. This could drop to 2 meters of 30,000 psi material.” 

More.

Taliban blunders story by NBC is complete rubbish designed to absolve the Taliban: What the Taliban did was intentional and precisely gives them the cover these naive reporters bought hook, line and sinker

In their push to retake Afghanistan, the Taliban made the security situation much more precarious by breaking prisoners out of prisons — including hardcore fighters housed at Bagram Air Base, Taliban officials acknowledged to NBC News.

Two Taliban leaders said in an interview that their biggest blunder was “releasing thousands of prisoners, among them hardcore Islamic State commanders, master trainers and bomb-makers. They were very trained people, and they are now organizing themselves.”

The Taliban itself was never designated by the U.S. government as a terrorist organization, but the Haqqani network, which has close ties to Al Qaeda and Pakistani intelligence, has long held that distinction.

More. 

The idea that the Taliban is not a terror organization is a lie, a fiction maintained by our lunatic US State Department and its friends in the press.

White House: Yes, The Taliban Is a Terrorist Organization   

GOP accuse Obama of "negotiating with terrorists," WH says Bergdahl was POW.

By JOHN PARKINSON and LEE FERRAN

June 4, 2014, 6:19 PM

But Tuesday White House National Security Council spokesperson Caitlin Hayden noted that the Taliban was added to the list of Specially Designated Global Terrorists (SDGT) by executive order in July 2002, even if it is not listed as a Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO) by the State Department. Either designation triggers asset freezes, according to the State Department, though they can differ on other restrictions imposed on the target organization. The Treasury Department told ABC News the Taliban is still on their SDGT list.

US Central Command has been promulgating the mistaken belief that the Taliban wants peace and forgiveness since at least 2011 when Obama ran the show, but also under Trump

 

Next up, the Kenya Variant

 

The CDC managed to change the subject from breakthrough cases to masks in one stroke, and the right has glommed on to it like the suckers they are

AP Obama last week:

Health officials on Friday released details of that research, which was key in this week’s decision by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to recommend that vaccinated people return to wearing masks indoors in parts of the U.S. where the delta variant is fueling infection surges. The authors said the findings suggest that the CDC’s mask guidance should be expanded to include the entire country, even outside of hot spots.

The findings have the potential to upend past thinking about how the disease is spread. Previously, vaccinated people who got infected were thought to have low levels of virus and to be unlikely to pass it to others. But the new data shows that is not the case with the delta variant.

The outbreak in Provincetown — a seaside tourist spot on Cape Cod in the county with Massachusetts’ highest vaccination rate — has so far included more than 900 cases. About three-quarters of them were people who were fully vaccinated. ...

People with breakthrough infections make up an increasing portion of hospitalizations and in-hospital deaths among COVID-19 patients, coinciding with the spread of the delta variant, according to the leaked documents. ...

The CDC report is based on about 470 COVID-19 cases linked to the Provincetown festivities, which included densely packed indoor and outdoor holiday events at bars, restaurants, guest houses and rental homes.

Researchers ran tests on a portion of them and found roughly the same level of virus in those who were fully vaccinated and those who were not.

Three-quarters of the infections were in fully vaccinated individuals. Among those fully vaccinated, about 80% experienced symptoms with the most common being cough, headache, sore throat, muscle aches and fever.

The whole thing is here.

The real story here is about vaccine failure, not masks.

The idea that we could find a cure for this ramped up cold virus, in a year!, is as preposterous as finding one for the original thing. Ever. Same with the flu. Every year you get a new flu shot because . . . you have to. The damn things mutate.

So they guess which strain will be dominant and you pays your money and you takes your chance. Often there are several shots to choose from, targeted at different strains. Inevitably they choose wrong, and so do you.

That's what the future holds for COVID-19. We'll most likely be faced with an infinite series of mutations. With any luck the things will concentrate on mutating to survive instead of to kill, and become less deadly. That's already the take on the Delta variant.

But The Powers That Be know how to get your goat if you are right of center and turn an imminent prospect of political disgrace over vaccines into something else: Distract you from the facts and make it about something else, in order to maximize the political opportunity the political disaster presents. It's pure Alinskyism. Pure Rahm Emanuel. Nothing has defined the stupid political polarization between Republicans and Democrats on the street currently better than masks.

Remember how it used to be the Red Hat?

The more things change the more they stay the same.

The left is playing the right like a fiddle.

LOL, Daily Beast columnist proves yet once again that the left just doesn't understand the true size of the 57 states of the union

 

.

.

It is now common to blame the invention of the cotton gin, a labor-saving device, for the increase in the US slave population

Can anything good come out of Oregon?

This garbage from a Professor of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Oregon State University, is anti-white anti-capitalism rearing its ugly head, not "historical scholarship". It's what Oswald Spengler warned us about in 1934.

Infighting in the Southern Baptist Convention shouldn’t be a surprise – the denomination has been defined by such squabbles for 400 years :

 

In the U.S., Baptists formed a national organization, the Triennial Convention, in 1814. Around the same time, attitudes of Baptists in the South toward the enslavement of Africans began to harden as the 1792 invention of the cotton gin, a machine that made it easier to separate the cotton fibers from their seeds, made enslavement more profitable. By the 1830s, abolitionism took firm hold among Northern Baptists, and both they and Baptists in the South argued they were upholding Scripture through their views on slavery.

 

Blaming the cotton gin for an increase of enslavement appears to be a new, and stupid, argument of the anti-white-anti-capitalist industry, advanced since about 2009, in tandem with the advent of the Obama era when hostility to capitalism began to become more widely racialized, along with everything else.

 

The claim, as per the Wikipedia article on the cotton gin, is that "The number of slaves rose in concert with the increase in cotton production, increasing from around 700,000 in 1790 to around 3.2 million in 1850".

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

But the cotton production figures cited don't match the population "production" facts:

 

"Cotton production expanded from 750,000 bales in 1830 to 2.85 million bales in 1850." You are led to believe with this sleight of hand that slave population was dramatically increased by 2.5 million (357%) to accomplish that 280% production increase in cotton.

 

That isn't the case.

 

From 1830 to 1850 slave population increased by 1.2 million, from 2 million to 3.2 million, or 60%, not 357% obviously. Automation meant fewer slaves were needed, not more. The increase in slave population over the period has nothing to do with the invention of the cotton gin. 

 

Importation of slaves to the US had been halted from 1808 by act of Congress. By 1850 fewer than 305,000 had been brought to America. Slave population increased in the US naturally through reproduction over the period, by 60%, in contrast with the free population which increased in the US by about 84% (from 10.85 million to 19.99 million) through both reproduction and immigration between 1830-1850.

 

You can't even make the argument that slaves were bred to serve, however aspirational that might have been for a very small minority of white race schemers of the plantation enterprise. The data shows whatever the intentions were, they didn't succeed, and slave population increased at a rate lower than the free population.

 

You could make the argument that the invention of the cotton gin enabled slave owners to get by much longer with fewer slave laborers*, some of whom enjoyed better working conditions as a result, thus perpetuating the economics of slavery in a situation where increased supply of that labor had been cut off, but that's not the argument they are making. They aren't smart enough to make it.

 

 

*Cotton production per slave increased from 188 pounds in 1830 to 445 pounds in 1850.

You fools who won't have enough electricity for air conditioning this summer have only yourselves to blame

From the story:

Peak temperatures are forecast to reach 115 degrees Fahrenheit (46°C) in interior California through the week, according to the state's electric grid operator, which warned the biggest supply deficit could occur on Thursday after the sun goes down and solar power is no longer available. ...

On Wednesday, solar power was providing about 30% of California ISO's supply, and the grid warned that it would be unlikely to be able to rely on additional supplies from other states due to the extreme heat hitting much of the Western United States.

The ISO was currently getting 13% of its power from other states. The ISO has said it expects to have about 50,734 MW of supply available this summer, but some of that comes from solar.

102,000 MW of coal-fired electric capacity was retired from 2010-2019, over 38,000 MW alone in 2012, 2015 and 2018. Another 17,000 MW is scheduled to be retired by 2025. 

The EIA blamed "flat electricity demand growth" during the decade for the retirements.

It should have blamed Obama, under whom real GDP grew at a rate worse than during the Great Depression.

But YOU elected him.

Twice.

 

 

No one understands why Barack Obama keeps insisting on 19 acres for his unusual high-rise presidential library

Rush Limbaugh conservatism is so over, if it ever existed

The worst thing about the announcement of Clay Travis and Buck Sexton being hired by Premiere Radio Networks to fill the noon to three once occupied by Rush Limbaugh is that rushlimbaugh.com is promoting this. That wouldn't be happening without the support of Rush's widow.

Never mind what ex-CIA employee Buck Sexton agreeing to team up with this guy says about him, Travis is the last person to whom Rush's audience would ever warm:

A self-described "radical moderate" who is pro-choice and against the death penalty, Travis said he voted for former President Barack Obama twice and never voted Republican. In 2016, Travis voted for Gary Johnson of the Libertarian Party. As an undergrad, Travis interned for U.S. Representative [Democrat] Bob Clement for four years while in college at George Washington University. In 2000, he worked on Al Gore's presidential campaign. Travis was hired to work on U.S. Representative [Democrat] Jim Cooper's 2002 congressional campaign but was fired for wrecking Cooper's wife's car.

Premiere rolled the dice on this duo and came up with snake eyes. They will have to build an entirely different audience, but it sure as hell won't be a conservative one.

You couldn't have asked for a better recipe to blow-up conservative talk radio.

Looks intentional to me. Is Travis on the Democrat payroll?

Just like that EIB, like Rush Limbaugh, passes into oblivion.