On the USSR's space "firsts" and the Space Industry today

For those who glorify Soviet achievements to belittle American ones:

"Ugh this again..

USSR was all about getting the title of being first, no matter how superficial the achievement, and how dangerous the approach, and sometimes, hiding the truth about it until decades later.  

First artificial satellite was achieved by the USSR. It did pretty much nothing but beep, and its orbit decayed quite quickly.  

USA's first artificial satellite orbited for years, carried a science payload and discovered the Van Allen radiation.  

The outright first animal intentionally put into in space was Rhesus monkey aboard a German V2 operated by the USA.  

First animal into orbit was achieved with a dog by the USSR, which died due to a cooling system failure.  

USA's first animal put into orbit was a chimpanzee that survived and landed.  

The first man in space was Yuri Gagarin of the USSR, but he was forced to eject prior to landing, and under the terms agreed meant his mission was technically a failure. This was kept secret by the USSR for decades.  

The first American in space landed successfully with his capsule.  

First woman in space was a clear USSR "first" that they were targeting. The USA had a policy of only accepting military test pilots, of which there were no women.  

The first space walk was demonstrated by the USSR, but it came close to disaster as the cosmonaut couldn't reenter the spacecraft due to his suit inflating due to the pressure differential, and had to bleed out air in order to be able to squeeze back into the hatch.  

USA's first space walk went without such problems, and quickly overtook the USSR in pioneering how spacewalks would be performed, and how to do useful work. It also claims the first untethered spacewalk.  

First orbital rendezvous was claimed by the USSR, but was achieved merely by launching two rockets at the right time. The two space craft were kilometres apart, and had no way of getting close to each other, or no knowledge of how to do it.  

The first rendezvous performed by the USA used orbital mechanics and deliberate manoeuvres to have two Gemini spacecraft find each other, fly in formation, and then go their separate ways.  

The first docking was achieved by the USA during the Gemini program.  

First docking for the purposes of crew transfer between two spacecraft was achieved by the USSR. The crew transfer was done via external spacewalk, and served in claiming another first. The re-entry nearly ended in complete disaster and had a hard landing.  

USA's first docking and crew transfer was achieved between an internally pressurised corridor during Apollo 9.  

First picture of the far side of the moon was achieved by the USSR, and is a very low quality image. Shortly after the USA began a complete mapping survey of the entire lunar surface.  

The first lunar return sample was achieved by the USSR, but was effectively a few grams of dust. The USA returned tonnes of different kinds of individually selected moon rock.  

The USSR lunar landing mission consisted of an external spacewalk to transfer a single cosmonaut to a tiny one man lander with just enough provisions to make some boot prints before trying to get back home. Again, just to be able to claim a first.  

The USA lunar landing mission***s*** thrived on the moon, taking down two astronauts and resulted in them being to stay on the surface for days, and even drive around on it in a car.  

Once the USSR lost the moon race, they instantly lost all interest in it, and focused on creating a space station.  

There's a familiar pattern to all of this. The USSR did the very minimum, often at the expense of safety to meet an arbitrary goal as soon as possible. The USA's failures and mishaps were all in the public eye. The USSR's were mostly kept secret.  

Both nations knew landing on the moon was going to be the finish line. The USA got there first, and didn't just hit the finish line gasping and wheezing as the USSR would have been, but came through it in complete comfort and style, before doing it a few more times with greater and greater challenges for good measure.  

Since NASA lost its original purpose (beat the Russians to the moon) it has lost its way a bit, but companies like SpaceX have actually managed to make the *point* of the space race better than Apollo did. The original space race was supposed to demonstrate private enterprise and the American way of life vs centralised government control, but the Apollo program wasn't private enterprise, and was under direct government control.  

SpaceX, Blue Origin, RocketLab and others are the true demonstration of commercial spaceflight, where the government agency NASA now just becomes a customer to private launch and even spacecraft providers.  

The USA won in the 60's, and it's absolutely winning now versus anything Russia or Europe is building with public funds."

New blog picture - 21st November 2020

"I love your "Malaysian Accent", can you say it again?"
"几够力一下有没有"

Description: Meme from Dexter's Laboratory (original scene - omelette du fromage [sic])

Edward VIII, Wallis Simpson & The Abdication Crisis

Edward VIII, Wallis Simpson & The Abdication Crisis | HistoryExtra Podcast - HistoryExtra

"‘Wallace Simpson made the very elementary mistake of believing that the king had a similar power to the American President. Unfortunately, so did Edward VIII. He believed that he was going to be able to take over the country and more or less run it on the lines he wanted to. He was called the most modernistic man alive by one of his admirers. And also very interesting is that he wants to take over BBC itself. He, at a dinner party one day, he said with robust good humour, that he would fix the question of BBC’s independence. It would be the last thing he did before he went.’

‘Was this just delusion or did he have any grounds for believing that the monarchy either possessed or could regain this sort of power?’

‘Well, something I found out about Edward VIII was that one of his private secretaries Lord Wigram believed that he was actually mentally ill, and put procedures in place for him to be certified if needs be. It was thought they might have had a second George III on their hands. So although posterity hasn't generally agreed with Wigram, there was a sense that I suppose if you look at it now, we’d probably give him some sort of delusion, narcissistic personality disorder or something like that, because he had these insane delusions of grandeur. Okay, he was King Emperor, which is a bit better than most of us going to get’...

‘Initially, there was no great spark between the two of them, but she became part of his social orbit. By the beginning of 1934, he was as obsessed by her as it'd be possible for a human being to be with another one. And there’s two ways of looking at this. The first way of looking at this is he was a deeply lonely man who for the first time in his life had actually met somebody who took him for what he was, rather than being something else. And that's the romantic way of looking at it’...

‘The person rather than the prospective crown?’

‘Absolutely. But she wrote in her autobiography that she had been the first to penetrate his inner loneliness. But without wishing to be crude, I think she penetrated something else entirely. And I think that what it was with Edward was that he was a masochist of the highest, indeed most submissive nature. And a lot of the contemporary accounts of their behavior together, suggested that she took a dominant role far, far beyond what you would have expected, and that he, the King of England was only too happy to appear pathetic and submissive in front of her... of course was always a feature of BDSM relationships, that the submissive partner is encouraged to give something up to prove their adoration to their dom. So why not, if you be King of England, do the most submissive thing of all, give up your friend for your mistress?’...

He would seem to be a trance. Over and over again, it's that specific phrase people used. He was in a trance like state, in a dreamlike state. And he would keep on sentence like, she is the most wonderful woman in the world. Nothing else exists except for her. And you start to think to yourself, what did she done to him? How has she bewitched him? What was her hold over him?

Because he showered her with most extraordinary amounts of money. I mean, even before he became king, he was giving her gifts so worth, well over a hundred thousand pounds a year which was, so so many times the average income as to be absolutely fantastical. But you have to ask what was she like?

And if you see the letters that she was writing to her aunt, and indeed her letters, which she wrote to Ernest Simpson after divorce, you do see a different side of her to the femme fatale of legend. You see a much more human figure and a much more frightened figure. One thing I want to bring out through the book was that she wasn't this ogre which people have often described her as. Yes, she was somebody who enjoyed the finer things in life. Yes, she certainly had mild insecurity. But I think to her credit, when she saw the game was up, she tried desperately to stop Edward leaving the throne. And she really did try to stop the abdication. And he wouldn’t. And because of that, I think that she was stuck with him forever. And I don't believe that the long marriage afterwards was a testament to how deeply in love they were, because the pictures that you see of them, especially later in life, look like they’re vampires emerging into sunlight for the first time...

The time that she spent in China, there's been a lot of discussion about the so called Shanghai dossier, which was said to have been something where she essentially went to the Sing Sing [sp?]  houses, which would be upmarket brothels and learned various arts. And of course, the sexual arts are one thing, but what we’re more interested in these Sing Sing houses, was actually teaching women to get men to become obsessed by them. Because obviously, the nature of how these things work in Shanghai and in these other Chinese cities, was that you would have Westerners especially, would become kind of completely enraptured by the courtesans, and they would do anything for them, and the courtesans would deny them release until they show themselves worthy"

Everything You Wanted To Know About The Cuban Missile Crisis

Everything You Wanted To Know About The Cuban Missile Crisis | HistoryExtra Podcast - HistoryExtra

"One of the things that had happened before the Cuban Missile Crisis was that the Kennedy administration developed contingency plans to attack Cuba. The origins of this planning go back to the Eisenhower years. But those plans were updated during the Kennedy presidency. Now, it's not easy to gauge the significance of them. The US has contingency plans for everything. I think as one historian once put it, you know, they probably have contingency plans for, you know, what would we do if we invade Canada? These things are not likely to happen...

John Kennedy had this reputation in the White House as being a sort of intellectual, a cultured man, a sophisticated man. He's very intelligent, educated, but that really wasn't him. It was his wife who was very cultured and sophisticated. And in fact, John Kennedy's fav, favorite literature, his favorite novels were the James Bond stories. He loved the James Bond stories. And, and he met Ian Fleming. During the 1960 campaign, he was in Washington. And the author of the James Bond stories, Ian Fleming was in a car driving down the street with someone who knew Kennedy and the car stopped, and that's when Kennedy was introduced to Ian Fleming. And Fleming was invited to dinner that night.

So this extraordinary, extraordinary event or episode during the 1960 presidential campaign where you have a Presidential Candidate John Kennedy, talking to the author of James Bond and soliciting his advice on how to handle Castro. He says to Fleming, you know, how would you handle Castro? How would you get rid of him? And Fleming comes out with all of these extraordinary stories, or policy suggestions like right out of a James Bond novel or film as to how to get rid of Castro.

Two months into his presidency, Kennedy is asked by a magazine to name his top 10 favorite books. One of them is a James Bond book. And actually at that point, the sales of James Bond books skyrocket. I mean, Fleming should have paid Kennedy royalties, in part of the extraordinary popularity of James Bond is due to Kennedy's endorsement of them. What's interesting is, of course, it turns into a film franchise. What's the first film? Doctor No. With Sean Connery and Ursula Andress. And what’s Dr No about? It's about a Cold War crisis in the Caribbean with a sort of despot Dr No who is building sort of rockets...

‘If it is a US invasion of the island, I want you to respond by carrying out a nuclear attack. It seems incredible. But that is what Castro said to Khruschev. If Kennedy invades, you must start a nuclear war. I think the general assumption is that this increased Khrushchev's sense that the crisis was spiraling out of control, and that he better bring about a peaceful settlement of the crisis quickly.

As for the ending of the crisis, Castro was furious. He was absolutely enraged. We have an account of this. He basically felt like he'd been betrayed by Khruschev, that Khruschev had been weak, he basically saw it as humiliation. So in terms of how, you know, the Cuban leadership responded, Castro responded, it was with unrestrained fury, rage and a sense of sense, a sense of humiliation. And just in a practical sense, Castro did think I mean, the early part of his government, he was concerned that the US was going to overthrow him and his rule of Cuba would prove to be ephemeral, short lived. Once the missiles were deployed, that increased Castro's sense that his regime was secure. So the removal of the nuclear missiles, I think, increased a sense of vulnerability.’...

'In 1975, the US Senate carried out an investigation. A committee in the US Senate carried out an investigation into alleged assassination attempts by the CIA against various foreign leaders, including Castro. What the investigation established was that at least eight assassination plots had been devised by the CIA to kill Castro, many of them during the Kennedy years. Now we're not certain, absolutely certain that [Kennedy] knew about them, or was it the CIA doing on its own initiative? And this is because of a practice known as plausible deniability. If a President was briefed about an assassination attempt, this was never written down, so that the President's knowledge was plausibly deniable'"

"War Plan Red was one of the color-coded war plans created by the United States Department of War in the late 1920s and the early 1930s to estimate the requirements for a hypothetical war with the United Kingdom."

Links - 20th November 2020

How Rahm Emanuel Would Run the World (Ep. 415) - Freakonomics Freakonomics - "LEVITT: My own hypothesis is that we’ve done a really bad job in this country at making people data-literate. And our school systems haven’t focused on data; they haven’t kept up with the advances in thinking and computing over the last 50 years. And I think we’re paying the price in this epidemic because many public servants and many policymakers aren’t trained to think in the right way about data science and models. What’s your reaction to that?
EMANUEL: Well, this is rare for an Emanuel. I haven’t thought about that, so I don’t know. But usually we have answers before we have questions. My knee-jerk answer is: I’m not sure everybody should be walking around being a data scientist. That’s what data scientists are for... everybody goes, “Oh, just follow the scientists.” Well, I come from a medical family. My dad— how many times my dad asked for a second opinion? There’s a reason you ask for a second opinions. The science— I hate this analogy when everybody goes, “Oh, just follow the science.” Well, the science isn’t clear! We’re chasing information and it’s moving in real time as we’re making judgments. And that’s where you’re going to need just making a judgment. In the storm of a crisis, you’re making informed, educated guesses. And the emphasis is on the word, “guess,” not “informed” or “educated.”...
You’d have to be idealistic enough to know why you’re doing what you’re doing, and then tough enough to get it done. And if you look at successful presidents in history, neither one tips the scales too far one way or the other. They have both of those skill sets. And you look at all the ones that never make it, they usually tip one way or the other...
You got to help the president evaluate all the options. President Kennedy used to say, “To govern is to choose between bad and worse.” And the judgment you need is to figure out which one is bad and which one is worse."

Timothy Sly's answer to My mother-in-law leaves the butter out on the counter 24/7 for days. I am certain this is a health hazard. Is it a health hazard or perfectly safe? - Quora - "Perfectly safe. In warm weather the butter may melt, but whether you use it melted (as for frying shrimp) or refrigerate it again, it is SAFE. After a longer period of time, the surface may take on a slightly oxidised taste (like soap or cardboard). This is a quality issue and has NO basis in health.
[Added edit] Butter is between 86%-93% butterfat. the remainder is moisture and salt. This means all of the salt is in the small amount of water. Bacteria do not live or multiply in either fat or very salty water. That is why butter is so safe."

Justin Coates - "We need to remake 300 from the Persian perspective where it’s a bunch of cultured monotheists coming to liberate a nation ruled by slave-owning, baby-murdering, pedophile pagans. Same ending obviously, except it’s depicted as a tragedy where a bunch of backwater dipshits who think their shit-awful society is the height of civilization eventually get steam rolled by an empire that will go on to be one of the greatest in history."

Steve Horwitz - "From the comments, James Hanley wins Facebook for the time being:
"Some of us are free enough to enjoy playing at being oppressed.""
Comments: "How history is taught over the past 20 years:
The world divides into two groups, the powerful and the oppressed. The powerful are bad and the oppressed are good.
How rich liberal arts majors react:
I am oppressed and therefore good!"

Yaakov Markel - "We need to pay teachers the way we pay athletes. What a beautiful world that would make."
"If we paid teachers how we paid athletes, it’d be based on ticket sales and there would be an extremely small number of elite super-teachers that’d rise to the very pinnacle of the field......while everyone else pretty much remained unpaid hobbyists. 🤷‍♂️"
Comment (elsewhere): "So, 1% of them gets millions, while 99% of them get paid less than min wage, and gets cut after 3 years?"

Roo stays at home 🦅️🇨🇦🇭🇰🇺🇲 on Twitter - "Don'tcall yourself a feminist ifyou don't stan the British monarchy"

Moment boy, 9, weeps with joy as he tucks into his first McDonald's after months of lockdown - "This is the heartwarming moment a nine-year-old autistic boy broke down in tears after his mother brought him his first McDonald's since the start of lockdown... McNuggets with fries and ice cream was Adam's favourite meal.She also said that her son has sensory sensitivity and mild autism that caused his 'overreaction.'"

SFF community reeling after Marion Zimmer Bradley's daughter accuses her of abuse - "The world of science fiction and fantasy is in shock, following news that the daughter of the bestselling late fantasy author Marion Zimmer Bradley has accused her mother of abusing her as a child.Authors such as John Scalzi, G Willow Wilson and Jim Hines have reacted to the allegations against a woman who had been regarded a pillar of the SFF community with horror... "The first time she molested me, I was three. The last time, I was 12, and able to walk away … She was cruel and violent, as well as completely out of her mind sexually. I am not her only victim, nor were her only victims girls." Greyland is the daughter of Bradley and Walter Breen, who was jailed for child molestation and died in prison. Greyland wrote in her email to Moen: "I put Walter in jail for molesting one boy ... Walter was a serial rapist with many, many, many victims (I named 22 to the cops) but Marion was far, far worse." SFF fans are reeling at the news. Bradley, who died in 1999, has been a celebrated author, beloved for her take on the Arthurian legend, The Mists of Avalon, which told the story from the perspectives of the women behind the throne, and for the Darkover stories. Set on a planet colonised by humans, the world of Darkover has continued in anthologies written by other authors... "I'm proud of those stories. I believe the Sword & Sorceress series was important, and I'm grateful to Bradley for creating it. I believe her magazine helped a lot of new writers, and her books helped countless readers. All of which makes the revelations about Marion Zimmer Bradley protecting a known child rapist and molesting her own daughter and others even more tragic."Greyland, writing to the Guardian via email, said that she had not spoken out before "because I thought that my mother's fans would be angry with me for saying anything against someone who had championed women's rights and made so many of them feel differently about themselves and their lives.  I didn't want to hurt anyone she had helped, so I just kept my mouth shut""
Looks like it's not just male feminists who turn out to be creepy abusers

Re-reading feminist author Marion Zimmer Bradley in the wake of sexual assault allegations - The Washington Post - "Answers like these throw passages from “The Mists of Avalon” into a new and disturbing light. Take one passage about a Beltane ritual. Zimmer Bradley writes that “The little blue-painted girl who had borne the fertilizing blood was drawn down into the arms of a sinewy old hunter, and Morgaine saw her briefly struggle and cry out, go down under his body, her legs opening to the irresistible force of nature in them.”Without the context of Zimmer Bradley’s personal history, it is possible to read this sentence as a description of an ancient religious practice that is unsettling both in its depiction of an altered state and behavior that contemporary readers would not find acceptable. In the context of her testimony, and an article she wrote about sensual relationships between older and much younger women in literature, we lose the reassurance that the author shares our moral and ethical presumptions.Similarly, Breen justified his attacks on young boys by comparing them to sexual relationships between men that crossed significant age gaps in ancient Greece. Knowing that, and reaching  the point in “The Mists of Avalon” when a young King Arthur compares the men who will become the knights of his round table to Alexander the Great’s closest companions makes that allusion seem less like a bit of cultural ephemera, and more like a queasy signal, placed there for those who know to look for it... Zimmer Bradley’s descriptions of the awakening of sexual desire, the devastating power of sexual assault and the psychic damage wrought by constricting women’s roles in society remain beautiful and evocative in ways that much contemporary pop culture could learn from. Many of her characters are young women, married in their teens, and Zimmer Bradley handles their shifting thoughts about their husbands, their roles as wives and their nascent sexuality with care and consideration. She sustains a sprawling narrative with a huge, intergenerational cast of characters over almost 900 pages. And her main character, Morgaine, is a tremendous accomplishment.How, then, to reckon with the masterful public work and the allegedly monstrous private life? Zimmer Bradley’s contradictions raise an unnerving but important proposition. Survivors can offer tremendous insight into pain and transcendence. But so can the people who committed or facilitated depredations against them."

Watch - Discover - "TikToker Cleans Out Astonishingly Dirty Computers
Watch these oddly satisfying TikToks of a guy cleaning out dirty computers "

Pregnant Wife Finds Second Wife for Husband, Says She Can’t Bear Seeing Him Uncared For - "The strange arrangement happened in Shah Alam, Malaysia after Khuzatul Atiqah got pregnant. The young woman saw that her husband, Samuel Dzul, was always tired after a busy day at work but still had to do chores and make her feel better as she was having a difficult pregnancy."

Alan Dillman's answer to I heard employment in Canada is not at will. Is this not a deterrent for companies to setup offices in Canada? - Quora - "Canadian business owners often hold different values than American business owners and managers.In fact, I have had several employers say things like “You don’t work for me, you work with me”, or “We work together”. One owner/employer didn’t even have his title on his business cards. All our cards had the company name, our name, and a contact number for each. No hierarchy or titles... I might be employed by someone, but I work for me. That is how business owners see it too. They work for themselves, and understand that we do too."

Yuna: "The Biggest Racism and Discrimination I Had was from My Own Race" - "The pride of Malaysia’s up-and-coming singer Yuna has been taking the heat for having hugged fame rapper Usher during a live performance of the track, ‘Crush’ during The Roots Picnic 2016 gig in Philadelphia, USA, last month... 'Isn’t it weird, the biggest racism and discrimination that I’ve ever faced, was never from the Americans – it was from my own race.There I’ve said it. They call me ‘perempuan sampah’ and tell me to ”might as well go naked’. The worst, hurtful & sexist things I’ve ever had thrown to me, were from the lips of the Malays'"
Damn white supremacy!

Walter Ulbricht - Wikipedia - "When Khrushchev approved the building of a wall as a means to resolve this situation, Ulbricht threw himself into the project with abandon. Delegating different tasks in the process while maintaining overall supervision and careful control of the project, Ulbricht managed to keep secret the purchase of vast amounts of building materials, including barbed wire, concrete pillars, timber, and mesh wire. On 13 August 1961, work began on what was to become the Berlin Wall, only two months after Ulbricht had emphatically denied that there were such plans ("Nobody has the intention of building a wall"), thereby mentioning the word "wall" for the very first time. Ulbricht deployed GDR soldiers and police to seal the border with West Berlin overnight."

Why Do Cats Like Boxes? - ""Cats like boxes because they are cryptic animals; they like to hide," Stephen Zawistowski, science adviser for the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, told Business Insider. "And a box gives them a place of safety and security.""

Cold hands, cold heart. - "So my boss once robbed a museum to prove a point and honestly, I think she is my new role model... Many years ago, my boss was working at this museum and they had these original Churchill documents on display. These documents are worth millions of dollars… The only thing separating the public from these documents was a sheet of glass secured with 4 philips head screws. Seriously. No security guards in the room, no cameras, just an easily removable piece of glass.My boss pointed out the security concern, but she wasn’t taken seriously, so she took matters into her own hands.She bought a ticket and  pretended to be a guest. She entered through the main entrance with a huge drill clearly visible on her belt, went straight to the documents and opened the case with the drill. (While  wearing gloves,) she removed the documents, put them in a folder, reattached the glass, and walked out the main exit.  Literally no one even questioned her.She immediately went around to the back of the museum, entered using the staff entrance and went straight to her boss’s office.  She dropped the folder on his desk and said “I just stole these in 15 minutes“Once he was done being mad at her, he listened and the museum increased security."

I,Hypocrite - Posts - "The Past, the present, the future. Consult her now! ON matters of... love, marriage... Closed due to unforseen pandemic"

Historian Sally Dixon-Smith On Medieval Love & Marriage

Historian Sally Dixon-Smith On Medieval Love & Marriage | HistoryExtra Podcast - HistoryExtra

"The majority of the Christian population who did get married. I mean, this is a period that we particularly associate with monasticism. With monks and nuns, with not getting married, but for by far the majority of Christians, marriage is absolutely normal. It's part of their lives. It's what shapes how they live everyday, their households, who they live, with their social contacts, their networks. And it's sort of estimated that probably about, only about 15% of people in this period didn't get married. Marriage is also a really important tie that bound in medieval society. So it's a very important way of making social connections...

When looking at the Church's approach to love and marriage, it's to do with the spiritual connectedness of marriage, how it can create spiritual connections between man and God, between the people in actually in the marriage and between their families. And this idea of also that marriage can be used for peacemaking. And this actually has really quite important ramifications in terms of some of the rules about who and how you could get married as a Christian in the Middle Ages.

So one of the things that the church is very concerned about is that Christians should marry outside of the group of people they're already related to in various ways. And this is because marriage is a bond that can create love, friendship, compassion, and can be an incredibly valuable tool in peacemaking. So if you'd like it's a shame to waste it on people you're already bound to, that you already share interests with. And you can see that in the Middle Ages, you know, marriages are often part of peace treaties on a national scale, but also on a more local scale. There's a strong assumption by the church, that love, affection, caring for the other person, putting them first is something that will develop in marriage. Great if you've got it beforehand, but that this is something that that will grow through working together within the marriage...

‘This kind of freedom of choice is very important. So consent makes a marriage, how do you exchange consent? There are three ways, really.

The first is words of present consent. So if you like, the I dos. So this is literally saying, there's no set phrases, there doesn't have to be a specific set phrase, but it's something along the lines of either I marry you, or I take you as mine. And it was normal. And it was expected that parish priests would teach their parishioners something appropriate. Something that also shows that priests are not necessarily there and don't have to be there when you're getting married. This is something that you can do on your own. And so once you've exchanged those present, words of present consent, you are married. This is for life. This is indissoluble, this is an absolutely legally binding bond.

There's also a second way of getting, of exchanging consent, which seems to have been actually the most usual way to get married in the Middle Ages. And this is exchanging words of future consent, like I will marry you, yeah, let's get married, and then expressing your present consent to marriage by having sex. And so this idea of you agree to marry, then you have sex, the sex sort of means that, yes, you mean it here and now. You want to be married. Now you're married, it's indissoluble. That's for life. That's done. And you see this actually being used to sort of enforce within s-, within society as well. So there was often a feeling that, in fact, single people having sex with each other, wasn't a great problem, something that obviously the church did consider a big problem, fornication. And so what tends to happen later in this period is that, if you like, people who are living in sin, who are sort of notorious couples, who are having sex but not getting married, can be hauled up before church courts, and made to publicly get engaged, so that if they then decide to have sex, again, they are married, whether they like it or not, and it's called under pain of marriage, if you like. So this, marriage used as a kind of penalty if you like.

So besides being able to give consent, by verbally, and also verbally plus physically, there's a third way of showing control and exchange consent, that was far more gestural. And this is actually a gift exchange. And so it's normally when a man gives a woman something that represents the desire to marry or the agreement to marry, and the woman accepts it from the man. And so technically, this is called a suburation [sp?]. And it can be anything, as long as both parties understand what its symbolism is, but it was often a ring that was given by the man to the woman.'...

The fact that this also gesture is, is so powerful and can bind you for life means that there are actual warnings from the church, not to muck about with this. So the statutes of Salisbury in the early 13th century actually give a warning about this, that you shouldn't muck about with this incredibly potent symbolism of the wed, of the wedding. And it says, it says that young men should be really, really avoid putting anything vile or precious on a woman's hand, in case they accidentally bind themselves in marriage. Even though you might think that you're joking, that you've actually pledged yourselves to the burden of matrimony.

And you can see with these kind of ways of giving consent sort of verbally and gesturally and verbally plus sex, that there can be confusion, an actual, genuine confusion between couples about whether they are married or aren't married, or you know, disputes. One thinks they are and one thinks they're not. And you can see this reflected in some literature. So for instance, in Troilus and Cressida, Chaucer’s Troilus and Cressida, there is a scene where it, and the word Chaucer uses is playing, they exchange their rings, and it's fairly clear that he thinks they're married or considers that they are married, and she doesn't...

There was a proper, if you like proper marriage ceremony available with a priest, but you didn't have to have that in order to be legally married. So as we can see, it's actually incredibly, possibly stupidly easy to get married. And these are normally described as impediments to marriage, that I think the easiest way to explain it is if you think of, you know, if you're either writing a job description or looking at a job description when you're applying for a job, and they have the sort of columns of essential and desirable.

So there are certain rules about marriage that are essential. So for instance, you have to marry another Christian. You have to marry somebody who is available to be married, they can't be married to somebody else, and they can't also be kind of bound to the church by a religious bow. And bigamy is actually used as a word in the Middle Ages for this kind of having two bonds at the same time, a bond to the church and trying to get married or, or, at the same time, and it's also used for what we would call today probably serial monogamy. And why this is seen as bigamy comes back to this idea of the symbolism, if you like, the symbol, the Christian spiritual symbolism of marriage, representing union of Christ and the church.

It's, the ideal and best marriage is just one person with one person. Of course, if that person dies, you are free to get married again. But that second marriage somehow is, if you like, less spiritually potent or doesn't have quite the perfect symbolism, because there's always this ghost of the previous relationship and the previous marriage in the background. However, having said this, though, you know, from the church’s point of view might not have been a spiritually wonderful, second and subsequent marriages were very, very common… That [first] marriage was seen as more correct. And, as I say, more symbolically perfect than the later and subsequent marriages...

Ideally, you shouldn't get married to someone who you've been committing adultery with, because that legitimizes or puts a sacred spin on something that's sinful...

Getting into a marriage is incredibly easy. Getting out of a marriage can be incredibly hard. Divorce in our sense of the word of ending a marriage that everyone accepts was absolutely fine. Just really doesn't exist. And this is another word a bit like wedding. That has quite a different meaning in the Middle Ages. So the word divorce or divorcem [sp?] is used, but it means either an annulment. So that means that say you did marry someone who was already, you know, married to the church, therefore that wasn't a marriage. So it's just, it's null and void. It's annulled….

It was also used for a type of legal separation that was granted incredibly rarely, and normally due to really extreme domestic violence and sort of threat to life. And that meant that there's sort of permission given for the man and wife to live separately. And this is the separation, this is the divorce if you like, but they're still married, they're not free to go off and marry anybody else. Because of this idea that that marriage is for life, and it's indissoluble.

The first contract you undertake is the binding one and this could have interesting outcomes in real life, particularly given what I've said about how easy it was to get married and how people could actually be mistaken. So for instance, to give a very high profile example, Joan of Kent, who was an aristocrat in the 14th century, she's granddaughter of Edward the First and she goes on to be the mother of Richard the Second. When she's 12 she enters into a completely secret marriage with a knight in her family's household. He then goes off on campaign. Then her family themselves organize a marriage to another aristocrat, big public in church, the whole business. And so she's married to him.

But her first husband, her secret husband comes back from compat, campaign and says: what about me, and is basically ignored. And so he saves up to press his court case. And he takes it to the papacy. And he manages to prove that, yes, he was married to her first. And so after about seven or eight years of her second husband, if you like, her public husband, her church husband, thinking they're legally married? Nope. She is ordered to return to her first husband...

People could also manipulate these rules. So as long as you're willing to commit perjury in court, you could say, well, you know, I'm not terribly happy with my marriage. But what if I decided to swap for my old boyfriend and if he’s up for it. And then we'll both, you know, declare that we previously did get married, but nobody really knew about it. And then I can get out of my current marriage and go back to a pre existing pre contract...

There are quite extended incest bars, much, much wider than is common today. So this is called the impediment of consanguinity, which means you're related by blood. And this is one of the big changes that the church actually makes to get round one of these loopholes that they think people are using. Because initially the rules are, you can't marry someone who's related to you by blood within seven degrees. So there were actually different ways of counting degrees in different parts of Europe, but potentially this, because it could mean you can't marry someone with great great great great great grandparents in common. There's one way of counting where you count up from one partner to the joint ancestor and then down again to the other partner. And one way where you just count up to the joint ancestor.

And so you could see that this could be used, and the church was obviously concerned that it was being used in the 12th century, and particularly by aristocrats to get out of marriages, or to marry so that they would be, so they could say that their first marriage was invalid, was annulled and that they're free to get married to somebody else. And so in 1215, at the fourth Lateran Council, massive Council of the church, one of the big changes that's made is that they sought out exactly how you're supposed to be counting degrees of blood relationship. And they also say it's within four degrees and you're only counting up to that joint ancestor…

Compaternity. So you can't get married to someone who's either your godparent or has stood as a godparent to your child. And again, it's all to do with this idea that you're already bound spiritually and in sort of Christian love with these people. So and there is a sort of an acceptance and you see this in in church discussions of it, that there's, if you like, real incest, and real lines that shouldn't be crossed. And then there are these sort of desirable wider ideas of incest and who you shouldn't marry…

One of the other essentials when you're getting married is about age of consent, and people being old enough in order to enter marriage. And because from the point of view of churchmen marriage was the only spiritually safe place for sex, it means that Christians have to be able to get married as soon as they might want to have sex. So in other words, from the age of puberty onwards, and this was normally regarded as about 12 for girls and 14 for boys, but depended on the individual. And it was also seen as a point at which you are mature enough to give your consent to a lifelong bond.

What happens in practice is that you're much much more likely to get engaged or married young if you are from a rich and powerful family. And so you can see this a great deal in royal marriages. So for instance, Isabella of Angouleme who's married to King John was about 12 when she got married...

However, as I say, if you're not in that top echelon of society, you would tend to get married old, at a older age, at the late teens or mid 20s. And this is seen, this has been described as a sort of European marriage model that applies for most of Western Europe. Tend to get married, as I say, so a bit later on, with the man being older. And why it's sort of correlated with wealth is it's to do with being able to be in a position to set up your own household, to be able to provide for the marriage... at almost every level of society, people had a prenup. And sort of things were put in place for what would happen if one partner died or when one partner died. And also what would happen or what would support the children of the marriage'"

Ironically for all the anti-"pedos" who like to invoke Crusader imagery, the age of consent in medieval times was so much lower than now

My wife FINALLY agreed to a Star Wars role play in the bedroom...

[Nsfw] My wife FINALLY agreed to a Star Wars role play in the bedroom... : Jokes

"...The only catch was I had to be Obi Wan, because she always had a thing for Ewan McGregor.

"Of course!" I said, and got to work putting together the sexiest Obi Wan costume I could. I even managed to find Glow in the Dark condoms so I could impress her with my "lightsaber".

The night finally came. Dressed in my Jedi robe I slowly opened the bedroom door. The room was dark. I could only barely make out my wife's pale naked body, posed sensually on the bed.

I slowly remove my robe, revealing the faint blue glow of my 'lightsaber'

'Hello there,' I say, in my best sexy Obi Wan accent

'General Kenobi,' she replied, as four other 'Lightsabers' appeared behind her"

History According To Bob - Ancient Mediterranean + Rome

Some miscellaneous bits:

Demetrius in Greece:

"Stilpo remarked that the Antigonid campaign of liberation had indeed left the city a city of freemen because the Antigonid soldiers had stolen all of the slaves. Now let's look a little bit about looting cities. In the Ancient World when an enemy, or an enemy city was sacked, it was not so much the gold, silver and works of art that were taken, although a lot is still collected, but the slaves were the main loot. This would be universal because you could then sell them ultimately for cash that could be divided up amongst the troops. It's easier to carry coin than a 10 pound gold statue"

Ptolemaic Egypt:

"The Macedonians hurt the pride of the Egyptians by refusing to recruit the royal army from the Egyptian warrior class. Instead they used Macedonian troops, even doing what Seleucus and others did is setting up colonies of troops so that they could continue to produce that. It's not that the Egyptians weren't good soldiers - at the great battles of Artemisium and at Salamis in 480 BC it had been Egyptian marines who fought the best amongst the Greek hoplites. The decision by the Macedonians not to use them in the army was political. Though they still served as sailors in the Ptolemaic fleets the Macedonians were afraid that an Egyptian army of trained men might revolt and tear down the infrastructure of both royal and private Hellenistic exploitation"

Reign Ptolemy IV:

"Numbering Ptolemies is a modern invention. The Greeks distinguished them by epithet or nicknames, rather than by numbers."

Reign Cleopatra V Tryphaena and Berenice IV:

"[On Berenice IV of Egypt] As a lone woman ruling Egypt, she was expected to marry and have a man as co-regent. When she didn't, her consuls forced her to marry Prince Seleucus the Seventh Kybiosaktes and remained as sole ruler."

Sulla Provinces and His Death:

"Caesar, after he does his first tour as consul. He is so disliked by members of the Senate that instead of giving him a regular province, they made one up and put him in charge of the roads and alleys and by ways of Rome... There's an old discussion that whenever you change the government of a country, that new government is never safe until everybody who can remember the past government have died off."

Spartacus Slave Revolt:

[On Crassus] "His famous quote that I like is no one is truly rich, unless one is able to support an army on his income"

Rise of Pompey Part 2:

"They shut Mithridates up in his palace, with all hope for escape or mercy gone. He murdered his wives and daughters and then committed suicide by the sword after failing repeatedly to poison himself. Remember, Mithridates is the king of poisons and had created a Mithridatium of 22 substances that he took daily to make him immune to poison. And obviously it worked too well. Mithridates' son Pharnaces the Second turned over his father's body to Pompey who honored him by having him buried in the tombs of the other Pontic kings. If there's one thing that Pompey's really good at, he knows how to do the carrot and the stick, he knows how to honor people when the people around him really appreciate that."

Octavian Responds to Cleopatra and Antony:

"He began to attack Octavian personally. Cassius of Parma alleged that not only was Octavian of low origin, the ultimate snob attack, but claimed that Octavian was named heir to Caesar only after submitting to Caesar’s homosexual desires. Whoa, now we're really going below the belt here to go after him. They also kind of chided Octavian on his lesser military record. He hadn't really done very well at Philippi and all of his great victories at sea had been done by Agrippa"

Death Cleopatra:

"Did Octavian really want Cleopatra to appear in his triumph? And the answer is, quite frankly, no. And the reason is simple. 16 years ago, 16 years before this event, Cleopatra's half sister, Arsinoë was displayed in one of Julius Caesar's triumphs, and the crowd felt such sympathy for that they had to deal with her differently, rather than just kill her, and Octavian had made this,  you know, he really whipped up this propaganda machine depicting, you know, Cleopatra, as the Egyptian whore, as the witch would bewitches Roman men, and pretty much the devil incarnate. And she had been to Rome once before and was very popular and very, very happily received, of course, she threw lots of money. If Cleopatra was in chains, and paraded in a triumph, all sorts of things could happen. First of all, the crowd could become sympathetic to Cleopatra as they had Arsinoë. And it could also be interpreted by putting her in that type of situation as an insult to the memory of Julius Caesar… executing a woman would kind of hurt Octavian’s reputation, but if he let her go, good heavens, she could stir up trouble in the east, again, in any number of places. For that matter, she can make it even worse by simply going and sitting on a little island and writing your memoirs of what's going on, which could make him look bad, and everybody else and cause all kinds of problems. So to some extent, the best thing that could happen as far as Octavian was concerned was that she would just die. But of course, it had to be in a manner that would, you know, leave Octavian above suspicion that he wasn't responsible. So playing up the part about the triumphs certainly made it look like the last thing you want to do is to have her die but that's for later consumption"

Octavian takes control:

"Octavian visited Alexander's tomb. He had the thing, the coffin opened. That was glass. Had the sword of Alexander removed so he could use it, and somehow or other, managed to accidentally break off part of Alexander's nose... He wouldn't visit Egyptian temples. He said he revered gods, not animals. Actually he revered gods, not bulls"

Can academia be saved from the mob?

Can academia be saved from the mob?

"Scientists in the field of sex research, for example, are terrified to pursue questions pertaining to sex differences, gender, and sexual orientation, for fear that any politically unpopular findings will end their career.

When news broke regarding The Journal of Controversial Ideas, which is launching in early 2019 and will allow scholars to publish their work pseudonymously in it, my academic colleagues, among them many liberal researchers, gave a collective sigh of relief: since they will able to publish their work pseudonymously in it...

Timsit voices fears that such a journal would house “a bias toward publishing particularly controversial ideas in the interest of freedom of thought”. This has echoes of the Left’s argument that the Right invented the term “political correctness” in order to defuse attacks on their “no longer acceptable” and “bigoted” views, rather than because liberals were stifling free speech. But academics need to be able to think and speak freely when conducting their research; unfiltered speech is grounded in good faith – not the desire to seek out controversy for the sake of it.

Which brings us to the question of why those on the Left aren’t celebrating the arrival of the launch. Freedom of speech isn’t solely of concern to the Right; academic freedom has, after all, allowed those on the Left to call into question issues such as climate change denial and creationism. They remain silent now, though, because they know they are winning the culture war.

Good scholarship, however, should stand regardless of an academic’s identity and political position, and McMahan points out that “[it] should make no difference who the author is”. We must have faith in the process of academic debate. If ideas without merit are submitted, then academics should be counted upon to call them out — that’s how the model is supposed to work, not by silencing these perspectives and preventing them from being heard.

It is interesting that Timsit also tries to play down the troubles on campus at the moment... <>Anyone who spends a reasonable amount of time on a university campus will know only too well the extent to which free speech is under threat. The problem of censorship is not, however, limited to “conservative thoughts”— anyone voicing an opinion that is even remotely to the Right of far-Left orthodoxy becomes suspect, including centrists and those who are otherwise Left-leaning.

If you have any doubt as to how toxic the environment has become, you need only look at how frequently university campuses have been subjected to protests and mobbing behaviour in the last few years as a result of challenging Leftist dogma: University of Missouri, Yale University, UC Berkeley, Evergreen State College, Lewis & Clark College, Sarah Lawrence College. The list goes on. These instances are so numerous, they are on the verge of becoming the norm.

I recently interviewed Rebecca Tuvel, an assistant professor of philosophy at Rhodes College and self-identified Leftist and feminist, who in the spring of 2017, was viciously mobbed online after publishing an academic paper on transracialism — the idea that some individuals choose to identify as a particular race that is different from their racial background. She had asked whether there were parallels between being transgender and being transracial...

Instead of engaging with Tuvel’s points, however, other academic scholars took to social media to attack her, calling her “transphobic” and “racist,” and threatening her academic career...

Tuvel told me what she endured has had lasting effects on her field, with academics steering clear of projects pertaining to gender and race. I saw a lot of this sort of thing during my time as an academic researcher — that in devising new research projects, some colleagues would intentionally avoid topics that could be interpreted as even potentially controversial. One such subject, for instance, is gender dysphoric children. Unless a researcher is supportive of the early transitioning approach, they have no hope of surviving in academia. In my case, writing about this issue led to my own decision to leave upon finishing my PhD...

Higher learning is being killed by student activists, who claim they are doing what is best for society while dictating what professors are allowed to say in their classrooms...

In its most drastic form, students will default to physical violence, as we saw during the 2017 protest at Middlebury College that left a professor concussed and in a neck brace as she attempted to shield Charles Murray from his attackers.

Of all people, academics should be protected from this behaviour, because we have no other way of vetting the truth. Instead, mobbing is not only encouraged, but celebrated. Even if an academic survives a bout with the mob, rarely is an apology issued. Many are instead hounded out of the academy, their professional reputations so tarnished that they have no alternative but exile...

An academic’s purpose isn’t to promote ideas that are crowd-pleasing and sanctifying. It is to interrogate our beliefs in order to come away with a better understanding of the world. When academic institutions are unable to facilitate honest discussions in search of this truth – the very thing they were built to stand for – the academy has lost its way.  Sometimes the truth is uncomfortable, but this isn’t a reason to pretend that it doesn’t exist, or to punish those who wish to explicate it."

Links - 12th November 2020

On Facebook and YouTube, musicians are getting blocked or muted - The Washington Post - "his audience started to disappear, one by one, all the way down to none.“What the hell is going on?” Spence recalls shouting to his son across the living room as the viewer count conspicuously dropped. Just minutes into the airing of the concert, Facebook issued Spence a notification that his video — an original performance of an hour-long piece composed by Mozart in 1786 — somehow contained one minute and 18 seconds of someone else’s work, in this case, “audio owned by Naxos of America.” Spence, and presumably Mozart, would beg to differ.“They’re blocking my use of my own content,” Spence said later in a phone interview, “which feels dystopian.”... These oft-overzealous algorithms are particularly fine-tuned for the job of sniffing out the sonic idiosyncrasies of pop music, having been trained on massive troves of “reference” audio files submitted by record companies and performing rights societies. But classical musicians are discovering en masse that the perceptivity of automated copyright systems falls critically short when it comes to classical music, which presents unique challenges both in terms of content and context. After all, classical music exists as a vast, endlessly revisited and repeated repertoire of public-domain works distinguishable only through nuanced variations in performance. Put simply, bots aren’t great listeners. After the removal of his clips, Spence’s only recourse was to file a dispute with Facebook by filling out a single-field form. This was followed by six hours of fruitless chats with various Facebook representatives. It took nearly four days to clear the spurious claim, and in the interim, Facebook suspended Camerata’s access to live-streaming.Clearing copyright claims has since become part of Spence’s new routine, casting emails into an opaque dispute system he describes as “the DMV on steroids.” And the hits keep coming: YouTube blocked a recent live stream of a recorded Camerata performance of Carl Nielsen’s Wind Quintet, Op. 43, after it attracted a swarm of five automated copyright claims from different record companies. It’s gotten to the point where Camerata videos are prefaced by a warning screen, explaining their anticipated disappearance in advance.“I have no protection for my own produced material,” Spence says. “If you want to put a copyright claim against me, I’m happy to take the time to write back to you and say, ‘This is an erroneous claim and here’s why.’ But when you’re immediately blocking videos or streams, that’s negatively impacting our very mission in a time where this now has become mission critical.”... Michael Sheppard, a Baltimore-based pianist, composer and teacher, was recently giving a Facebook Live performance of a Beethoven sonata (No. 3, Op. 2, in C) when Facebook blocked the stream, citing the detection of “2:28 of music owned by Naxos of America” — specifically a passage recorded by the French pianist Jean-Efflam Bavouzet, whom Sheppard is not.The takedown led Sheppard into what he describes as “a byzantine web of ridiculousness” starting with Facebook’s dispute form: “Beethoven died in 1827,” he responded. “This music is very much in the public domain. Please unblock it.”... musician and blogger Sebastian Tomczak received multiple copyright claims against a 10-hour stretch of white noise he uploaded to YouTube three years prior... It might be tempting to glance at the copyright claims and simply blame the names listed at the bottom — the seemingly aggressive record companies issuing them all. But many of those companies are as helpless against the system as the targets of their claims.Take Naxos, the classical mother ship that represents about 2.5 million tracks and, according to senior manager of video and new media Duncan Hammons, considers copyright protection “among our chief duties per our relationship with our distributed label clients.”... “Though the technology works most of the time in terms of correctly identifying instances of our clients’ content on-platform, it still generates a not-insignificant amount of mismatches that require human review to differentiate,” Hammons says. “The chances of conflicts with this amount of content are considerable. For these reasons there is always a volume of potentially erroneous auto-generated claims that unless contested, I may never be made explicitly aware.”... the faith that platforms and record companies invest in these technologies may be as flawed as the systems themselves.“We built these systems around the presumption that everybody is either: A, a pirate, or B, should be a copyright expert”"

Antifa Activist Goes Viral Bragging About Lawsuit Against Landlord for Demanding Rent — Turns Out It’s His Grandma - "A militant antifa activist went viral recently for filing a complaint against his landlord for tracking his coronavirus stimulus check and demanding rent — but he conveniently left out that the landlord is his grandmother.Austin Goodrich, 22, received an outpouring of sympathy for his situation after filing the lawsuit in Oregon on April 22. The complaint said that the actions of his landlord left him “feeling overwhelmingly violated and vulnerable.” Goodrich was demanding that his grandmother waive all rent due until the end of his lease on June 30, waive all due and past-due amounts, return his security deposit and give him an excellent rental reference. Since she did not respond to his absurd requests, he filed a lawsuit... Goodrich tweeted that his landlord had text him hours after he received his stimulus money asking whether he planned to use it to pay rent.However, the defendant is not only his grandmother and landlord — she is also his tax preparer... Goodrich previously made waves when he helped shut down a College Republicans event at Portland State in 2019... Goodrich locked his Twitter account after it was revealed that his landlord is his grandmother."
Communists rage a lot against landlords. It seems they just want to live rent-free

Andy Ngô on Twitter - ".@CasResistance, a Portland antifa & regional separatist group, instructed its members to steal from stores on #MayDay."
Looks like communists want everything for free

JustJanis on Twitter - "So my friend’s vet has a comfort-dog assistant that helps sick patients know that everything will be alright and this is really all you need to see today ️"

'Tulsa for Tesla': US oil city uses 75-foot-tall statue of Elon Musk to persuade CEO to build new electric car factory - "Tulsa, the second-largest city in Oklahoma, has a rich history in the oil business. But its city leaders made a new and creative pitch to woo Tesla into building its next electric car factory there. City officials started transforming the town's landmark Golden Driller statue Wednesday, to resemble Tesla CEO Elon Musk, complete with company logos added to the 75-foot-tall structure. The company has reportedly picked Tulsa and Austin, Texas, as finalists for its new factory that is expected to employ more than 10,000 people... Tulsa touts its low tax rates and cost of living as reasons for Tesla to build its next U.S. assembly plant in town. But some neighbors even said they want Musk to go even a step further -- and relocate his company out of the Bay Area entirely... Musk made national headlines last week for threatening to relocate his company out of Alameda County, after county officials ordered him to stop production at the Fremont plant, which had reopened early in sharp defiance of the previous county health order. It even prompted President Trump to weigh in."

𝙃𝙖𝙧𝙢𝙤𝙣𝙮 𝘾𝙪𝙧𝙩𝙞𝙨 on Twitter - "I was playing Fifa 19 with some random dude online & he was using his headset & prolly forgot to turn it off. So I was leading 3 nil at halftime & I heard him say “if I win, will u sleepover?” And a girl replied yes but u won’t win. I had to let bro win 5-3 for the culture "

Police summon Jolovan Wham for posing in public with smiley face - "When is a photo a protest and a piece of cardboard a threat? Social worker and civil rights advocate Jolovan Wham will find out as he is now under formal police investigation over a photo of him holding a smiley face in public.Wham said Wednesday that he has been ordered to report to Tanglin police, around two months after he took the photo in a show of solidarity with two youths under separate probes for photos they took of themselves demanding climate action... It is illegal to hold public demonstrations without a permit in Singapore, even if it is just a silent protest involving one person. And the only public place Singaporeans have been granted a permit to do so is the Speaker’s Corner in Hong Lim Park... In 2018, artist Seelan Palay was jailed two weeks after refusing to pay a fine after being convicted of an unlawful procession. He had walked from Hong Lim Park to the Parliament House while holding a mirror."
Positivity is illegal in Singapore

Ryan Creamer Wiki & Bio - Comedian - "Ryan Creamer (born September 9, 1992) is a comedian, writer, and performer based in Olney, Maryland. He is known for his verified Pornhub account where he makes wholesome videos... Creamer was scrolling through Pornhub when he noticed a "Work for Us" option at the bottom of the page. When he realized that anyone could get verified, he applied and started posting wholesome videos after he was accepted. His first upload "I Tuck You in After You Have Cum" was posted on Reddit and he started to gain a following. Other videos he has posted include "I, Your Step Brother, Decline Your Advances but Am Flattered Nonetheless," "I Ride in a Taxi and Don't Have Sex With the Driver," "POV FOREHEAD KISS COMPILATION," and "I Hug You and Say I Had a Really Good Time Tonight." Creamer has stated that he had received a number of supportive messages from viewers and has received support from the sex industry"

:-) - "some places use clams to test the toxicity of the water. It’s like that in Warsaw- we get our water from the river, and the main water pump has 8 clams that have triggers attached to their shells. If the water gets too toxic, they close, and the triggers shut off the city water supply automatically.The clams are just better at measuring the water quality than any man-made sensors."

Who's afraid of the feminists? - "A new YouGov poll, commissioned by the charity HOPE Not Hate, finds that 33% of people agree with the statement “Feminism is to blame for making some men feel marginalised and demonised in society”... significant percentages of every age group, including 33% of 18- to 24-year-olds, agrees that feminism makes some men feel marginalised. More men (42%) than women agreed, but a quarter of women did too. The charity themselves described it as “staggering”, and linked it to far-right YouTubers... Sometimes men have more “feminist” attitudes than women: for instance, men are more likely than women to say that it is “always” or “usually” wrong for men to comment on women’s appearance in the street... 83% of Britons support “equality of opportunity for women” – again, more among men (86%) than women (81%)... It took me all of five seconds to find a feminist magazine declaring that men can be allies but they cannot be feminists... [feminist antics are] I think, part of a wider need to signal membership of a group: publicly denouncing someone for heresy is a clear signal that you are pure. I’ve heard some feminists complain that working for gender equality has been partly displaced by this call-out culture, policing public spaces for incorrect language or bad opinions, and that this puts people off feminism as a label. I can entirely believe that that’s the case, although I don’t imagine that it’s unique to feminism"
More and more people are realising how toxic and misandristic feminism is
If men are more feminist than women in their views on women, is this oppression and ignoring 'minority' preferences?

Lana Del Rey's Instagram Post Is a Classic White Feminism Trap
Basically feminism now demonises white women almost as much as it demonises men

How a Jeopardy! Champ's Play to Become a Feminist Public Intellectual Crashed - ""I try to remember, as a straight dude, that the discomfort I feel at gay porn sites is how women online are made to feel most of the time"
This post perfectly encapsulates Chu’s online presence: pompous woke posturing mixed with a baffling non-sequitur. Why was he watching gay porn if it makes him uncomfortable? How does that relate to being a woman online? Why did he put this on the internet, with his whole legal name on it and everything? The documentary Who is Arthur Chu?, recently released on various VOD platforms, leans toward a fairly routine character study rather than seek to answer such questions. In interviews, Arthur gives accounts of his childhood, his thorny relationship with his father, the pressures of being the first-born child of immigrants, and his introduction to identity politics. This is interesting material, but it feels like sitting in on a particularly unproductive therapy session. Arthur has little self-awareness, and despite talking at length, he never reaches any real insight. The film is much more successful at finding dark humor in the contrast between the way Arthur sees himself and the way he actually behaves, particularly in his relationship with his wife Eliza. Almost every time she appears on screen, she’s hard at work ironing his shirts, cooking his dinner, or supporting his narcissistic bid for fame as a professional feminist, all while he lies around the house giving her orders. The people closest to him seem to live in a perpetual wince. His mother worries that Eliza will leave him. After a public speaking gig goes badly, his father gently suggests that he should keep his day job. When his younger brother and sister sit together for an interview, they struggle to find anything positive to say about him... The comedy of Arthur Chu is that he thought he could understand what being a woman is like by visiting a gay porn site. The tragedy is that he did not think to simply listen to a woman — for example, his wife"

IT ENDS TONIGHT: Arthur Chu's Wife Dumps Him, Has Marriage Dissolved

Taking on the Social Justice Warriors - "Even if Remain wins out and Trump is defeated in 2020, one thing is pretty certain: we will continue to live in polarised times. In my new book Whiteshift I argue that one of the main forces driving this fracturing is the perfectionist creed of multiculturalism, whose shock troops are the so-called Social Justice Warriors (SJWs)... You know a non-academic has struck a chord when, at the last count, his book has accrued 562 academic citations, far more than anything I’ve managed as a longstanding professor. In 2017’s The Road to Somewhere, David Goodhart helps make sense of our post-UKIP, post-Brexit world. He nicely lays his finger on the key divide in modern western societies between ‘Anywheres’, whose identity is tied to their credentials and achievements, and the ‘Somewheres’, whose identity is rooted in place, ethnicity or nationhood.In Britain, about a quarter of the population are Anywheres, many of whom attended residential universities and voted Remain. Somewheres, about half the population, tended to vote Leave. About half the UK population lives within 20 miles of where they were born, and this group exists a world away from the bubble of those who form opinions in the media and academia, or play a leading role in politics and finance. Somewheres have stronger national identities than Anywheres, view change as loss and tend to want less immigration and economic change. Their interests are ill-served by an Anywhere elite, whose mobility and lack of connection to place renders them tone-deaf to the longings of those with a Somewhere worldview. Goodhart suggests the Leave vote in the Brexit referendum was a democratic expression of discontent from the Somewheres, whose cultural and economic interests have been repeatedly ignored by governments since Blair. He urges more Somewhere input into culture and politics – and a new accommodation between Somewheres and Anywheres that better balances the desires of each – in order reduce the pressures driving populism and polarisation"

Why do 'open' liberals live in closed communities? - "in American liberal enclaves like San Francisco. They may deplore Trump’s wall, but their restrictions on development serve as a financial barrier to incomers.In Britain, house prices act as a one-way valve, encouraging people to move northwards in search of a higher quality of life, but impeding those who prioritise higher wages from moving in the opposite direction.This results is what Watling calls a “surplus of ‘trapped’ labour” that keeps wage levels low in the North. This is the trouble with saying ‘not in my backyard’ — it’s not just your backyard that’s affected.Of course, not all nimbys are Remain-voting liberals. Many are dyed-in-the-wool reactionaries. But there’s something especially repellent about people who preach about openness without practicing it where it matters.In particular, a liberal immigration policy means that millions more people will come to work here each decade. So where are they going to live?"

New Black Panthers ‘Fight’ Racism by Targeting Chinese Restaurants, Get Disowned by OG Black Panthers - "the NBPP was allegedly protesting the forceful eviction of Africans “from their homes and hospitals” in China"
Damn white supremacy!

Why allowing Big Tech to spy on you doesn't mean you need to allow Government to do the same

There is a common claim that many people allow big tech (e.g. Google) to basically spy on them. Thus, this means that we shouldn't care if governments spy on us.

This ignores many differences between big tech and government spying:

1. Choice
2. Consequences
3. Avoidance
4. Redress

In turn,

1. Choice

People who choose to allow big tech to spy on them *choose* to do so.

I used to know this guy who claimed that his phone had been hacked, so he downgraded his smartphone to a feature phone so it would be impossible to hack his phone.

However, the sorts of privacy-compromising government surveillance that are promoted under a false equivalence with big tech's spying typically cannot be opted out of.

In any event, even if I opt to be spied on by one big tech company, it doesn't mean I consent to be spied upon by all other big tech companies. So I may trust Apple, but not Google, for example.

2. Consequences

What is the potential for abuse if I allow big tech to spy on me?

Typically, big tech will at most know anything I have done online - and any information I have willingly given it.

On the other hand, Government has the potential to combine information directly gathered from spying on me with information from its administrative records.

Having the information that they have, big tech and government then differ in what they can do with this information.

Big tech is constrained by end user licence agreements and can only use the information they have about me to deliver ads, make their products work properly and improve their products. The very worst that they can do is to ban me from using their services (and I can always bypass the ban surreptitiously - see below). If they try to do anything more, I can sue them (see below too).

Governments, on the other hand, can throw the full power of the legal system at me, and initiate criminal proceedings which can result in a fine, jail term or even - in extremis, in jurisdictions which allow for them - corporal and/or capital punishment.

3. Avoidance

While big tech spies on you, you can give it wrong information. There're many people who give big tech fake information or otherwise mess up its algorithms, e.g. filling in wrong information, using VPNs, clearing their cookies, using incognito/private browsing mode etc.

Government spying is typically (and certainly potentially) more sophisticated than what big tech can do. And while technically you can try to avoid government spying, this also ties in with 2 - if you mess with big tech's spying, they can't do very much to you (at most, ban you from their service). But a government can impose criminal sanctions upon you.

4. Redress

This is perhaps the most important point.

If big tech abuses their ability to spy on people, I can sue them in court. For example, Google settled a class action lawsuit in 2018 around privacy problems in Google Plus.

Suing the government is a lot harder. And it may not even be possible.

Even in the US, which is lawsuit heavy, the Federal Tort Claims Act only lays out a few limited exemptions to sovereign immunity - you can only sue the federal government when it performs a "discretionary function or duty".

Meanwhile, in Singapore, you can't sue the government for abusing private data - at most individuals will be punished. Which means that there is potential for institutional abuse.

It is instructive to see what happened to a previous privacy guarantee in Singapore, around ERP 2.0, in under one and a half years:

Nov 3, 2014:
Parliament: New ERP system 'not a threat to privacy'

"Data collected by a satellite-tracked electronic road-pricing (ERP) system Singapore is building will be "aggregated and anonymised", said Transport Minister Lui Tuck Yew in response to questions about how privacy will be safeguarded."

Apr 7, 2016
ERP, traffic data to be used to counter terror threat

"Electronic Road Pricing (ERP) data and public transport cameras will be added to the Home Team's arsenal in the fight against terrorism and serious crime - as the Government toughens its stance on the use of such information in the face of mounting threats."

Addendum:

A friend of mine added: "Predictability. Corporate goals are generally predictable, not so much about politics/govt."

The Cold War according to a Tankie

C: What Kind of Superpower Will China Be? - The Atlantic

“Even in deep antiquity, the Chinese considered themselves better than other peoples because they believed that their civilization was civilization. This formed the basis of a worldview in which the Chinese sat atop the hierarchy. They did not believe in equal relationships, at least in official or ideological terms. Their world order, with its rules and norms, was based on the principle of Chinese superiority, and the acceptance of that superiority by all others. Traditionally, when the Chinese were forced into a subordinate or even an equal position with another power, usually due to military weakness, they resented it and tried to reassert their usual dominance when they were strong enough to turn the tables.

And it is happening again today. Seething at what they consider humiliations inflicted by Western powers—from the Opium War to what the Chinese call “unequal” treaties that sapped their sovereignty—China is on a mission to regain the upper hand. As Xi put it, the country “will never again tolerate being bullied by any nation.” That’s the goal behind much of his current policies, from a significant buildup of military capabilities to state-funded programs aimed at helping China overtake the West in technology. More and more, China’s diplomacy turns threatening when faced with challenges from other countries, whether the U.S., India, or Australia.”

The whole article is quite accurate.

A: The ‘China’s diplomacy turns threatening....’ sentence is ridiculous. So the US(in particular), India(increasingly so) and Australia don’t do this? Remember that time China stationed war ships off the coast of the US and built military bases in Canada and Mexico? Oh that’s right, it never happened. 🙄

C: Chinese warship targeted Philippine Navy vessel in West PH Sea – AFP

A: because the South China Sea is China’s only open side to the circle of military bases that sounds it. Of course China is going to aggressively defend that. The Soviet’s put one base in Cuba and the US almost started WW3, regardless of the troops and guns surrounding the USSR, in particular those in Turkey I believe it was

B: All hail all our past and current wise Communist leaders who have nothing but the well being of humanity in mind!

A: China is attempting to keep a border open. Sure there are other claims, almost exclusively from countries aligned to the US.

sure. The encirclement of USSR wasn’t provocation at all. And the Soviets had no right of response? Exactly the same policy we see towards China now. Pivot Asia is a deliberate containment policy, which by your logic PRC has to just accept.

Me: I guess it was the USSR's right to install puppet governments in Eastern Europe so they could act as buffer states because they were afraid of invasion

A: not like the US has ever done that. What’s your point?

Me: which puppet governments did the US install as puppet governments to be buffer states in case of invasion? Hawaii is part of the US

The point being that Justifying everything the ussr did as due to "provocation" leads you down some strange paths. But being able to only see one side of the conversation means I may be misinterpreting you

A: really? Puppet governments all over the globe. Korea, Indonesia, Chile. In Europe, basically every country thanks to NATO.

The Marshall plan literally made Western Europe a puppet state, all be it not by force. Italy, Greece and France arguably were.
Every country in SE Asia, so many in Latin America and Africa.
Not to mention the US’s support for the fascists in Spain and Portugal. West Germany and Japan were reconstructed out of former fascist regimes.
You don’t have any high ground here. At all.

Me: so by puppet government you mean any government that's not hostile to the US?

B: Sure, West Germany was built on the ruins of a facist regime. So was the GDR. Unlike the GDR, West Germany didn't shoot its citizens in the back when they tried leaving the country because it was trampling on their civil liberties. The Stasi was the true successor to the Gestapo; West Germany had nothing remotely similar. As to the Marshall Plan: Most historians agree that much of the European economic recovery was well under way before the Plan kicked in. It definitely got the US a lot of goodwill and for good reason (so did the Berlin Airlift). Far from Western Europe having to be coerced into an alliance with the US most countries were actively seeking it. Unlike the Soviets who had to kill to keep their satellite states in line (e.g. Czechoslovakia). Overall, you keep peddling a caricature of history that seeks to build an apology of totalitarian mass murderers while falsely claiming that it's all the fault of the "imperialist US".

Me: France was such a US puppet state that when it withdrawed from the NATO Integrated Military Command Structures, the US sent tanks into Paris to replace De Gaulle with a more pliable figurehead

B: Right, I totally forgot. That must have been censored in my German (but US-controlled) school history books.

Communism and Equality of Outcomes

"All communist regimes have experimented with a variety of systems of remuneration and distribution in the attempt to reduce inequalities of outcome or condition among citizens. One thinks here, for example, of early Russian drives towards the levelling of wages and benefits; of the short-lived hopes of substituting moral for material incentives in post- revolutionary Cuba; and of periodic (sometimes catastrophic) attempts in China to restructure the allocation of rewards without inducing either economic stagnation or administrative chaos...

Having conceded that inequalities of outcome, although perhaps diminished, would continue to be a necessary feature of socialist societies for the foreseeable future (at least if economic growth were to be secured), elites then offered the alternative argument that socialism nevertheless promoted distributive justice by giving people more equal access to unequally rewarded positions, in a society still (temporarily and regrettably) characterized by a hierarchy of offices carrying different levels of material advantage...

One obvious illustration is provided by Soviet policy towards entry into higher education, which alternated between egalitarian and meritocratic initiatives. What we now call positive (or reverse) discrimination was often practised in the attempt to guarantee equal outcomes in the distribution of university places. Children of workers and peasants were compensated for cultural and other disadvantages by being awarded studentships irrespective of their educa- tional achievements. At other times, performance in competitive exam- inations was the principal criterion of admission, and the concerns of individual merit were given priority over those of class preference. In this instance, as in other attempts to resolve the tensions between equality of outcome and equality of opportunity, most socialist governments pursued a middle course - 'retaining the promise of greater equality in the future, and claiming that much of it has been achieved, while citing the socialist performance principle as a contemporary guide to reward...

Marxist sociologists have been loath to discuss equality of opportunity, on the grounds that Marx himself regarded this as a bourgeois ideal that was irrelevant to the classless communist societies of the future...

In their review of the history and functions of social mobility under real socialism, Wesolowski and Mach (1986: 30) observe that

During the first stage of a socialist regime, a stress on equality of positions as the main characteristic of the new order is of strategic importance for those in authority."

--- Was Communism Good for Social Justice?: A Comparative Analysis of the Two Germanies / Gordon Marshall

Links - 3rd November 2020 (Biden & Harris)

I am very far behind in sorting out my links and won't finish the time-sensitive ones before the US election, but here is the current backlog:

🇺🇸 MrsCaliBlonde™ on Twitter - "The American people deserve to know what Donald Trump is hiding in his tax returns."
"@JoeBiden Weird. Most of America wants to know how your son Hunter.. made billions with zero education, skills and still had time to knock up strippers. Let’s hear THAT story.. Creepy Grampa."

Eric Weinstein on Twitter - "A surprising number of Left-leaning people are confiding to me that they are planning to vote for Trump for two different stated leading reasons:
A) Biden’s Mental decline.
B) What is happening in the Pacific Northwest w Democratic Mayors/Govenors experimenting w non-policing.
Anyone else seeing this? It’s two different reactions. Both of them indicating that there is something catastrophicly wrong with this process. All of them previously *bitterly* opposed to Trump, and many even to the Republican Party."

Melissa Chen - "Biden says Trump is wrong to hold China accountable for coronavirus because Americans can’t distinguish “between a South Korean and someone from Beijing.”
Basically, what he’s saying is, all Asians look alike.
Looks like it is *he* who can’t distinguish between Americans who can tell Asians apart and Americans who can."

𝒜𝓃𝑔𝑒𝓁⚔️𝒲𝒶𝓇𝓇𝒾𝑜𝓇𝟦𝒯𝓇𝓊𝓂𝓅 on Twitter - "Biden promises to “transform “ the United States if he is elected. He’s been in politics for decades, the White House for 8 years & NOW he’s going to save America??? Raise your hand if you disagree with #SleepyJoeBiden 🏻‍♀️ #Trump2020Victory"

Joe Biden voted to give Robert E. Lee his US citizenship - "Joe Biden, who last week blasted President Trump over a protest to bring down a statue of Robert E. Lee, voted to restore the Confederate general's citizenship early in his Senate career.In 1975, Biden joined a unanimous Senate vote to restore citizenship to Lee, 110 years after the Virginian surrendered his Army of Northern Virginia to the Union general and future President Ulysses S. Grant... Voting along with him were segregationists or former segregationists such as Sens. James O. Eastland of Mississippi, Herman Talmadge of Georgia, and Robert Byrd of West Virginia — all Democrats — and Sens. Strom Thurmond of South Carolina and Jesse Helms of North Carolina, both Republicans. Biden was a prominent opponent of busing, designed to stop the segregation of schools, and even embraced the concept of segregation in 1975, claiming it was a matter of "black pride." He had recently boasted of his friendships with segregationists... "If you look at what I said, you will see that question was answered perfectly. And I was talking about people that went because they felt very strongly about the monument to Robert E. Lee, a great general," Trump said. "Whether you like it or not he was one of the great generals. I've spoken to many generals right here at the White House, and many people thought of the generals they think he was maybe their favorite general. People were there protesting the taking down of the monument of Robert E. Lee. Everybody knows that.""

Biden Asks Black Reporter If He’s A Junkie On Cocaine - "When a CBS News correspondent on a Yahoo! News panel asked presidential candidate Joe Biden if he was ever tested for “cognitive decline,” Biden dodged the question by asking the black reporter whether or not he took a drug test before participating in the panel... Despite previously claiming that he is “constantly tested” for cognitive decline and even challenging President Trump to compare results on an IQ test, Biden enthusiastically denied that he needed testing and that he was ever tested... Biden’s answers grew increasingly more odd as he stumbled over his words trying to communicate that he is capable of debating Trump."
If Trump had said that...

Federalist Perspectives - Posts - "Black Woman: "I'll NEVER vote for you!"
Joe Biden: "Then, I am afraid... YOU AIN'T BLACK" *sucks the blackness from her*"

Scott Pas - ""Three hardest jobs in America right now
1) Police officer
2) Alaska crab fisherman
3) Sign language interpreter for Joe Biden"

Escape The Echo Chamber - Posts - "In the debate last night Joe Biden said that non-violent offenders should not be put in jail. Under that rule no white collar criminal would be sent to prison — Bernie Madoff, Paul Manafort, Gen. Flynn, Martin Shkreli, etc."

Joe Biden's disastrous plans for America's suburbs - "Biden’s plan is to force suburban towns with single-family homes and minimum lot sizes to build high-density affordable housing smack in the middle of their leafy neighborhoods — local preferences and local control be damned. Starting in 2015, President Barack Obama’s Department of Housing and Urban Development floated a cookie-cutter requirement for “balanced housing” in every suburb. “Balanced” meant affordable even for people who need federal vouchers. Towns were obligated to “do more than simply not discriminate,” as a 2013 HUD proposal explained. Rather, towns had to make it possible for low-income minorities to choose suburban living and provide “adequate support to make their choices possible.”Had the rule been implemented nationwide, towns everywhere would have had to scrap zoning, build bigger water and sewer lines to support high-density living, expand schools and social services and add mass transit. All pushing up local taxes. Towns that refused would lose their federal aid."

Joe Biden: Democratic candidate apologises for 'racist' comments about Black community - "'What you all know, but most people don’t know, unlike the African American community, with notable exceptions, the Latino community is an incredibly diverse community, with incredibly different attitudes about different things.'... Biden’s statement plays into a dangerous trope that implies Blackness is a monolith, with Black people seen as a homogenous mass rather than individual actors with their own agency, opinions and agendas. It also pitted two marginalised communities against each other and, as one person pointed out, using the term ‘African American’ can other the Black American community by implying they are not ‘wholly’ American... Biden has historically been enormously popular with Black voters in the US; his political ‘resurrection’ in the race to be Democratic nominee was ‘powered’ by Black voters in South Carolina.But in recent weeks Trump has gained the support of more Black voters, closing the gap between them with that demographic to only an 8 per cent margin."
The euphemism treadmill has progressed!

To Save Time, The Babylon Bee Will Now Just Republish Everything Biden Says Verbatim | The Babylon Bee - "We're tired of trying to out-parody things like "I got hairy legs that turn blonde in the sun and the kids used to reach in the pool and rub my leg down and watch the hair come back up again" and "Corn Pop was a bad dude."... laugh at these hilarious Babylon Bee headlines from our new best satirist, Joe Biden:
Biden: 'Poor Kids Are Just As Bright As White Kids'
Joe Biden Says All Men And Women Are Created By You Know The Thing Presidential Candidate Nibbles On His Wife's Fingers
Joe Biden: 'I'm Going To Beat Joe Biden'
'Go To Joe 30330' Says Joe
Biden Tells Campaign Rally 'We Choose Truth Over Facts' Joe
Biden Calls Iowa Man 'Fat' And A '[FLOWERBED] Liar'"

Equality For The Elderly: Grampa Simpson Will Now Be Voiced By Joe Biden | The Babylon Bee - "In an ongoing effort to make sure cartoon characters are only voiced by actors who are exactly like them, Abraham "Grampa" Simpson will now be voiced by Joe Biden in all future episodes of The Simpsons. Dan Castellaneta said he would be stepping down from the role in order to make space for a real elderly person with dementia to take the part. As a result, Castellaneta will now only voice approximately 1,429 characters on the show. "Characters with dementia should be voiced by actors with dementia," said a spokesperson for Fox. "It was ableist and discriminatory for us to allow Castellaneta to voice the role for so long without seeking out real, flesh-and-blood people who act exactly like Grampa Simpson in their everyday speech and mannerisms.""

Joe Biden Says He's Running For 'United States Senate' While In South Carolina; Supporters Say It's Rhetorical - "supporters of the Sanders and Warren campaigns went so far as to describe Biden's confused remarks as an example of "elder abuse.""

Here's Joe Biden waving to an empty field 🤷‍♂️ | Not the Bee

Howie Carr: Media continues to cover up Joe Biden's mental decline

WATCH: Famed Marxist Activist Says Biden Candidate Most Prone To Being ‘Pressured’ Into Caving To Leftist Demands - "Marxist activist Angela Davis told a Russian-state propaganda media organization that presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden would be easier to pressure into caving to the demands of the radical Left than President Donald Trump."

Steve Cioccolanti on Twitter - "BREAKING:A man is reported as dead in an active shooter situation after an attack on a police officer in CaliforniaThe Sheriff's Deputy who was shot is in serious but stable conditionThere is a war on police in America and the Democrat Nominee for President is silent.RT!"
"The reason Biden’s silent is the strategy works 4 him. “Attacks on the police is an old communist tactic to eliminate law enforcement. The Bolsheviks successfully unleashed widespread attacks on police in the run up 2 the October Revolution.” -Alexander Solzhenitsyn"

Joe Biden Mistakenly Says 120 Million Americans Have Died of Coronavirus - ""If I ever said something so mortifyingly stupid, the Fake News Media would come down on me with a vengeance. This is beyond a normal mistake. Why isn't the media reporting it?" Trump wrote in a tweet with the video... "He just falsely claimed 120 million Americans (more than one-third of the country) died from the coronavirus. This is after he previously claimed 150 million Americans died from guns. He's not playing with a full deck, folks. #BarelyThereBiden"... in May he made a similar mistake during a live-streamed virtual round table on PBS, when he confused the number of lives lost and the number of jobs lost due to the virus."We're in the middle of a pandemic that has cost us more than 85,000 jobs as of today," he said. "Lives of millions of people, millions of people, millions of jobs."... Biden also recently mixed up the name of where the coronavirus is believed to be originated as he referred to Wuhan, China as "Luhan," as well as calling the new virus "COVID-9" instead of COVID-19."

Potential Biden VP Pick Tammy Duckworth Signals Openness To Tearing Down Statues Of Founding Fathers

CNN says Biden campaign gave it edited photo for biographical special - "Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden’s campaign gave CNN a photo that appears to have edited off the Washington Football Team's former logo to air as part of its recent biographical special on the candidate... D.C.'s  NFL team said in July it would be retiring its “Redskins” name and logo after years of criticism that it is a racist name that refers to Native Americans."
The left has a long history of doctoring photos to falsify history, after all

Former White House stenographer says Biden has 'lost a step' - "Joe Biden’s former White House stenographer said the Democratic presidential nominee has “lost a step” and isn’t as mentally sharp as he was four years ago.“It is a complete difference from what he was in 2017,” Mike McCormick, who worked with the former vice president from 2011 to 2017, told the Washington Free Beacon. “He’s lost a step and he doesn’t seem to have the same mental acuity as he did four years ago.”“He doesn’t have the energy, he doesn’t have the pace of his speaking. He’s a different guy”... McCormick, whose book “Joe Biden Unauthorized” chronicles his time in the White House, told the publication that Biden had a talent for clicking with audiences and would often go off-script, something the nominee doesn’t do anymore. “He’d just make a big joke out of it, and go straight from the hip. And notice, he’s not doing that anymore. He read that [Democratic National Committee speech] verbatim … it’s not Joe Biden anymore,” McCormick said, noting he looks “lost” during interviews now.The Beacon notes how Biden has been sticking to his teleprompter so closely that he reads cues noted in his scripts out loud."

Amid evidence of scripted campaigning, questions about Biden mental stamina, acuity multiply - "President Trump on Thursday chided rival Biden for a nearly seven-second delay in Biden's answer to a video question from a barista in a virtual AFL-CIO Labor Day event. Unable to immediately answer the barista's question, Biden delayed and struggled to find words, instructing an off-camera handler: "Move it up here." It was an apparent request for a more rapid scroll down inside the teleprompter script... Biden also drew questions after Porsche Bennett, an activist with Black Lives Matter, went off-script at a Biden listening event at a church in Kenosha, Wisc. last week because she said she wanted to tell Biden "the truth" about race relations. "I'm just going to be honest, Mr. Biden," Bennett said at the event, held in the town where police shot Jacob Blake, an African-American male. "I was told to go off this paper, but I can't. You need the truth, and I'm part of the truth.""

'Fact check: True': Trump’s approval rating surges during Biden’s convention - "On the Rasmussen Twitter page, it was noted how rare it is to see the other party’s candidate ratings surge during convention week."

Judicial Watch Files Suit after Secret Service Admits to Destroying Records Related to Alleged Biden Altercation with Secret Service Agent - "an unidentified Secret Service agent was suspended for a week in 2009 for “shoving Biden after he cupped his girlfriend’s breast while the couple was taking a photo with him.” “The situation got so heated … that others had to step in to prevent the agent from hitting the then-Vice President”"

Fact Check: Biden Claims 'A Black Man Invented the Light Bulb' During Kenosha Town Hall - "Lewis Latimer, the inventor Biden was probably referring to, is credited with improving Edison’s light bulb but not creating the light bulb itself. “We gotta give people facts,” Biden said during the town hall. “Teach them what’s out there.”"

Biden Supporters Use Guillotine to Chop 'Trump's' Head Off - "I can remember four years ago, people in Indiana had an offensive effigy of Barack Obama in a parade. It became a national news story. All Republicans were forced to denounce it. All Trump supporters were smeared over it, including Trump himself... HERE ARE SOME WHITE JOE BIDEN SUPPORTERS CALLING A BLACK COP 'UNCLE TOM' and WATCH THESE BIDEN SUPPORTERS MAKE A 7-YEAR-OLD TRUMP SUPPORTER CRY AND STEAL HIS HAT. I kinda doubt we'll see any media coverage tough. If this was a MAGA supporter sharing a meme on Facebook, than maybe.
CNN FACT-CHECK: They didn't chop Trump's head off in effigy. They only stuck his head in the guillotine and threatened to chop his head off.
Also, how exactly does the guillotine get to these places? Someone would need to put it in a truck or some other big vehicle, drive it to the protest, assemble it ... with no one noticing. A torture device gets dragged through the streets of liberal cities, and no one thinks twice. Especially in Washington, D.C., where you can't carry a gun ... but you can carry a guillotine.Yet if someone was shows up at a Trump rally with mean words written on a piece of cardboard, we need to have a national conversation about it."

Meme - "The DNC couldn't even find 30 people to cheer for Joe Biden, so they duplicated multiple livestreams..."

TIL Joseph Robinette Biden, 47th Vice President of the United States, is the 5th generation descendant of Maryland slave owner Jesse Robinette through his paternal grandmother Mary Biden (Robinette). Jesse Robinette owned 16 slaves. : BlackLivesMatter

Watch: Joe Biden Stumbles Through Disastrous TV Appearances - "Biden appeared alongside Dr. Sanjay Gupta, and the candidate left Gupta and host Anderson Cooper to stare blankly into the camera as he muttered gibberish.
   BIDEN: “Um, you know, there’s a uh, during World War… Two, uh, you know, where Roosevelt came up with a thing that uh, you know, was totally different than a, than the, the, it’s called, he’s called it a, you know, the World War Two, he had the World, the War Production Board.”...
During the same appearance, he seemed to have difficulty recalling 2001, the year of the terrorist attacks on New York City, the Pentagon, and Shanksville, Pennsylvania... Biden suffered another awkward moment during his scripted town hall meeting, where he referred to the coronavirus as “COVID-9.”"

Facebook - "Escape The Echo Chamber:
Politicians misspeak. It goes with the job. Biden didn’t used to utter these kinds of nonsensical sentences. At least not that I recall.
——-
“Covid has taken this year, just since the outbreak, has taken more than 100 year, look, here's, the lives, it's just, when you think about it.""

Facebook - Tim Pool: "Trump Landslide coming https://cdn.donaldjtrump.com/public-files/press_assets/trump-endorsement-letter.iron-range-mayors.pdf
Historically Democrat cities have just formally endorsed Donald Trump
"The area remains the greatest Democratic stronghold in Minnesota after the urban centers of Minneapolis and St. Paul.""
"As Greater Minnesota Mayors from Democratic cities on theIron Range of Minnesota, we write today to formally endorse the re-election of President Donald J. Trump and Vice President Mike Pence.Like  many  in  our  region,  we  have voted  forDemocratsover  many  decades.  We have  watched  as  our constituents' jobs left not only the Iron Range, but our country. By putting tariffs on our products and supporting  bad  trade  deals,  politicians  like  Joe  Biden  did  nothing  to  help  the  working  class.  We  lost thousands of jobs, and generations of young people have left the Iron Range in order to provide for their families with good paying jobs elsewhere. Today, we don't recognize the Democratic Party.It has been moved so far to the left it can no longer claim to be advocates of the working class. The hard-working Minnesotans that built their lives and supported their families here on the Range have been abandoned by radical Democrats.We didn’t choose to leave the Democratic Party, the party left us.Yet, four years ago, something wonderful happened. Donald J. Trump was elected President of the United States, and he stood up to China, implemented tax cuts and fought for the working class.Now, four years later, the Iron Range is roaring back to life and for the first time in a very long time, locals are hopeful because of thisPresident's policies and willingness to fight for us.Lifelong politicians like Joe Biden are out of touch with the working class, out of touch with what the country needs, and out of touch with those of us here on the Iron Range and in small towns like ours across our nation.In  this  election,  there  is  a  lot  at  stake,  but  the  biggest  risk  is  our  jobs,  our  economy,  and  our  way  of life.President Trump delivered the best economy in our nation’s history, and President Trump will deliver for us again. He will continue to fight for every American, regardless of party affiliation and continue to stand up for the working class.Today, we write to formally endorse President Donald J. Trump and Vice President Mike Pence for four more years.
Larry Cuffe John Champa Chuck Novak Mayor of Virginia Mayor of Chisholm Mayor of Ely
Chris Swanson Robert Vlaisavljevich Andrea Zupancich Mayor of Two Harbors Mayor of Eveleth Mayor of Babbitt"

Biden tells coal miners to "learn to code"
Lucky he didn't tell journalists this, or he'd be banned from Twitter

Barack Obama reportedly undercuts Biden's 2020 White House run - "Barack Obama publicly endorsed presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden — but has privately expressed grave concerns about his former veep’s 2020 White House run, a report said.“Don’t underestimate Joe’s ability to f–k things up,” the former president told an unnamed Democrat, who told Politico about the conversation— reportedly reflective of a strained history between the two... “You could certainly see technocratic eye-rolling at times,” according to former White House communications director Jen Psaki, who recalled other aides chortling at Biden’s frequent gaffes and lack of discipline.That attitude contributed to Obama’s decision to back Hillary Clinton for the party’s 2016 nomination over Biden... When Biden threw his hat in the 2020 presidential mix last year, Obama kept his distance for months — and continued to talk him down behind the scenes.During the run-up to this year’s Iowa caucuses, one Biden rival told Politico, Obama privately reminisced about the bond he formed with the state’s voters during his 2008 campaign.But Biden struggled to grasp the electorate, #44 reportedly said. “You know who really doesn’t have it?” “Joe Biden.”"

George W. Bush Spox Denies NYT Article Claiming He Won’t Vote For Trump - "much was made of former Secretary of State Colin Powell’s announcement that he’d vote for Biden, as if that was shocking news after he voted for Obama twice, and Hillary Clinton. So, is it really earth-shattering news that Colin Powell, who hasn’t voted Republican in the previous 3 elections, won’t in 2020? Is he even a Republican anymore?"

Election 2020: Joe Biden has MORE senior moments at Michigan rally - "'Sleepy' Joe Biden was caught napping twice during a rally in Michigan on Saturday, missing his cue to appear on stage and then forgetting his mask as he walked off it.The 77-year-old was speaking at a rally in Flint alongside Barack Obama when he suffered the 'senior moments', just the latest in a series of gaffes that have dogged his presidential run and raised questions over his mental capacity... During the rally itself, Biden also appeared to stumble over the word 'healthcare' while lining up a shot at the newest member of the Supreme Court - a Trump nominee - Amy Coney Barrett. 'Donald Trump thinks health care is a privilege, Barack and I think it's a right to have badakathcare,' he said... Biden - who was wearing a mask as he emerged before removing to speak - appeared to forget he hadn't put it back on as he departed... Biden slipped up at a rally in Philadelphia - touting his links to the state by boasting 'I married a Philly girl' before pointing to his jacket.'By the way, I've got my Eagles jacket on,' he said, pointing to the logo on his windbreaker.In fact, the symbol was not the Philadelphia Eagles' logo but that of his alma mater, the Delaware Blue Hens... Biden was addressing a virtual concert when he appeared to forget who he was running against, telling viewers 'we need to stop four more years of George.'... It comes just two days after the former Vice President said during a campaign video: 'We have put together, I think, the most extensive and inclusive voter fraud organization in the history of American politics.'"

Biden will bring woke to the White House - "a number of liberal commentators known for their opposition to woke culture have called for a vote for Joe Biden. As the headline in an Atlantic piece written by Yascha Mounk puts it: ‘Hate woke? Vote Biden.’ Many of these writers acknowledge that Biden’s Democratic Party is associated with woke, and that Donald Trump has been a vocal antagonist of it. But they see two positive arguments, specifically related to woke culture, for voting Biden. First, these writers argue that woke is largely a response to Trump... Secondly, they claim that Biden is a moderate, and not supportive of woke... they fail to appreciate how deeply these views are already entrenched within the American liberal elite, including the Democratic Party and Biden himself.For a start, these writers seem to forget that woke began under the presidency of Barack Obama, well before Trump. Many cite 2014, the year of the Ferguson riots and the formation of Black Lives Matter, as the start of the ‘Great Awokening’. As researcher Zach Goldberg has documented, terms such as ‘micro-aggression’ and ‘white privilege’ skyrocketed in use in the pages of the New York Times and Washington Post before spreading across elite society... The origins of wokeness can be traced even further back in time, before 2014. In many ways, woke is an outgrowth of identity politics and ‘political correctness’ – phenomena that began in earnest in the 1990s. Though the fundamental concepts underlying woke were established decades ago, what makes woke different from its earlier manifestations is its coercive and punitive character. We have gone from ‘you can’t say that’ to ‘you must say this – or suffer the consequences’. Chatterton Williams and others write about the ‘worst excesses’ of woke. But what about woke isn’t excessive? That is in its DNA. Pluckrose and others refer to ‘radical’ or ‘extreme’ social-justice activists. But the entire ideology is radical and extreme in the way it corrodes social solidarity. Woke ideology is built on identity politics, which is the antithesis of the civil-rights movement and other past movements against social oppression. There is no ‘non-extreme’ version of woke that can be salvaged... As I and others argued in 2016, the emergence of Trump was in many respects a response to the elite embrace of political correctness and woke. The vote for Trump was energised, in particular, by Hillary Clinton’s use of the word ‘deplorables’, through which she dismissed vast swathes of the working class for being insufficiently woke... Biden certainly comes from a more moderate, centrist section of the Democrats. It’s also true that he has not been as outspoken in support of woke ideas as, say, Kamala Harris or Elizabeth Warren. But that doesn’t mean he isn’t committed to the ideas that his party and its backers have embraced.A common view is that the threat that Biden represents is that, once in office, he will not be strong enough to withstand pressure from his left. There is an element of truth in this. A vice-president Harris and others will most likely push this agenda. Over his 47 years in politics, Biden has proven to be unprincipled and politically malleable, and he knows which way the wind blows today. More to the point, a vote for Biden is a vote for a huge administrative bureaucracy that will be filled with Democratic appointees infused with this outlook. But this argument misses the more central truth: that Biden himself is fully on-board with these woke ideas. His track record demonstrates that.When you consider Biden’s decisive role in promoting unjust sexual-assault policies on college campuses, he has a strong claim to being called the Grandfather of Woke... As KC Johnson, author of The Campus Rape Frenzy, has put it: ‘Perhaps no major American political figure has so consistently championed the erosion of due process of those accused of sexual misconduct.’ Biden has also been at the forefront of the campaign to promote transgender ideology. In January of this year, he tweeted: ‘Let’s be clear: transgender equality is the civil-rights issue of our time. There is no room for compromise when it comes to basic human rights.’ Not only does Biden declare trans to be the civil-rights issue, but this supposed moderate also adds a characteristically woke note of stridency and menace when he states there is ‘no room for compromise’... Biden is also supportive of today’s racial politics. He has rejected Black Lives Matters’ call to ‘defund the police’, but in most respects he sings from the same hymn sheet. In his first debate with Trump, he notably referred to ‘equity’ – woke-speak for reverse discrimination – as opposed to the traditional progressive call for ‘equality’. The writers with high hopes for a Biden presidency like to point out that he condemned violent rioting. What they overlook is how Biden refused to criticise BLM, Antifa and others, who have been behind the vast majority of violence and destruction, including deaths. Instead, he blamed ‘extreme right-wing militias’ who were ‘aligned with white supremicists’... this ‘anti-woke for Biden’ outlook underestimates the extent to which woke has been incorporated by the mainstream of the American liberal elite. Think of all of the institutions that espouse woke ideas: the New York Times, the American Museum of Natural History, Harvard, Google, even Wall Street banks. Is it likely that Biden will in any way stand up to this? And the woke rot goes far deeper than most elite American institutions. It has infiltrated our communities, in local government and our schools. The other day my son, a high-school teen, received an assignment – in health class – that required him to list his privileges, and thus express his white guilt... The reality is that woke is a major cultural and social phenomenon. In some respects, it is pre-political in nature, calling into question foundational things like child-rearing, religious beliefs and personal relationships – things that were once taken for granted as arenas that allowed for personal autonomy and privacy. And it’s not the government that has been doing most of the cancelling these days. It is companies and other social organisations. Woke is divisive at the local and personal level, setting neighbour against neighbour. To combat the culture war that woke represents, the battle will need to be waged beyond the White House and beyond the political sphere. But that said, the political realm has an impact on the extent to which notions like woke may become institutionalised or not. Since 2016, there has been a balance of power: the illiberal left has dominated the cultural sphere while there has been conservative advantage in representative government. The lords of US culture pretend that the majority goes along with their identity politics on issues of race, sex and gender. But the mere existence of Trump in the White House has been a stark reminder that not everyone in the US shares their outlook... If Biden and the Democrats win, this messy balance of culture and politics will end: cultural and political power will be united in one party and the predominant ideology of that party is woke. Facing less political opposition, it is easy to see how woke ideas will become institutionalised to an even greater extent. The progressives will take Biden’s win as an endorsement of woke. Woke will worsen under Biden."

Biden blunders could hand the election to Trump - "A new round of riots in Philadelphia overnight and Joe Biden’s opposition to fracking could swing Pennsylvania to Donald Trump, opening a path for a Trump victory... Law and order has been Trump’s top theme. Middle-class American voters watched nervously as police departments backed away from confronting rioting and looting in dozens of American cities. Thirty Philadelphia police officers suffered injuries the night of October 26 after rioters took to the streets following the police shooting of a black man armed with a knife.Most of the police injuries came from bricks and other missiles hurled at them, suggesting that police were under orders from Democratic Mayor Jim Kenney not to defend themselves. A female police officer was in hospital with a broken leg after a protester driving a pickup truck collided with her... Two-thirds of American voters have told pollsters that public order is a crucial issue for them"

WATCH: Joe Biden pledges to mobilize 'trunalimunumaprzure'

Trump's Non-Stop Campaign Schedule Versus Biden's Basement Strategy Is Paying Off

Is America ready to return to the Obama-Biden foreign policy? - "With some 44 years of collective government service as a U.S. senator and vice president, Joe Biden has amassed a substantial foreign and national security record. An examination of some of his key votes as senator and performance as vice president does not provide a ringing endorsement for his presidential candidacy. Instead, it raises serious questions about whether his votes and decisions detrimentally affected the U.S. economy, U.S. national security, and international peace and security... Obama’s defense secretary, Robert Gates, raised serious questions about Biden’s security judgments. In his 2014 book, “Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War,” Gates wrote that “he (Biden) has been wrong on nearly every foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades.” In 2000 Biden championed and voted for President Clinton’s initiative to normalize trade relations with China and facilitated its entry into the World Trade Organization in 2001. China’s economic rise contributed to the closing of some 60,000 U.S. factories.The Economic Policy Institute reported that it also cost about 3.7 million U.S. jobs, mostly in the manufacturing sector.In 2001 and 2002, Biden voted for the Afghanistan and Iraq wars... What did the world look like after eight years of Obama/Biden? The Institute for Economics and Peace’s Global Peace Index provided a general assessment. It reported a decade-long decline in peace, with terrorism at an all-time high, battle deaths from conflict at a 25-year high and the number of refugees at a level not seen in 60 years.The U.S. State Department reported a 34 percent growth in foreign terrorist organizations since Obama/Biden took office in 2009, with about 75 percent of them operating in Muslim-majority countries.Freedom House reported that as of 2016, global freedom had declined for 10 consecutive years, with press freedom at its lowest point in 12 years. Of the world’s 7.3 billion people at the time, only 40 percent lived in freedom and only 13 percent enjoyed a free press."

Opinion | Biden says voters don’t deserve to know his position on court-packing. That’s unacceptable. - The Washington Post - "Biden suggests court-packing is an idea Republicans have come up with to distract the American people during the presidential campaign. Sorry, it was Senate Democrats who raised the prospect last year... Biden’s running mate, Sen. Kamala D. Harris (D-Calif.), said during the primaries that she was “absolutely open” to packing the court. Democratic Sens. Cory Booker (N.J.), Amy Klobuchar (Minn.), Elizabeth Warren (Mass.) and Kirsten Gillibrand (N.Y.) are all on record saying much the same. And Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (N.Y.) warned just a few weeks ago that if Republicans confirm Judge Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court, “Everything is on the table.” It is Democrats, not Republicans, who have raised the issue... Biden instead said the Republican effort to confirm Barrett is “the court-packing the public should be focused on.” Sorry, filling existing vacancies is not court-packing... There is no justification for Democrats to use her untimely passing as one of their pretexts for court-packing — an idea Ginsburg abhorred... Ginsburg was not alone in criticizing FDR’s 1937 court-packing attempt. At a 1983 hearing, Biden called it “a bonehead idea” and a “terrible, terrible mistake” that would have called into question the court’s independence. In a 1987 speech, Biden praised Democrats for standing up to Roosevelt and approvingly quoted the report issued by the Democratic-controlled Judiciary Committee, which called FDR’s proposal “an invasion of judicial powers … which should be so emphatically rejected that its parallel will never again be presented to the free representatives of a free people in America.” In a 2005 floor speech, Biden said of FDR’s court-packing gambit, “It took an act of courage on the part of his own party institutionally to stand up against this power grab.”Well, today it is members of his own party in Congress who are pushing this power grab. Will Biden have the courage to stand up to it?Voters deserve to know."

The Biden Town Hall Was a Total Sham, Questioners Included a Former Obama Admin Speechwriter - "If you watched both the Biden town hall on ABC and the Trump town hall on NBC, you likely noticed they couldn’t have been more different. Trump was repeatedly interrupted by moderator Savannah Guthrie, who attempted to fact-check him while he was answering questions, while Joe Biden was given free rein to speak by George Stephanopoulos. Guthrie, before even having any of the voters at the event ask a question, wasted time with questions about Trump’s COVID-19 diagnosis, QAnon, and repeated the many-times-debunked accusation that Trump hasn’t denounced white supremacy. It was a full twenty minutes before she even allowed the first voter to ask a question... two attendees of NBC’s town hall with Biden were presented as undecided voters, despite having told the network they were Biden supporters. But the mainstream media is less interested in these incidents and have instead focused on the woman who was seen nodding behind Trump throughout his town hall, even though she never asked a question. The anti-Trump bias of both town halls is further demonstrated by the fact that Trump was fact-checked 45 times during his town hall, while Biden was only fact-checked ten times, according to an analysis by USA Today. Guthrie also asked 43 questions of Trump, while voters only got to ask ten."

Director of National Intelligence Ratcliffe: Hunter Biden Laptop, Emails Not Russian Disinformation - "Director Of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe told Fox Business on Monday morning that Hunter Biden’s laptop and emails are not part of a Russian disinformation campaign. "It’s funny that some of the people that complained the most about intelligence being politicized are the ones politicizing intelligence and unfortunately in this case, it is Adam Schiff, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, who as you pointed out on Friday said that the intelligence community believes that Hunter Biden’s laptop and e-mails on it are part of some Russian disinformation campaign," he said. "Let me be clear, the intelligence community doesn’t believe that because there is no intelligence that supports and we shared no intelligence with chairman Schiff or any other member of Congress that Hunter Biden’s laptop is part of some Russian disinformation campaign. It’s simply not true.""

The Biden Family Business: Corruption - "In Profiles in Corruption, Peter Schweizer points out that the Biden family’s wealth “depends on Joe Biden’s political influence and involves no less than five family members: Joe’s son Hunter, daughter Ashley, brothers James and Frank, and sister Valerie.” Biden’s sister has headed up a political messaging firm, to which “two and a half million dollars flowed … from Citizens for Biden and Biden for President Inc. during the 2008 presidential bid alone”... Meanwhile, Biden’s brothers have capitalized on his public “service” through a variety of lobbying gigs and sketchy businesses. Hunter Biden got a million-dollar job on the board of a Ukrainian natural gas firm without a lick of experience in that field. And Biden’s brother James became an executive at a construction firm even though he had little to no experience in construction, according to Schweizer: “James Biden was joining Hillstone just as the firm was starting negotiations to win a massive contract in war-torn Iraq.” Brother Frank, though he had no experience in education, used his last name to get a job with a dubious charter school management firm that raked in millions of dollars from federal grants during the Obama years — all while his brother feigned opposition to such expenditures."

Inside Hunter Biden's murky history of business dealings in China

Senate report links Hunter Biden to trafficking ring - "a woman who was suing Biden for paternity in Arkansas was a former stripper at a Washington, DC, club that he frequented around the time he was dating the widow of his late brother, former Delaware Attorney General Beau Biden."

PRESIDENTIAL DEBATE: Biden asks for break every 30 minutes; Trump campaign asks for inspections for ear piece on Biden

Joe Biden And Kamala Harris Both Refer To 'Harris Administration' During Public Speeches

Steve Guest on Twitter - "Joe Biden campaign manager Jen O'Malley Dillon refuses to deny that Biden uses a teleprompter in interviews"

Leaked Call Reveals Biden Risked National Security To Sabotage Trump - "A recently leaked phone call between then-Vice President Joe Biden and Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko directly after the 2016 presidential election shows that Biden sought to sabotage the incoming Trump administration before Donald Trump even took office, and much worse... [He] attempted to set up a foreign policy backchannel for himself after he left office as a private citizen, which could violate the Logan Act.The Logan Act bars private citizens from engaging in U.S. foreign policy, although its constitutionality remains questionable and no person has ever been convicted of violating it since it was signed into law in 1799. Ironically, this is the same act that, at Joe Biden’s suggestion, the FBI accused National Security Advisor Michael Flynn of violating as a result of a discussion Flynn had with the Russian ambassador to the United States around nearly the same time as Biden’s call with Poroshenko... All of this took place while his son, Hunter Biden, was on the payroll of a Ukrainian energy firm for which he admitted he had no related experience."

Biden Promises Fewer Fires, Floods, Hurricanes if He Wins - "Although Biden excoriated Trump for “ignoring the facts” and “denying reality,” he focused his remarks on the wildfires ravaging California, Oregon, and Washington State — fires exacerbated by bad forest management more than any sort of climate change... As Ars Technica’s Scott Johnson reported, a Stanford research team found that about 20 percent of California — 20 million acres — would benefit from controlled burns.Climate activists have opposed the harvesting of dead trees and the aggressive clearing of brush, however. Gov. Jerry Brown (D-Calif.) vetoed forest management attempts in 2016. California’s forests don’t get the work they need because private landowners fear liability for controlled burns, CAL FIRE doesn’t have enough resources to prioritize controlled burns, and stringent climate regulations make it difficult for proposed burns to get approved. President Trump has encouraged California to use proper forest management to combat the wildfires. He noted that forest fires are “starting again in California. I said, you gotta clean your floors, you gotta clean your forests — there are many, many years of leaves and broken trees and they’re like, like, so flammable, you touch them and it goes up.”Biden condemned Trump for his common-sense advice, suggesting that the president was blaming the victims... Steve Milloy, a former Trump/Pence EPA transition team member and founder of JunkScience.com, noted that California “has experienced megadroughts lasting as long as 220 years over the past 1,100 years — a period before the advent of SUVs and fossil fuel power plants.”... Although the Midwest did experience devastating floods last year, floods in that area are not exactly new. The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 was the most destructive river flood in U.S. history, and it came only a few decades after the invention of the automobile... As for hurricanes, many peer-reviewed studies have disputed the notion that carbon emissions make hurricanes worse. Yet Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D-N.Y.) suggested that “there were no hurricanes” hitting New York before the devastating impacts of climate change. Yet analysis of sedimentary evidence from New Jersey showed that a major hurricane struck the New York/New Jersey area between 1278 to 1438, long before the internal combustion engine... California’s rolling blackouts provide concrete evidence that a forced transition to green energy makes energy more expensive and more scarce for a society. Biden’s energy policies could bring California’s rolling blackouts to the rest of America. Far from preventing tragedies, his policies would actually create them."

Biden's Glass-House COVID Criticisms of Trump - "Joe Biden will say anything that scrolls across his teleprompter. How else to explain his reckless charge that Donald Trump is not only responsible for every American life lost to COVID-19 but that “the president failed to do his job on purpose.”Instead of accusing his opponent of murder, Biden should be demonstrating humility since no one knows better than he the difficulty of responding to a global pandemic. In 2009, Biden and President Obama were confronted with the H1N1 virus, which ultimately took at least 18,449 lives... The administration failed to deliver a vaccine as promised. It distributed but never replenished the nation’s stockpile of protective gear, putting us behind the eight ball when COVID-19 erupted. Former Biden chief of staff Ron Klain summed up the response last year: “We did every possible thing wrong. Sixty million Americans got H1N1 in that period of time and it is just purely a fortuity that this isn’t one of the great mass-casualty events in American history. [It] had nothing to do with us doing anything right; just had to do with luck [that the virus wasn’t as deadly as feared].”... Biden and his stenographers in the mainstream media insistently claim that Trump has blood on hands because he did not pursue some mythical perfect response to COVID-19. If we want to play that game, then yes, our death rate would be much lower if Trump had coupled a complete shutdown of the border in January with a massive program of contact tracing and testing. That might be the way to go when the next pandemic strikes.But no public figure, including Biden, proposed such a measure. Instead, Democrats attacked Trump’s efforts to contain the virus. The day after Trump’s Jan. 31 announcement of travel restrictions on flights from China, Biden said: “This is no time for Donald Trump’s record of hysteria and xenophobia – hysterical xenophobia – and fearmongering to lead the way instead of science.”... More problematic is their related suggestion that the president’s rose-colored comments and refusal to wear a mask inspired Americans to take reckless risks that resulted in death. This claim might make a smidgen of sense if most of the COVID hot spots weren’t in deep blue areas. Even today, the four hardest hit states are the Democrat strongholds of New Jersey, New York, Massachusetts, and Connecticut. Twelve of the top 15 states have Democrat governors – two are led by Republicans, the other is the almost monolithically Democrat District of Columbia. Although the Washington Post gleefully reported on Sept. 3 that this blue state dominance appeared to be ending as “seven in 10 new coronavirus cases are emerging in red states,” the article also reported that half of the cases were appearing in counties that voted for Hillary Clinton"

Joe Biden’s Me-Too Covid Plan - WSJ - "Joe Biden on Thursday issued an appeal to Americans who have grown tired during the pandemic of Donald Trump’s persona and behavior. The Democratic nominee is also promising a better virus strategy, which would be wonderful if he had one. But the virus plan he’s pushing is little different on the substance than what the Trump Administration is already doing. President Trump’s biggest mistake in the pandemic has been his own shifting rhetorical leadership... It seems Mr. Biden’s main policy difference is that he’d impose a national mask mandate. We’re all for wearing masks in public settings, but businesses and states that mandate them have struggled to enforce compliance. The Constitution doesn’t give the federal government the police powers to do so in any case. A highly contagious and deadly virus is a hard problem for any democracy, as the Obama-Biden Administration learned in its manifest failure dealing with the less deadly H1N1 virus in 2009. Despite his partisan boasts, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo made many mistakes in the pandemic, including the catastrophic decision to send Covid-19 patients back to nursing homes. New York state still leads the country by far in the number of Covid deaths."

Iran Behind Hack Attacks, Online Disinformation Campaigns to Boost Biden

STUDY: 150 TIMES More Negative News on Trump than Biden - "If you consider the evening newscasts a reliable gauge of the liberal media at large (cable news, big newspapers, etc.), it means Biden has enjoyed an army of so-called journalists conducting a massive negative information campaign against his opponent, while he is sheltered from any scrutiny. Controversies from the spring, such as allegations from former staffer Tara Reade that he sexually assaulted her in the 1990s, completely disappeared from his evening news coverage in June and July. Biden’s various policy proposals — which by his own admission would take his administration farther to the Left than the very liberal Obama administration — received a meager 5 minutes, 22 seconds of airtime, not one second of which included any critical analysis from any journalist. There were no labels of Biden as “progressive,” “left-wing,” or even “liberal” on any of these newscasts, either; reporters also neglected to tell viewers how much the Democrat would raise taxes if he were elected (spoiler: more than $4 trillion).Biden’s plan for $700 billion more federal spending (what he called “investments”), announced July 9, received a scant 40 seconds of evening news airtime (25 seconds on ABC, 15 seconds on CBS, nothing on NBC). When he outlined his massively expensive ($2 trillion) plan to combat climate change on July 14, it received six seconds, all of it on CBS. If the networks weren’t scrutinizing Biden’s policies or his character, what accounted for his 58 minutes of airtime? Conveniently for the candidate, a plurality of it (23.5 minutes, or 40%) consisted of showcasing his near-daily criticisms of Trump. Conversely, only 88 seconds of Trump’s 512 minutes of airtime consisted of relaying his criticisms of Biden (a minuscule 0.25%)... No presidential candidate — not even Barack Obama in 2008 — has ever been on the receiving end of such a wide array of media favors. (While Obama received highly positive coverage, there was no massive media effort to destroy his GOP opponent, Senator John McCain.)"

The China election | Spectator USA - "Bill Clinton, in a speech heralding China’s entry into the World Trade Organization in 2000, remarked that ‘by joining the WTO, China is not simply agreeing to import more of our products. It is agreeing to import one of democracy’s most cherished values, economic freedom. The more China liberalizes its economy, the more fully it will liberate the potential of its people — their initiative, their imagination, their remarkable spirit of enterprise. And when individuals have the power, not just to dream but to realize their dreams, they will demand a greater say.’It is by now glaringly obvious that this vision didn’t come to pass. For far too long, ‘End of History’ hubris dominated western engagement with China, and hubris led to nemesis. Instead of importing democratic accountability, China exported its model of authoritarianism to the world... look no further than the myriad ways the Chinese Communist party has been subtly waging its offensive on various fronts — economics and finance, information, technology, global diplomacy, and education, in what former Air Force Brigadier General Robert Spalding has termed a stealth war. This version of modern warfare is fought not with bullets and bombs but with bytes and pixels, and dollars and yuans. For the average American, it has and will continue to have a real impact on everyday life, from the availability of jobs to the price of certain goods, from the tech apps you can use to what you can and cannot say on social media (as Houston Rockets general manager Daryl Morey found out), from the supply of fentanyl decimating our communities to what the internet will look like, from the content of your university courses to the plots of the movies you consume.Racial fault lines and fissures in our culture wars are exploited by armies of propagandists and trolls employed by a Chinese state which seeks to further weaken an already fragile social fabric. This materializes as chaos on the streets and edges the country closer to a civil war. American businesses are learning their lessons too as the CCP escalates corporate intimidation tactics, using access to its huge market as leverage for its political bidding... The Trump administration’s move to ban TikTok and WeChat prompted critical headlines about the end of the open internet and the dawn of the ‘splinternet’, where cyberspace is balkanized into several geopolitical entities circumscribed by digital borders. Such analyses overlook that, from a trade reciprocity standpoint, China has since 2009 banned US social media networks and content platforms including Facebook, Github, YouTube and Netflix. So uncoupling our internet from China’s access is less about ‘sinking to their level’ than it is about enforcing an ethos of openness... For the last four years, the Trump administration’s approach to China has departed sharply from the previous decades of engagement that saw every administration greet the rise of the sleeping giant as, in the words of Joe Biden, ‘a positive development’ instead of as an existential threat... China featured heavily over four nights of the Republican National Convention. Who could forget the moving sight of blind Chinese human rights lawyer Chen Guang Cheng addressing the podium, castigating the policy of appeasement of former administrations which he said had ‘allowed the CCP to infiltrate and corrode different aspects of the global community?’... In contrast, China was barely a single blip on the Democratic National Convention radar. The C words just got one mention in Joe Biden’s acceptance speech."

Joe Biden Needs a Kshama Sawant Moment - "In the 1992 presidential campaign, presumptive Democratic nominee Bill Clinton clearly and unreservedly denounced a Black rapper named Sister Souljah who had called for the killing of white people. Moreover, Clinton did so at a gathering of the Rev. Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition, where Souljah herself had spoken the previous day. Jackson was furious at Clinton, but the incident reassured voters that the Arkansas governor wasn’t beholden to the furthest left elements of his coalition. Clinton’s “Sister Souljah moment” became political shorthand for having the courage—and basic tactical good sense—to call out lunatic extremism on one’s own side.Today’s Democratic presidential nominee faces a similar conundrum, though on a far larger scale. The past three months of urban unrest across America—the cost of repairing the destruction, mostly to small businesses, is currently put at $1 billion—has placed Joe Biden and the party he leads in a difficult position, which they seem eager to evade and deny. The early and unquestioned embrace by Democratic Party elites of Black Lives Matter, as well as the broader, inchoate movement seeking what is invariably described as a “racial reckoning” across all sectors of American society, has left many of the party’s spokesmen and elected officials unable to delineate where legitimate protest against police brutality ends and violent anarchism led by black-clad antifa rioters begins. This predicament is worse in cities where Democratic mayors and city councilors sympathetic to BLM and antifa have not only praised the rioters, but in some cases endorsed demands that the police be defunded... While repeatedly denouncing “right-wing militias and white supremacists and vigilantes,” however, Biden declined to call out the far-left groups that have caused the vast majority of the destruction, nor the figures in the media, academy and entertainment worlds who have provided the anarchists and violent looters with ideological air cover. One of the cities worst affected by a summer of chaos was Seattle, where Police Chief Carmen Best—a 30-year veteran of the force and its first Black woman leader—resigned earlier this month after the city council moved to strip her department of 100 officers and slash her salary by 40%. The Seattle chapter of BLM, with whom Best had developed a positive working relationship during her tenure, decried the top cop’s departure as a “loss” and the council’s effort to undercut her as one that “prioritize[ed] performative action that solely suggests the appearance of change.”The main driver behind the effort to expel Seattle’s first Black woman police chief was City Councilor Kshama Sawant. A member of the Socialist Alternative party and supporter of Bernie Sanders in this year’s Democratic presidential primary, Sawant was one of the most prominent public officials to embrace the Capitol Hill Organized Protest (CHOP) zone, Seattle’s brief experiment in police-free, utopian living—that Seattle’s Mayor Jenny Durkan originally defended as having a “block party atmosphere” and compared to “the Summer of Love”—and whose signal legacy was the murder of Black teenagers. “Two African American men are dead, at a place where they claim to be working for Black Lives Matter,” Best said at the time, lamenting how the city’s politicians were preventing her from doing her job. “But they’re gone, they’re dead now.” Kshama Sawant enunciated a different view. “Though we await confirmation of the details of the killing, there are indications that this may have been a right-wing attack,” she said in a statement after the first shooting, which authorities have since pinned on another Black teenager. Alongside President Donald Trump, Sawant alleged, Mayor Jenny Durkan and Chief Best also “share responsibility for having portrayed our protest movement as violent.”... After the second murder of a young Black man in the “peaceful Capitol Hill occupation” in as many weeks, Sawant blamed the killing on “capitalism’s brutality & endemic violence.” Meanwhile, when an Asian American constituent initiated a petition to recall Sawant, whom he decried as “the leftist version of the right-wing version of Trump,” the cinema where he worked fired him. Herewith, then, a modest proposal for the man seeking to defeat Donald Trump: Direct your campaign plane to Seattle, call a press conference with Carmen Best at your side, and unreservedly denounce Kshama Sawant in a speech to the people of Seattle... If he can pull it off, Joe Biden’s Kshama Sawant Moment would be far more powerful than Bill Clinton’s rebuke of Sister Souljah nearly three decades ago. In 1992, Sister Souljah was well outside the mainstream—an entertainer babbling incoherent revolutionary slogans. There was no critical mass of officials within elite institutions backing her call to kill white people. It was political theater... Today, however, bad things are happening—and there are countless Kshama Sawants occupying positions of power and influence in American life. These petty tyrants run entire departments at some of our most prestigious universities, dictate the ethical standards in critical government agencies, and control the curriculum for millions of students in the country’s public school systems. Sawant’s votaries have taken over what used to be the country’s paper of record (where Dwight David Eisenhower, the original anti-fascist, is now referred to as “yet another white male figure from an era dominated by white men”) and rule the roost at most other well-funded media outlets. Corporate titans tremble at their feet; U.S. senators bow down to their will. Next time you’re walking down a deserted downtown street and espy the BLM signs dutifully pasted over the boarded-up store windows, ask yourself: Do those really look like the expressions of solidarity they’re purportedly meant to be? When Sawant likened Carmen Best’s Seattle police force to one in the Jim Crow-era South—“where law enforcement across the country did not lift a finger to stop the KKK’s lynch mobs, and often participated in them”—it read not only like the musings of a collegiate Marxist, but The New York Times op-ed page on any given morning. A few weeks ago, a journalist at National Public Radio interviewed the author of a book in favor of looting as if she had written about hot yoga or any other bourgeois-bohemian hobby. But this was no more ridiculous than the NPR contributor who, earlier in the summer, urged listeners to “decolonize your bookshelf,” a process of “actively resisting and casting aside the colonialist ideas of narrative, storytelling, and literature that have pervaded the American psyche for so long.” Only five years ago, most observers rolled their eyes when a mob of Yale undergraduates surrounded a renowned professor in a courtyard and hurled verbal abuse at him for over two hours, all because of an utterly innocuous email his wife had composed questioning the university’s intrusion into the all-important matter of Halloween costumes. “What privileged brats!” seemed to be the broad consensus at the time... Today, the screaming student in the Yale quad is the screaming reporter in the American newsroom. The foisting upon the entire country of crackpot texts like White Fragility and How to Be an Anti-Racist, the abject terror of academics that their careers will be destroyed should they question any aspect of these poisonous bromides, the cynical and transparent efforts by the mass media and leading Democratic politicians like Jerry Nadler and Nancy Pelosi to downplay the rioting (when not ignoring it entirely)—all stand in the way of what should be an easy victory for the former vice president. Biden needs to assure the country that the past four months of cancellations, forced confessions, efforts to revise American history as if it were akin to Nazi Germany, and other attempts by the woke left to coerce ideological conformity within every institution it’s allowed to control, will not be welcome under his presidency... Contrary to the Russiagate dead-enders who have become the Democratic Party equivalent of the QAnon cult, insisting that half the country was duped into voting for Donald Trump in 2016 by a secret conspiracy involving a few hundred thousand dollars of Facebook ads and therefore his entire presidency is “illegitimate,” the millions of undecided voters who will determine this election are not actually stupid or deranged: They see with their own eyes how leaders within liberal institutions have wilted when confronted with mau-mauing from the woke left. In June, when a group of Times reporters seized upon a bit of Marcusian jargon that, if implemented in newsrooms, would spell the death of journalism as we know it—the notion that “speech is violence”—and leveraged this against an editor along with the extortionist claim that his publishing a piece of writing they did not like “put black lives in danger,” nothing was stopping Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger from defending the principle of open debate other than his own fear of being called a “white supremacist” by some of the people whose paychecks he signs. Sulzberger’s cowardice was par for the course among the liberal establishment, whose leaders have repeatedly shown what happens when progressives confront them with such tactics: They surrender. That anyone should have to call on Joe Biden to denounce the crazies in an election year itself seems crazy. The vast majority of Americans, including racial minorities, believe political correctness is a problem. Majorities across racial and ethnic groups oppose the consideration of race or ethnicity in college admissions. Only 22% of Blacks think abolishing the police is a good idea"

Kamala Harris believed Joe Biden’s accusers — until she didn’t - "Harris beefed up her #MeToo credentials later, making it clear she doesn’t just believe women accusing Republicans of sexual assault. All women had to be believed, including those who accused prominent Democrats. At a campaign event in Nevada in April 2019, Harris discussed the allegations against Biden, declaring of the accusers: “I believe them, and I respect them being able to tell their story and having the courage to do it.”So Biden is an abuser — because women have accused him, and all women should be believed. Right?So what has changed since then? Sexual assault and harassment are some of the most serious allegations that can be leveled against a man. Harris now needs to account for why she is comfortable joining an abuser’s 2020 ticket. This isn’t some debate-stage policy disagreement she can just walk back, claiming she has “evolved.” There are only two possibilities. One is that Harris didn’t, in fact, believe Biden’s accusers but claimed she did to score political points against him. If so, she used the very serious issue of sexual assault as a cheap political cudgel.The other possibility is that she still believes the ex-veep’s accusers but is comfortable teaming up with an abuser (not to mention a racist, another charged accusation Harris has thrown Biden’s way). After Harris ended her own bid and Biden emerged as the presumptive nominee, she began subtly backtracking... Note well the new standard: When the accusation is against a Republican foe, a woman is automatically to be believed, period, no questions asked. But when an accusation is less politically expedient, women are owed no more than the right to be “heard,” and the accused men deserve a fair hearing, as well.That’s disgusting. How we treat assault and abuse allegations shouldn’t depend on the personal ambitions of Kamala Harris... For the last several years, progressives have repeatedly claimed they seek the moral high ground against a Republican president with a checkered past with women. That moral high ground is now lost.The fact that Harris so eagerly climbed aboard Joe’s bus says something about her character and what she really thinks about #MeToo. Far from the feminist icon she portrayed herself as during the Kavanaugh hearings, she personifies the left’s weaponization of assault for political ends. The biggest losers in this game are true victims of assault and abuse, who now face an even more daunting climb to being believed.Harris’ addition to the Biden ticket, then, is not a great feminist achievement. Rather, it is a harsh blow to the feminist cause. Her decision to join Biden after accusing him of assault underscores, in a damning and irreversible way, how unseriously her party takes these issues when there are political ambitions at stake."

FACT CHECK: Trump Never Promoted Kamala Harris Birther Story - "Brian Stelter wants us to believe that anti-Trump media doesn’t exist, but on Friday, his own network published a “fact check” that claims Trump “promoted” a birther conspiracy theory about Kamala Harris... CNN claims that Trump promoted the conspiracy theory, but he wasn’t even the one who brought it up—the reporter did. And he not only said he assumed Democrats would have properly vetted her, but twice he said he only just heard about it and doesn’t know anything about the claims. This is CNN equating Trump answering a question about it with actively promoting it."

Vivian on Twitter - "She could literally be Hitler and the Biden/Hitler combo would still be a better choice than Trump." "neoliberals remain committed to being utterly beyond parody"
Comment (elsewhere): "Leftists: Trump is literally Hitler
Also Leftists:"

Kamala Harris, ‘pranked’ by Russian comedians posing as Greta Thunberg, ‘accepts’ hoax kompromat on Trump - "The duo then claim they have “dirt” on Trump that could prove helpful to Harris, in the form of a recording of the president telling Thunberg “you will never achieve your goal.”... After Greta offers her support to Harris’s campaign, ‘Svante’ tells the senator that the conversation between Trump and his daughter was recorded and asks if the recording would be helpful to her. Harris appears to accept the offer. “That would be wonderful,” she says. She also accepts an offer from ‘Greta’ to testify against Trump... Vovan and Lexus have managed to prank other politicians and get past the usually strict security measures, mainly offering criticism of Trump when they do so. They’ve spoken to both Sen. Bernie Sanders (D-Vermont) and Rep. Maxine Waters (D-California)... Given she’s been one of many Democrats accusing Trump of colluding with Russia during the 2016 presidential election, accepting “dirt” on the man ahead of a 2020 campaign is not a good look, as many on social media have pointed out"

Kamala Harris ripped for flip-flopping on rioters after she asked for donations to bail them out of jail - "Vice Presidential nominee Kamala Harris asked supporters in June to donate to Minnesota rioters who were arrested, in a tweet now earning her criticism after condemning rioters’ violence this weekend... Over the weekend, Harris and Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden condemned the violence seen in recent days, specifically in Portland, Oregon, where one person was shot dead Saturday night... “Kamala Harris helped violent rioters in Minnesota get out of jail to do more damage,” Cotton tweeted. “Don't believe her when she says she ‘condemns the violence’ — look at her record, not her words.”... “Remember: Joe Biden called them ‘peaceful protesters.’ Kamala Harris raised money to bail violent rioters out of jail. And they both continue to oppose @realDonaldTrump's plan to send in the National Guard to finally end these violent riots once and for all”... "As vice president, Joe Biden oversaw cuts to police funding, and now as a candidate, he says he wants to redirect funding away from police. His staff mocked police as worse than ‘pigs,’ called for defunding the police, and now, we know his campaign and Kamala Harris helped bail out violent criminals, rapists, and would-be cop killers"... Support for Black Lives Matter protests has been slipping in recent months, according to a poll out of Wisconsin.Forty-eight percent of Wisconsin residents support Black Lives Matter protests and 48% disapprove, according to a Marquette Law School poll conducted between Aug. 8 and Aug. 9"

Defund the Police? Make the Police VP? : PoliticalCompassMemes

Party Of The Poor And Oppressed Nominates Old, Rich, White Man And Cop | The Babylon Bee - "The party that claims to represent minorities, the poor, the oppressed, and the marginalized has nominated an old, rich, white man and a cop, sources confirmed Tuesday."If you want to fight for oppressed minority groups, you must vote for this rich, old, white man who authored the 1994 crime bill and this corrupt police officer who has made a career out of throwing minorities in jail for non-violent drug crimes," said a DNC spokesperson. "It's the only way to fight the establishment." According to sources at the DNC, the old white guy you're supposed to vote for, in order to show that you love and respect women, has been accused of inappropriate sexual behavior by several women. "Several photos circulating on the internet demonstrate proof-positive that Joe Biden loves women and children very much," wrote Snopes, the internet's premiere fact-checkers."

Appalling Apostolic Memes for Liberty-Minded Teens - Posts - Shaun King: "My friend @jamaltrulove was framed for murder by @KamalaHarris when she was District Attorney of San Francisco. He was sentenced for 50 years to life in prison for a crime he had nothing to do with. Spent 7 years in prison before he was exonerated."
Shaun King: "That's it for me. I am incredibly proud to see a brilliant Black woman, and HBCU grad, chosen as a Vice Presidential nominee. I've done political work my whole life. It's rarely things dreams are made of. Kamala Harris is the most progressive VP nominee in American history."

Shaun King on Twitter - "I'll be frank and tell you two Democrats that I am 99% sure I won't be supporting - primarily because of their dismal history on criminal justice reform over the course of their entire careers. Joe Biden & Kamala Harris. They both helped build & advance mass incarceration."

The Victoria Taft Show - Posts - "The American Left went from ‘defund the police’ & ‘remove all monuments to slave owners,’ to ‘let’s elect a cop whose family owned slaves in Jamaica,' in less than 3 months"

Kamala Harris compared ICE officers to KKK - "should the Biden-Harris ticket win, it will be a major dent to immigration enforcement.“CBP’s in a world of hurt. ICE is going to be in a world of hurt if these two prevail,” he said... The KKK exchange is part of an overall record that has seen Ms. Harris stake out a position as one of the most fervent defenders of undocumented immigrants, including during her aborted presidential bid when she flirted with abolishing ICE as an agency, saying it might make sense to “start from scratch.” She later backed away from that.She’s also been one of the harshest critics on Capitol Hill of Homeland Security’s immigration agencies, peppering agency leaders with questions about their training and procedures.Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, said Ms. Harris’s comparison of ICE to the KKK shows where the Democratic Party is headed on immigration policy.“Someone should ask Vice President Biden whether he agrees with his running mate that federal law enforcement officers are domestic terrorists,” he said... While in California, she authored an opinion that provided “legal cover” for sanctuary cities to refuse to cooperate with ICE detainer requests, said Jessica Vaughan, policy studies director at the Center for Immigration Studies.“She’s the one who really set the stage for the extreme sanctuary policies in California”... Mr. Biden, for his part, voted for 700 miles of border wall while a senator in 2006, and while vice president was part of an administration that set the all-time record for deportations in 2012. But that administration also created the DACA program, which helps “Dreamers” stay in the country.Mr. Biden has since called the deportations a “big mistake... Mr. Biden has also said he’d revoke the policies Mr. Trump put in place to solve last year’s migrant border surge.Mr. Vitiello said canceling those policies would spur a new surge of illegal crossings.“How are we going to stop the tens of thousands of people?””

Public Defender Jeff Adachi Says D.A. Kamala Harris Blowing Off Crime Lab Scandal - and Him - "San Francisco Public Defender Jeff Adachi sharply criticized District Attorney Kamala Harris' handling of a growing scandal at the San Francisco Police Department crime lab today, saying the city's top prosecutor had ignored repeated requests to meet with him and failed to disclose the full extent of problems at the lab."

Judge rips Harris' office for hiding problems - "San Francisco District Attorney Kamala Harris' office violated defendants' rights by hiding damaging information about a police drug lab technician and was indifferent to demands that it account for its failings, a judge declared... The failure by Harris' office "to produce information actually in its possession regarding Madden and the crime lab is a violation of the defendants' constitutional rights," Massullo wrote."

Hindu groups seek apology from Kamala Harris’ niece for sharing image depicting aunt as Durga - "Hindu groups in the US have sought an apology from the niece of Senator Kamala Harris for tweeting an “offensive” image, which depicted the Democratic vice presidential nominee as goddess Durga... "Your tweeting a caricature of the feminine divine, Maa Durga, with faces superimposed, deeply aggrieved many Hindus globally"... Kamala Harris, depicted as goddess Durga, was seen killing US President Donald Trump, who was depicted as buffalo demon ‘Mahishasura’. The image also showed Democratic Presidential nominee Joe Biden as a lion, the ‘vahana’ (vehicle) of the goddess."

Kamala Harris on Twitter - "@FlaDems On Day 1 as president, I will reenter the Paris Agreement. Make the climate crisis a top national security priority. Ensure communities impacted by the climate crisis get justice. Hold corporations who damage the environment accountable. Pass a Green New Deal. #ClimateCrisisFL"
Of course now we are told she is a moderate

Raheem Kassam on Twitter - "Kamala Harris just admitted to the world that she doesn’t believe what she says, she just says things in certain settings because it’s expected"

Scott Walker To Kamala: You Visited Jacob Blake. How About Visiting Ambushed L.A. Deputies In Your Own State. - "former GOP Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, taking note of the two Los Angeles County deputies who were shot in the head in a cold-blooded ambush as they sat in their patrol car Saturday night, threw down the gauntlet to Democratic vice-presidential candidate Kamala Harris, who is a senator from California... "She visited someone in WI who was charged with felony 3rd-degree sexual assault and said she was proud of him. She and @JoeBiden need to side with law enforcement and denounce radicals"... attorney Benjamin Crump who is representing Blake reported that Harris visited Jacob Blake and told him that she was “proud of him and how he is working through his pain.”"

Kamala Harris: Biden’s VP Pick & Your Next Candidate to Libel Police & Criminal Justice - "BLM IS COSTING LIVES: Harvard economist Roland Fryer has a new working paper indicating that defunding police can lead to almost 500 additional lives taken a year — which he calculated in just five cities (Baltimore, Chicago, Cincinnati, Riverside and Ferguson/St. Louis)... I run data showing 165,000 lives have been saved due to reductions of homicides since the early 1990s, a significant portion coming from adding more police nationwide and locking up criminals. For comparison, 14 unarmed black lives were taken last year by law enforcement along with 25 unarmed white lives.
POLICE ARE MOSTLY FAIR: Control for violent arrests and resisting arrest and any “per arrest” black-white gap in non-lethal use of force is erased, too. Various graphics below will highlight how “fair” the treatment by police is by race, and how rarely force is used —one study indicating it occurs as few as 1 in 1,167 calls for service. So, no, “White Fragility” author Robin DiAngelo, this garbage rhetoric said by you and numerous others ad nauseum is not true and is entirely mythology: “Who doesn’t know that calling the police on black people risks them being shot?” Are you also often hearing from academia or CNN about how black folks are “three times” more likely to be killed by police than white folks? Well, African Americans are also “eight times more” likely to kill or rob others and “three times more” likely to be arrested, too. These things you almost never hear in the media to provide essential context.
STUDIES DEFENDING POLICE BEHAVIOR AGAINST CHARGES OF RACISM ARE BEING ATTACKED & DROPPED DUE TO POLITICS...
The latest DOJ survey (NCVS) report on Tuesday, September 11, showed violent crime is on the rise. It’s telling this came one day after a major presidential candidate offered a plan to change the criminal justice system with a “progressive wish list of policies,” as The New York Times reported, while barely touching public safety concerns like gun violence or sexual assault.The problem with Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris’ “Plan to Transform the Criminal Justice System and Re-Envision Public Safety in America,” inspired by the new consensus direction of the Democratic party, is how it’s hopelessly tethered to mythology. The most glaring myths are the ones that say policing and the U.S. criminal justice are systemically racist or locking up far too many people for profit... Blacks are 27% of arrests but only 25% of people killed by police almost every year since 2015. Blacks are 43% of police killers, according to a 2015 Washington Post analysis (a story, I might add, that will be left on the dustbin of journalism history). African Americans are responsible for about 55% of all robberies and murders, too, and are under-arrested for those crimes... when contextualizing for real behavior, there’s almost no racism at all... “Blacks are arrested at about their reported rate of crime, or the odds benchmarked on arrests show greater anti-White bias, suggesting that Blacks are under-arrested given their rate of reported crime.” Cesario said that given there’s 50 million individuals interacting with police annually, some multiple times, having around 50 killings by police where the victim is unarmed and not attacking, or the officer mistakes a wallet for a gun, is possibly quote low. Or as he calls it a “1 in a million error rate.” Thus, it can be argued that unjustified or “bad shootings” by police are rare and as low as 5% of the total. It is also noteworthy that the majority of those shot in these scenarios are non-Hispanic white... Marijuana arrests are only 5% of arrests and nearly 50% of people in prison are there for violent crimes — the latter figure Harris does touch on in her plan, and never mentions “guns” or “firearm” violence a single time even though they significantly affect the safety within communities of color. Only around 5% of people in prison are “low level” non-violent drug offenders, and less than 1% of people are even in prison for marijuana possession. What is rarely said is a majority of people in prison for “drugs” are professional drug dealers and gang members. Many of those were pleaded down from more violent offenses. Critics of this false standard narrative have also shown that if you remove “drug” convictions from state prisons, the black population drops from 37.5% to 37%... And then there’s the dreaded specter of “private prisons,” which members on the political left constantly say is driving mass incarceration when in reality they’re a response to it. Private prisons hold only 8.5% of prisoners, yet activists constantly bray about the greed of for-profit prisons causing large-scale carceral lockups and comparing it to slavery, as the Netflix special “The 13th” speculated. Professor and researcher Dr. John Pfaff wrote in The Washington Post that it’s a complete myth that for-profit institutions are propelling increases in imprisonment, stating instead that, “Most of those in private prisons are held in just five states, and there is no real evidence that prison populations have grown faster in those states than elsewhere.” A 2019 study titled “Do Private Prisons Affect Criminal Sentencing?” answered conclusively, “No,” and said the doubling of private prison capacity raises sentence lengths by only 1.3%, did not increase the likelihood of conviction, nor did they appear to accentuate existing racial biases in sentencing decisions. Yet when the issue of private prisons is brought up in Harris’ YouTube video, consensus builds in the small group — almost conspiratorially — that “private prisons” are a monstrosity of injustice... a recent study in Georgia said private prisons cost the state 10% more than public prisons per prisoner, yet they didn’t determine if legacy costs of pensions for thousands of prison workers were factored in and some of the methodologies are still in question. And if the costs are the same, which are easier to end contracts and close if the government has a concern: Private companies or public institutions? The answer is certainly the former... “it’s good politics” for people like Bernie Sanders and Kamala Harris to be against private prisons, even if their sway over incarceration is minimal. “it’s good politics” for people like Bernie Sanders and Kamala Harris to be against private prisons, even if their sway over incarceration is minimal... “There is some suggestive evidence that there are racial disparities in resistance based on research by Smith and colleagues for the National Institute of Justice. They find that the rate of officer injury is lower when arresting a White suspect than a suspect of another racial group"... Basically, blacks are more likely to be arrested for violent crimes, and more often resist arrest, compared to whites... D. Watkins says police have not been held accountable because “they protect and serve the rich.” That’s patently false. The reason they’re in poor minority communities (not rich communities) in Chicago, Oakland (where Harris is from), Detroit, and Baltimore is because Democratic mayors and officials want them there. It’s black police chiefs and commanders who are pushing for more patrols in high crime areas. It’s because they’re listening to the black mothers and grandmothers that wants them there, not elites and progressive activists on YouTube and Twitter. Criminologists like Dr. Goff almost never say arrest rates by race match National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) rates — which reports the percentage of suspects by race and gender. And both those rates also match fatal use of force rates, and are mostly in line with non-lethal force percentages. Media doesn’t make that connection either. Why is that? I argue because stating such facts are intolerable. They would prove the police aren’t racist because they’re arresting and incarcerating populations at nearly the exact rate of crime commission by them. Wagging the finger of “institutional racism” is the only option — and what’s not politically correct to say, as some studies do, is that whites are more likely to be arrested for committing the same crime. But what if murder rates go up 20%, as they have in the past few years? What if Americans start being informed that the per capita murder rate is higher than anytime since 2007? How is that tolerable?... Goff doesn’t release his data to other researchers, which Dr. Fryer called him out for in a footnote where he reported that “blacks are 27.4 percent less likely to be shot at by police relative to non-black, non-Hispanics.” Goff also had the audacity to censor — or possibly lie about — his own data with the media... Who wants to bet that if the Center for Policing Equity and Google finds data that exonerates police nationally, they won’t release it?When police institutions are reluctant to give up their data, this is one of the major reasons why. They know it will be manipulated to make them look bad. This clearly happened at The New York Times, as well as from The Washington Post and PBS... “For all prisoners released in 2016, the median time served was only 1.3 years; the mean was 2.6 years. For violent offenders the median was 2.4 years, the average 4.7 years.”... Americans are arrested at least 5–10 times before serving time."