Durham says Clinton campaign funded surveillance of Trump Tower, White House

From Washington Times.com (Feb. 12):

Special counsel John Durham alleged in a court filing Saturday that the Clinton campaign paid for a tech company to hack servers in former President Donald Trump’s residences and the White House to gather derogatory information on him during the 2016 campaign and while he was president.

In the filing, Mr. Durham says the government has evidence that an unnamed tech executive “exploited” an arrangement with the government to monitor Mr. Trump’s internet traffic at Trump Tower, Mr. Trump’s Central Park West apartment, the executive office of the president and an unnamed healthcare provider.

The tech executive was only identified in court filings as “Tech Executive-1”. In previous filings by Mr. Durham, “Tech Executive-1” referred to Rodney Joffe, an internet entrepreneur and internet data expert.

Mr. Joffe did not respond to multiple requests for comment by The Washington Times.

“Tech Executive-1 and his associates exploited this arrangement by mining the [Executive Office of the President] for the purpose of gathering derogatory information about Donald Trump,” Mr. Durham writes.

Mr. Trump said Mr. Durham, who is investigating the origins of the Trump-Russia collusion probe, had revealed the depth of the Democrats’ scheme to undermine his presidency. He said the filing provides “indisputable evidence” that his campaign and presidency were spied on by Clinton campaign operatives.

“This is a scandal far greater in scope and magnitude than Watergate and those who were involved in and knew about this spying operation should be subject to criminal prosecution,” Mr. Trump said in a statement. “In a stronger period of time in our country. This crime would have been punishable by death.”

In 2018, Mr. Trump has repeatedly claimed that his campaign was spied on. Trump allies said the court filing vindicated the former president.

“Trump was right,” former Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski told The Times. “They spied on the president of the United in the White House. That’s treason. Who’s going to jail for the rest of their life?” [read more]

Lock Crooked Hillary up! Not only did she knew what was going on, she probably ordered the spying. The is worse than Watergate.

Other articles on the subject:

• Damning statements from Hillary Clinton's campaign resurface after explosive filing from John Durham
• Durham probe has 'accelerated,' with more people 'cooperating,' coming before grand jury
• “He’s Going to Deliver. He’s Unraveling BIGGEST Political Scandal in US History” – KASH PATEL DROPS BOMBS – Durham Grand Jury Interviewed 24 People So Far (VIDEO)
• Latest Durham revelations put Biden's national security adviser in uneasy light
• Tech executive fires back at John Durham
• Two intriguing points about the Durham allegations
• Rudy Giuliani to Newsmax: Failed 'Frame-up' Against Trump Exposed
• Explosive allegations protect Durham probe from being shut down
• Rep. Burchett to Newsmax: Hillary Clinton 'Dangerous,' Won't Answer to Findings
• Hawley demands Jake Sullivan’s wife, a Justice Department lawyer, recuse herself from Durham probe
• Hillary Finally Reacts to Durham Probe Spying Reports: 'Nonsense'
• The frightening breadth and unaccountability of the deep state
• Durham Response to Sussmann Motion to Strike Squelches the Ridiculous Arguments
• Yes, Hillary Clinton spied on Donald Trump — while he was president
• John Durham sent a message to the attorney general and the country
  

Crusading Movements

Despite the great variety of issues in a series of crusading movements among the intelligentsia during the twentieth century, several key elements have been common to most of them:

1. Assertions of a great danger to the whole society, a danger to which the masses of people are oblivious.
2. An urgent need for action to avert impending catastrophe.
3. A need for government to drastically curtail the dangerous behavior of the many, in response to the prescient conclusions of the few.
4. A disdainful dismissal of arguments to the contrary as either uninformed, irresponsible, or motivated by unworthy purposes.

Sounds like the Left. If you don’t have an impending catastrophe then create one.

H/T: Sowell on grand movements

Source: The Vision of the Anointed: Self-Congratulation As a Basis for Social Policy (2013) by Thomas Sowell.

US Troops Secretly in Taiwan Training Military

From Newsmax.com (Oct. 7, 2021):

Small units of Taiwan's military ground forces have been trained by a U.S. special operations unit and a contingent of Marines, who have been secretly operating in that country, The Wall Street Journal is reporting.

Some two dozen members of U.S. special-operations and support troops have been conducting the training in an effort to strengthen Taiwan's defenses in light of concerns about potential aggression by China.

Officials tell the paper that American forces have been conducting the training for at least a year.

White House and Pentagon officials would not comment on the U.S. deployment.

China’s Foreign Ministry urged the U.S. to cease military aid to Taiwan.

"China will take all necessary steps to protect its sovereignty and territorial integrity," it said in a statement.

President Joe Biden announced Tuesday he and Chinese leader Xi Jinping agreed to abide by the Taiwan agreement and reduce tensions in the region following provocative moves by the Chinese.

"I've spoken with Xi about Taiwan," Biden told reporters, The Hill reported. We agree we will abide by the Taiwan agreement. That's where we are, and I made it clear that I don't think he should be doing anything other than abiding by the agreement."

Known as the "Taiwan Relations Act," the 1979 law passed by Congress allows the island nation off the Chinese mainland to govern itself separately from the communist Chinese regime and maintain a trade relationship with the U.S. without being officially recognized as a separate country.

But recently, China has made some provocative moves against Taiwan, amassing troops on the shore facing the island and intruding into Taiwan's airspace.

The Journal noted that U.S. officials have expressed concerns over nearly 150 flights by Chinese military aircraft near Taiwan in the past week.

Matt Pottinger, a distinguished visiting fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution who served as a deputy national security adviser during the Trump administration said, "Taiwan badly neglected its national defense for the first 15 years or so of this century, buying too much expensive equipment that will get destroyed in the first hours of a conflict, and too little in the way of cheaper but lethal systems — antiship missiles, smart sea mines and well-trained reserve and auxiliary forces — that could seriously complicate Beijing’s war plans."

Taiwan’s defense minister, Chiu Kuo-cheng, said China would be able to mount a full-scale attack on his nation with minimal losses by 2025. [source]

Other articles about Taiwan:

• Xi blames Taiwan standoff on past Chinese weakness, vows to retake island nation
• Taiwan Rejects China's 'Path' Amid Show of Military Force
• Chinese military now set for invasion of Taiwan, says Hill commission
• Taiwan Reports 27 Chinese Air Force Planes in Air Defense Zone

Iran smuggling high-tech drones to militant allies, opposition group says

From Washington Times.com (Oct. 6, 2021):

Iran’s theocratic regime has ramped up its drone manufacturing operation in recent years and is now smuggling an increasingly sophisticated slate of the weaponized remote control aircraft to allied militant groups around the Middle East, according to intelligence gathered by a leading Iranian dissident group.

The Iranian military’s embrace of drones, or unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), has given Tehran an expanding edge in asymmetric warfare across the region while U.S. sanctions have otherwise crippled the capabilities of its conventional air forces, the National Council of Resistance of Iran said Wednesday.

The dissident group gave a presentation to journalists at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington, revealing what it characterized as “newly disclosed information” about the scope and nature of the Iranian program, including a matrix of eight drone development complexes.

“The UAV program of the Iranian regime is the primary weapon used for terrorism and warmongering and destabilizing the region, and certainly this is supplying proxies in the region with those UAVs,” said Alireza Jafarzadeh, the deputy director of the U.S. branch of NCRI.

The group has critics and followers in various countries and is known for openly supporting regime change in Tehran.

“There are two elements involved in the [drone] production. One is the Ministry of Defense, and the other one is the Aerospace Force of the Revolutionary Guards,” Mr. Jafarzadeh said. He circulated data obtained and compiled by the Mujahedeen-e-Khalq (MEK), an NCRI-affiliated group with members operating inside Iran.

Mr. Jafarzadeh’s claims were not immediately verifiable and the MEK has a controversial history in Washington, but the group appears to have sources deeply embedded within the Iranian defense community. MEK members are credited with significant revelations about Iran’s covert weapons activities, most notably its nuclear and ballistic missile programs.

The Wall Street Journal published an expose Wednesday that quoted U.S., European and Israeli defense sources as saying Tehran’s ability to develop and deploy drones rapidly is changing the security equation in the volatile region.

The components of Iran’s drones are widely available, although some designs mimic those of the Israeli and U.S. militaries. The Journal cited a confidential assessment produced for the British government by C4ADS, a Washington-based think tank that says Iran has armed its Houthi allies in Yemen with drones using a network of commercial companies around the world. [read more]

Another article about Iran & drones: Expert Warns Weaponized Drones May Come to US Soon

Government hiring is behind Biden's job growth

From Washington Examiner.com (Feb. 9):

If you watched President Joe Biden’s remarks on the January jobs report, you could be forgiven for believing that a great feat that "never happened before" had just actually happened. You could be forgiven for believing all his platitudes about working families getting more of what they need, despite inflation not seen since the early 1990s. The problem for Biden and his plummeting approval rating is that his remarks are, at best, a rose-tinted view of reality.

A closer look at the jobs report reveals some concerning data. As the economy continues to recover from the COVID-19 lockdowns, we would expect that smart government policy would foster growth in private sector jobs. Unfortunately, this jobs report shows a reduction in private employment of some 300,000 jobs. Despite this administration’s claims to be laser-focused on "buy American" and repatriating the supply chain, this is a serious blow to the recovery.

In fact, the drop in private employment from December 2021 to January 2022 in this report is the largest decline in private employment during the recovery. This might explain White House press secretary Jen Psaki’s bizarre comment that 9 million workers had called in sick during January and thus there would be fewer people employed. They knew the private employment numbers were going to look bad.

So what explains the increase of 467,000 jobs in January trumpeted by Biden?

A massive, unprecedented increase in government jobs at all levels. Federal, state, and local governments hired nearly 768,000 new employees between December 2021 and January 2022. With the exception of massive government hiring in July and August of 2020 thanks to the CARES Act, there has not been an increase in government employment this large going back to May 2002, when the data became available.

This is not to say that government jobs are not important or that there are not generally good reasons for an increase in government jobs at times. Especially at the state and local levels, government jobs provide vital services to the public. However, the decline in private employment, coupled with high inflation, is indicative of some serious problems with economic fundamentals. Piling on more government jobs will only further burden the struggling recovery.

The decline in private employment alongside the massive increase in government employment does not bode well for average people.

Jobs reports can be juiced with government hiring. GDP reports can be stuffed with government spending financed by yet more borrowing. None of this changes the underlying reality: The 1970s-style stagflation we are experiencing is not likely to be addressed by the Biden administration. [source]

Government secretly orders Google to track anyone searching certain names, addresses, and phone numbers

From Washington Examiner.c0m (Oct. 5, 2021):

The U.S. government is reportedly secretly issuing warrants for Google to provide user data on anyone typing in certain search terms, raising fears that innocent online users could get caught up in serious crime investigations at a greater frequency than previously thought.

In an attempt to track down criminals, federal investigators have started using new "keyword warrants" and used them to ask Google to provide them information on anyone who searched a victim's name or their address during a particular year, an accidentally unsealed court document that Forbes found shows.

Google has to respond to thousands of warrant orders each year, but the keyword warrants are a relatively new strategy used by the government and are controversial.

“Trawling through Google’s search history database enables police to identify people merely based on what they might have been thinking about, for whatever reason, at some point in the past,” Jennifer Granick, surveillance and cybersecurity counsel at the American Civil Liberties Union, told Forbes.

“This never-before-possible technique threatens First Amendment interests and will inevitably sweep up innocent people, especially if the keyword terms are not unique and the time frame not precise. To make matters worse, police are currently doing this in secret, which insulates the practice from public debate and regulation,” she added.

The government said that the scope of the warrants is limited to avoid implicating innocent people who happen to search for certain terms, but it's not publicly disclosed how many users' data are sent to the government and what the extent of the warrant requests are.

Google has defended its decision to respond to the warrants and said it protects users when doing so.

“As with all law enforcement requests, we have a rigorous process that is designed to protect the privacy of our users while supporting the important work of law enforcement,” a Google spokesperson said. [source]

What Left-Wing Educators Don’t Teach During Black History Month

From The Daily Signal.com (Feb. 19. 2021):

When will Black History Month be … history?

Apart from the bizarre notion that educators should set aside one month to salute the historical achievements of one race apart from and above the historical achievements of other races, Black History Month appears to omit a lot of black history.

About slavery, do our mostly left-wing educators teach that slavery was not unique to America and is as old as humankind? As economist and author Thomas Sowell says:

More whites were brought as slaves to North Africa than blacks brought as slaves to the United States or to the 13 colonies from which it was formed. White slaves were still being bought and sold in the Ottoman Empire, decades after blacks were freed in the United States.

Are students taught that “race-based preferences,” sometimes called “affirmative action,” were opposed by several civil rights leaders?

While National Urban League Executive Director Whitney Young supported a type of “Marshall Plan” for a period of 10 years to make up for historical discrimination, his board of directors refused to endorse the plan.

In rejecting it, the president of the Urban League in Pittsburgh said the public would ask, “What in blazes are these guys up to? They tell us for years that we must buy [nondiscrimination] and then they say, ‘It isn’t what we want.'”

Do our left-wing educators, during Black History Month, note that President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s celebrated New Deal actually hurt blacks? According to Cato Institute’s Jim Powell, blacks lost as many as 500,000 jobs as a result of anti-competitive, job-killing regulations of the New Deal.

Powell writes: “The minimum wage regulations made it illegal for employers to hire people who weren’t worth the minimum because they lacked skills. As a result, some 500,000 blacks, particularly in the South, were estimated to have lost their jobs.”

Are students taught that gun control began as a means to deny free blacks the right to own guns? In ruling that blacks were chattel property in the Dred Scott case, Supreme Court Chief Justice Roger Taney warned that ruling otherwise would mean that blacks could legally own guns.

If blacks were “entitled to the privileges and immunities of citizens,” said Taney, “it would give persons of the Negro race, who were recognized as citizens in any one state of the union, the right … to keep and carry arms wherever they went … endangering the peace and safety of the state.” [read more]

If the teachers taught the real truth about black history it would destroy the Left’s narrative about the black race. And that wouldn’t be good.

Another article on black history: Know Your Black History

California ports aren't the only ones facing record backlogs of cargo ships — 3 other US ports have hit historic highs

From Business Insider.com (Oct. 2, 2021):

Shipping delays are piling up across the country as multiple US ports hit record backlogs.

As the largest source of imports in the US — responsible for nearly half of all incoming goods — Southern California ports have received widespread attention. The ports have over 60 hulking cargo ships line up along the shore waiting to dock and unload. But, several smaller ports are also feeling the pinch.

In the Port of Savannah — the fourth largest US port — over 20 container ships are waiting to dock. The port has hit multiple records this year for the number of container ships that have passed through the location. In July, Associated Press reported that the port moved 5.3 million 20-foot containers in a fiscal year — the most the location has ever encountered in a single year.

Georgia Ports Authority did not respond to a request for comment from Insider, but Executive Director of the Georgia Ports Authority Griff Lynch told The Wall Street Journal that the boom in e-commerce has contributed to the backlog of cargo ships.

"Because of all this extra freight being imported, it's creating a backlog from the ship side to the dock side to warehouses and across the whole supply chain," Lynch told The Journal. [read more]

Let’s go Brandon!

Another article on the supply chain: Inside America’s broken supply chain

My Niece is a Car

From Cynthia Lewis on American Thinker.com (Oct. 4, 2021):

-Satire-

My niece is a car.  She used to be a human being.  We're not supposed to talk about that anymore.

About a year ago, my sister Claire called and told me that she was tired of hand-sewing costumes for her oldest daughter, Alice.  One day Alice would beg to be dressed as a school bus, the next a pickup truck, and the next, a sports car.  She told her mom that she wished she were an automobile instead of a person.  Claire was running out of material and patience.

At first, Alice's behavior made sense to me.  She'd loved to play with toy cars when she was little, and she had a wonderful imagination.  I'll admit that I was one of the family members who found her new hobby cute.  Some thought it was just a phase and that we should humor her.  Others tried to convince her that she couldn't actually become a car.  And some tried to bolster her self-esteem by reminding her that cars are cool, but so are twelve-year-old human girls.

My doubts began when Alice asked that her body be covered with metal.  What about gymnastics? Claire asked.  You wouldn't be able to bend anymore.  Alice started to cry.  I don't want to bend, she said.  I want to zoom.

Claire reluctantly bought scraps from the junkyard and glued them onto her daughter each morning.  Alice couldn't walk as well when she had her panels on (as she called them), but she did seem to smile more.  When Claire pulled off the panels before Alice's bath one night, some skin came with them, and she bled.  Alice said that the pain was worth it and that she wanted permanent parts installed.

Soon after, Alice changed her name to Vroom.  Her homeroom teacher stood with his arm around her shoulder while her classmates chanted support for her automotive identity.  All 28 of them signed a pledge never to call her by her dead name again.  I was shocked when I saw the footage posted on the school website under "Student Achievements."

Then came the fines.  Vroom had checked out all the critical transportation theory books from the library.  Pages began appearing magnetized to the fridge, with lines of text obliterated by black marker and angry notes in the margins.  Claire found piles of ashes in the oven, wads of shredded paper in the trash can.  Even when the library fines were deducted from Vroom's allowance, she would not stop.

Vroom demanded that everyone she knew identify himself as human, car, or hybrid.  We all updated our email signatures.  I ordered replacements for my expensive business cards.  And when I phoned Vroom, I would say, "This is your human aunt."  It seemed obvious that I was human, but accommodating her didn't hurt anyone, I rationalized, and I wanted to keep her happy.

After coming home from a meeting of her automotive club one evening, Vroom announced she would sleep in the garage from then on.  When her parents said no, Vroom made engine-revving sounds and repeatedly crashed into the wall.  Her father, Bob, began moving her bedroom furniture.

I drove the 50 miles to my sister's house after Vroom and the other kids were asleep.  Claire and Bob and I sat around the kitchen table, staring into our coffee cups without drinking.  Claire broke the silence with whispered questions: why doesn't Vroom want to be a human being?  Why can't she simply play with cars instead of trying to become one?  What did we do wrong?  When will this end? [read more]

Cute!

They Can’t Win if We Won’t Surrender

From John Green on American Thinker.com (Oct. 4, 2021):

I get a fair number of emails along the lines of:  We’ve had our last fair election, it’s hopeless, America is lost.  These disturb me because they represent a faction of conservatism that’s ready to surrender.

The simple fact is that we are at war for the soul of America -- though for now, it’s a cold war.  What we are experiencing is not politics as usual.  The two political sides do not share common objectives while differing in their approaches to achieve those objectives.  They have diametrically opposed objectives.  The Left has said that they intend to transform America.  We didn’t want to believe them, but they meant it, and have been acting on it.

One of my mentors in the business world was a retired Army colonel.  He gave me two important tidbits of wisdom that are applicable in our current time.  First:  The objective of war is not to kill people and break things, but to break the enemy’s will to resist.  That is precisely what the Left has been doing to us -- attempting to break our will.  Second:  War is only ended by the loser, not the winner.  That’s why the pessimist faction of conservatism bothers me the most.  They’re ready to concede, and they’re playing into the Left’s hands.

The Left has been working towards the elimination of our will to resist for many years.  They’ve leveraged the pandemic to curtail our freedoms.  Censorship and deplatforming have been used under the guise of preventing “misinformation.”  Freedom of assembly (churches and political rallies) has been restricted in the name of “social distancing.”  Even property rights have been suspended with forced business closures and eviction moratoriums.

The Left has also used legal harassment to target its enemies.   The IRS has targeted Christian and conservative groups.  The DoJ uses the unequal application of the law to benefit its political allies and punish its political opponents.  The EPA encroaches on property rights.  And now, OSHA is being used as the enforcer of a vaccine mandate.

The education system has been little more than a cultural reeducation machine to prepare our children to be obedient Marxists.  Critical Race Theory, gender fluidity, and toxic masculinity are taught to our children to prepare them for the Left’s new utopia.

Corporate media functions as the Left’s propaganda ministry to hide the subversiveness of the Left’s efforts and promote their narrative.  Peaceful protests are now insurgencies, while riots are “mostly peaceful.”  Elections are sacrosanct and must not be questioned (at least when they go their way).  It’s normal to pass bills to learn what is in them.  It’s all total baloney intended to eliminate our will to resist. [read more]

To the Left politics is war. Hillary Clinton in the 2016 Democrat primary said that republicans are her enemy. Not her opponent or adversary, but her enemy. She’s probably not the only democrat to think that. So, what the article says about the Left makes perfect sense. Any conservative that doesn’t understand that will make a terrible mistake.

Groups Warning of Imminent Global Supply Chain System Collapse

From Red State.com (Oct. 2, 2021):

Under Joe Biden, it seems as though — in a very few months — we have been dragged into a boatload of crises.

But there’s another crisis that hasn’t been getting the attention it deserves from the media, and it’s affecting all of us whether you know it or not — and it’s about to get worse.

Cargo ships anchored off California and New York, and in rail yards and on trucking routes, shipping consumer goods are incredibly backlogged  due to a lack of manpower and pandemic restrictions to unload the goods. And now, there are warnings that the supply chain may be on the brink of collapse.

Shipping ports which normally only had one or two ships in dock waiting to be unloaded prior to the pandemic now have dozens lined up, waiting to be unloaded for up to four weeks, slowing the whole chain. In Los Angeles and Long Beach, as many as 73 vessels were waiting to be unloaded last month. The bottlenecks at the ports are also impacting railways and trucking. In Chicago — that has one of the largest rail yards — it was at one point backed up for 25 miles.

From Daily Mail:

At APM Terminals, a 484-acre facility boasts 12 miles of railroad tracks in Los Angeles, and the largest container site in the Western Hemisphere, Steven Trombley, the facility’s managing director, struggles to keep up with the increased influx of products and a shortage of workers.

‘It’s a headache. Cargo is sitting here longer than planned,’ Trombley told The Washington Post. ‘If I don’t get the cargo moving, then the next ship is not going to have space.’

At the facility, containers set to travel by rail commonly sit dockside for weeks, in contrast to just days, prior the pandemic.

Across from the headquarters building, trucks sit parked across a backlog of containers stacked 50 feet high, waiting to be driven east.

That’s caused prices to soar, for everything in the supply chain which, of course, will be passed on to the consumers.

Pre-Covid, the cost of shipping a container from China to the US’s West Coast was roughly $1,300. Today, that cost has risen exponentially, with the cost of transporting one container being roughly $35,000.

And the right to use these containers goes the highest bidder, hurting a host of retailers, especially small ones.

These retailers cannot afford the increasing cost to transport their inventory, and many have gone out of business.

Some have tried to turn to air freighters, and that’s overwhelmed that system and made everything more expensive there, as well.

“This has turned the economy upside down,” a logistics expert told the Daily Mail. Unions that represent shipping workers around the world are warning of a coming “global transport systems collapse.” [read more]

The Property We Have in Our Rights

From American Thinker.com (Sept. 5, 2021):

No person has a natural or a divine right to rule over another person unless the latter person gives intelligent consent.  This is a fundamental axiom of our American government.  The axiom takes root in the ideas expressed by Thomas Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence: "We hold these truths to be self-evident: That all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; that, to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed[.]"

The president of the United States, however, ignores these principles and continues to push public- and private-sector employers to force vaccine mandates on their employees.  Many companies have acquiesced.  More companies will follow.  Let's look to an action taken by Delta Airlines as one example.

Chief financial officer Ed Bastian recently grafted a $200 surcharge onto Delta's company-sponsored health care plan.  Delta requires new employees to be vaccinated.  The surcharge affects only current Delta employees who remain unvaccinated.  Bastian's decision to surcharge Delta's unvaccinated employees exemplifies a coercive initiative instituted by the federal government, leading Delta to an abuse of its employees.

Herein lies the danger.  When our national government co-opts cooperation from corporate entities to actualize the goals of the federal government for COVID-19, our individual right to private property and the property we have in our rights are placed in jeopardy.  Let's look at three of these jeopardized rights with the assistance of another Founding Father.

………….

Below are three human rights that I believe are being trodden upon by government and corporate officials through vaccine mandates.

First, vaccine mandates violate the property we have as individual persons in the free exercise of our private conscience.  Government or corporate vaccine mandates supplant the informed conscience of individual persons for the coercive and self-righteous virtue-signaling of a few elites.  In his letter, Madison is clear: "Conscience is the most sacred of all property," as a natural and inalienable right, independent of positive law.  C.S. Lewis also proclaims the importance of conscience when conscience is "the pressure a man feels upon his will to do what he thinks is right."  Here, says Lewis, conscience "is not to be argued with, but obeyed, and even to question it is to incur guilt."¹  Thus, to compel any person to obey a vaccine mandate is to place that same person at war with his conscience, without his consent, and against his better judgement.  

Second, vaccine mandates induce people to violate their personal liberty and safety.  Madison understood that a man "has a property very dear to him in the safety and liberty of his person."  No one is truly at liberty to choose for oneself whether to accept a COVID vaccine, or not, when either the state or one's employer offers a manipulative choice: get the vaccine or be subject to masking and weekly COVID tests.  These unsatisfactory options breach the state's duty to safeguard our individual rights.  And corporate mandates to vaccinate fall outside the purview of our employers.  Moreover, every person shares an equal dignity with each person calling for a vaccine mandate.  Equal dignity stands as part of our Judeo-Christian tradition, which sees each person as someone created in God's image.  Therefore, our shared human dignity demands that no person force some other person to receive an unwanted or unnecessary or potentially harmful vaccine without the recipient's informed consent.

Third, Delta's $200-a-month "surcharge" is an act of thievery.  The money distributed by an employer to an employee through a paycheck is the exclusive property of that employee for the service that employee has rendered to the company.  Except in cases of legal garnishment, to discriminately withhold part of the wage owed to an employee denies said employee the full-fruit that, in Madison's view, results from "the free use of their faculties ... which not only constitute their property in the general sense of the word; but are the means of acquiring property strictly so called."  And Delta's punitive partial-wage withholding will likely prove to be a violation of the working agreement between Delta and its employees. [read more]

The far-Left and socialists (is there really a difference anymore?) don’t believe in individual rights—only group rights. Well, the Elites believe in their individual rights.

Other articles on property:

• It’s Not "Just Property": How Looting Destroys Lives and Low-Income Neighborhoods
• Pope Francis's Latest Attack on Property: It's a "Secondary Right"
• Native Americans Had a Lot More Private Property than You Think

LOCK HIM UP: Federal Reserve Vice Chair Made Big Trade on Stocks and Bonds Just Before Fed’s Pandemic Statement

From The Gateway Pundit.com (Oct. 2, 2021):

Richard Clarida, the Vice-Chair of the Federal Reserve, traded money from a bond fund to a stock fund only a day before the Fed made their pandemic statement in 2020.

The statement flagged possible actions the Fed could take if the pandemic worsened.

Yahoo reported:

Federal Reserve Vice Chair Richard Clarida traded between $1 million and $5 million out of a bond fund into stock funds one day before Chair Jerome Powell issued a statement flagging possible policy action as the pandemic worsened, his 2020 financial disclosures show.

Clarida’s trades, described in forms filed with the government ethics office, show the shifting of the funds out of a Pimco bond fund on Feb. 27, 2020, and on the same day buying the Pimco StocksPlus Fund and the iShares MSCI USA Min Vol Factor exchange-traded fund in similar dollar ranges. For the year, he listed five transactions.

The following day on Feb. 28, a Friday, at 2:30 p.m., Powell took the unusual step of releasing a statement saying the virus poses “evolving risks to economic activity.” In the same statement, Powell said the Fed was “closely monitoring developments and their implications for the economic outlook.”

Two weeks ago, Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell directed officials to look at ethical rules regarding financial activities by senior staff at the Fed.

The Hill reported:

Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell has directed officials at the central bank to take a “comprehensive look” into the ethics rules surrounding permissible financial holdings and activities by senior staff.

A spokesperson confirmed to The Hill on Thursday that Powell issued the directive last week after reports emerged of stock trades made by leaders at the Fed’s banks in Dallas and Boston last year.

“This review will assist in identifying ways to further tighten those rules and standards. The Board will make changes, as appropriate, and any changes will be added to the Reserve Bank Code of Conduct,” the spokesperson said in a statement.

The Presidents of the Dallas Fed and Boston Fed retired after their pandemic stock trades came under scrutiny.

The Hill reported:

Robert Kaplan, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, announced Monday he will step down from the bank amid scrutiny over millions of dollars of financial trades he made at the outset of the coronavirus pandemic.

Kaplan said in a Monday statement that he will step down from the Dallas Fed on Oct. 8, six years and one month after he was appointed to lead one of the Fed system’s 12 reserve banks.

Kaplan and Boston Fed President Eric Rosengren, who also announced his retirement Monday, have been under growing pressure after financial disclosures obtained by The Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg revealed heavy trading in individual stocks and other investment products in late March and April last year. At the time, the Fed was launching an unprecedented effort to stabilize financial markets through more than dozen lending facilities.

Who is watching the Fed? [source]

Apparently no-one is watching the Fed like no-one is watching most of the gov’t agencies. They are held unaccountable.

Biden’s Soviet-raised pick for Treasury post sought end to banking ‘as we know it’

From NY Post.com (Sept. 30, 2021):

President Biden’s controversial pick to be the Treasury Department’s comptroller of the currency is a USSR-born and educated professor who has praised the former Soviet Union’s lack of a gender pay gap while recently advocating for ending banking “as we know it” by moving Americans’ finances from private banks to the Federal Reserve.

Saule Omarova, a Cornell University law professor, was tapped by the president Sept. 23 to oversee the nation’s biggest banks and federal savings associations, with the White House calling her “one of the country’s leading academic experts on issues related to regulation of systemic risk and structural trends in financial markets.”

If approved, Omarova would be the first female and non-white person in the position.

Her nomination has sparked criticism from Republicans, who say she is seeking to “radically reshaping the basic architecture and dynamics of modern finance” — and reportedly Janet Yellen, Biden’s Treasury secretary raised concerns about her taking the post.

In an early 2021 paper titled “The People’s Ledger,” Omarova argued for making private banks “non-depository lenders,” changing banking “as we know it.”

“Banks, in other words, will not be ‘special’ any more,” she wrote, advocating for separating their lending function from their monetary function.

“Once banks lose their “special” status and entity-based access to the public subsidy, they will inevitably lose their appeal as potential acquisition targets for other financial institutions,” she added. [read more]

Even though she withdrew her nomination, it’s scary that note-card Joe (or someone on his staff—who knows) would pick such a radical nominee. But he feels he has to appease the far-Left. So there will be other radical picks.

Senate confirms Biden public lands nominee accused of affiliation with 'ecoterrorist' group

From Washington Examiner.com (Sept. 30, 2021):

The Senate narrowly confirmed President Joe Biden's pick to lead the Bureau of Land Management over fierce Republican opposition spurring from accusations of past affiliation with an "ecoterrorist" organization.

Tracy Stone-Manning was confirmed 50-45 on Thursday, with all Democrats voting to confirm and all present Republicans voting in opposition.

The confirmation comes after Biden nominated Stone-Manning, a senior adviser for the National Wildlife Federation, in April. GOP members of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee accused her of being linked to an "ecoterrorist" organization years ago and deceiving the committee about it.

Court documents from 1993 reveal Stone-Manning testified to mailing a letter to the U.S. Forest Service after an acquaintance committed "tree spiking," the placement of metal rods, nails, or other materials into trees to sabotage logging operations. The letter threatened the agency not to sell the timber.

Stone-Manning denied having prior knowledge of the spiking but said she mailed the letter because she "wanted people to know those trees were spiked" to avoid injury.

Energy Committee ranking member John Barrasso, a Republican from Wyoming, accused Stone-Manning of failing to disclose her involvement in criminal proceedings in the early 1990s over the tree spiking incident. He criticized her in particular for not disclosing that she received immunity to testify in the spiking case.

All 10 committee Republicans voted to oppose Stone-Manning in July, but the 10 Democrats voted to advance her nomination, setting her up for a vote by the full Senate.

“It is hard to imagine a nominee more unqualified than Tracy Stone-Manning,” Barrasso said at the time. “Her actions and her lies should cost her this nomination.”

Republicans rehashed their case against Stone-Manning in speeches Thursday ahead of the confirmation vote, with several bringing large nails like those used for tree spiking onto the Senate floor.

"The BLM director in Alaska is our landlord, and I don't want an ecoterrorist as my state's landlord*," Alaska Republican Dan Sullivan said. [read more]

Those trees the eco-terrorist are spiking should be chopped down. They are dead and can cause forest fires if a lightning bolt strikes them. The wacko eco-terrorists don’t think of that. They probably don’t care.

*Yea, I don’t blame him. I would feel the same way.

Supreme Court Halts Biden COVID-19 Vaccine Mandate for Businesses

From News Max.com (Jan. 13):

The US Supreme Court delivered a blow to President Joe Biden on Thursday, blocking his Covid vaccination-or-test mandate for large businesses.

At the same time, the nation's highest court allowed a vaccination mandate for health care workers at facilities receiving federal funding to go ahead.

After months of public appeals to Americans to get vaccinated against Covid-19, which has killed more than 845,000 people in the United States, Biden announced in September that he was making vaccinations compulsory at companies that employ 100 workers or more.

Unvaccinated employees would have to present weekly negative tests and wear face masks at work.

The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), a federal agency, gave businesses until February 9 to be in compliance with the rules or face the possibility of fines.

But the Supreme Court's six conservative justices ruled the mandate would represent a "significant encroachment into the lives -- and health -- of a vast number of employees."

"Although Congress has indisputably given OSHA the power to regulate occupational dangers, it has not given that agency the power to regulate public health more broadly," they said.

"Requiring the vaccination of 84 million Americans, selected simply because they work for employers with more than 100 employees, certainly falls in the latter category," they added.

The three liberal justices dissented. [read more]

Good!

Other articles on the stupid mandate:

• OSHA cancels business vaccine mandate after Supreme Court loss
• Judge halts Biden COVID vaccine mandate for federal employees

None Dare Call It Conspiracy

From American Thinker.com (Aug. 23, 2021):

Fifty years ago, journalist Gary Allen set out to write a book to prove conservative anti-communists wrong.  But while researching, he realized he had not seen the "hidden picture."  There indeed was a conspiracy, shielded by a narrative advanced by liberal academia and the mainstream media, both actually in the service of an elite cabal that included Rockefeller, Ford, Morgan, Rothschild, Loeb, Kennedy, and Carnegie.  No longer willing to dismiss "right-wing conspiracy theorists," he titled his book, published in 1971, None Dare Call It Conspiracy.  It was a surprising bestseller: more than four million copies were sold during the 1972 presidential elections.  Many received it as gifts through an informal grassroots distribution system.

What Allen claimed to have discovered was that a plutocracy of 3% of the population covertly controlled the lives of the rest.  They had wrested control of the constitutional republic, with its separation of powers, limited government, and competitive free enterprise, and turned it into a system of centralized control by a few.  How was this achieved?  According to Allen, the conspiratorial clique was hidden and protected by a complicit media establishment they own and control.  Also, they are accomplished liars and farseeing planners.  Their subversive tour de force has been to advance the lies that a) communism is inevitable and b) communism is a movement of the downtrodden.  The first lie aims to destroy the will to fight, the second to gain the support of the poor masses and justify the destruction of a vigorous, innovative middle class.

Allen offers an alternative, realistic definition of communism: an international conspiratorial drive for power on part of men in high places, who are willing to use any means for global conquest.  In The Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels said a proletarian revolution would necessitate a temporary socialist dictatorship, which would give way to full-on communism if three things were achieved: a) the elimination of private property rights, b) the dissolution of the family, and c) the replacement of religion with Marxist ideology.  These, in fact, are exactly what academia and left-wing groups in America are pushing for, today and when Allen wrote the book.

But all that, as Allen claims, is an elaborate ruse.  Behind it are the super-rich.  We are blinded to this because we believe they stand to lose the most in a socialistic setup.  Allen backs his counterintuitive conclusion with the fact that communist countries are in fact always ruled by an oligarchical group — the nomenklatura — that controls wealth, production, and the lives of the rest of the population.  Thus, socialism is a movement to consolidate wealth in the hands of a few, creating not a classless society, but one with just two classes: an elite and a proletariat, with no middle class.

The approach the international elite used was multi-pronged.  They gained control over the government after the Panic of 1907 by lending it large sums of money.  In exchange, they obtained monopolies in banking, natural resources, and transportation.  The Federal Reserve Act was passed in 1913 to create the Federal Reserve and presented as a "victory of democracy."  In reality, private bankers could now determine inflation, recession, and boom periods; they could swing the stock market at will; and they could subordinate the fiscal powers reserved for Congress.  They sought to run up the debt through the expansion of government spending.  Simultaneously, they benefited from the increased money supply and bid up the stock market.  Through insiders in government, they created a mechanism to collect their debts: two months before the Fed was established, a progressive income tax program was implemented for the public.  But laws were made to allow them to set up tax-free foundations, hence avoiding the taxes they imposed on everyone else.  They compounded their wealth tax-free.

The final component of their plan to gain control of the government was to further increase the serviceable debt by going to war.  Historian Charles A. Beard called it "perpetual war for perpetual peace."  The elite thus set the stage for American involvement in two world wars, and nearly 200 military incursions since 1945, through massive propaganda in the media they controlled.  This not only gained them lucrative government contracts but also enhanced the prospects of a world government they could eventually control.  The owned "intellectuals" in academia and the media establishment camouflaged these conspiracies, disparaging the view that a subversion was underway.  They propagated and maintained the fiction that history is accidental and all societal problems can be ascribed to poverty, ignorance, and disease. [read more]

I have the book on my reading list. Sounds interesting.

Liberal Soros Connected Group Sends Letter to FCC Calling to “Shoot Republicans”

From The Gateway Pundit.com (Sept. 26, 2021):

George Soros is behind numerous groups whose purpose is power.  Two of these groups are the Center for American Progress and the Open Society Foundations.  Another is Free Press.

Like all things left, whether bills or entity names, left-wing related entities, and policies always have grandiose names that represent the opposite of what they really are.  Think about Obamacare that destroyed healthcare for millions of Americans, increased health care costs and taxes like never before, and distributed health care expenses from the poor to the wealthy, labeled the Affordable Care Act.  Another example is the bill that will steal elections forever that is in the House, labeled ‘For the People Act’.

So it comes as no surprise that the left-wing Soros connected group, Center for American Progress, calls for shooting Americans who love their country.

The Washington Free Beacon reports:

A left-wing group funded by the Center for American Progress and George Soros’s Open Society Foundations submitted a letter to the government that advocated for murdering Republicans.

Free Press, a well-funded liberal group that aims to “reshape media” in the United States, sent a letter to the Federal Communications Commission that included the question: “Are we going to have to shoot Republican[s] to reclaim our democracy?”

The Free Press letter, which called on the FCC to “investigate its own history of racism and examine how its policy choices and actions have harmed black people and other communities of color,” was signed by just under 5,000 of the group’s members, who were given the opportunity to provide comment along with their signature. The call to “shoot” Republicans came from a California member named David Lyons, who further complained that “racist horseshit like FOX and the other ultraconservative outlets and Christians” owned “most of our media.”

Free Press formally withdrew the petition after FCC commissioner Brendan Carr said its inclusion of violent rhetoric was disqualifying.

These are the people who want to run this country and who believe they know better than you.  Ask yourself, who acts more like Nazis, these people or conservatives who love freedom, fair elections, God, and their country? [source]

Disgusting.

More Soros articles:

• George Soros has blood on his hands for the rise in killings nationwide
• ERIC Investigation, Part 2: The Largest U.S. Counties Removed Only ZERO to TWO Ineligible Voters From Their Voter Rolls the Last 4 Years
• ERIC Investigation, Part 3: Soros Open Society and the Founding of the Nation’s Largest Voter Roll Clean-Up Operation
• George Soros’ DAs: Billionaire’s cash helped elect two dozen district attorneys across the U.S.
• Soros Pumping $125M Into Super PAC's Operations
  

Authoritarians want to 'democratize' your parenting

From Washington Examiner.com (Sept. 28, 2021):

Most people think "democracy" is that thing whereby all of us get to vote for mayor, congressman, and maybe a new tax hike or bond issue. For a lot of most rabidly “pro-democracy” folk on the Left, though, democracy means something completely different. It means that a mob of activists get to tell you how to raise your children.

“Democratize everything” is a terrifying and authoritarian mindset witnessing massive new popularity. It’s behind cancel culture. It’s behind the culture-war efforts to crush conservative and religious institutions. It’s behind the Marxism ascendant in Western nations.

“Democratize everything” means that nothing should be beyond the control of what an empowered mob demands. This is a view fundamentally antagonistic toward not only individual liberty, but also civil society and property rights. If a store owner gets to set his or her prices, that’s some rich person making decisions that affect the rest of us, without our input. If a local church’s membership decides it will have only men as pastors, even though the broader society has adopted more egalitarian standards, that's "undemocratic."

Alexis de Tocqueville, whose home country of France had been convulsed by the democracy of the guillotine decades earlier, wrote in Democracy in America about how the zeitgeist of democracy was antipathetic toward civil society. "Little platoons" are inherently anti-democratic, whether they are internally democratic or not. Local government control allows a small town to have rules the state as a whole might dislike. Capitalism means that owners make decisions with very little control by others. Clubs, churches, and congregations can set their own rules and prevent people from joining, which means nonmembers, who surely outnumber members, effectively have no say over the club’s rules.

This is the root of the growing appetite to crack down on and control businesses, churches, and other small groups that might buck elite morality.

Nowhere does this show up more than in education. The everything-democratizers are pretty upset that some people might be educating children in a way that the public-education establishment doesn’t approve of.

Here, by the way, we see what democratize everything really means. It doesn't merely mean that the majority gets to oppress the minority. It really means we give control over people’s lives to specific people who are politically powerful that leftists approve of. Special interest groups, such as socially liberal activist groups and teachers unions, are the ones who call the shots when government power becomes stronger and more centralized.

The Pennsylvania School Boards Association flatly asserted this week that private schools are less accountable than public schools. [read more]

To the Left democracy means socialism. America is not a democracy. It is a representative republic. True direct democracy eventually fails because of man’s sinful passions. The Founding Fathers understood this. Benjamin Franklin said it well: Democracy is six cannibals and four missionaries voting on what’s for dinner.

Also, to the Left the only family a child has is the State, therefore it is the Dept. of Education which decides how a child is to be raised and taught (brainwashed?). The State knows better than the parents in how to raise the child. The parents have no say in the matter. This comes from Marx himself. That’s why there is public education. The Founders would have disagreed with the State raising the child. They knew correctly that the child is given to the parents, not the State.

More school insanity:

• Leftist Teacher Shoves SICK Note In Students Backpacks, Parents Livid After Reading Only 2 Words
• Parenting and the State: Red Flags in “Build Back Better”

The United States and the West are in the Grip of Delusional Madness

From American Thinker.com (Sept. 27, 2021):

The politically motivated and unprecedented overreaction to a virus with a 99.5% survival rate was launched in March of 2020, thus unleashing what can best be described as a once-in-a-century fiasco. Nineteen months later it is impossible to look at the United States and the world and not conclude that this country and much of the West is in the grip, not of a virus, but of delusional madness and malevolence.

The governing elites have been so successful in propagandizing and fear-mongering the populace in many western nations, including the United States, that the virus has made far too many people blind to the madness as they wallow in anxiety, depression, and hopelessness -- deliberately and with forethought brought about by these malevolent cabals.

The noted British historian Kenneth Clark in his book and television series Civilization said that empires fall not just to barbarians and other external enemies, but more so on account of exhaustion and loss of confidence within.  He warned of the evolutionary process of destruction of self-confidence leading to exhaustion and culminating in the feeling of hopelessness which can overtake people even with a high degree of material prosperity. As any civilized nation, in order to survive, requires confidence in the society in which one lives as well as belief in its philosophy and in its laws and confidence in one’s own mental powers.

In the United States, the left-wing dominated ruling class, determined to transform the nation into a one-party oligarchy, has long focused on demoralizing and fomenting hopelessness among the American people so they would be amenable to this transformation. In a society already beset with self-doubt and disquiet about the future, they gaslighted the populace through the gross and near-criminal exaggeration of the threat of Covid-19, combined with manipulated data, unprecedented societal and economic lockdowns, social distancing, mandatory masking and now de facto vaccination passports. Thus, exacerbating the feeling of hopelessness among the citizenry.

At the height of the pandemic hysteria in the fall of 2020, 36% of Americans reported symptoms of anxiety disorder (in 2019, 6.5% of Americans reported anxiety disorder). In this same period, 42% of Americans reported anxiety or depressive disorder (in 2019, 10.8% of Americans reported these disorders). The age group 18-39 (30% of the overall U.S. population) had the highest reported levels of anxiety or depressive disorder-- 52%.

The manipulation of the public by the ruling class and its media arm has succeeded as nearly half of the overall American population and a majority of the Millennials (America’s most populous generation) are suffering from anxiety or depressive disorders, which inevitably leads to hopelessness. [read more]

What the Left-wing media is doing by creating senseless fear is shameful. Then again it is easier to control the masses when they are fearful or at least not being rational.

Other articles on madness:

• 'Mass Formation Psychosis' — It's Real, and It Was Purposely Caused by Biden and the Democrat Party
• MASS FORMATION PSYCHOSIS