Rep. Jim Banks Introduces ‘Defund NPR Act’

From The Gateway Pundit.com (Apr. 20, 2024):

NPR has been under fire after hiring a leftist activist, Katherine Maher, as their new CEO.

I do wish Hillary wouldn’t use the language of “boy and girl” – it’s erasing language for non-binary people.

— Katherine Maher (@krmaher) October 10, 2016

Former NPR editor Uri Berliner was also recently suspended (and subsequently resigned) after revealing NPR’s Washington, D.C., news team includes 87 registered Democrats and zero registered Republicans.

The bill states that “no Federal funds may, directly or indirectly,” be “made available to or used to support” NPR, “including through the payment of dues to or the purchase of programming from such organization by a public broadcast station using Federal funds received by such station.”

In a press release, the Anti-Woke Caucus Chairman said, “NPR’s new CEO is a radical, left-wing activist who doesn’t believe in free speech or objective journalism.”

“Hoosiers shouldn’t be writing her paychecks,” the congressman continued. “Katherine Maher isn’t qualified to teach an introductory journalism class, much less capable of responsibly spending millions of American tax dollars. NPR was a liberal looney bin under the last CEO John Lansing, and it’s about to get even nuttier. It’s time to pull the plug on this national embarrassment. Congress must stop spending other people’s hard-earned money on low grade propaganda.”

Banks’ office noted, “Katherine Maher, NPR’s recently appointed CEO, has described the First Amendment as ‘the number one challenge’ to combatting ‘misinformation,’ and has attacked former President Donald Trump on social media on several occasions.” [source]

Good! It's about time. While he’s at it, he can defund PBS too. Let George Soros and other ultra-rich Leftists fund them if they think those media are worth it.

Democrats overwhelmingly vote against Laken Riley Act

From The Blaze.com (Jan. 7):

The House passed the Laken Riley Act on Tuesday, with a majority of Democrats voting against the bill.

The Laken Riley Act is the first bill in the 119th Congress addressing illegal immigration, requiring that aliens charged with theft or burglary be detained. The landmark legislation was named after Laken Riley, a 22-year-old nursing student who was brutally murdered by an illegal alien while she was jogging at the University of Georgia.

Despite the overwhelming resistance from 159 Democrats, 48 voted with 216 Republicans to pass the legislation.

The bill was also passed in the House during the 118th Congress, with 170 Democrats voting against it. Notably, 37 Democrats joined 214 Republicans to pass the bill.

Speaker Mike Johnson praised the legislation, saying it will "ensure criminals like Laken's murderer are detained & deported before they can commit such evil acts."

"President Biden never apologized to Laken's family for allowing her killer into our country, but he DID apologize for calling that monster an illegal," Johnson added.

Under President Joe Biden's administration, there have been over 8 million encounters with illegal migrants on the southern border alone. As a result, illegal immigration has exacerbated the housing crisis and flooded communities with criminals, all at the cost of the taxpayer.

"This isn’t a partisan issue, but those on the Left will continue to prioritize 'political correctness' over American lives," Republican Rep. Andy Biggs of Arizona said.

After enduring four years of the Biden administration's burdensome border crisis, Americans rejected the Democratic Party at the ballot box.

Leading up to the presidential election, immigration had become a top priority for voters. President-elect Donald Trump spent his campaign addressing illegal immigration as a crisis and vowing mass deportations. At the same time, Trump's Democratic opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris, avoided the topic altogether.

The message on November 5 was loud and clear, and Congress took note. [source]

Voting for this bill is a no-brainer. I guess the 159 Dems who voted against this bill care more for illegal criminals than for the public’s safety. Shameful.

Another article on the act: Senate Passes Amended Version Of The Laken Riley Act

Congress Only Wants To ‘Ban’ TikTok So The Deep State Can Use It To Spy On Americans

From The Federalist.com (Mar. 19, 2024):

Given all we know now about how U.S. intelligence agencies conspire with Big Tech firms and nongovernmental cutouts to spy on and manipulate U.S. citizens, together with what the Twitter Files revealed last year about how the FBI and DHS deputized social media companies to censor Americans and throttle free speech, you’d think lawmakers who ostensibly care about the First Amendment would balk at expanding the online censorship industry’s reach in the United States.

But you’d be wrong. Last week in Washington there was a sudden concentrated push among House Republicans and Democrats alike to pass a so-called “TikTok ban.” The bill, which sailed out of committee and was passed with bipartisan support in the House, now goes to the Senate, where it will likely meet the same bipartisan approval.

It’s not really a ban, though. The bill would give TikTok, which is owned by its Chinese Communist Party-controlled parent company, ByteDance, the option to sell the app’s U.S. operations or be banned. Because the CCP uses TikTok to spy on U.S. users, the bill seems at first glance like a good idea. President Trump tried to ban the app in 2020 via executive order but was blocked by federal courts.

But there’s something else going on here. Namely, the push to “ban” TikTok is a thinly veiled scheme to force ByteDance to sell to a U.S. company. The purpose of forcing a sale should be obvious. If a U.S. firm owns TikTok, the federal censorship industrial complex can use the platform as it has used virtually every other social media company: to spy on and manipulate American citizens.

With more than 170 million users in America, TikTok would be a powerful new tool at the federal government’s disposal heading into the 2024 presidential election. If you think that’s crazy, or some kind of conspiracy theory, recall that just weeks before the 2020 election, dozens of former high-ranking U.S. intelligence officials signed onto a letter denouncing the New York Post’s reporting on Hunter Biden’s laptop as a Russian disinformation campaign. That effort was coordinated and led by future Secretary of State Anthony Blinken, who at the time was a senior official for the Biden campaign.

The suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story, which was banned from Twitter, Facebook, and most other social media platforms almost as soon as it was reported, was only possible because of the leverage that federal intelligence agencies had over these social media companies.

Over the past year, we’ve learned more and more about the depth and breadth of collusion between Big Tech and the federal government, which views social media companies as proxies that enable it to censor and manipulate American citizens. Anything that cuts against the deep state’s preferred narrative is labeled as “misinformation” that must be suppressed, censored, or banned. Instead of doing this directly, the intelligence community dragoons social media companies into carrying out these tasks, and the effect is the quashing of free speech online.

Make no mistake, this is the goal of the movement to “ban” TikTok. How else to explain the effort to force a TikTok sale? If the goal was really to ban TikTok (because the CCP uses it to collect data on American citizens, or because it’s harmful to its users’ mental health, or both) then Congress would have simply passed a bill that banned the app from stores and web-hosting services in the United States. It could have been a straightforward, one-page bill.

Instead, the bipartisan bill now before the Senate allows for U.S. ownership with virtually no changes in how TikTok functions, as congressional supporters of the bill have freely admitted. If only TikTok is controlled by a U.S. firm, it can continue to operate as it has thus far—with an important difference. Instead of answering to the CCP, it will answer to CISA, or the CIA, or FBI—just as Twitter and Facebook and all the others have for years now.

Indeed, TikTok itself boasted earlier this year about how fastidious it has been in walling off U.S. users’ data from China, even as it has struggled to keep that data private. In January, the Wall Street Journal reported the company had spent $1.5 billion on an operation designed to convince U.S. lawmakers that user data was safe.

But that effort itself reveals how the campaign to keep data safe from China is really a backdoor to allow U.S. intel agencies access to user data. In the report, a TikTok spokeswoman said the app’s U.S. algorithm is stored with Oracle, an American company. “Over the past year, we took the unprecedented step of granting Oracle full access to our source code and algorithm,” she said.

But of course Oracle isn’t just a U.S. data storage and management company. It’s also one of four major defense contractors providing cloud-computing contracts to the U.S. government. It’s not a stretch, much less a conspiracy theory, to see how a U.S.-owned TikTok, whose entire source code and algorithm has been given to Oracle, could be used by the intel and defense bureaucracy to spy on American TikTok users.

Such details aren’t getting in the way of the bipartisan push in Congress to take control of the app. To make the TikTok “ban” seem like a patriotic move, we’re now seeing its proponents talk about how bad it is that we allow a Chinese-controlled social media firm to operate with no oversight. That’s why former Trump administration Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, who last week announced he was putting together a group to purchase TikTok, said, “There’s no way that the Chinese would ever let a US company own something like this in China.”

It’s also why establishment Republicans like Rep. Dan Crenshaw denigrated opponents of the bill last week, saying a vote against the bill “is a vote for the Chinese Communist Party. The opponents of this bill aren’t defending free speech, they’re defending Chinese access to American data and American minds.”

Whenever anyone pushes back on these claims, the response is often, oh so you’d rather communist China be allowed to spy on us and manipulate U.S. news coverage? The answer to this should be obvious. If the choice is between the CCP spying on and manipulating us or our own government doing it, I’d much rather it be a foreign power.

When it comes to censorship and the muzzling of Americans, the greater enemy by far is the U.S. government. It’s not even close. That there’s even a question about which is the greater threat is a testament to how far we’ve come in our understanding of tyranny and how susceptible we are to it arising domestically, within our own government.

The truth is, our government has embarked on a tyrannical, republic-destroying project of censoring and spying on its citizens. It’s galling that the same people who want to expand the U.S. intelligence community’s power to do that are pretending to have patriotic motives for doing so.

Don’t fall for this lie. They don’t want to protect you from China. They want to do to you what the CCP does to its people: spy, manipulate, censor, and suppress free speech. It’s not more complicated than that. [source]

Hmmm. Well, that’s one way to ponder the ban.

America’s Lab Rats?

From Victor Hanson.com (July 29, 2024):

Half the country thinks something has gone drastically wrong in America, to the point that it is rapidly becoming unrecognizable. Millions feel they are virtual lab rats in some grand research project conducted by entitled elites who could care less when the experiment blows up.

Consider: Our military turns over $60 billion in state-of-the-art weapons to terrorists in Kabul and then flees in disgrace?

Terrorist flags fly in place of incinerated Old Glory at the iconic Union Station in Washington as radical students and green card-holding guests deface statues with threats that “Hamas is coming” while spewing hatred toward Jews—and all with impunity?

A wide-open border with 10 million unaudited illegal immigrants?

Once beautiful downtowns resembling Nairobi or Cairo—as paralyzed mayors spend billions without a clue how to remedy the self-created disaster?

Fast food drive-ins priced as if they were near-gourmet restaurants?

In truth, this apparent rapid cultural, economic, and political upheaval is well into its third decade. The disruptions are the results of the long-term effects of globalization and the high-tech revolution that brought enormous wealth into the hands of a tiny utopian elite. Almost overnight, every American household became a consumer of cellular phones and cameras, laptop computers, social media, and Google searches.

We then entered into a virtual, soulless world of hedonism, narcissism, and the cheap, anonymous cruelty of click-bait, cancel culture, doxing, ghosting, blacklisting, and trolling. The toxic COVID lockdown and the DEI racist fixations that followed the George Floyd death only accelerated what had been an ongoing three-decade devolution.

By 2000, a former market of 300 million American consumers was widening to a globalized 7 billion shoppers—at least for those mostly on the two coasts, whose expertise and merchandising were universalized in megaprofit high-tech, finance, investment, media, law, and entertainment.

Americans of the 20^th century had never quite seen anything like the mega-global celebrities from Michael Jackson to Taylor Swift, or a Bezos fortune of $170 billion, or the sorts who fly in their Gulfstream private jets to Davos, Sun Valley, and Aspen to lament the ignorance of the backward muscular classes and to plot their noblesse oblige salvation for them.

Indeed, for those reliant on muscular jobs and the production of the material essentials of life—agriculture, fuels, construction, assembly, timber, mining, and services—their livelihoods were often xeroxed abroad. Millions of their jobs were offshored or outsourced to third- and second-world countries with cheaper labor, abundant natural resources, and less overhead that made investment “wiser” and more profitable.

Anointed Americans in the “soft” or informational economy achieved levels of wealth never seen before in history. Meanwhile, Americans in the “hard” or concrete sectors saw stagnation in wages, job losses, and the erosion of middle-class life itself.

That the universities, the media, the administrative state, entertainment, high tech, and the federal government were mostly on the coasts became a geographical force multiplier of the growing economic and cultural divide—perhaps in the manner that the Civil War became not just an ideological conflict but one of definable geography as well. [read more]

Can't wait for the Left's warped experiment to be over (at least for four years anyway) when President Trump resumes his term which is today! Yea! Another insightful article by VDH.

7 Financial Tips From the Book of Proverbs

From FEE.org (Dec. 26, 2022):

Ask someone from the millennial or Generation Z crowds about tech-related topics and you’ll likely get an encyclopedia of knowledge pouring forth. Ask those same cohorts about a financial decision or money-related matter and you just might get a deer-in-the-headlights look.

Over two-thirds of people ages 18-41 have “financial topics they want advice on,” a Harris Poll found earlier this year, “but aren’t sure how to get it.” And given that 70 percent of millennials and 65 percent of Generation Z live paycheck to paycheck, it’s not hard to imagine what types of financial advice might be needed.

Unfortunately, that last set of statistics shows that hiring a financial coach at an average of over $250 per hour is out of the question for most of those seeking advice. Lest you despair, I have good news on where to find invaluable, free financial advice, available at your fingertips. It’s liberally dispersed throughout an ancient work called the Book of Proverbs.

Here are just a few of the financial bits of wisdom that Proverbs offers.

1. Choose Diligence Over Laziness

Warnings against sloth and laziness pepper the Proverbs, many of them directly contrasting the sluggard with an ant, whose industrious nature works hard in the summer to store up food for winter. No one wants to be compared to a sloth, and many of us would likely pat ourselves on the back and contend we are not lazy bums. But Proverbs painfully points out some finer, overlooked aspects of slothfulness, such as a tendency to be wasteful, to take it easy and take multiple breaks, and to do a lot of talking rather than taking action and completing a task.

“In all labour there is profit: but the talk of the lips tendeth only to penury,” says Proverbs 14:23.

Like those who go into debt, Proverbs tells us that those who chose the way of sloth will be the servants in society, not the rulers, and will be overcome by poverty rather than riches. Those who are diligent in their business, however, will be society’s influencers, “standing before kings” and increasing in profit and material wealth.

“He becometh poor that dealeth with a slack hand: but the hand of the diligent maketh rich,” says Proverbs 10:4.

2. Pick a Partner with Good Work Ethic

One of the best financial investments a person can make is to choose a financially savvy spouse. Proverbs 31 famously paints a picture of this by describing a woman who does her husband good, not evil, by being an industrious worker who wisely considers a large purchase before investing her money, isn’t wasteful, and even runs and operates her own home business ventures.

A virtuous spouse, Proverbs says, is worth far more than rubies—but industry is part of virtue.

“She will do him good and not evil all the days of her life. She seeketh wool, and flax, and worketh willingly with her hands,” says Proverbs 12-13.

3. Think Long Term

For those who live paycheck to paycheck, thinking long term seems like the last thing to consider on the list of life worries. The good news is that preparing for the future doesn’t have to be difficult. According to Proverbs, it can be as simple as maintaining friendships on which we can fall back upon for help in times of trouble. Keeping our business and financial affairs in good order is another way to prepare for hard times.

Additionally, we should consider that our children and grandchildren are also likely to encounter hard financial times. Preparing a nest egg or inheritance for them ahead of time, Proverbs tells us, is the mark of a good man.

“A good person leaves an inheritance for their children’s children, but a sinner’s wealth is stored up for the righteous,” says Proverbs 13:22.

4. Avoid Get-Rich-Quick Schemes

It may sound exciting and easy to “make $90 an hour working from home,” but Proverbs suggests that being hasty to get rich leads to poverty and want.

“Good planning and hard work lead to prosperity, but hasty shortcuts lead to poverty,” says Proverbs 21:5.

Those who faithfully do their work, however, will abound with blessings.

5. Pursue a Lifestyle of Integrity

Young people are often encouraged to sow their wild oats and enjoy life early on, but such riotous living may have negative financial consequences. Love of food, drink, and a free-wheeling lifestyle can lead an individual to spend extravagantly, eventually leading to poverty, Proverbs tells us.

Those who pursue righteous living, however, avoid extravagant lifestyles and practice honesty in their business dealings, not willing to take a bribe or lie in order to increase in wealth. Living a life of integrity promises great rewards, among which are “riches, and honour, and life,” Proverbs tells us.

Furthermore, in times of political turmoil and trouble, it is a righteous, upright life—not riches—that deliver an individual from death.

6. Avoid Loans

Borrowing money for school, cars, and homes has become the American way of life in recent years, even to the point that borrowing is now common even for basic living expenses. In fact, over 50 percent of Americans say they have more than $1,000 in credit card debt.

Proverbs warns against such debt, cautioning that those who borrow become servants to those who lend. This is likely why Proverbs also cautions against taking responsibility for another’s debt. Such an action may seem kind, but chances are that person will never be able to pay, leaving you stuck as the servant of debt in their place.

7. Be Generous

While Proverbs warns against taking responsibility for another’s debt, it does encourage us to be generous givers. Indeed, one might even say that Proverbs advances the idea of a giving principle: those who hoard and try to make sure they have enough to live on themselves will find that they’re grasping to make ends meet. But those who give freely to others, particularly the less fortunate, will find themselves overflowing with great blessings and plenty.

The Bottom Line

These seven financial principles are diverse and broad, but there is one component underlying each of them: wisdom. In the eighth chapter of Proverbs, wisdom is personified as a woman calling to individuals to forsake their foolishness and seek her instead. Those who do so, she promises, will reap not only material rewards, but moral ones as well:

Riches and honour are with me; yea, durable riches and righteousness. My fruit is better than gold, yea, than fine gold; and my revenue than choice silver. I lead in the way of righteousness, in the midst of the paths of judgment: That I may cause those that love me to inherit substance; and I will fill their treasures.

In essence, those of us who want to do well in financial matters will follow this “one simple trick”: seeking wisdom. [source]

Good financial advice from the Good Book.

Hamas Leader Using At Least 15 Hostages As Human Shields: Report

From The Daily Wire.com (May 2, 2024):

Yahya Sinwar, the Hamas terrorist leader who was the mastermind behind the brutal October 7 attack on Israel, is hiding behind at least 15 hostages, according to American and Israeli officials, The New York Times reported.

As the U.S., Israel, and Egypt push Hamas to release the remaining hostages — which include as many as six Americans — Sinwar is negotiating behind a human shield made up of the very people Israeli forces are trying to rescue, officials said. The Times cited “people briefed on the negotiations” between Hamas and Israel who have blamed Sinwar for preventing a deal from being made that would release the hostages.

The outlet added that Sinwar is negotiating “from his hiding space deep in the tunnels below Gaza,” adding that his human shield of hostages “prevent[s] Israel from assassinating him.” Former U.S. Army Vice Chief of Staff General Jack Keane also told Sky News that Sinwar could have as many as 20 hostages surrounding him and his family.

“My sources tell me that Sinwar, who is the number one leader in Gaza of the Hamas organization, has 15-20 hostages protecting him and his family,” Keane said.

U.S. officials made similar comments, in concurrence with Israeli intelligence, about Sinwar using hostages as human shields in February. Hamas terrorists kidnapped hundreds of civilians and soldiers from Israel during its October 7 attack. Israeli and U.S. officials said last month that it’s unclear how many hostages remain alive in Gaza.

Sinwar’s brutality has been evident over the course of Hamas’ war with Israel as he said in November that the October 7 attack on Israel that killed 1,200 people “was just a rehearsal.” Hamas terrorists have also said after being captured that the leaders of the terrorist organization, including Sinwar, hide under hospitals in Gaza.

Terrorist leaders have hidden behind non-combatants in the past, with one of the most recent examples dating back to 2011, when Al-Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden attempted to use women as human shields during the U.S. raid on his compound in Pakistan before he was killed by special forces, according to the White House. Officials added that one of the women Bin Laden was hiding behind was also killed. [source]

The Hamas leader is an evil jinn worshipping coward. Hopefully, President Trump can help get the rest of the hostages (especially American hostages) released, because the current president is useless.

FBI Had 26 Confidential Human Sources At Jan. 6 Events In Washington, D.C.

From The Federalist.com (Dec. 12, 2024):

More than two dozen confidential human sources (CHS) were in Washington, D.C., on Jan. 6, 2021, according to a new report the Justice Department inspector general released on Thursday.

Twenty-six CHSs were present in total, and the inspector general said that 11 of these “entered the restricted area around the Capitol.” At least one informant entered the Capitol amid the riot, and the FBI reimbursed that individual’s travel expenses.

While the Justice Department confirmed the FBI’s deployment of confidential sources at events related to Jan. 6, the inspector general denied “any CHS [was] directed by the FBI to encourage others to commit illegal acts on January 6.”

The presence of FBI informants at the Capitol had long been dismissed by legacy media as another conspiracy of independent media. In December last year, CNN’s Abby Phillip tried to fact-check then-Republican presidential contender Vivek Ramaswamy at a network town hall when the candidate brought up the existence of FBI informants at events related to Jan. 6.

“The reality is we know that there were federal law enforcement agents in that building; we don’t know how many,” Ramaswamy said.

“I’m going to go ahead and interrupt you here,” Phillip interjected, “you’re saying that there were federal agents on January 6th. There is no evidence that there were federal agents in the crowd on January 6th.”

By that point, however, the presence of FBI informants and assets had been reported by The New York Times and Newsweek, the latter of which said the Justice Department deployed special commandos with “shoot-to-kill authority.”

Senior leadership at the FBI meanwhile repeatedly stonewalled House and Senate lawmakers’ questions related to the FBI’s use of informants on Jan. 6.

“How many FBI agents or confidential informants actively participated in the events of Jan. 6?” Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, asked Jill Sanborn, the executive assistant director for the FBI’s National Security Branch, a year after the riot.

“I can’t go into the specifics of sources and methods,” she said.

More recently, FBI Director Christopher Wray, who announced on Wednesday that he will step down next month, refused to answer similar questions.

“I’m never going to be getting into when and where we have or have not, or have not used confidential human sources,” Wray said this summer.

In March, former Capitol Police Chief Steven Sund, who resigned after the riot, said he was also left in the dark about the presence of federal informants in the crowd. In an interview with the D.C. radio station WMAL, Sund called the lack of disclosure “concerning.” [source]

Of course they did. Being a setup and all. So, was Ray Epps a confidential human source or not? He says he's not. Still I wonder...

The Government Wants To Track Your Steak

From Reason.com (June 22, 2024):

The government has a long history of using tracking technology to ascertain our whereabouts, our habits, and even our preferences. From cellphones and cars to snow plows and garbage trucks, governments seemingly want to track anything that moves—or moos.

The USDA recently finalized a rule—set to go into effect in a few months—that will require all cattle and bison being moved across state lines to be tagged with radio-frequency identification (RFID) ear tags. RFID technology uses radio frequency waves to transmit and collect data by way of a system of electronic tags and scanners. The technology is best viewed as a type of electronic or remote barcode, in which scanners can read an RFID chip anywhere from a few meters away to around 100 meters away. In some ways analogous to a shorter-range GPS system, RFID can track geographic location and also operate as a system of data collection and storage.

In the context of livestock, a quick scan of an RFID tag can pull up information like a cow's date of birth, weight, vaccine records, ownership history, what farms it has been to, and what movements it has made. The USDA is justifying its RFID mandate on public health grounds, claiming that it can help trace and eradicate potential disease outbreaks among livestock, such as mad cow disease or hoof-and-mouth disease.

While plausible at first blush, it is far from clear that the mandate will accomplish its intended objective, and it is very clear that it will disproportionately hurt small and independent ranchers and cattle farmers.

For one thing, most ranchers already want to be able to identify their cattle and have used physical metal tags for years to do so. Electronic RFID tags are twice as expensive as traditional metal tags and also require an upfront investment in scanners and software, making the switch cost-prohibitive for many small farms. Farmers also complain that electronic tags are harder to identify visually from a distance, which matters during cattle drives and other large and quick-paced movements of livestock. Most farmers that use electronic tags therefore also still tag their animals with traditional physical tags, necessitating a double-investment in two types of tags.

There's also the issue of tag retention. "I've talked to many people who have used these RFID tags and their cows have lost 50 percent after five years," Ken Fox, a South Dakota cow farmer and chair of R-CALF USA's Animal Identification Committee, told Wisconsin State Farmer. "By year nine or ten only 14 percent of the tags were left; and our beef cows can be with us for 15 to 20 years, so that's a serious concern." Fox also notes that the RFID scanners often need to be replaced every four or five years.

Fox points out that not all livestock operations are created equal. For dairy farmers who keep their livestock penned up, frequent replacing of tags is more logistically feasible, if still expensive. But for cattle ranchers, tag replacement can be entirely impracticable. "That just doesn't work when we've got cattle on 10,000 or 30,000 acres of range land and we handle those cattle maybe twice a year," said Fox. "If they lose those tags, how are we going to know who those cattle are?" Amish farmers have also opposed electronic tagging on moral grounds given their opposition to technology.

Large cattle operations can afford to double-tag their livestock with physical and electronic tags, and in fact, many have already done so voluntarily—which means the mandate's burden will fall heaviest on small and medium-sized farms and ranches. The USDA rule also favors large cattle operations more directly, including allowing them to use so-called "group identification" for livestock herds of a certain size and continuity.

"The new rule also provides for large-scale cattle operations to use one ID per group of a certain size, instead of one ID per animal," writes Remington Kesten in a blog post for David's Pasture, a small-scale cattle operation in Missouri. "This means that the smaller farms will actually incur more cost per animal once the mandate takes effect, than the big players will."

Worse yet, this group identification actually undercuts the USDA's entire disease-traceability rationale for mandated electronic tagging. "This intentional loophole also reduces the traceability for large farms and exporters, contradicting the USDA's primary reason for mandating RFID Ear Tags in the first place," notes Kesten.

The rule also fails on its own terms. While supporters point to the 2003 mad cow disease outbreak in Washington state as an example of a situation where electronic tagging could have allowed for quicker identification of where the disease originated, it's worth noting that the government was still able to track the original diseased cow back to its birthplace farm in Canada within 13 days.

It's also worth recognizing that livestock disease outbreaks are exceedingly rare in the United States. An article in Lancaster Farming, which takes a generally favorable bent toward the USDA mandate, notes that hoof-and-mouth disease was last found in America in 1929. Farmers such as Fox have also highlighted the successful combatting of brucellosis in the United States, which was accomplished without electronic tagging.

If anything, it is large-scale commercial farms that are most responsible for disease outbreaks. "There is no data in over a decade showing that food borne illnesses have resulted from disease on small farms," writes Kesten. "All major disease outbreaks in recent years have occurred on large farms." In other words, small and independent ranchers are bearing the brunt of a new rule in the name of fixing a problem that they have nothing to do with.

Finally, the USDA rule creates significant data privacy concerns. RFID tags cannot distinguish between scanners—which are portable and easily carried in hand—so potentially anyone with a scanner could access the data contained in each tag. Ominously, the USDA rule opts to use the term electronic identification tags instead of the RFID acronym, although for now RFID tags are the only technology approved by the USDA for livestock tagging.

This flexible language means that USDA is explicitly leaving the door open to even more comprehensive tracking technology. This could come in the form of "active" RFID tags (instead of "passive" ones as currently contemplated) that have a greater range of readability or even GPS tracking of cows via satellites.

One small beacon of hope for American ranchers is that Congress appears to finally be waking up to the USDA's overreach. Sen. Mike Rounds (R-S.D.) recently introduced legislation that would prohibit the USDA from implementing any rule that mandates electronic tagging technology for cattle and bison.

The USDA is attempting to find a solution for a problem that has already been largely addressed through current practices.

Fox puts it more colorfully: "Someone told me this story—NASA spent millions trying to develop a pen that could work in sub-zero temperatures and zero gravity. The Russians just used a pencil." [source]

Not sure if tracking cattle is good or not by the USDA. Individual ranchers doing it is one thing. I can understand that. But the federal government? The new USDA admin. might have to re-evaluate this regulation.

Biden Awards Second Highest Civilian Honor to Jan. 6 Panel Leaders

From Newsmax.com (Jan. 2):

President Joe Biden is bestowing the second highest civilian medal on Liz Cheney and Bennie Thompson — the lawmakers who led the congressional investigation into the violent Jan. 6, 2021, U.S. Capitol attack — who President-elect Donald Trump has said should be jailed.

Biden will award the Presidential Citizens Medal to 20 people in a ceremony Thursday at the White House, including Americans who fought for marriage equality, a pioneer in treating wounded soldiers, and two of the president's longtime friends, former Sens. Ted Kaufman, D-Del., and Chris Dodd, D-Conn.

“President Biden believes these Americans are bonded by their common decency and commitment to serving others,” the White House said in a statement. “The country is better because of their dedication and sacrifice.”

Biden last year honored people who were involved in defending the Capitol from the rioters, or who helped safeguard the will of American voters during the 2020 presidential election, when Trump tried and failed to overturn the results.

Cheney, who was a Republican representative from Wyoming, and Thompson, a Mississippi Democrat, led the House committee that probed the insurrection. Cheney later said she would vote for Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris in the 2024 presidential race even campaigned with her, raising Trump's ire. Biden has been considering whether to offer preemptive pardons to Cheney and others Trump has targeted.

Trump, who won the 2024 election and will take office Jan. 20, has said he would pardon people involved in the Jan. 6 attack after he takes office.

During an interview with NBC's “Meet the Press,” Trump said, “Cheney did something that’s inexcusable, along with Thompson and the people on the un-select committee of political thugs and, you know, creeps," claiming without evidence they “deleted and destroyed” testimony they collected.

“Honestly, they should go to jail,” he said.

Biden is also giving the award to attorney Mary Bonauto, who fought to legalize same-sex marriage, and Evan Wolfson, a leader of the marriage equality movement.

Other honorees include Frank Butler, who set new standards for using tourniquets on war injuries; Diane Carlson Evans, an Army nurse during the Vietnam War who founded the Vietnam Women’s Memorial Foundation; and Eleanor Smeal, an activist who led women's rights protests in the 1970s and fought for equal pay.

He's also giving the award to photographer Bobby Sager, academics Thomas Vallely and Paula Wallace, and Frances Visco, the president of the National Breast Cancer Coalition.

Other former lawmakers being honored include former Sen. Bill Bradley, D-N.J.; former Sen. Nancy Kassebaum, the first woman to represent Kansas; and former Rep. Carolyn McCarthy, D-N.Y., who championed gun safety measures after her son and husband were shot to death.

Biden will honor four people posthumously: Joseph Galloway, a former war correspondent who wrote about the first major battle in Vietnam in the book “We Were Soldiers Once … and Young"; civil rights advocate and attorney Louis Lorenzo Redding; former Delaware state judge Collins Seitz; and Mitsuye Endo Tsutsumi, who was held with other Japanese Americans during World War II and challenged the detention.

The Presidential Citizens Medal, created by President Richard Nixon in 1969, is the country’s second highest civilian honor after the Presidential Medal of Freedom. It is awarded to those who “performed exemplary deeds of service for their country or their fellow citizens.” [source]

Of course, he would, the bastard.  He'll probably pardon them too.

Characteristics of American Tinkerpreneurs

1. Mechanical ability from an early age;
2. Stubborn practicality and dedication to making and selling useful things;
3. Willingness to expand their creative orbits as widely as possible to get the job done;
4. Relentless work ethic and insatiable commitment to continual self-improvement;
5. A deep and abiding respect for intellectual property, fair play, and the rule of law;
6. Strong faith and perseverance through failure and adversity; 
7. Reverence for America’s special role as a beacon of freedom and opportunity.

Source: Who Built That. Awe-Inspiring Stories of American Tinkerpreneurs (2015) by Michelle Malkin.

'Eco-friendly' paper straws actually contain toxic 'chemicals'

From Rebel News.com (Aug. 25, 2023):

It wasn't that long ago that plastic straws were replaced by paper ones in major fast-food chains and restaurants. But now paper straws are the ones to be considered 'toxic' according to scientists.

On August 24, 2023, a significant study published under the category of Food Additives & Contaminants, examined 39 brands of straws made from various materials such as paper, bamboo, glass, stainless steel and plastic. Each straw underwent two rounds of PFAS testing.

The term "per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances" (PFAS) refers to a large and complex group of synthetic chemicals that have been used in everyday items.

In this particular study, the straws showed PFAS in 69% of the cases. 18 different PFAS were found during testing.

These compounds were discovered in 90% of paper straws, 80% of bamboo straws, 75% of plastic straws, and 40% of glass straw brands tested positive as well.

No traces of PFAS were found in stainless steel straws.

According to the study:

Most PFAS barely break down and are both accumulative and potentially toxic to humans, animals, and the environment (EEA Citation2022).

Intake through food and drinking water are the main routes of general human exposure to PFAS. In addition, many food packaging materials (Food Contact Materials, FCMs) and reusable plastic bags used in the food industry can contain PFAS (Sznajder-Katarzyńska et al. Citation2019; EEA Citation2022).

Researchers say that the high concentration of PFAS in the straws show that they were used as a waterproof coating.

Science Daily said:

The PFAS concentrations were low and, bearing in mind that most people tend to only use straws occasionally, pose a limited risk to human health. However, PFAS can remain in the body for many years and concentrations can build up over time.

This raises the question if plastic straws will make a comeback in certain food places in the future, because paper straws aren't as 'eco-friendly' as we thought. [source]

The paper straws don’t work as well plastic straws and they are toxic too people. Do the enviro-extremists care? No, as long as the straws aren’t toxic to the environment in general.

Three takeaways on China’s spies in the Navy

From Washington Examiner.com (Aug. 4, 2023):

This week, the FBI arrested two Navy sailors whom the Justice Department accuses of spying for China. Both men were paid by China for their efforts. These arrests are a reminder of the vast ambition, scale, and threat Beijing poses in terms of espionage.

The first case involves Jinchao Wei, a sailor who was assigned to the USS Essex amphibious assault ship. Wei is accused of communicating with a Chinese intelligence officer, who directed him to delete “records of their conversations and using encrypted methods of communication,” starting in February 2022.

Wei is said to have “described defensive weapons of the Essex” and provided his Chinese handler with technical manuals, including on damage control systems, power, steering, and flight deck operations. This information would be of use to the People’s Liberation Army both in terms of boosting its institutional knowledge of how the U.S. Navy operates in combat and advancing the PLA’s tactics for engaging with vessels such as the Essex. Seeing as a war with China is likely before 2030, this is not a small concern.

The second case involves Petty Officer Wenheng Zhao. Zhao is accused of communicating with a Chinese intelligence officer between August 2021 and May 2023. That officer, almost certainly from China’s Ministry of State Security or the People’s Liberation Army, pretended to be a maritime commerce specialist. This cover was likely designed not to convince Zhao that he wasn’t dealing with a Chinese spy, but to afford him a thin psychological pretense to that effect: making it slightly easier for him to betray the Navy and the nation. This is an interesting example of how, when it comes to recruiting an agent, sometimes an intelligence service needs to dangle both a bit of money and a bit of “here’s how you can pretend you can sleep comfortably at night” mythology.

Regardless, Zhao’s spying was deadly serious, as it included his photographs of “electrical diagrams and blueprints for a radar system stationed on a U.S. military base in Okinawa.” It is no secret why China would be interested in U.S. radar facilities on Okinawa. It is because those facilities would be crucial to the island’s defense in the event of PLA missile and air attacks during any future war over Taiwan. The island would also serve as a key forward operating base for U.S. and Japanese air forces engaged in Taiwan’s defense.

Three further points stand out from these arrests.

First, both sailors are ethnic Chinese. As John Schindler notes, Beijing often leverages Chinese heritage to recruit intelligence agents. It does so by leveraging a variety of inducements for and pressures on family members back in China. Beijing also opens its wallet. It is not known how and where these two sailors were recruited, but it would be interesting to know whether either has made visits to China or proximate locales in recent years.

Second, the sailors were engaged in espionage for long periods before they were arrested. While the FBI may have allowed this espionage, believing the damage caused by the sailors was outweighed by the afforded FBI’s insight into Chinese espionage efforts, it’s also possible that this spying was only recently detected. If so, it’s likely the National Security Agency played a role here. The NSA has a number of sensitive efforts designed to identify Chinese signals intelligence operations targeting the U.S. mainland.

That leads to point three. The head of the Justice Department’s national security division, Assistant Attorney General Matthew Olsen, is now patting himself on the back. Olsen says these arrests prove that “the Department of Justice will continue to use every tool in our arsenal to counter threats from China and to deter those who aid them in breaking our laws and threatening our national security.”

Unfortunately, and against the FBI’s adamant advice, Olsen helped eliminate a key tool for dealing with China’s threat — namely, the Justice Department’s now-ended “China Initiative” to identify Chinese espionage officers, agents, and efforts at U.S. academic institutions. Supporting the Biden administration’s misguided public relations stunt in ending the China Initiative, Olsen absurdly also suggested that future incidences of deception by academics who lie about taking money from China might be treated as civil rather than criminal matters. That’s hardly a way to “deter those who aid” Chinese spying. Indeed, the Biden administration’s approach is downright dangerous.

The top line, however, is a familiar one. From the Netherlands to Taiwan to the United Kingdom to even China’s “no limits partner,” Russia, Beijing’s intelligence apparatus poses an extraordinary threat — one that is truly unparalleled in terms of its human and cyber intelligence efforts. China has the data and the ambition to detect vulnerable targets and then exploit them ruthlessly. Within 20 years, this unparalleled descriptor may also apply to China’s space-based intelligence capabilities.

Put simply, the arrest of these two sailors is the tip of a very large iceberg. [source]

Daniel Penny: No Regrets Standing Up to Help

From Newsmax.com (Dec. 10):

Marine veteran Daniel Penny, despite being prosecuted by leftist Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, saidTuesday he has no regrets about trying to help others on the subway in May 2023.

Penny was acquitted on Monday of criminally negligent homicide in the death of Jordan Neely, who witnesses said was threatening people on the train.

"I'm not a confrontational person. This type of thing is very uncomfortable — all this attention and limelight is very uncomfortable, and I would prefer without it. I don't want any type of attention or praise, and I still don't," Penny told Fox News.

Penny added that he knew he needed to step in to protect people on the subway from Neely.

"The guilt I would have felt if someone did get hurt, if he [Neely] did do what he was threatening to do, I would never be able to live with myself. I'll take a million court appearances and people calling me names and people hating me just to keep one of those people from getting hurt or killed," Penny said. [source]

Good for him!  I'm glad he was found not guilty. He should never have been prosecuted. Society needs to encourage good Smartian protectors not to discourage them.

More articles about him:

• The Daniel Penny verdict.
• Glenn: How Alvin Bragg turned hero Daniel Penny into a villain
  
• JD Vance invites Daniel Penny to attend Army-Navy game with him and Trump after Marine vet cleared in subway chokehold death

Are the Years of Madness Ending?

From AM Greatness.com (Dec. 16):

Never in U.S. history has a president-elect been welcomed as the real president before his January 20 inauguration. And never has the incumbent president so willingly surrendered his last two months in office and all but abdicated—to the relief of his nation and the rest of the world.

One reason so many are welcoming Trump’s return is the universally desperate hope that his election spelled an end to a collective madness at home and its ripples abroad during the last four years. And why not?

Nations overseas had never quite witnessed anything like the lethal August 2021 American flight from Afghanistan. That utter humiliation and impotence of the U.S. military likely signaled to Russia there would be no consequences if it invaded Ukraine—and it did; to Iran that it could now unleash Hamas and Hezbollah on Israel—and it did; and to China that it could daily threaten Taiwan and send a spy balloon across the United States with impunity—and it did.

The result was the current global chaos perhaps not seen since the late 1930s when a confused United States was similarly a bystander to the rise of bellicose regimes and wars. The Biden administration shrugged that the Red Sea, the Black Sea, the South China Sea, the Straits of Hormuz, and the Eastern Mediterranean Sea all became dangerous to the U.S. Navy and unsafe to world shipping.

A disparate group of nuclear and near-nuclear powers—Russia, China, North Korea, and Iran—are either at war with Western allies or threatening war with them. Their confidence was predicated on the assumption that the U.S. after 2020 was engaged in a Maoist-like cultural revolution that warred on its own security, energy, military, universities, and social unity—and would continue with a second Biden term.

The Biden-era cultural revolution has done great damage to the United States. The U.S. border was systematically and deliberately destroyed to allow some 10-12 million illegal entrants to pour into the U.S. without legality or background checks. Never has an outgoing administration spitefully sold taxpayer-purchased border wall material for pennies on the dollar—rather than see it used for the purposes for which it was purchased.

Never had the U.S. experienced such an immigrant surge. And never had more than 50 million, and over 15 percent of the resident American population been foreign-born.

Why did Biden and Alejandro Mayorkas erase the border? What madness and hate drove them to dismantle federal immigration law? Was it sheer nihilism? Or a desperate but calculated effort to alter American demography for political purposes?

For four years, the public, elected officials, and pundits have all warned that Joe Biden was dangerously cognitively challenged and indeed completely unfit to fulfill the duties of the presidency.

A long-suffering nation winced as Biden slurred his words, spoke in unintelligible sound bites, stood frozen and mute, screamed at and libeled half the country, tripped, fell, wandered aimlessly, became bewildered, and more or less proved a global embarrassment. All knew Biden was not able to run the country; yet none knew exactly who was actually in charge of America in his stead. The Obamas? Leftists like Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, the Squad, Jill Biden, and the Biden staff?

Our allies worried that the usually resilient American president was now all but demented. Our enemies enjoyed these leaderless years of opportunity. And the left serially misled the public that the decrepit Biden, whom they feared in private was senile, was “dynamic,” “energic,” and “fit as a fiddle.”

Never has a president so deserved to be removed by the 25^th Amendment or through impeachment and conviction. And never has even his inner circle finally but silently agreed as they left office, the very enablers who had done their political best to mask his dementia for four long years.

Rarely have the FBI, the CIA, the IRS, the Department of Justice, and the Pentagon become weaponized and so flagrantly and with impunity broken the law, abandoned their mission statements, and served political agendas rather than the American people. Not since the J. Edgar Hoover era has the FBI hierarchy serially lied under oath, stonewalled Congress, forged a court affidavit, or partnered with the media to suppress the news. Has the FBI ever raided an ex-president’s home, spied on parents at school board meetings, monitored Catholics, or tried to terrify and harass pro-life activists?

Never has the justice system, from local to state to national jurisdictions, so systematically and coordinately, sought to bankrupt, render inert, and jail an ex-president and current presidential candidate.

Never has a presidential family so brazenly profited by selling its influence to foreign interests. Never has it used the powers of the FBI and DOJ to cover up its crimes and to ensure the family filial bagman would be for years exempted by the DOJ and later pardoned by the president himself, the father of the family miscreant and privy to the family syndicate’s illegal activities.

Seldom has a president and his administration sought to fuel a veritable cultural revolution to change the fabric of the nation by institutionalizing a third, transexual gender, violating civil rights law, and systematically admitting, hiring, and promoting Americans on the basis of their race and gender.

Never since the Civil War era had local and state insurrectionist governments established 600 nullification zones, in which they vowed to break federal law and consider it null and void within their jurisdictions. Never have rioters looted, burned, killed, assaulted, and occupied large swaths of cities for over 120 days, and largely with impunity.

Never had the U.S. Treasury borrowed so much money so quickly and owed $37 in national debt—and been so intent on borrowing continuously nearly $2 trillion a year in annual deficits.

Never has a political party sought to systematically violate long-standing traditions, customs, and often the law itself to destroy a political opponent: hiring a foreign national to spread smears among the media and bureaucracies, impeaching a president twice, trying an ex-president in the Senate, seeking to remove a presidential candidate from 16 state ballots, using five different judicial jurisdictions to try an ex-president, and serially so defaming a candidate and ex-president as a dictator, fascist, and Nazi to create a climate that encouraged two near-miss assassination attempts on him.

In sum, for the last four years, the world has watched aghast as the United States lost its collective mind and became a radical Jacobin revolutionary society.

So why is there not a sense of almost ecstatic relief, not just among conservatives but even among Democrats, that the years of darkness and madness are ending?

The global public believes that the United States will again become lawful, have a secure border, return as a beacon of free-market economics, protect its allies, deter its enemies, win over its neutrals, return to the rule of law, restore the professionalism and prestige of its government agencies, check predatory nations abroad with a new deterrent military, and prepare to lead the world in energy production, exploration of space, and scientific and technology development.

Summed up, the welcomed counterrevolution is one of restoration—to dream again that nothing is impossible, and the dreary age of stasis, envy, cynicism, and nihilism is ending, replaced again by a world without limits. No one knows quite what is ahead, but all know that it is at least better already than the current nightmare. [source]

I hope so. The adults are back in power. So, that's good. Now, if the Left can let go of their hatred of President Trump, the country (and them) will be better for it. Another thought-provoking article by Victor Davis Hanson.

Six Ways Socialism is Anti-Social

From Lawrence W. Reed on FEE.org (Dec. 4, 2022):

Here’s a question for a PhD dissertation: How did something so radically anti-social ever get the name, social-ism?

I leave that vexing matter to whoever wants to write it up. Meantime, I can assist the project by offering some of the reasons why socialism is a self-evidently anti-social contrivance.

First, what is socialism? For a definition, socialists themselves offer numerous moving targets. For example:

It’s happy talk and sharing things even though under socialism there’s less to share and be happy about.

It’s free stuff until the bills come due.

It’s the welfare state, where the politicians get well and the rest of us pay the fare. (See “John Calhoun’s Mouse Utopia and Reflections on the Welfare State”).

It’s bread lines that bring us all together, somehow. Remember that Bernie Sanders once proclaimed that people lining up for food in communist countries was a blessing in disguise.

It’s government ownership of the means of production so the economy can hum with the efficiency of the Department of Motor Vehicles.

It’s when workers run the factories that somebody else invested in.

It’s when clueless elites tell the economy what to do.

It’s Scandinavia (which isn’t socialist).

It’s communal utopia where everybody gets an equal portion regardless of effort, until they nearly starve. The Pilgrims tried it until forced to replace it with private property. (See also “The Dark Side of Paradise: A Brief History of America’s Utopian Experiments in Communal Living”).

It’s Venezuela, or it was Venezuela until it didn’t work.

If it seems like socialists don’t really know what it is, that’s only partly true. In most cases, they just don’t want YOU to know what it really is. The best charlatans are always the clever ones.

Socialism is rightly and widely perceived as diametrically opposed to capitalism. So it can’t possibly be acts of caring, sharing, giving and being compassionate toward the needy. There is demonstrably more caring, sharing, giving, and compassion toward the needy under capitalism!

Even when it comes to foreign aid, capitalist countries are the donors and socialist countries are the recipients. You can’t give it away or share it with anybody if you don’t create it in the first place, and socialism offers utterly no theory of wealth creation, only wealth confiscation and consumption.

Another way to think of the distinctions between these two opposing systems is this: Capitalism is what happens when free and peaceful people are left alone. In that sense, it’s natural and spontaneous. Socialism is nothing more than the presumptuous plans of bullies and know-it-alls who impose their plans at gunpoint. In that sense, it’s unnatural, contrived, arbitrary and officious.

Socialists are math-challenged: They’re good at division and subtraction but are unaware of addition or multiplication. If your second grader tells you that 3 + 2 = 1, you know he’s a future socialist. Likewise if he tells you that taxes on cigarettes discourage smoking but taxes on investing, hiring or starting a business have only beneficial effects. The economics knowledge of socialists is even more dismal: They think supply and demand means the people demand and the government supplies.

In my book, Was Jesus a Socialist? I blew away the smoke bombs to reveal what socialism really is:

It is the concentration of power in the hands of the State, which then deploys legal force for one or more of these purposes (and usually all three to one extent or another): the redistribution of income, government ownership of property, and the central planning of economic life.

Note that socialists do not propose to accomplish their objectives by mutual consent. They do not advocate raising the money for their plans by way of bake sales or charitable solicitations. Your participation is not voluntary. From start to finish, socialism’s defining characteristic is not so much the promises meant to beguile but rather, the method by which it implements its agenda—FORCE. If it’s voluntary, it’s not socialism. It’s that simple. [read more]

Socialism is definitely evil. Anti-God.

Here are the reasons socialism is anti-social:

• The Plans of Socialists Are More Important Than Yours
• Socialists Are Know-It-Alls and Know-Nothings, Simultaneously
• Socialism Rejects Biological Science
• Socialists Call the Cops for Everything
• Socialism Is Anti-Capital
• Conflict Is Their God

How a US lab created energy with fusion—again

From Pop Sci.com (Aug. 13, 2023):

About eight months ago, scientists at a US-government-funded lab replicated the process that powers stars—nuclear fusion—and created more energy than they put in. Now, physicists and engineers at the same facility, the National Ignition Facility (NIF) at Northern California’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, appear to have successfully created an energy-gaining fusion experiment for the second time.

NIF’s latest achievement is a step closer—the second step down a very long road—to a dream of fusion providing the world with clean, abundant energy. There is a long way to go before a fusion power plant opens in your city. But scientists are optimistic.

“It indicates that the scientists at [NIF] and their collaborators understand what happened back in December well enough that they have been able to make it happen again,” says John Pasley, a fusion scientist at York University in the UK who wasn’t part of this experiment.

NIF declined to comment, noting that the facility’s scientists had not yet formally presented their results. Until that happens, there’s a lot we won’t know about the specifics of the experiment, which took place on July 30.

There are multiple ways of achieving fusion, and NIF works with one, called inertial confinement fusion (ICF). In NIF’s setup, a high-powered laser beam splits into 192 smaller beams, showering a capsule that scientists call a hohlraum. Inside the hohlraum’s walls, this barrage spawns X-rays that crash into the capsule’s filling: a pellet of deuterium and tritium, super-squeezing it at temperatures and pressures more intense than the sun’s, initiating fusion.

The goal of all this work is to pass the break-even point and create more energy than the laser puts in: an achievement that fusion scientists call gain. In December’s experiment, 2.05 megajoules of laser beams elicited 3.15 megajoules of fusion energy. We won’t know for sure until NIF releases its data, but unnamed sources told the Financial Times that this second success created even greater gain. [read more]

Nice! Hopefully, the lab can scale up the fusion.

US researchers develop revolutionary 'cancer-killing' pill

From J Post.com (Aug. 2, 2023):

US researchers at City of Hope have found a new way to treat cancer via a targeted chemotherapy pill that can kill solid tumors, according to a recent study.

The findings of this study were published in the peer-reviewed academic journal Cell Chemical Biology.

The drug in question, dubbed AOH1996, works by targeting a specific cancerous protein variant called a proliferating cell nuclear antigen (PCNA).

This protein is vital in DNA being able to replicate and therefore tumors being able to spread.

How does AOH1996 help treat cancer?

This is where AOH1996 differs from other targeted cancer treatments. Most others tend to focus just on a single pathway. However, that method can result in the cancer mutating and becoming more resistant to treatment.

"PCNA is like a major airline terminal hub containing multiple plane gates. Data suggests PCNA is uniquely altered in cancer cells, and this fact allowed us to design a drug that targeted only the form of PCNA in cancer cells. Our cancer-killing pill is like a snowstorm that closes a key airline hub, shutting down all flights in and out only in planes carrying cancer cells," said City of Hope Prof. Linda Malkas in a statement. 

"Results have been promising. AOH1996 can suppress tumor growth as a monotherapy or combination treatment in cell and animal models without resulting in toxicity. The investigational chemotherapeutic is currently in a Phase 1 clinical trial in humans at City of Hope."

In tests, AOH1996 was found to be useful in treating breast, prostate, brain, ovarian, cervical, skin, and lung cancers. It selectively kills cells by disrupting how those cells reproduce. This process is known as apoptosis and it prevents cells with damaged DNA from spreading throughout the body.

More clinical trials are slated to help test this drug for future use.

"No one has ever targeted PCNA as a therapeutic because it was viewed as 'undruggable,' but clearly City of Hope was able to develop an investigational medicine for a challenging protein target," said Long Gu, lead author of the study and an associate research professor in the Department of Molecular Diagnostics and Experimental Therapeutics at Beckman Research Institute of City of Hope.

"We discovered that PCNA is one of the potential causes of increased nucleic acid replication errors in cancer cells. Now that we know the problem area and can inhibit it, we will dig deeper to understand the process to develop more personalized, targeted cancer medicines." [source]

Nice. Hope the drug is a success and gets approved.

Joe Biden and Iran

From Bill O’Reilly.com (Dec. 17):

In a largely unreported story, the Biden administration unfroze another $10 billion dollars so the Mullahs in Iran could have a nice Christmas.  Of course, the fundamental Islamists don't believe in Christmas, and if you do, you're an infidel.

That makes around $100 billion that Joe Biden has allowed to flow into Tehran. That money was frozen in banks around the world after Iran refused to stop exporting terrorism.  They still lead the league in that death sport, but Joe doesn't seem to mind very much.   What's next, pardoning the terror killers?

Sorry, I mentioned it.

The Biden administration says all that cash will be used for "humanitarian" concerns. Sure. Don't know about you, but when I hear the word Iran, I immediately think of a benevolent government aiding those in need, and the country's nuke program is simply to provide clean energy.  Right, Joe?

Joe?  Helloooo. 

Like the open border, there is no rational reason to help the crazed Mullahs amass billions.  It will become blood money.

Somebody gently awaken President Biden and tell him.

See you this evening for the No Spin News. [source]

Stupid and potentially dangerous.  Briben just doesn't care about America's national security. This is what happens when appeasers are in power.

The Folks Saved America

From Bill O’Reilly.com (Dec. 1):

Having traveled to 86 countries, I believe the United States is, indeed, the land of opportunity - By A LOT, as Donald Trump might say.

Many people on Earth agree.  Millions are trying to get here.  No one is sneaking into Russia, China, or even Mexico, for that matter.  The pathway to success is "El Norte."

t's all about the long and winding road to personal freedom and economic success. We have that lane here.  But it is being threatened by the far left which believes that life outcomes must be dictated by a central government.

More than 74 million people voted for Kamala Harris, a politician who joined with socialist Bernie Sanders in an effort to allow the federal government to run America's health care system.  Do you think those voters have any idea what kind of medical chaos would arise from bureaucrats making healthcare decisions for them?

No, they don't.

Canada has just 41 million citizens, and its Ottawa-based healthcare system is plagued by enormous wait times as well as incompetent management.  We have 330 million citizens down here.  Math is instructive.

The truth is most Americans are clueless when it comes to understanding that the more a citizen depends on government, the less freedom that person actually has. I don't want to live in a country where pinheads dictate and impose an ideologically driven lifestyle on me and my family.

Benjamin Franklin didn't want that either and cajoled his compatriots into constructing a constitution that promoted self-reliance, achievement, individualism.

Today, the progressive movement seeks to deconstruct Franklin's vision.

The 77 million Americans who voted for Donald Trump stopped the far-left zealots cold.  Harris, Biden, Pelosi, the corporate TV media, Hollywood, and the newspaper industry were all badly battered by the election outcome.  Recovery is doubtful. Good.

The strength of America is not government but strong, well-intentioned individuals.  President Biden will go down in history as a weak leader whose only problem-solving solution was massive spending and imposing onerous regulations and taxation.  That equation spiked consumer prices, leading to the collapse of the Democratic Party.

Had she been elected, Vice President Harris would have been worse.

Finally, there is an arrogance in the progressive movement that is simply appalling. To have Hollywood nitwits tell the foreign press that Trump supporters are idiots is beyond the pale.  I voted for Trump and can tell you there is not one entertainer in this country, not one, who could best me in a political debate.

The offer is on the table.

So, this Thanksgiving I said a prayer of gratitude for the voters who have saved the country from massive dysfunction and equity-driven unfairness.  You guys stopped the madness.

And I thank God you did. [source]

Yes, we did. Thank God Trump got back in. Good article.

Don’t Confuse Trusting the Experts with Knowing the Facts

From Patrick Carroll on FEE.org (Dec. 2, 2022):

If someone were to ask you how you know Australia exists, what would you say? If you haven’t been there yourself, it can be a surprisingly difficult question to answer. You might point to your grade school geography teacher who first told you about the country. “I know it exists because my teacher told me it exists,” you might say. Alternatively, you might mention a friend of yours who has visited the country and can testify to its existence. Finally, you might point out that you’ve consulted an atlas and confirmed that the country does, in fact, appear on the map.

Though each of these justifications may sound compelling, they all lean on a critical linchpin: trust. “Trust me,” your teacher says, “I’ve looked into this.” “Trust me,” your friend says, “I saw it with my own eyes.” “Trust us,” the atlas publishers say, “we’ve consulted the experts.”

To be sure, these are often trustworthy sources, but it’s important to acknowledge that in some fundamental sense you are choosing to believe what others have told you. If you’ve never verified it yourself, you don’t really know Australia exists, you just trust that it exists.

Trust and Authority

The reason this question is important is that it reveals to us just how much we defer to authority in our thinking. It’s easy to regard ourselves as being incredibly knowledgeable, but if we’re honest, it’s much more that we’re incredibly trusting. We have accepted what “authority” has told us in just about every domain, and with very little pushback.

C.S. Lewis drew attention to this phenomenon in his book Mere Chrstianity. Indeed, the following passage is what inspired the present article.

“Do not be scared by the word authority. Believing things on authority only means believing them because you have been told them by someone you think is trustworthy. Ninety-nine per cent of the things you believe are believed on authority. I believe there is such a place as New York. I have not seen it myself. I could not prove by abstract reasoning that there must be such a place. I believe it because reliable people have told me so. The ordinary man believes in the Solar System, atoms, evolution, and the circulation of the blood on authority — because the scientists say so. Every historical statement in the world is believed on authority. None of us has seen the Norman Conquest or the defeat of the Armada. None of us could prove them by pure logic as you prove a thing in mathematics. We believe them simply because people who did see them have left writings that tell us about them: in fact, on authority. A man who jibbed at authority in other things as some people do in religion would have to be content to know nothing all his life.”

As Lewis points out, there’s nothing wrong with believing things on authority. We do it all the time, and it helps us make our way in the world.

But while there’s nothing inherently wrong with trusting various sources, I’d argue we tend to be a bit too trusting as a culture. We take authorities at their word, even when we probably shouldn’t.

The whole COVID fiasco is surely a great example of this. How much evidence did it take to convince the average person to get the vaccine? Embarrassingly little. People also bought into lockdowns and mask mandates simply because some “experts” said these policies were a good idea.

The climate change issue is another great example of how much we put blind trust in intellectual authorities. Since most of us have no expertise in the matter, we resign ourselves to taking the experts at their word. But it’s ok, we are assured, because “97 percent of climate scientists agree.” Since we know there’s a “consensus” we can trust them, right?

Not so fast. Ask yourself, do you really know there’s a 97 percent consensus? Did you look at the raw data regarding expert’s opinions yourself? If you haven’t, then on this too you are deferring to authority. You are trusting the source of that 97 percent figure. Specifically, you are trusting that the people who came up with that figure aren’t misleading you and that their collection and representation of the data on expert’s views is reasonable, unbiased, accurate, and complete.

Remember, you don’t actually know that 97 percent of climate scientists agree, you trust that 97 percent of climate scientists agree. (As it happens, this figure is more dubious than most people realize).

Again, there’s nothing wrong with trust. But we need to be careful of trusting too easily, because things are not always what they are reported to be. [read more]

Good advice. Also, the track record of the expert counts too. How wrong or right has the expert been in the past? Experts like everyone else are imperfect. They can make mistakes, lie, or even distort the truth or their own advice.