[Defense attorney] Richards reportedly said it is “preposterous” that the FBI allegedly lost the footage. Thomas Binger, the lead prosecutor, then told [Judge] Schroeder in regard to the FBI’s plane footage, that “the federal government is not under our control.”
Boy, that’s the truth.
Having the news media as a yes man is dangerous.
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Having the whole news media on your side is often helpful — such as when Joe Biden enjoyed a media blackout on his son’s influence-peddling. But when it convinces you that issues matter that don’t, or that issues don’t matter that do, it’s a handicap.As Ben Shapiro put it the other day when Juan Williams floated this same theory, "Please, Democrats, make this your platform for 2022. I'm begging you." As a winning campaign message, it's right up there with "CRT doesn't exist--and it's awesome."
The finding is part of PRRI’s 12th annual American Values Survey released Monday which, among other things, highlights the continued impact of the same falsehoods and conspiracy theories...
If that's where you're starting from, of course you can't see the truth. At this point it's obvious that election laws were widely violated, and the Constitution ignored. What remains to be decided is whether a legitimate election can ever be held again; or, if not, what that means.
This is from a roadside stand near the forks of the French Broad River, where there's a nice taproom and occasionally a good food truck called Mama Bear's (although she's going offline for the winter starting tomorrow to pursue motherhood rather than food-truckery). It may be technically in the Pisgah Ranger district rather than one of the Nantahala ones, as the border between those is right about here. The road that runs up to the Blue Ridge Parkway from this spot also serves as the border between the Middle Prong Wilderness and the Shining Rock Wilderness.
Granted, fall down here may last a month, week, or happen intermittently between October and February. Still it was a great day to take the DR out. This is on the Brazos river.
“Once literacy on the extremist underpinnings of strategic humour is established, the next step is to closely monitor dynamics around far-right meme cultures,” the [EU] report states. “Online cultures quickly develop into extremist movements, as seen in the conspiracy cult around QAnon and the anti-government militia in the United States known as the boogaloo movement.”Wait--there's an anti-government militia movement called boogaloo? Should I have known about this already? I'm beginning to doubt my chaotic fascist bona fides, though I've been carrying a "Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy" card in my wallet since the first Clinton administration.
The term boogaloo alludes to the 1984 sequel film Breakin' 2: Electric Boogaloo, which was derided by critics as a derivative rehash. Subsequently, appending "2: Electric Boogaloo" to a name became a jocular verbal template for any kind of sequel, especially one that strongly mimics the original. The boogaloo movement adopted its identity based on the anticipation of a second American Civil War or second American Revolution, which was referred to as "Civil War 2: Electric Boogaloo" and became popularly known among adherents as "the boogaloo".
Participants in the boogaloo movement also use other similar-sounding derivations of the word, including boog, boojahideen, big igloo, blue igloo, and big luau to avoid crackdowns and automated content flags imposed by social media sites to limit or ban boogaloo-related content. Intensified efforts by social media companies to restrict boogaloo content have caused adherents to use terms even further detached from the original word such as spicy fiesta to refer to the movement. The boogaloo movement has created logos and other imagery incorporating igloo snow huts and Hawaiian prints based on these derivations. Adherents of the boogaloo sometimes carry black-and-white versions of the American flag, with a middle stripe replaced with a stripe of red tropical print and the stars replaced with an igloo. The stripes sometimes list the names of people who have been killed by police, including Eric Garner, Vicki Weaver, Robert LaVoy Finicum, Breonna Taylor, and Duncan Lemp.
Adherents attend protests heavily armed and wearing tactical gear, and sometimes identify themselves by wearing Hawaiian shirts along with military fatigues. The boogaloo movement has also used imagery popular among the far-right such as the Pepe the Frog meme.So, if I have this right, Hawaiian shirts now carry a sinister meaning, especially if mixed with fatigues and memes and anything with "loo" in it, such as "igloo." (The Wiki piece helpful clarifies that the reference is to a "snow hut," but I imagine that a properly labeled camping cooler might do.) Even a swatch of fabric with a tropical pattern may serve as the secret handshake. "Big luau" is a good one, mixing the sounds of "boogaloo" and "igloo." I think I now understand the appeal of an increase in articles about Boolean analysis. Bootleg? Bu Lu Lemon? I see a huge future in merch.
Earlier this month, Fairfax County, Virginia... previewed the attacks on election integrity likely planned for the midterm cycle of 2022 and beyond. There, election officials in the deep-blue county approved absentee and mail-in ballot applications lacking the statutorily mandated last four digits of the voter’s Social Security number, then promptly mailed these unauthenticated individuals ballots for next Tuesday’s election.
Judge Andrew Oldham dissented from the Fifth Circuit’s decision. In concluding the case was not moot, Oldham, a Donald Trump appointee, highlighted the supplemental letter brief submitted by the county. “Harris County not only refused to disclaim unlawful drive-through voting for future elections — it promised to continue that practice,” Judge Oldham wrote.Oldman continued, “Harris County has taken the remarkable position that it (1) wholly ignored provisions of the Texas Election Code in 2020, and (2) can continue wholly ignoring those provisions in future elections — notwithstanding the Legislature’s express instructions to the contrary.”
Make it a crime for an election official to mail a ballot to a resident if the application submitted fails to satisfy the requirements set by the legislative branch. Make it a crime for an election official to provide a ballot to a resident if he or she lacks the mandated identification. Make it a crime for an election official to count a ballot if it is returned beyond the legislatively established deadline.Line-by-line review the election code and for every mandate make clear that ignoring it means a fine or imprisonment. Then authorize the state legislature to appoint a special counsel to prosecute the offense if a local prosecutor refuses.
There's more, but that last line is crucial: the executive branch will simply refuse to prosecute crimes it wants to encourage. We saw that yesterday in Wisconsin, and it has become standard practice in many cities and a few states.
Roger Pielke unwraps the brand-new IPCC report:
For my technical readers, the scenarios judged unlikely by the IPCC are high emission (“such as RCP8.5 or SSP5-8.5”) and the scenarios “in line” with current policies are intermediate scenarios (“RCP4.5, RCP6.0 and SSP2-4.5”).
This is huge news. Fantastic in fact. Why? The extreme scenario RCP8.5 was in the most recent IPCC report identified as our most likely future. Now IPCC has completely reversed that, and it is now considered low likelihood. There could not be a more profound change in the scenario foundation of climate science.
Instead of apocalyptic warnings about “immediate risk” a top line message of this report should be: Great News! The Extreme Scenario that IPCC Saw as Most Likely in 2013 is Now Judged Low Likelihood. I am actually floored that this incredible change in such a short time apparently hasn’t even been noticed, much less broadcast around the world.
Maybe it's a sign of creeping old age to have lived long enough to see the better part of a century lurch from one racist extreme to another. Don't get me wrong: it's always been obvious that you can identify human genetic groups with striking differences in their averages according to an impressive variety of measurements, from height to intelligence to resistance to different diseases. Racism is something different: an insistence that race, however defined, is a reliable basis for assessing human worth and a proper basis for rigid social and political ringwalls around individuals regardless of their actual traits and behavior. As a shorthand, I think of it as dreaming up of reasons why Jews can't be admitted to good universities or hired by good law firms. You have to be an incipient geezer like myself even to remember when excluding Jews didn't make most people scratch their heads in bewilderment--but the same people who've forgotten the treatment of the Jews in the not-all-that-distant past often have little difficulty swallowing an explanation for why universities and law firms must now employ similar practices to enforce quotas against whites or Asians. (I leave aside for the moment the resurgence of bare-faced Jew-hatred.)
Decades ago I read and enjoyed "Guns, Germs and Steel." That was near the beginning of the online discussion age, so I was unprepared for the bizarre debate that broke out in the Amazon review section. Back then, as I recall, the fury was provoked by Jared Diamond's undervaluing the virtue of superior cultures, which led him to use environmental determinism to explain variances in success among ancient genetic/geographical groups. Certainly his analysis was flawed in many ways, but not in its basic curiosity about the impact of the regional availability of suitable crops and animals for domestication, or suitable East-West migration routes for expansion without encountering radically different growing conditions.
It's amusing now to discover that a new crop of critics detests Diamond for his failure to acknowledge that the only acceptable alternative to the racial superiority explanation is racial oppression. Diamond is no more a racial supremacist than he is blind to horrifying clashes between genetic groups, but he has sinned against his culture by opting to consider any other factors at all. For the most part we appear nearly incapable of imagining that a lot of things can be going on in a clash between cultures, from bigotry to luck to disparities in cultural competence--and that none of these factors proves a moral superiority in either the culture or the individual hearts of the victors or the vanquished.
Wisconsin's Racine County Sheriff is partially just restating what we already knew from the Time Magazine article: several states violated their own laws in the 2020 elections. It is news, however, that officials ordered citizens to go along with violating the laws. Nursing homes across the state, for example, were ordered to comply with the election law violations.
The US Constitution says that states or Congress shall set the laws governing the conduct of elections; instead, such laws were violated in favor of the edicts of bureaucrats and governors. The election was consequently illegitimate, root and branch, in all such states. There appears to be no remedy for this.
UPDATE: The Sheriff says that the state Attorney General has rejected calls for an investigation at the state level. No charges are being brought at this time by prosecutors.
UPDATE: This is a slam-dunk case with hard evidence.
The investigation focused on abuse of voters confined to nursing homes and assisted living facilities. Investigators discovered that Wisconsin Election Officials expressly discussed that their proposed conduct for the 2020 election would violate state law, and yet they decided to do it anyway. They memorialized their decision in a letter they wrote and disseminated to every single county clerk’s office in Wisconsin.
Sheriff Schamling stated that officials indicated that they “needed the flexibility to violate the law,” and that they needed to “instruct county clerks to break the law.” Despite the blatant absurdity of the statements, the express illegality of their activities, and the fact that they were all being recorded on their Zoom meeting, election officials went ahead and violated the law anyway. The sheriff’s office played the video from the Zoom meeting of the commissioners discussing their need to break the law and instruct others to do the same.
Emphasis added. They estimate somewhere between fifty and a hundred thousand fraudulent votes from this activity alone, in a state Biden allegedly won by only twenty thousand.
After Sen. Richard Burr of North Carolina dumped more than $1.6 million in stocks in February 2020 a week before the coronavirus market crash, he called his brother-in-law, according to a new Securities and Exchange Commission filing.They talked for 50 seconds.Burr, according to the SEC, had material nonpublic information regarding the incoming economic impact of coronavirus.The very next minute, Burr’s brother-in-law, Gerald Fauth, called his broker.
