Category: Essays And Commentaries

Long essays or op-ed length commentaries on the issues of the day or on topics of special interest.

Is last week’s Biden-Trump debate a game-changing moment or not?

2:04 pm

Joe Biden at his February 2024 press conference
Joe Biden at his February 2024 press conference
after Justice Department special counsel Robert Hur
revealed he could not indict Biden of criminal misuse
of classified materials because Biden was “an elder
man with poor memory.”

In my life I have seen three moments in politics that appeared to change everything. In two of those cases, the appearance turned out to be true. In the third, in the end nothing changed, to the sad detriment of our country.

Last week’s debate between president Joe Biden and former president Donald Trump appears to be another such potential game-changing event. The change however will not be whether Joe Biden will be the candidate when the election finally rolls around in November, or whether even if he will win or lose the election.

The change, should it happen, will be much more funadmental. I come at this from the point of view of a historian, so bear with me as I attempt to explain.

Of the previous three game-changing moments, the first was the Watergate hearings in 1973. For months prior to those hearings, Republican politicians from all levels of government fought aggressively and with some success the accusations that president Richard Nixon had been involved in the Watergate break-in and the planning of the “dirty tricks” campaign against George McGovern leading up to the 1972 election.

The Watergate hearings however were a game-changer. It forced the entire Republican party to end its unqualified support of Nixon. The hearings, which were televised live each day and covered extensively by the press, were seen by everyone, and showed without doubt the extensive nature of Nixon’s dirty trick activity. It also illustrated bluntly the amount of duplicity and lying that Nixon and his cohorts were willing to do to defend themselves.

Unlike today, in the 1970s the American public did not tolerate lying by their politicians. Though the hearings ended in late June 1973, and Nixon held on until August 1974 before resigning, it was those hearings that ended his popularity and creditability. It was also those hearings that destroyed the creditability of the Republican Party at that time. Too many of them had backed Nixon blindly before the hearings, and were exposed themselves by those hearings as sycophants and toadies. The result: The Republican Party was wiped-out in the 1974 elections, with the Democrats gaining 53 seats in the House, 4 seats in the Senate, and 4 additional governorships.

The second game-changer occurred during the Iran-Contra affair in 1987 against Ronald Reagan. » Read more

39 comments

Sixteen Nobel economists once again prove that our “expert” class is expert at nothing

1:57 pm

Our modern intellectual class
Our modern intellectual class

Earlier this week a group of sixteen Nobel laureate economists issued a public letter endorsing Joe Biden’s economic agenda and claiming that a return of Donald Trump to the White House would lead to economic ruin.

“We believe that a second Trump term would have a negative impact on the U.S.’s economic standing in the world, and a destabilizing effect on the U.S.’s domestic economy,” the economists write in the letter. “Many Americans are concerned about inflation, which has come down remarkably fast. There is rightly a worry that Donald Trump will reignite this inflation, with his fiscally irresponsible budgets.”

You can read their letter here. It was signed by the following (the date of their Nobel award in parenthesis):

George A. Akerlof (2001), Sir Angus Deaton (2015), Claudia Goldin (2023), Sir Oliver Hart (2016), Eric S. Maskin (2007), Daniel L. McFadden (2000), Paul R. Milgrom (2020), Roger B. Myerson (2007), Edmund S. Phelps (2006), Paul M. Romer (2018), Alvin E. Roth (2012), William F. Sharpe (1990), Robert J. Shiller (2013), Christopher A. Sims (2011), Joseph Stiglitz (2001), and Robert B. Wilson (2020).

What is hilarious about their letter is how it exposes these so-called economic giants as partisan hacks. A dive into their campaign contributions finds that eleven are donors to Joe Biden or the Democrats, while the remaining five have all previously endorsed Biden publicly. Before the 2020 election two of these sixteen economists signed a similar letter, calling for Joe Biden’s election, claiming he would “…build an economy that works for all Americans.” In 2021 thirteen of these same economists then followed up with another letter, endorsing all of Biden’s spending proposals then before Congress (costing an expected $1.9 trillion).

A comparison between the claims in all three letters and what actually happened also reveals how little these economists know about economics. As noted at this City Journal article by James Piereson:
» Read more

15 comments

More garbage science about wildfires and global warming from Nature

12:31 pm

Nature: the science journal that no longer does real science
The science journal which no longer
understands how real science is done

The once highly respected science journal Nature continues its descent into propaganda and bad science, all because it bows unskeptically before the altar of global warming and leftist science fantasies.

Today’s example is an article this week entitled “You’re not imagining it: extreme wildfires are now more common,” describing a new Nature paper that attempted to use satellite data to prove that the intensity of wildfires has increased in the past two decades.

For the current study, published in Nature Ecology and Evolution on 24 June, Cunningham and his colleagues scoured global satellite data for fire activity. They used infrared records to measure the energy intensity of nearly 31 million daily fire events over two decades, focusing on the most extreme ones — roughly 2,900 events. The researchers calculated that there was a 2.2-fold increase in the frequency of extreme events globally in 2003–23, and a 2.3-fold boost in the average intensity of the top 20 most intense fires each year.

We’re all gonna die! As is usual for these crap climate-related studies, the entire goal is to drum up some manufactured new crisis that justifies the claim that the climate is warming. This study is no different, as the article eagerly notes:

Although the study doesn’t directly connect the fire trend to global warming, Cunningham [the study’s lead author] says “there’s almost certainly a significant signal of climate change”. Research has shown that rising temperatures are drying out ecosystems — such as coniferous forests — that are naturally prone to fire. This provides fuel that can boost the fires’ size and longevity. The latest study also found that the energy intensity of the fires increased faster during the night-time over the past two decades than during the daytime, which aligns with evidence4 that rising night-time temperatures are contributing to fire risk.

Not surprisingly, the New York Times immediately jumped on the bandwagon with its own article that accepts the conclusions of this research with utter naivety.

What junk. First, Cunningham fails to note this minor fact mentioned in the abstract of his own paper:
» Read more

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Just remember: These obnoxious disturbers of the peace are all Democrats

12:46 pm

They’re coming for you next: In what is actually a relatively mild example of the obnoxious and almost always illegal protests by pro-Hamas supporters — such as taking over and trashing buildings, attacking Jews and blind children, and blocking traffic — for the past six months protesters have been disturbing the peace at late evening and early morning hours in the residential neighborhood where senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas) lives with his family in Houston.

For the past 6 months, anti-Israel protestors have come to my home just about every Sat morning at 7 am and most Fri nights until 10 or 11 pm. They scream, disturb the peace & wake the neighbors.

I have embedded below the video of these protesters that Cruz included with his tweet:
» Read more

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Bill Anders, the thoughtful astronaut who liked to go fast

12:27 pm

Bill Anders suiting up for the December 1968 launch of Apollo 8
Bill Anders suiting up for the December 1968
launch of Apollo 8

The death of Apollo 8 astronaut Bill Anders on June 7, 2024 requires that I give the public my own personal taste of the man, whom I met and interviewed when I was writing my 1998 history of the Apollo 8 mission to the Moon, Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8.

The first time I met Bill Anders was in 1997. Anders had told me to fly into Los Angeles for our first interview. A few days before my arrival, however, his wife Valerie realized that both she and Anders would not be in Los Angeles, but in San Diego.

Rather than have me change flights, Anders agreed to drive up to LA, pick me up at the airport, and drive me to San Diego so I could interview Valerie. During the two hour drive I would be able to interview him.

Anders was waiting for me as I exited the terminal. As I have noticed routinely, he seemed much smaller than I expected, as does every astronaut at first meeting. Anders guided me to a low-slung sports car, which he slid into with ease. I — being 6′ 4″ — had to crowbar my way in.

And then Anders demonstrated instantly one reason he was chosen to fly to the Moon. He started the car, and backed out of the parking space and out of the lot at what seemed to me to be about seventy miles an hour. And he did it with total control.
» Read more

12 comments

SpaceX successfully launches and lands Starship and Superheavy

7:20 am

Damaged but working flap on Starship
Damaged but working flap on Starship

SpaceX this morning successfully launched and landed both Starship and Superheavy in the ocean, with both vehicles splashing down in a vertical position as planned.

Some quick details:

  • One engine on Superheavy failed during launch, but the vehicle completed its job, successfully releasing Starship as planned.
  • Superheavy then completed a controlled splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico, landing softly and vertically. It then tipped over into the water as planned. At this moment it is unclear how successful it was in landing precisely at its planned location. One engine during the landing burn failed.
  • Unlike the previous test, Starship flew under control for its entire flight, even though the camera view showed a flap actually begin breaking up.
  • That flap, despite damage, appeared to function through landing. The screen capture to the right was taken just before landing, as the flap adjusted its position despite the significant damage near its attachment point to the ship.
  • It appeared that Starship successfully completed its flip to vertical just before landing.
  • At landing it was unclear if the landing burn occurred as planned. It did appear the spacecraft splashed down softly, and the controllers announced the burn occurred, but the indicators on the screen showed no engine burn.

Overall, this launch was an incredible success. Based on the results, the fifth test flight should be approved by the FAA relatively quickly. The FAA’s responsibility is supposed to be limited to just issues of safety. As long as SpaceX demonstrates the rocket landed where it was intended, the FAA has no cause to delay future approvals.

If so, the next launch could occur very quickly, as the next prototypes are ready and waiting. We could see another launch within two months, at the most. I predict late July, though it could be a bit later if SpaceX engineers need more time to analyze what happened to Starship during descent and then apply that knowledge to the next prototype.

UPDATE: China also had a successful launch this morning. Pseudo-company Galactic Energy’s Ceres-1 rocket placed three satellites into orbit, lifting off from the Jiuquan spaceport in the northwest of China.

Little information was released by China’s state-run press, which didn’t even bother to mention the pseudo-company’s name in its report. The solid-fueled lower stages landed somewhere inside China, but we have no idea where or how close to habitable areas.

The leaders in the 2024 launch race:

60 SpaceX
27 China
8 Russia
7 Rocket Lab

American private enterprise now leads the world combined in successful launches, 70 to 41, while SpaceX by itself leads the entire world, including other American companies, 60 to 51.

Note that for context the U.S. total at this moment, 70 launches and achieved in less than half a year, matches the nation’s previous annual record set in 1966 and held until 2022.

30 comments

Sunspot update: In May the Sun went boom!

12:43 pm

As I have done at the start of every month since I begun this webpage back in 2010, I am posting NOAA’smonthly update of its graph tracking the number of sunspots on the Sun’s Earth-facing hemisphere, adding to it several additional details to provide some larger context.

While April had showed only a small uptick in sunspot activity, in May the sunspot activity on the Sun went boom, setting a new high for sunspots during this solar maximum as well as the highest sunspot count since September 2002. The sunspot count of 171.7 smashed the previous high of 160 this cycle, set in June 2023. This new high underlined was by the large solar flare on May 9th that sent the most powerful geomagnetic storm to hit the Earth’s magnetic field in many decades, producing spectacular auroras in many low latitudes.
» Read more

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Beware the cornered rat!

1:14 pm

Trump is only in the way

The absurd guilty verdict against Donald Trump yesterday by a jury of twelve partisan New York Democrats confirms something that we should have recognized back in 2016. The Democratic Party and its partisan supporters will brook no opposition, and are willing to do anything — including throwing the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and the entire legal system in the trash can — in order to maintain their control of the government.

In 2016 they were outraged that an outsider like Donald Trump could become president, and for the next four years exhibited that irrational outrage by pushing one fake and slanderous scandal against him after another, from idiotic claims that he deprived visitors of the same portions of ice cream as he got to the utterly false accusations that he won the election due to Russian help.

To defeat him in 2020 it appears the administrative state teamed up with many Democratic Party governors to create the panic over COVID as well as the outrage over the drug overdose death of an addict during his arrest in Minnesota. The former allowed those governors and state governments to corrupt the election system.

The latter outrage over George Floyd allowed the armed wing of the Democratic Party, its BLM and Antifa thugs, to loot and riot throughout the country, thus reinforcing the absurd lockdown rules imposed because of COVID.

It remains unclear whether the the election shenanigans that followed gave Biden the victory, but any objective review of the facts and the many vote tampering allegiations put forth by numerous election officials nationwide suggests it was very possible.

Thus, Biden became president, and since then the Democrats have been on an aggressive blacklisting campaign to destroy anyone who opposed them. That campaign reached its summit yesterday with Trump’s conviction in what could be called the most ludicrous and disgusting legal case ever brought against any American. Not only can no one name the crime that Trump was supposed to have committed, the jury was given instructions that it could find him guilty even if they themselves couldn’t agree on that crime.

As expected, the public’s response to Trump’s conviction has been to increase his support. » Read more

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Solar storms are simply no longer a threat

3:39 pm

The sunspot cycle as of May 2024
The sunspot cycle as of May 2024. Click
for full details.

Today’s Chicken Little Report: When NOAA predicted on May 9, 2024 that a powerful solar flare had erupted from the Sun and was aiming a major solar storm directly at the Earth, the scientists at the federal government’s Space Weather Prediction Center could not help underlining the disaster potential, and were ably aided by the mainstream press. This CNN report was typical:

“Geomagnetic storms can impact infrastructure in near-Earth orbit and on Earth’s surface, potentially disrupting communications, the electric power grid, navigation, radio and satellite operations,” according to the Space Weather Prediction Center. “(The center) has notified the operators of these systems so they can take protective action.”

The center has notified operators in these areas to take action to mitigate the potential for any impacts, which include the possibility of increased and more frequent voltage control problems. Other aspects operators will monitor include a chance of anomalies or impacts to satellite operations and frequent or longer periods of GPS degradation.

And as always, the news report has to end with this warning of doom:
» Read more

12 comments

A Catholic threatened with blacklisting because he gave an unapologetic Catholic speech at a Catholic university to a class of Catholics: How dare he!

2:47 pm

Harrison Butker committing leftist heresy
Harrison Butker committing leftist heresy
by simply stating his basic Christian beliefs

They’re coming for you next: This week’s blacklisting kerfuffle centers on a graduation speech given by football player and Super Bowl champ Harrison Butker at Benedictine College in Atchison, Kansas on May 11, 2024.

It appears a lot of leftists and advocates of the queer agenda didn’t like what he had to say, and are pushing to have the Kansas City Chiefs fire him. A petition at change.org has already collected nearly 200,000 signatures to have the “Kansas City Chiefs management … dismiss Harrison Butker immediately for his inappropriate conduct.” On social media and within the media the outrage was just as sharp. Several tweets on X attempted to dox both Butker and his family, with one (immediately deleted) coming from the office of the mayor of Kansas City.

It got so bad that the NFL disavowed Butker, stating publicly that “his views are not those of the NFL as an organization. The NFL is steadfast in our commitment to inclusion, which only makes our league stronger.”

But what did Butker do that was so terrible? You can find out for yourself by reading the full text of his speech here. I can sum it up however quite simply: » Read more

19 comments

Why are so many conservatives such downers?

4:07 pm

Frankly, for the Joe Biden campaign these numbers are an absolute disaster
“Frankly, for the Joe Biden campaign these numbers
are an absolute disaster.” Click for full video.

In the past two weeks I have noticed two political trends within the United States, one that seems quite hopeful and another that depresses me to the bottom of my soul.

The hopeful trend has to do with the left and what appears to be a growing collapse of its political support. The pro-Hamas riots on college campuses and elsewhere have not had the impact of the 2020 Antifa and BLM riots, where those disruptions struck fear into ordinary Americans while instilling them with a deep unfounded guilt that paralyzed them into either inaction or endorsing the foolish racist policies of that BLM movement.

In 2024 the pro-Hamas riots are doing the exact opposite. They are antagonizing everyone, and highlighting the racism and violence that is presently very inherent within the modern policies of the Democratic Party. Who wants to support a party whose base justifies and supports the work of terrorist organizations like Hamas, that torture, rape, and murder of innocents, including women, children, and babies?

On top of those ugly riots, Biden’s administration in almost all things has proven to be a disaster. Inflation has been terrible, the economy has doing poorly, the illegal immigration is out-of-control and impacting not just Republican border states but the Democratically-controlled inner ciites. Internationally Biden’s weak and indecisive leadership has led to wars in the Ukraine and Middle East, with tensions rising in many other places.

The result has been disastrous polls for Joe Biden — across the board — suggesting that not only will Donald Trump win the November election, he will do so with such strong numbers it will be impossible for even the worst vote tampering by the Democrats to overthrow that victory. Those polls also suggest that the Republicans will gain a large majority in the Senate, and likely a larger renewed majority in the House.

The disaster that is Joe Biden and the viciousness of the Democratic Party base has become so evident that even some previously knee-jerk Democrats are beginning to admit to it, and are attempting to change it. They don’t seem to be succeeding, but that effort illustrates further these hopeful trendlines. If even Democrats can no longer stand what their party stands for, then there is a good chance we might finally see that party clean up its act, or die and be replaced with something more laudable.

You must then wonder: What trend could possibly exist at this time that could be depressing me to the bottom of my soul?
» Read more

24 comments

The left begins recognizing Biden is going to lose

1:08 pm

Frankly, for the Joe Biden campaign these numbers are an absolute disaster
“Frankly, for the Joe Biden campaign these numbers
are an absolute disaster.” Click for full video.

The conservative press this past weekend went gaga over a number of CNN reports that were shockingly negative about Joe Biden’s chances of winning re-election as president.

First CNN’s Fareed Zakaria reviewed the overall situation and bluntly concluded, “The trendlines are not working in Biden’s favor.” Then CNN had several reports outlining Biden’s very bad polling numbers:

The right saw these reports as confirmation from the left — which CNN represents as an operative of the leftist Democratic Party — that the campaign is not going well for Joe Biden, that the momentum right now is for Donald Trump.

What I see is something even more fundamental. The left, for the first time in almost a decade, is accepting the possibility of defeat, and these reports are an almost unprecedented effort by the left to process this possibility.
» Read more

21 comments

Biden abandons Israel to appease student rioters and help Hamas survive

12:24 pm

Joe Biden, allied with Hamas
Joe Biden, appeaser to Hamas and student rioters

The mask is off: President Joe Biden has now made it clear that if Israel moves into the southern Gazan city of Rafah in order to destroy Hamas’s last batallion of soldiers as well as its leadership, he will stop sending Israel major shipments of ammunition and bombs.

President Joe Biden said for the first time Wednesday he would halt some shipments of American weapons to Israel – which he acknowledged have been used to kill civilians in Gaza – if Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu orders a major invasion of the city of Rafah. “Civilians have been killed in Gaza as a consequence of those bombs and other ways in which they go after population centers,” Biden told CNN’s Erin Burnett in an exclusive interview on “Erin Burnett OutFront,” referring to 2,000-pound bombs that Biden paused shipments of last week.

“I made it clear that if they go into Rafah – they haven’t gone in Rafah yet – if they go into Rafah, I’m not supplying the weapons that have been used historically to deal with Rafah, to deal with the cities – that deal with that problem,” Biden said.

Let’s distill the real significance of Biden’s decision:
» Read more

12 comments

Apparently rioting in support of murderous terrorists does not win the hearts and minds of the public

1:55 pm

Hamas vs Israel
Do the protesters really believe that behaving like
Hamas will get the public to support Hamas?
Courtesy of Doug Ross.

Good news: The student protests and riots on college campuses as well as at a variety of other public events in the past month in support of the terrorist organization Hamas has apparently succeeded in only one thing: tarnishing the reputations of their universities while disqualifying their own job prospects.

It appears the public really doesn’t support anti-Semitism and the killing of all Jews in Israel. Nor have the violent riots by the protesters to destroy libraries while illegally taking over campuses done anyting to change the public’s mind.

Who wudda thought it?

Instead, the public is appalled, and is showing its disgust in the past week in very public ways. For example, yesterday thirteen federal judges announced they will no longer hire law clerks from Columbia.
» Read more

27 comments

The long delay in Israel’s final Gaza offensive has harmed everyone except the terrorists

5:32 pm

Hamas vs Israel
Even the Arabs recognize these facts.
Courtesy of Doug Ross.

Despite several months of delay forced on it by the Biden administration in its effort to placate the Democratic Party’s Islamic wing, Israel today began its final offensive against Hamas’s last Gazan stronghold in the southern city of Rafah.

According to the Israeli Defense Force (IDF), “The IDF is currently conducting targeted strikes against Hamas terror targets in eastern Rafah in southern Gaza.” It has also dropped leaflets throughout Rafah telling the general population to evacuate to the west and north into areas that Israel has set up to hold non-combatant refugees.

The initiation of this offensive is likely linked to Hamas’s actions this weekend. First Hamas proudly took credit for bombing the border crossing used to bring humanitarian aid to the city. That attack killed three Israeli soldiers, and put an end to the aid. Hamas also continued to stall and refuse to negotiate, and then when it was clear the offensive was about to start it suddenly announced it had accepted a ceasefire deal offered to it by Qatar and Egypt that Israel had no part in negotiating and had already rejected.

What will happen next is somewhat unclear. Israel will without doubt be able to take Rafah and likely eliminate the remaining four or so battalions of Hamas terrorists. Will it be able to do so without a large number of civilian casualties is unclear, as Hamas has a policy of using those civilians as shields. It will likely try to do so again.

The ramifications of the long delay in this offensive are however important. It occurred partly because Israel’s army wanted to regroup, but mostly because the Biden administration has been desperately trying to prevent it. The White House has threatened Israel in a number of ways if it moved forward with the attack, most recently by putting a hold on a shipment to Israel of ammo. Biden officials have also stated several times that they are considering a major change in its policy towards Israel if the Rafah offensive occurs.

Israel’s leader Benjamin Netanyahu has repeatedly made it clear that Israel has no intention of making any peace deal with Hamas. In the past month however it did appear the Israeli government was holding off on the offensive in order to placate the White House and hopefully work out a deal to get the hostages released.

In the end, the delay has served no good purpose, and in fact has had many negative consequences, against Biden, the Gazan people themselves, and the United States.
» Read more

5 comments

The pro-Hamas campus mobs were almost as barbaric as Hamas itself

2:29 pm

Library destroyed by pro-Hamas mob
Library destroyed by pro-Hamas mob

With the mobs of pro-Hamas protesters finally cleared from many occupied college campuses, we are now finding out just how much these rioters resembled the Hamas barbarians whose effort to murder Jews these protesters supported.

To the right is a screen capture from video taken during a short walk through of the inside of the Portland State University’s Millar Library, following the removal of the pro-Hamas rioters. The place was trashed in the most childish way. You can seem more evidence here. As noted by that report:

Paint splattered on floors. Spray-painted messages and screeds covering walls. Furniture moved and overturned. Security cameras disabled. Fire extinguishers missing and entrances blocked by stacks of chairs. “We’ve got our work cut out for us,” a facilities manager at Portland State University said Thursday as he examined the destruction left behind after a three-day occupation by pro-Palestinian protesters in Millar Library.

It also was reported that rare archival materials were stolen by the student mob.

The situation was the same at numerous universities. » Read more

12 comments

Pro-American UNC frat boys: Don’t hold a party, use the money more effectively!

2:37 pm

UNC Frat boys protecting American flag

Earlier this week a group of college students belonging to the Pi Kappa Phi fraternity at North Carolina University (UNC) put their bodies between a mob of pro-Hamas protesters and the American flag, as shown in the picture on the right. That mob had been attempting to remove Old Glory and replace it with the Palestinian flag. Video of the incident can be seen here, with the Hamas mob throwing bottles and garbage at the UNC students, while other American students circle about in-between, holding up the Israeli flag in defiance.

The story quickly went viral in the conservative press. Then someone set up a Gofundme fundraiser to thank the students: “Pi Kappa Phi Men Defended their Flag. Throw ’em a Rager”. As noted by John Noonan, the origanizer:

Commie losers across the country have invaded college campuses to make dumb demands of weak University Administrators.

But amidst the chaos, the screaming, the anti-semitism, the hatred of faith and flag, stood a platoon of American heroes. Armored in Vineyard Vines and Patagonia, fueled by Zyn and White Claws, these triumphant Brohemians protected Old Glory from the unwashed Marxist horde — laughing at their shrieks and wails and shielding the Stars & Stripes from Soviet missiles.

These boys… no, men, of the UNC Chapel Hill Pi Kappa Phi, gave the best to America and now they deserve the best. Help us raise funds to throw this frat the party they deserve, a party worth of the boat-shoed Broleteriat who did their country proud.

To the shock of everyone, the money poured in. Within days more than 13,000 people had donated over $450K, with some donations topping five and ten thousand each.

Noonan now says he has found “a world class event planner [Susan Ralston] and she is already hard at work. She worked in the White House and knows what she’s about.” Noonan and GoFundMe is also attempting to identify every student seen holding up or defending the flag. It appears the goal is to to put together a big event that will not only be a great party but a political campaign rally.

I say that’s a big mistake. » Read more

29 comments

Voting by conservatives HAS made a difference, just not enough so far

1:24 pm

Voting does make a difference
Voting does make a difference.

In one of my essays last week I took to task the many Republican conservatives who repeatedly say there is no point voting for Republicans because the leadership of the Republican Party does not represent conservative or American interests, and is in many ways as corrupt as the Democrats, only in a slightly different way.

[T]his refusal to support Republicans because they aren’t perfect simply guarantees that the Marxist and very corrupt Democratic Party will gain more power. The result is even worse policies, and more corruption, and congresswomen like Sheila Jackson-Lee and NASA administrators like Bill Nelson.

It is all very self-defeating. If conservatives went out and always voted for the most conservative candidate available to them, the power in Congress and in local legislatures would quickly shift rightward. It would also encourage other individuals even more conservative to run for office.

Many commenters for that essay disputed my claim, and still insisted there was no reason to vote any longer because the whole system is rigged.

This claim however is wrong. Though there is certainly ample evidence of vote tampering and corruption in the whole system, these issues can be overcome by the voters, if they have the courage and determination to vote. Proof of this fact was given in this op-ed published on April 27, 2024 and entitled “GOP Establishment’s Days Are Numbered”. The writer, Kevin Roberts, is president of the Heritage Foundation, which while solidly conservative has itself too often allied itself with that establishment, and thus is not to be trusted blindly in all political matters. However, in describing how that think tank had fought the gigantic foreign aid bill for the Ukraine that the Republican establishment and the Democrats pushed through, Roberts also noted these very important facts:
» Read more

13 comments

The new Nazis and the coming genocide they are planning

3:37 pm

The faces of babies held hostage desecrated
The Nazi desecration of babies held hostage
by Hamas

Unless you have been badly educated at one of the so-called elite universities in the United States, Great Britain, or Europe, the genocidal goals of the terrorist organization of Hamas in Gaza are as plain as day. These murderous thugs not only admire Hitler and wish to finish his effort to wipe out all Jews, they demonstrated that blatant evil goal on October 7, 2024, killing more than a thousand men, women, and children, torturing and raping many women and children in the process. Hamas’ victims that day had committed only one crime: being Jewish and living near Gaza. Many were from the leftwing secular Israeli community, and had worked hard to build good will ties with many in Gaza. The Gazans, working for Hamas, used those ties to gather intelligence that was then used to murder these Jews.

Soon after the massacre, Hamas officials went on television to celebrate these vicious murders. Ghazi Hamad of the Hamas Political Bureau proudly said said that the slaughter on October 7th “is just the first time, and there will be a second, a third, a fourth.” When asked if his position called for the anniliation of Israel, he immediately answered “Yes, of course,” adding “No one should blame us for the things we do, on October 7, October 10, October million, everything we do is justified.”

So what does these goals tell us about the hoards of protesters now swarming on many of these same college campuses, screaming things like “Globalize the Intifa!” and “Kill the Zionists!”? The picture above tells us all we need to know. On October 7th Hamas not only killed more than a thousand, it kidnapped more than two hundred more to hold as hostages, many of whom were little childen and babies. When supporters of Israel began putting up these posters showing the actual hostages held and demanding their release, supporters of Hamas in America and elsewhere would routinely go around ripping those posters down. In the case of the poster above put up in London, they did worse, actually drawing Hilter mustaches on the faces of the babies.

On campuses now, these student protesters are daily telling us where they stand. They support Hamas unequivocally, and want it to survive to kill Jews. Like the Nazis in Germany, they work to harass and persecute any American Jews who happen to stroll by, sometimes acting to block their access to the university. In some cases they attack them violently.
» Read more

20 comments

Good news: The nature of the riots this election year suggest the leftist rioters are losing steam

3:44 pm

Don't tread on me!

Amid the illegal protests by pro-Hamas anti-Semitic new Nazis on college campuses, a wider looks suggests some encouraging trends, though hard to spot amid the chaos promoted by these genocidal rioters, most of whom are students but led it appears by many outside agitators.

There is no question these college rioters are causing havoc as they spread fear and hatred on numerous college campuses, including Columbia, Harvard, MIT, Princeton, NYU, Cal Poly Humboldt, USC, and UT-Austin, to name jsut a few.

In every case the protesters arrived with tents and a definitive plan to illegally occupy part of the campus, using almost identical tactics of the Occupy Wall Street crowd in 2011. Very clearly they wanted to establish themselves in a prominent position on each campus, where they could daily interfere with campus life while harassing anyone they saw as either Jewish or a potential enemy. Their tactics also mimicked the actions of the 2020 BLM and Antifa rioters, not only acting to keep out Jewish students from campuses, but working together violently to exclude anyone they wanted excluded. Reporters were routinely blocked with banners, umbrellas, and their bodies. In at least one case these terrorists even attacked one reporter, stabbing her in the eye with the pole of a Palestinian flag.

There is also no question that these riots have the same ulterior motives that existed in 2020, to disrupt the upcoming November election so that the Democrats could win. Many of the 2020 riots were specifically aimed at Trump election rallies, often causing their cancellation. The riots also provided Democratic Party officials in many key swing states reasons to justify the arbitrary changing of election laws — done also in conjuntion with the COVID panic — to allow the illegal use of very insecure ballot measures, such as unsupervised drop boxes and the misuse of mail-in ballots.

The differences today from 2020 and 2011 however are quite significant, and suggest these violent tactics are no longer working, that the country is beginning to push back hard against such insurrectionist behavior.

The pushback
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14 comments

These are the idiots WE have put in power

2:16 pm

Bill Nelson exhibiting his ignorance to Congress
Bill Nelson exhibiting his ignorance to Congress

On April 17, 2024 Bill Nelson, former Democratic Party senator and now NASA’s administrator, testified at a budget hearing in the House of Representives about the proposed 2025 NASA budget proposed by the Biden administration.

Such testimony is routinely boring and tells us nothing, which is why I no longer waste much time listening to it.

Other do, however, and as a result we all find out about moments of stupidity such as this one, spouted by Nelson:

“What do you think the Chinese are trying to get at, at the back side of the moon?” Rep. David Trone (D-MD) asked Nelson at a congressional hearing last week.

“They are going to have a lander on the far side of the moon, which is the side which is always in dark. Uh, we’re not planning to go there,” he said.

Trone followed up by asking, “And why not? What’s the benefit of doing so?”

“We don’t know what’s on the back side of the moon, so, uh, that would be something that they would discover,” the NASA administrator told lawmakers on Capitol Hill. “But our decision is that it’s more profitable for us to go to the South Pole of the moon because that’s where we think the water is,” he added.

First, Nelson exhibits the same kind of utter ignorance about basic space science as did congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee (D-Texas) when she proclaimed on April 8, 2024 that the Moon “was made up mostly of gases.” Nelson says the “dark side” is always dark, when it is well known for many centuries that the back side of the Moon is sometimes referred to as the “dark side” not because it is dark, but because it is never visible to us on Earth, and until the space age no one knew what was there.

Furthermore, since the 1960s however we have known what is there, even if Nelson is an ignoramus about these basic facts. Landing there to research it up close and in detail is a entirely laudable science goal, something American scientists have wanted to do for decades. China is simply doing it.

Finally, China is also targeting the south pole for its lunar base, something Nelson seems utterly unaware, an ignorance that is shocking considering their lunar base goals are potentially in direct conflict with our lunar base goals.

You would think the administrator of NASA would know these basic facts.
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29 comments

Jonathan Scott – Wagner’s Ride of the Valkyries

6:01 pm

An evening pause: Performed on the organ of Rochdale Town Hall, Rochdale, UK.

Hat tip Judd Clark. To all: I could use suggestions from others. Right now Judd is doing the lion’s share of work, suggesting a lot of great evening pauses. I want more variety, however, including suggestions from many others. If you have suggested something before you know the routine. If you haven’t and want to, post a comment here, but DON’T post the link in your comment. I will contact you for it.

4 comments

It is simple: Conservatives don’t have the votes

2:53 pm

The Republican Party and its voters
The modern Republican Party and its voters

Many conservatives both in Congress and out have recently railed in fury at the compromises that House speaker Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana) has made with the Democrats in order to pass large multi-billion dollar foreign aid bills to help the Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan protect their sovereignty and borders, while doing nothing to pass any bills to secure the American border at all.

That fury is best represented by Marjorie Taylor Greene, (R-Georgia), who has filed a motion to vacate the speaker but as yet has not followed through to force a vote. She has repeatedly condemned his willingness to work to pass Democratic Party proposals while doing little to help Republicans get their bills passed.

The problem however for Johnson is the same one faced by the previous Republican speaker, Kevin McCarthy, as well as the Republican speaker before him, Paul Ryan, and the speaker before him, John Boehner. All struggled to get Republican proposals passed, and all failed. None could garner a majority strong enough, especially because the Democrats stood firm and united in opposition and many Republicans were actually more allied with the Democratic Party agenda. It is this same problem that Greene faces and is why she has not moved to force a vote for a new speaker.
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22 comments

On the left, certainty and violent passion; On the right, doubt and fearful timidity; This must change!

3:11 pm

What the left wants to destroy
What the left wants to destroy

“If you will not fight for right when you can easily win without blood shed; if you will not fight when your victory is sure and not too costly; you may come to the moment when you will have to fight with all the odds against you and only a precarious chance of survival. There may even be a worse case. You may have to fight when there is no hope of victory, because it is better to perish than to live as slaves.” ― Winston S. Churchill

It is said that if you want to win a war, it is essential to know your enemy almost better than you know yourself, so that you know what will be required of you to win.

Americans, those who still believe in the Constitution and the basic values of our country — limited government and the right of each individual to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness — routinely still think they are in the majority, that given a fair fight they will always win against the fascists of the left because the general public will immediately recognize the justice of the right’s cause.

This is not only a grave error, it is an error that Americans have been making for decades. Year by year since the 1960s Americans of all stripes have been unwilling to fight for right when it could have been easily won without bloodshed. Now bloodshed is almost certainly required, and the right continues to be unwilling to fight hard. Instead it still thinks its victories can be won easily, and so it is lazy about fighting those battles.

The left

To understand best why the right continues to lose, we first have to look closely at the left. As a movement, it has for decades been passionate and unwilling to compromise. Its leaders and followers are filled with certainty, and have been willing to do whatever is necessary to win.
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14 comments

Remember: The climate data foisted on us by NOAA is based 30% on nonexistent weather stations

2:24 pm

The uselessness of the global temperature record

A story yesterday at Zero Hedge noted once again that the yearly global data that NOAA inflicts on us, each year claiming that a new record has been set as the hottest year ever, is all based on fake data, with about one-third of the data created from weather stations that no longer exist.

The problem, say experts, is that an increasing number of USHCN’s stations don’t exist anymore. “They are physically gone—but still report data—like magic,” said Lt. Col. John Shewchuk, a certified consulting meteorologist. “NOAA fabricates temperature data for more than 30 percent of the 1,218 USHCN reporting stations that no longer exist.”

He calls them “ghost” stations.

Mr. Shewchuck said USHCN stations reached a maximum of 1,218 stations in 1957, but after 1990 the number of active stations began declining due to aging equipment and personnel retirements. NOAA still records data from these ghost stations by taking the temperature readings from surrounding stations, and recording their average for the ghost station, followed by an “E,” for estimate.

This is not a new story. » Read more

16 comments

Idiocracy has arrived

1:54 pm

Sheila Jackson-Lee:
Sheila Jackson-Lee: “The Moon is made up
mostly of gases!””

Over the last few days the conservative press has been having a field day making justifiable fun of a number of Democrats and leftists for exhibiting incredible scientifict ignorance, an ignorance so profound as to be mind-boggling.

First, after the unusual 4.8 magnitude earthquake centered in New Jersey on April 5th, a Green Party senate candidate in New Jersey, Christina Amira Khalil, immediately tweeted, “I experienced my first earthquake in NJ. We never get earthquakes. The climate crisis is real.” The mocking on X was so great she quickly deleted the tweet.

Then, in an incredibly embarrassing segment of the television show, The View, one host, Sunny Hostin, showed off her complete lack of any scientific knowledge when she claimed that the earthquake, the solar eclipse, and even the normal arrival of the cicadas every seventeen years (which she thought happened every hundred-plus years) was evidence that climate change was real.

Finally, to top off this stream of utter empty-headiness, during an eclipse event in Texas, Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee gave a speech of such stunning incompetency and lack of knowledge you have to wonder how she can figure out how to put on her clothes each day. This quote has been most often used to ridicule her:
» Read more

20 comments

What are Israel’s strategic military goals with its latest pull back from Gaza?

12:33 pm

Hamas vs Israel
Even the Arabs recognize these facts.
Courtesy of Doug Ross.

Over the weekend numerous news reports announced that Israel had suddenly pulled almost all its troops out of the Gaza strip, apparently abandoning its plan to finish off the last four battalions of Hamas that were hiding out in the southern town of Rafah.

Despite denials by Israel’s military and the Netanyahu government, on the surface it appeared Israel had bowed to pressure from the Biden administration to cancel its invasion of Rafah and instead break off its military offense against Hamas.

I suspect things are much more complicated, and could instead be — as some Israel officials claimed — a tactical maneuver intended to make that military invasion of Rafah more effective while reducing the large number of civilian deaths anticipated because of the more than a million Gazan refugees that have been crammed into that southern city.

The nature of the withdrawal reveals much about its goal:
» Read more

9 comments

Biden’s anti-Christian Easter proclamation means the Democrats believe their November victory is certain

11:48 am

Biden's proclamation declaring Easter a day to honor the queer agenda
Biden’s proclamation declaring Easter a day
honoring the queer agenda. Click for full proclamation.

The decision by the White House to declare Easter Sunday, the holiest day of the Christian religion, to instead be this year’s “Transgender Day of Visibility”, as shown by the screen capture of his declaration to the right, outraged and insulted millions of religious people throughout the country.

That outrage was further inflamed when the very next day Joe Biden boldly denied he had done any such thing, even though he had done it only one day previously.

“I didn’t do that,” Biden said when asked about proclaiming Easter Sunday ‘trans day of visibility.” Asked about Speaker Johnson’s claim otherwise, the president replied, “he’s thoroughly uninformed.”

Most political analysis of these events has focused on whether these actions suggest Biden is entirely incompetent, or whether it proves that others run things in the White House and that Biden is merely a puppet on a string. In either case, those analyses noted that these actions showed an amazing contempt for the religious community that could only hurt Biden in November.

I see this in an entirely different way. While the decision showed utter contempt of Christians, who consider the queer agenda to be deviant and sinful, it also showed us two things about the Democratic Party leadership, whether Biden or the puppet masters pulling his strings, that should truly terrify every single American who values our democratic republic, its Constitution, and its Bill of Rights.
» Read more

25 comments

Boeing’s problems are only the tip of the iceberg

1:25 pm

Most of all beware this boy.’
As noted by the Spirit of Christmas Present in Dickens’ The Christmas
Carol, ‘This boy is ignorance, this girl is want. Beware them both,
but most of all beware this boy.’

Since the beginning of this year, following the near disaster when a door of a Boeing 737-Max airline blew off during the Alaska Airlines flight, the media has been obsessed with reporting every single subsequent Boeing airplane incident as attributed to bad management and quality control at Boeing.

The problem with this shallow reporting is that it fails entirely in recognizing the real depth of the problem.

First, in most of the incidents reported, the planes involved were not recent purchases from Boeing, but had been owned by the airlines for years, sometimes decades. Thus, any maintenance issues, such as a wheel falling off after take-off or a landing gear collapsing on landing or the sudden failure of an Airbus plane’s hydraulic system, are not Boeing’s fault, but the fault of the airline the plane belongs to. In the case of these particular incidents, that airline was United, and in every case, the failure was with its maintenance department, not Boeing’s bad management and poor quality control.

A similar string of incidents has also occurred at American Airlines, involving both Boeing and Airbus airplanes. With both United and American, evidence suggests that the quality of its maintenance staff has likely declined significantly since 2020, when both companies decided to abopt Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) hiring practices, which made skin color and sex the most important qualification in hiring, rather than talent, skill, experience, or knowledge.

It is important for readers to recognize this fact when they see new stories about a Boeing plane forced to make an emergency landing, such as the story today about a United Airlines’ Boeing 787. It apparently had a cracked windshield, requiring an unscheduled landing in Chicago. The article at the link focuses a great deal on Boeing, but the focus should instead be on United Airlines, not the airplane maker, since it is United’s responsibility to keep its fleet flightworthy. When an airline fails to do so, future customers should take note, and consider other options when they need to fly.

In other words, you shouldn’t avoid flying on a Boeing plane, you should avoid flying on airlines that maintain their airplanes badly.

Having said this, I don’t want my readers to think I am trying to let Boeing off the hook. Far from it. » Read more

27 comments

Part 3: The expected tantrum of madness should Biden actually lose the election

1:48 pm

The Democratic Party: hostile to freedom and fair elections

For the past two days I have tried to lay out some of the illegal and immoral strategies and tactics of the Democratic Party in its relentless effort to guarantee a win in this year’s presidential election, no matter what. (For the first two parts, go here and here.)

The bottom line is that Democratic Party politicians and their allies in the press and big tech will stop at nothing to prevent Donald Trump from regaining the White House. They will cheat, lie, encourage riots and looting, censor and blacklist their opponents, and in the end, even commit election and voter fraud on a massive scale.

But despite all this, what if Donald Trump still ends up victorious? Right now a rational look at both the polling trends and the disastrous consequences of Joe Biden’s presidency all suggest the American public is screaming for a change. The historic shift in the black and hispanic populations to Trump and away from the Democratic Party underlines these trends quite clearly. These trends are further underlined by the presence of two different moderate-left alternative presidential tickets, both drawing the bulk of their support from the Democrats.

In the end, this data tells us that it is very likely that none of the chaos and violence and fear-mongering and vote tampering by the Democrats will work, that in the end Donald Trump will emerge as the winner.

How will this now very close-minded and very vicious Democratic Party respond when that happens? The signs tell us that they can no longer tolerate defeat, or even the existence of alternative parties. (For example, consider the relentless effort by the Democrats to legally squelch these alternative parties from the ballot box.) For them, “democracy” only exists when they win.

We should therefore expect these terrible things to happen in short order after election day.
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