I'm kinda fed up with the world today, and all the bad, nasty, or just plain annoying things going on: so let's examine something a little more palatable. I'm obliged to Larry Lambert for posting this chart on his blog some weeks ago. Click the image for a larger view.
The Amsterdam, Brazil, Colombia, Georgia and Guatemala variants look interesting. I reckon they call for a little experimentation.
Does anyone have other variations to suggest? If so, please let us know in Comments.
Peter
I've just learned that installing a ductless, split-level air-conditioning unit in my new garden shed/utility building will be financially out of my reach. A quote obtained early this year was about $2K, but one obtained this week is literally double that, with one option reaching almost three times as much. It looks like the supply chain crunch has cleaned out the older stock of units, and the only ones available now cost an arm and a leg. Guess what I won't be buying?
The alternative is to install a window A/C unit for summer use. (In winter I'll plug in an oil-filled radiator, which'll take the edge off the cold at an affordable energy cost.) Yes, a window unit's not ideal, and if anything goes wrong you basically have to throw it away and buy a new one: but it'll cost only about a tenth of a split-level unit, so it's something I can afford. It'll be a smaller unit, about 10-12,000 BTU, because the building isn't very large. However, I'm in a quandary about mounting it. In a metal building there's almost no wall thickness to speak of, so the "conventional" window frame or wall mount simply won't work. The thin metal will probably buckle under the strain. Clearly, I'm going to have to mount some sort of reinforcing bracket (see, for example, this one), but that, too, depends on a wall 4"-11" thick. I haven't (yet) found one that can work on a metal wall less than 1/4" thick.
I guess one solution is to build a makeshift window sill out of wood, on the inside of the wall, with a panel below the window to take support bracket screws, and "legs" that reach the floor to support the weight. However, is there a better way? Can readers who've had to do this suggest an alternative? If so, please let us know in Comments. I'm sure I'm not the only person who could use such advice. If you can include a suggestion on where to find anything specific you mention, that would be very helpful.
Thanks in advance.
Peter
The video is self-explanatory.
I wonder how many years it took for all that silt to accumulate? It sure was reluctant to move.
Peter
Following yesterday's post about the danger of fire in electric buses and cars, a reader who wishes to remain anonymous sent me the link to this video clip of an electric scooter that spontaneously combusted while being charged inside a house.
That must have been an expensive blaze, what with redecorating costs as well as replacing the scooter! Again, there are plenty of videos on YouTube of similar occurrences. All I can say is, don't bring your electric vehicle indoors . . .
Peter
On Tuesday I published an article titled "Imagine a US election being halted, or even overturned, by a 'Public Health Emergency'..." In it, I pointed out that the proposal to give the World Health Organization exclusive executive power to control entire nations' response to "public health emergences" might be used as an excuse to disrupt or nullify national elections.
Now Off-Guardian goes further, showing that the proposed regulations will "hand the WHO the keys to global government".
In combination, these proposed rules would literally incentivize reporting possible “disease outbreaks”. Far from preventing “future pandemics”, they would actively encourage them.
National governments who refuse to play ball being punished, and those who play along getting paid off is not new. We have already seen that with Covid.
Two African countries – Burundi and Tanzania – had Presidents who banned the WHO from their borders, and refused to go along with the Pandemic narrative. Both Presidents died unexpectedly within months of that decision, only to be replaced by new Presidents who instantly reversed their predecessor’s covid policies.
Less than a week after the death of President Pierre Nkurunziza, the IMF agreed to forgive almost 25 million dollars of Burundi’s national debt in order to help combat the Covid19 “crisis”.
Just five months after the death of President John Magufuli, the new government of Tanzania received 600 million dollars from the IMF to “address the covid19 pandemic”.
It’s pretty clear what happened here, isn’t it?
Globalists backed coups and rewarded the perpetrators with “international aid”. The proposals for the Pandemic treaty would simply legitimise this process, moving it from covert back channels to overt official ones.
Now, before we discuss the implications of new powers, let’s remind ourselves of the power the WHO already possesses:
- The World Health Organization is the only institution in the world empowered to declare a “pandemic” or Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC).
- The Director-General of the WHO – an unelected position – is the only individual who controls that power.
We have already seen the WHO abuse these powers in order to create a fake pandemic out of thin air…and I’m not talking about covid.
Prior to 2008, the WHO could only declare an influenza pandemic if there were “enormous numbers of deaths and illness” AND there was a new and distinct subtype. In 2008 the WHO loosened the definition of “influenza pandemic” to remove these two conditions.
As a 2010 letter to the British Medical Journal pointed out, these changes meant “many seasonal flu viruses could be classified as pandemic influenza.”
If the WHO had not made those changes, the 2009 “Swine flu” outbreak could never have been called a pandemic, and would likely have passed without notice.
Instead, dozens of countries spent millions upon millions of dollars on swine flu vaccines they did not need and did not work, to fight a “pandemic” that resulted in fewer than 20,000 deaths. Many of those responsible for advising the WHO to declare swine flu a public health emergency were later shown to have financial ties to vaccine manufacturers.
Despite this historical example of blatant corruption ... the proposed treaty could allow the DG of the WHO to declare a state of global emergency to prevent a potential pandemic, not in response to one. A kind of pandemic pre-crime.
If you combine this with the proposed “financial aid” for developing nations reporting “potential health emergencies”, you can see what they’re building – essentially bribing third world governments to give the WHO a pretext for declaring a state of emergency.
. . .
But all of that could pale in comparison to the legal powers potentially being handed to the director-general of the WHO (or whatever new “independent” body they may decide to create) to punish, rebuke or reward national governments.
A “Pandemic Treaty” that overrides or overrules national or local governments would hand supranational powers to an unelected bureaucrat or “expert”, who could exercise them entirely at his own discretion and on completely subjective criteria.
This is the very definition of technocratic globalism.
There's more at the link.
As I pointed out last Tuesday:
... changes to the US regulations implementing the WHO's policies 'were published one day before Donald Trump was inaugurated'. What could have pushed the Obama administration into doing that? Could it have been a deliberate plan, a 'poison pill', to put in place some mechanism that could be used to override a subsequent administration, that was not doing what our 'grey eminences' wanted? Might such regulations be used to either prevent, or override, a future election on the grounds of a fraudulent, made-up 'Public Health Emergency'?
In the light of Off-Guardian's report above, I'd say that's a long way from far-fetched speculation. Instead, it appears more and more likely. To those who say it could never happen, that the US constitution prevents it, I can only point out that the US Senate has already ratified this country's accession to the World Health Organization, and therefore approved the powers granted to that organization under its founding treaty. The new WHO regulations being proposed (by the Biden administration, no less!) are merely an amendment to powers that already exist. They would not have to be ratified again by the US Senate; they would be binding on all member nations (including ours) six months after they were approved. Argue all you like, but that's the simple fact of the matter.
The more I read about the proposed changes to WHO regulations, the more worried I am by them. I think they're nothing more than a pretext to impose "one world government" by declaring a health emergency that requires nations to surrender their sovereignty to health authorities. It's the thin edge of the wedge, the camel's nose under the tent. Once such powers are in operation, who knows what further mischief might be arranged by those wielding them - mischief that has nothing to do with health at all, but everything to do with reducing or abolishing nation-states' rights to control their own affairs?
Draw your own conclusions.
Peter
Glenn Greenwald points out that the alliance between US intelligence organizations and Big Tech - or, as I prefer to call it, between the "Deep State" and "Deep Tech", because (as Sundance has argued in great detail) the intelligence organizations have made themselves into a fourth branch of government - is now clear to see.
A group of former intelligence and national security officials on Monday issued a jointly signed letter warning that pending legislative attempts to restrict or break up the power of Big Tech monopolies — Facebook, Google, and Amazon — would jeopardize national security because, they argue, their centralized censorship power is crucial to advancing U.S. foreign policy.
. . .
While one of their central claims is that Big Tech monopoly power is necessary to combat (i.e., censor) “foreign disinformation,” several of these officials are themselves leading disinformation agents: many were the same former intelligence officials who signed the now-infamous-and-debunked pre-election letter fraudulently claiming that the authentic Hunter Biden emails had the "hallmarks” of Russia disinformation ... Others who signed this new letter have strong financial ties to the Big Tech corporations whose power they are defending in the name of national security...
The ostensible purpose of the letter is to warn of the national security dangers from two different bipartisan bills — one pending in the Senate, the other in the House — that would prohibit Big Tech monopolies from using their vertical power to "discriminate” against competitors (the way Google, for instance, uses its search engine business to bury the videos of competitors to its YouTube property, such as Rumble, or the way Google and Apple use their stores and Amazon uses its domination over hosting services to destroy competitors).
. . .
This letter by former national security officials is, in one sense, an act of desperation ... The extreme animus harbored by large parts of the left and right toward Big Tech make it very difficult for any lawmaker to go on record in opposition to these proposed bills if they are forced to publicly take a position in a floor vote ... As a result, Big Tech's last hope is to keep the bill from reaching the floor where Senators would be forced to go on record ... This is where these former intelligence and national security officials come in ... they command great loyalty from Congressional national security committees [which] are notoriously captive to the U.S. National Security State. The ostensible purpose of this new letter is to insist that Big Tech monopoly power is vital to U.S. national security — because it is necessary for them to censor “disinformation” from the internet, especially now with the grave Russian threat reflected by the war in Ukraine — and they thus demand that the anti-Big-Tech bills first be reviewed not only by the Judiciary and Antitrust Committees, but also the national security committees where they wield power and influence, which have traditionally played no role in regulating the technology sector.
. . .
Why would these former national security and intelligence officials be so devoted to preserving the unfettered power of Big Tech to control and censor the internet? One obvious explanation is the standard one that always runs Washington: several of them have a financial interest in serving Big Tech's agenda ... As Rep. Buck, the Colorado House Republican who favors reform, put it: “It is not surprising that individuals who receive money from Big Tech are defending Big Tech. At the end of the day, Big Tech is harming U.S. competition and innovation through anticompetitive practices.” In other words, these former intelligence officials are exploiting their national security credentials to protect an industry in which they have a deep financial interest.
. . .
Big Tech and the U.S. security state are in a virtually complete union, with all sorts of overlapping, mutual financial interests ... Needless to say, the U.S. security state wants to maintain a stranglehold on political discourse in the U.S. and the world more broadly. They want to be able to impose propagandistic narratives without challenge and advocate for militarism without dissent. To accomplish that, they need a small handful of corporations which are subservient to them to hold in their hands as much concentrated power over the internet as possible.
If a free and fair competitive market were to arise whereby social media platforms more devoted to free speech could fairly compete with Google and Facebook— as the various pending bills in Congress are partially designed to foster — then that new diversity of influence, that diffusion of power, would genuinely threaten the ability of the CIA and the Pentagon and the White House to police political discourse and suppress dissent from their policies and assertions. By contrast, by maintaining all power in the hands of the small coterie of tech monopolies which control the internet and which have long proven their loyalty to the U.S. security state, the ability of the U.S. national security state to maintain a closed propaganda system around questions of war and militarism is guaranteed.
There's more at the link.
It's sickening to any supporter of individual rights and liberties (not to mention the US constitution) to see this marching-in-lockstep mutual support between Big Tech and the intelligence agencies. It's inimical to freedom and an informed electorate. It's already given rise to the almost complete destruction of individual privacy in the information technology sphere (and, extending from there, to almost every other sphere). I, for one, resent this bitterly. I was raised to believe that nobody had the right to snoop on another, to invade their privacy, or to try to manipulate them in the way that public opinion is now shaped and formed by the Deep State to build support for its policies and positions. This sort of incestuous, you-scratch-my-back-I'll-scratch-yours relationship between the intelligence agencies and Big Tech is inimical to every form of individual freedom that I can imagine.
One hopes the bills in the House and Senate succeed. They'll be a good first step towards reining in the technological narcissists who basically fellate and facilitate each other's dreams of dominance. We'll have to go a lot further towards restoring the balance to what it should be - but these bills are a start.
Peter
Last month I reported that a number of allegedly Ukrainian refugees arriving in Ireland were very obviously not Ukrainian at all, but Indian and Pakistani in origin. Furthermore, they were clearly not refugees from a crisis, but economic migrants. In a report about the same time, Summit News observed:
According to a report by German newspaper Bild, “someone is making a fortune” out of giving non-Ukrainian economic migrants fake Ukrainian passports so they can slip into western Europe and get free welfare.
. . .
Bild cited a police source who said the overwhelming majority of the “refugees” were from the Sinti and Roma ethnic groups and that, “Only a fraction are really Ukrainian refugees.”
“They have brand-new Ukrainian passports, which are also real. Someone in Ukraine is making a fortune right now,” the newspaper quoted the police representative as saying.
. . .
The reality of the situation is clear; Economic migrants from Africa, the Middle East and South Asia are cynically exploiting the Ukrainian refugee wave to abuse the system and get free accommodation and welfare in European countries with poor vetting systems.
This comes at the expense of genuine Ukrainian refugees who need urgent help.
There's more at the link.
Now comes news that thousands of "Ukrainian refugees" are lining up at our border with Mexico, seeking refugee status in the USA.
More than 2,000 Ukrainian refugees have arrived in [Tijuana, Mexico] and the pace continues to grow every day with hundreds of new arrivals as the U.S. government speeds up processing to admit Ukrainians under humanitarian parole.
President Joe Biden said the U.S. would admit 100,000 Ukrainian refugees into the country.
. . .
Nearly all flights coming from Mexico's other large airports with international connections to Europe land in Tijuana with dozens of Ukrainians on board as word of mouth spreads about the ease with which refugees can enter the United States.
. . .
After they arrive in Tijuana, Ukrainians have a much easier path to the U.S. than thousands of other asylum seekers living and waiting in Tijuana. They spend an average of two to three days before U.S. border officials process them at San Ysidro.
Customs and Border Protection in San Diego declined to answer how many Ukrainians they have processed at San Ysidro in recent weeks. They deferred to their website tracking monthly statistics, but the agency has not yet posted March's numbers.
Again, more at the link.
I have a few questions:
I think the answers might make interesting reading. What say you, readers?
I have no problem helping genuine refugees - but I want to make sure they really are refugees from war, not economic migrants or from somewhere else entirely.
Peter
SNAFU Solomon linked to a tweet with this video of an electric bus that caught fire in China.
That's what happens when lithium batteries burn. They produce enormous internal pressure that blows out through the casing and burns like a blowtorch. The bus's batteries were/are much bigger than those in an electric car, so they burn correspondingly more fiercely. Here's what happens when one bus catches fire in a rank of them.
(There are many video clips of burning electric vehicles on YouTube, if you want to watch them.)
I'm looking at the growing trend overseas, particularly in China, for electric buses to take over city routes from those using fossil fuels, and I'm thinking this could be very dangerous. Imagine being in your car, or a taxi, stopped in traffic next to a bus like that, and it catches fire. With those blowtorch-like flames starting up so quickly, coming right at you, how on earth would you get out of your vehicle and reach safety?
Just a thought . . . but a very worrying one. I presume we'll be more and more likely to encounter such vehicles on US city streets before long. Would any firefighters or first responders among our readers care to comment?
Peter
The inimitable Brandon Smith is at it again. Highlighted text is my emphasis.
Basic Solutions To Our Economic Problems That Establishment Elites Won’t Allow
I think one of the great misconceptions about economic crisis is that solutions are always dependent on centralized government action. In truth, most financial disasters are actually caused by too much government action and involvement ... One clear way to fix our system would be to first force government to interfere less ... there are a lot of deeply rooted problems that government intervention has caused that add up to one big fiscal calamity. Many of these threats require a basic but sweeping return to fundamentals that government elites will rarely address and will try to stop at all costs. Here are just a few examples…
. . .
The US and parts of Europe are facing their own inflationary disasters and this is largely due to the unchecked avarice of central bank stimulus and government spending. The ONLY way to secure the dollar’s existence as a stable store of wealth would be to back it with hard commodities like precious metals (among others). This might kill the dollar’s world reserve status because fiat printing would be impossible from that point on, but I got a news flash for those that hate the idea of grounding the dollar in commodities: We’re going to lose world reserve status anyway, and it’s going to happen soon.
One third of the world’s population including Russia, China and India are already breaking from the dollar in bilateral trade. The US might as well accept this is the reality and prepare to mitigate the coming currency collapse by supporting the dollar with commodities.
. . .
If the dollar was about to collapse due to inflation, oil would be one of the first early warning indicators. With the establishment blocking new oil production and hindering the most cost effective method for oil transport (pipelines), an engineered decline in supply becomes a very effective smokescreen for the death of the dollar. The crisis caused by the government and the Federal Reserve’s currency destruction could then be blamed on supply chain issues and climate “peril.” This is the reason why the establishment will not allow any future growth in US oil production. They cannot allow the public to realize the precarious position our currency is in.
. . .
There are a lot of reasons why manufacturing has left the US, from greedy and corrupt labor unions driving up wages to higher taxes and land costs to extremely cheap shipping from overseas exporters. There is also the theory that US factories were outsourced to places like China in order to deliberately force the public into a global interdependency scheme. In other words we are stuck with the supply chain we have, not because it’s the best system, but because the globalists want it that way.
It’s unlikely that the federal government and the elitist establishment would ever allow real manufacturing to come back to the US in a way that would make us more self sufficient.
. . .
Ultimately, the most clear solutions to our fiscal fate are not pursued because the elites do NOT WANT to save the economy, at least not in a way that ends up with them having less power. They want even more power and centralization that extends beyond national boundaries into the realm of global management. Fixing the system can’t happen because they won’t let it happen.
This means that the fix that will save us in the long run will be the one that allows all others to progress; and that fix is to remove these people from positions of influence and authority.
There's more at the link.
Mr. Smith knows whereof he speaks. Almost invariably in my experience, traveling extensively through literally dozens of countries, whenever the governments of those countries were more actively involved in "managing" the economy, the economy got worse. Whenever governments kept their interference to a minimum, and/or backed off their previous aggressive interference, their economies improved. There appeared to me to be an almost infallible correlation.
Of course, those doing the interfering - the bureaucrats, the power-hungry, the politicians and those behind them - don't want to stop interfering, because they're interfering in their best interests. To hell with our interests. Those don't count, as far as they're concerned.
Peter
After publishing two articles over the past two weeks on the unfolding worldwide food crisis and the need to build up our emergency food reserves, I've been fielding questions from several readers about what they should do in their particular situations. I thought the answers I gave them might be of wider interest.
One reader complained that my earlier article on storing water for emergencies wasn't much help when she wanted to store a week's supply of water right now, starting from scratch and not having to wait to build up supplies. There's one very cost-effective solution available right now. Sams Club offers at many of its stores 4-gallon containers of water to fit most dispensers. At my local store they're currently for sale, container and water, for $4.99 apiece. That's an absolute steal in anyone's language. Allowing 2 gallons per person per day, a week's emergency water supply for a family of 4, including the reusable containers, will cost you less than $60. Add a few accessories such as a dispensing bottle stand, a water dispenser valve, some replacement bottle caps, and a carrying handle, and you're good to go. It would cost a lot more than that to buy empty water containers and fill them yourself!
(In case of a prolonged water shortage or outage, I suggest having plenty of paper plates, bowls and cups on hand. It's easier to throw them away than to consume precious water washing dishes.)
Several readers appeared to have focused on freeze-dried and dehydrated foods for their emergency reserve. That's fine, and I do recommend having some of them if you can afford that: but they're a lot more expensive than regular canned food. Most cans have a "best buy" date a couple of years in the future, and often are good for years beyond that. (I've eaten beef stew from a ten-year-old can, eight years past its expiry date, and it was still entirely edible.) Cans have the disadvantage of being bulky and heavy, but their lower cost makes them very worthwhile. I've compiled a spreadsheet of our canned goods, including their "best by" date. We go through it once a quarter, and note all the cans that are within four or five months of that date; then we either use them, or donate them to a local food pantry and replace them with fresher goods. In future, if food is hard to come by, I won't cry if we keep them on hand and use them after their "best by" date. Needs must, etc.
The most economical way to buy canned foods, in my experience, is either at Aldi, which tends to be the lowest-priced of all supermarket chains for canned goods (their house brands are fine), or to buy them in bulk from big-box stores. I order from Walmart and Sams Club and have them shipped right to my door, saving me a lot of time and effort. For the cheapest goods, I find the Walmart house brands aren't always the best, but IMHO the Sams Club "Member's Mark" house brand offers good value for money. That's not an advertisement for them: it's just my experience. In recent weeks I've ordered their Mandarin oranges, green beans, sweet corn, chicken breast and diced tomatoes, amongst other things. Compare their price (and quality) per can to elsewhere. They've helped to top up our food reserves very nicely.
Don't neglect what you need to prepare food. If you fry a lot, you use oil, butter, lard, etc.; do you have enough in reserve to cover however long you expect the problem to last? What about seasonings, spices, herbs, and so on? My wife and I use Cajun seasoning quite often, so we've made sure to have more of that in reserve, in case of need. If you have young children, they'll need food they can digest easily, and that tastes good to them. If some are bottle-fed, you'll need spares for that. Dish-washing and sanitizing utensils mean that you'll need to store dish soap, and a few sponges or cloths, for manual cleaning - your dishwasher won't work well if the power is out. (The same goes for laundry and clothes-washing.) If you expect to have to cook on an outdoor grill or gas stove, be aware that some of your pots and pans (particularly aluminum pressure-cookers) may not be well suited to that environment. All these considerations need to be taken into account.
As for reserve supplies of gasoline, I recommend you store at least enough for one tank of fuel for each of your family's vehicles. If you have an emergency generator to power your home, I suggest at least one week's fuel for it. That can add up. If you have two vehicles with tank capacities totaling, say, 30 gallons, and you need 5 gallons a day to run a small generator intermittently (to keep your freezers frozen, etc.), that means you're looking at storing 65 gallons! I suggest 5-gallon jerry cans as the best storage containers, because they're pretty much leakproof and odor-proof; but they're also very expensive, typically over $50 apiece at current prices. (The most highly recommended on the market at present, at least among my circle of friends and acquaintances, appear to be those from Deutsche Optik, made in Poland to NATO standards.) Plastic fuel containers are a lot cheaper, but also more flimsy and easier to puncture, requiring greater care in storage and handling; and if you travel with them in your vehicle, the smell of gasoline or diesel from them can become overpowering.
When it comes to storing your reserve fuel supplies and things like tanks of propane, obviously - NOT IN YOUR HOME!!! The fire hazard is too great. The same goes for storing them in an attached garage. I strongly suggest having a garden shed, or something like that, where you can store them a safe distance from your family home. (Don't keep them in a storage facility - that's usually a violation of the contract you sign to rent it, and if there's a fire and they go up in flames, you're likely to find the owner[s] and/or their insurer[s] demanding that you pay for the entire cost of the fire, because your fuel stash started it and/or made it worse! If a firefighter is injured or killed fighting the blaze, you'll have the fire department on your back, too, and probably face charges of manslaughter.)
I've covered these and other questions in more detail in my "Emergency Preparations" series (see sidebar) and other articles. However, it's never a bad idea to remind ourselves of the basics, and brush up on the details.
Peter
This report is infuriating.
A man who successfully fought to have two murder convictions overturned, was pardoned by the governor and won a $6 million judgment for civil rights violations by a Durham police detective will likely never see most of the money after the Durham City Council decided it won’t pay.
Darryl Howard couldn’t believe it when told the city wouldn’t indemnify retired detective Darrell Dowdy, meaning it wouldn’t pay the jury’s judgment. The determination is particularly concerning and confusing since the city paid millions of dollars for attorneys who attacked Howard’s character during the trial, Howard and his attorney said.
. . .
On Dec. 1 a federal jury awarded Howard $6 million after finding Dowdy fabricated evidence and performed an inadequate investigation that led to Howard being wrongly convicted of two counts of second-degree murder and one count of arson.
After a nearly month-long trial, it took the jury about an hour to reach a decision.
The city has spent more than $4 million on litigation against Howard. Legal expenses have been paid out of a fund for uninsured legal liabilities.
Howard and his attorney said the city, which employed Dowdy for 36 years, gave the detective the power that led to Howard spending over two decades incarcerated after a Durham County jury found him guilty of killing Doris Washington, 29, and her 13-year-old daughter, Nishonda, in 1991.
In a move that Howard’s and Dowdy’s attorneys described as unprecedented, the Durham City Council decided in a series of closed session meetings not to pay the judgment on Dowdy’s behalf.
In legal filings, the city has also indicated it will ask Howard to pay the legal fees of two city employees who were dismissed from the lawsuit.
There's more at the link.
The city appears to be relying on a tangled web of legal arguments in refusing to pay the judgment against it. Nevertheless, the basic facts are inescapable. The wrong man was convicted of a crime, and spent almost a quarter of a century in prison, because of the false statements made by a city policeman. When, after exoneration, he sued for damages, the city spent almost $4 million defending itself and the employees who had acted on its behalf in convicting him. Now that a federal court has found them, and their employer, liable for their misdeeds, the city is saying, in so many words, "If they'd acted correctly, we'd have accepted liability for their actions and paid up; but, since they acted wrongly, we won't accept liability for their actions." This, after spending that much on their mutual defense???
There should be one standard for liability across all police actions, but in this case that appears to be conspicuous by its absence. This appears to be yet another example of "one law for the rich, and another for the poor". Mr. Howard may not have been a particularly savory character in his younger days, but a wrongful conviction is a wrongful conviction. If the rule of law is to have any meaning at all, he should be compensated for what that wrongful conviction has cost him. As far as I'm concerned, that cost should be borne by the entity whose employees, acting on its behalf, manipulated his trial to wrongfully convict him. What say you, readers?
Peter
I'm obliged to James Roguski for putting in a nutshell the enormous dangers posed by proposed changes to the International Health Regulations of the World Health Organization. These changes were proposed by the Biden administration, and are so far-reaching that they effectively hand over control of the USA to the WHO in the event of a health crisis. In the process, they trample the United States Constitution.
It's not hard to see how an unscrupulous administration might use these as a pretext to override the results of a future election, or even impose undemocratic controls over the people of this country to prevent an election being held.
Here's Mr. Roguski's summary of what the amendments imply.
Of greatest concern to me is the fact that changes to the US regulations implementing the WHO's policies "were published one day before Donald Trump was inaugurated". What could have pushed the Obama administration into doing that? Could it have been a deliberate plan, a "poison pill", to put in place some mechanism that could be used to override a subsequent administration, that was not doing what our "grey eminences" wanted? Might such regulations be used to either prevent, or override, a future election on the grounds of a fraudulent, made-up "Public Health Emergency"? After the COVID-19 regulatory and bureaucratic fiasco, that appears far less unlikely than it should . . . and it arouses dire suspicions in my mind. Imagine the damage a Governor Cuomo, or Governor Whitmer, or Dr. Fauci, could do if such authority were given to them!
I don't subscribe to all of Mr. Roguski's speculations, or his more extreme views. Nevertheless, I was motivated enough by his articles to do my own research, and confirm that the regulatory changes proposed by the USA are, indeed, sufficiently far-reaching to pose the threat he outlines in his series of articles (all linked in the post above). I can only suggest that you read more about the WHO's proposed regulations for yourself, and make up your own mind.
If something like this is tried in America, how will you respond? Unless these regulations are stopped before they can be implemented, all of us may have to decide that - and quickly.
Peter
Today's award goes to two "local diversity advocates" in Arizona, who forgot to engage their brains before putting their mouths in gear.
This week, an ASU instructor, and a librarian, who hold themselves out as being Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) gurus, falsely accused a Black DJ of wearing blackface during a charity event for the Scottsdale Unified school district.
Stuart Rhoden and Jill Lassen attacked the Scottsdale Unified School District’s Hopi Elementary PTA for hiring Koko Kim Hunter to host their charity auction. The two were informed after their attack that Mr. Hunter is, in fact, a Black man, who was not wearing blackface.
. . .
While Koko has put the episode behind him, his supporters and parents in the District are not. They say he is just one more victim of the stalk and destroy crew that supports Superintendent Scott Menzel’s parent-unfriendly administration.
“When these community activists were informed that their accusations were wrong, they didn’t apologize, they doubled-down,” said Scottsdale Unified School District parents and public school activist, Amanda Wray. “Stuart Rhoden dismissively referring to Kim Koko Hunter as “dude” said “looking on his FB page (photos below), it seems at the very least he is in darker make-up if not “Black face…”
“The SPC is so intent on finding racism they will go so far as to accuse a member of one of the communities they claim to advocate for of reprehensible behavior. SPC invoices every Scottsdale Unified School District PTO/PTA/APT for dues each year and then uses those funds to attack community members,” said Wray.
There's more at the link.
I've met all too many such individuals over the years. They actively seek to whip up negativity at every turn, manufacturing controversy out of whole cloth and ignoring reality. Note that, even when informed that his criticism was misplaced, one of them actually dared to imply that the (Black) DJ was actually wearing blackface makeup, to make himself look blacker! How daft can you get?
What's even worse is that some of these activists have used their manipulative, destructive tactics to extort money from their victims, whether individuals or organizations, in the form of "donations" to their organizations or causes. (For example, Jesse Jackson and his Rainbow/PUSH organization have been accused of such shakedowns.)
In this case, I'm glad the perpetrators have egg on their faces - but I daresay it won't change their antics for the better. It's been my experience that ideologically hidebound activists (whether on the left or the right of US politics and society) don't learn from their mistakes; rather, they double down on them.
Peter
I was fascinated by these before-and-after images of what a poster on Gab described as, "A 2000-year-old Roman silver dagger, that was discovered by an archeology intern in 2019 in Germany, before and after nine months of careful restoration work". Click the image for a larger view.
Intrigued, I looked for more information, and found a detailed article at Live Science.
Archaeologists in Germany were "lost for words" after the discovery of a 2,000-year-old silver dagger. The weapon was found in its sheath in the grave of a Roman soldier who once fought against the Germanic tribes.
The dagger was so corroded, it took nine months of sandblasting and grinding before the sharp, 13-inch-long (35 centimeters) weapon was restored, at which point researchers were easily able to remove it from its richly decorated sheath.
. . .
An intern with the Westphalie department, 19-year-old Nico Calman, discovered the dagger and sheath, as well as the remains of the decorated leather belt, during an archaeological dig at Haltern am See (Haltern at the Lake), a town in the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia, in April 2019.
During the Augustan period, from 27 B.C. to A.D. 14, Haltern was home to a Roman military base, known as "Hauptlager," or "main camp." Archaeologists have known about the site since 1900, making the newfound discovery of the dagger all the more surprising, Tremmel said.
. . .
After the dagger was X-rayed, CT scanned and restored, archaeologists marveled at the dagger; its handle is inlaid with silver and decorated with rivets, and the iron blade has "deep grooves on either side of the midrib, a pronounced waist and a long tapering point," Tremmel said.
The iron sheath is lined with linden wood and decorated with red glass, silver, niello (a black mixture, often of sulphur, copper, silver and lead) and red shiny enamel. Rings on the sheath were used to hang the dagger from a belt, which was also found in the grave.
The dagger was likely wielded by a legionary infantryman, an auxiliary infantryman or an officer known as a centurion, Tremmel said.
There's more at the link, including photographs and a video report.
I'm amazed it survived two millennia of grave-robbers, various and sundry battles fought in and around the area, and the ravages of time in general. It's in astonishingly good condition. The owner must have been a fairly wealthy man, or perhaps lucky in the loot he gathered during his service in the legions - a dagger like that would not have been an everyday possession. Was it perhaps a ceremonial blade? I guess we'll never know, but it's fascinating to speculate.
Peter
Gathered from around the Internet over the past week. We have an unusually large selection today. Click any image for a larger view.
On this Easter Sunday morning, what better way to celebrate it than with George Frideric Handel?
Lovely music for the holiest day of the Christian faith.
If you'd like to hear the full "Messiah" oratorio, my favorite rendition after sixty-plus years of listening to it remains that by Colin Davis with the London Symphony Orchestra and Chorus, recorded in 1966. The soloists were Heather Harper, soprano; Helen Watts, alto; John Wakefield, tenor; and John Shirley-Quirk, bass. You'll find the full recording on YouTube, and it's also available on CD. IMHO, it's seldom been equalled and never surpassed.
May the blessings of Easter be with and for all of you.
Peter
This will be a very short Saturday Snippet. I've had a heck of a week, with a patio slab being cast and later framed for a roof, our electrical main board being swapped out and re-wired after finding two faults we've been living with for six-odd years (that very fortunately didn't kill us or burn the house down, but were serious enough to need immediate remedial action), and sundry sorting out and cleaning up (likely to continue for a couple of months as construction and repairs wind down). My ass is whupped, as my Southern friends put it. My brain may feel like it's still 21, but my mid-'60's kinda-crippled, post-heart-attack body disagrees! With all that going on, I haven't had time to transcribe a longer excerpt for this morning.
In my copious (?!?) spare time, I've been dipping into James Sullivan's book "Unsinkable: Five Men and the Indomitable Run of the USS Plunkett".
The blurb reads:
In the bestselling tradition of Indianapolis and In Harm’s Way comes a “captivating… gripping” account of the USS Plunkett—a US Navy destroyer that sustained the most harrowing attack on any Navy ship by the Germans during World War II, later made famous by John Ford and Herman Wouk.
Unsinkable traces the individual journeys of five men on one ship from Casablanca in North Africa, to Sicily and Salerno in Italy and then on to Plunkett’s defining moment at Anzio, where a dozen-odd German bombers bore down on the ship in an assault so savage, so prolonged, and so deadly that one Navy commander was hard-pressed to think of another destroyer that had endured what Plunkett had. After a three-month overhaul and with a reputation rising as the “fightin’est ship” in the Navy, Plunkett (DD-431) plunged back into the war at Omaha Beach on D-Day, and again into battle during the invasion of Southern France—perhaps the only Navy ship to participate in every Allied invasion in the European theatre.
Featuring five incredibly brave men—the indomitable skipper, who will receive the Navy Cross; the gunnery officer, who bucks the captain every step of the way to Anzio; a first lieutenant, who’s desperate to get off the ship and into the Pacific; a seventeen-year-old water tender, who’s trying to hold onto his hometown girl against all odds, and another water tender, who mans a 20mm gun when under aerial assault—the dramatic story of each plays out on the decks of the Plunkett as the ship’s story escalates on the stage of the Mediterranean. Based on Navy logs, war diaries, action reports, letters, journals, memoirs, and dozens of interviews with the men who were on the ship and their families, Unsinkable is a timeless evocation of young men stepping up to the defining experience of their lives.
It's an interesting, well-written book, following the minutiae of daily life for a select group of shipmates, showing the war and their lives together through five different sets of eyes. I'm enjoying it - when, that is, I find time to read a few more pages!
The excerpt I'm going to use made me laugh out loud. I'm sure many current and former service personnel will have met someone like this from time to time.
At mess one day, Jim had started to work on a side of black-eyed peas when he noticed the black eyes moving. No one else noticed anything, and he wondered at the dimwittedness of his mates. Recently, he'd been the one to discover that the engineering compartment was infested with bedbugs; everyone else just figured they were itchy. Jim took his tray in to George Schwartz and pointed out the weevils. George shut down the mess line and called in Dutch Heissler to look at the bottom of his barrel. They were scraping it.
On Jack Simpson's orders, the ship's paymaster gave Dutch money for provisions, and he ambled away with a detachment of men from one of Jack's repair parties. Even as Jack authorized the foraging expedition, he didn't have a good feeling about the outcome. Dutch could work wonders on a provisioning run to a supply depot, or the Liberty ships. He could wheel and deal with peers on other cans who'd just topped off and the chockablock freighters that had plenty of everything. The crew loved Dutch for this, and because he was the kind of man who'd stay up all night with the cooks to bake bread, not because he had to but because he was vested in the stores he procured, as well as the men he fed: he wanted it done right. But Dutch was also a tattooed hard-ass who went toe to toe with Burke on the fantail [i.e. sparring matches with the ship's commanding officer], who cheated at cards and craps, and who could drink himself into oblivion, and Jack wondered whether it'd be the good Dutch out there on the island of Sicily, or the mercurial Dutch, operating out there without any decent restraint. It was both.
Long after Dutch was due back, he was not back. There weren't any Germans on Sicily. The last of eighty-eight thousand fighters had been spirited off the island while Plunkett was shelling Gioia Tauro, concluding a mass evacuation the likes of which had not been achieved since Dunkirk. But there were plenty of Sicilians left on Sicily, and that was the problem. Standing on a wing of the bridge, Jack Simpson heard the sounds of the returning repair party from a distance, heard songs in Italian, for some of the men who'd gone out with Dutch could speak Italian and those who couldn't by now thought they could. When Plunkett finally did see them, they also saw wheeled wooden carts filled with food, and in one or two of the carts, a couple of the ship's men too drunk to walk.
At the gangplank, in a voice thickened by wine, Dutch called up to report that they'd had some success. They'd secured food, and they'd managed to do so without having to expend any of the ship's money. The Sicilians had greeted them as liberators and wouldn't let them pay for anything.
Jack's Dead End Kids, reeling with the same Sicilian vintage, started hustling their provisions up the gangplank. One of the Kids tottered off the side and plunged into the drink. Someone dead-panned the obvious, "Man overboard", and the splashed sailor's voice billowed up from below, small, happy, and oblivious: "Where is he? I'll get him while I'm down here."
Peter
I've watched people try to throw their weight around with serving staff. It seldom ends well, as Stephan Pastis reminds us. Click the image to be taken to a larger version at the comic strip's Web page.
Peter
The near-hysteria on the progressive left at the prospect of Elon Musk buying Twitter can only be described as "delicious!". Glenn Greenwald reports:
During the failed liberal campaign to force Spotify to remove Joe Rogan's podcast — remember that? — I wrote that the real lesson from that tawdry episode was that the central religious belief of American liberals now is censorship. Silencing, deplatforming and otherwise preventing their adversaries from being heard is their paramount goal, their primary weapon.
. . .
As I noted yesterday in reporting on the unprecedented censorship regime imposed in the West in the name of the war in Ukraine, a series of ostensible crises — Russiagate, the 1/6 riot, the COVID pandemic and now this war — have, in rapid succession, convinced not just liberals but increasingly large numbers of Westerners in many ideological camps not only to tolerate but to crave state/corporate censorship. They have somehow inverted history so that they now believe that it is not censorship that is the favored tool of fascists, tyrants and authoritarians — even though every fascist and despot in history used censorship as a key means for maintaining power — but instead believe that it is free speech, free discourse, and free thought that are the instruments of repression.
Few events have revealed this twisted framework as vividly as the news that Elon Musk offered on Wednesday to buy Twitter and take it private. The fact that Musk has repeatedly denounced Twitter's increasingly heavy-handed and clearly ideological censorship regime does not mean he is earnest in his intention to restore free speech to the platform, but the mere possibility that he does intend to do so has sent censorship-dependent liberals into spasms of panic and hysteria. Before the morning was over, some were even comparing Musk's offer to ... the rise of Nazism in the 1930s.
I will undoubtedly have more to write about these potentially exciting and encouraging developments as they proceed. Few things are more potentially positive than the restoration of free discourse on major internet platforms.
There's more at the link.
As if to provide a counterpoint to Mr. Greenwald, Katy Tur of MSNBC moaned:
"There are real and devastating consequences for using that platform to lie, and we've seen it happen ... You know in talking about this, you know, it's kinda funny, oh, Elon Musk wants to buy it, but there are massive, life and globe-altering consequences for just letting people run wild on the thing.”
Ye Gods and little fishes. She's having a meltdown because someone is threatening to make speech on one platform a whole lot more free than it is at present. She's supposed to be a bloody journalist, for heaven's sake? If she isn't on the side of free speech, she's no journalist at all - she's a paid hack for the establishment!
That's why I'm on Gab rather than Twitter or Facebook. I unreservedly and unequivocally support free speech. There are things that make me uncomfortable, and at times I've approached some people to ask them to tone it down. If they do, fine: but if they don't, I don't blame them in the least. Free speech is their right as well as mine. If the topic is sufficiently important to me, I simply leave the platform concerned, or stop (at least publicly) associating with them. I'm not censoring them, and I won't, because if I try to censor others, they can do the same to me. It's a two-way street, and we have to live that way.
Meanwhile, let the progressive meltdown continue. It's good entertainment, if nothing else.
Peter
SNAFU Solomon linked to a tweet from Lancer Brigade that provided a video clip about the US Army's third-generation AN/PSQ-20 ENVG-B (Enhanced Vision Night Goggle - Binocular) and associated equipment. It was pretty amazing to watch.
Intrigued, I looked for more information (you'll find a brief overview at the link above). This twelve-minute video shows how the equipment is fitted and tuned to the individual soldier, and what they can see when they use it. It's impressive. It looks like the device takes raw input from all the sensors, combines and refines it using computer-generated imagery, and presents a composite result to the user.
I'm particularly intrigued by the way the soldier can now "see through" his rifle's sight without bringing it to his eye. He can hold the weapon at waist height, or even extend it around a corner while all of his body except his hands and forearms remains behind cover, and still accurately hit what he's aiming at. That offers an immense tactical advantage, as does the fact that he can now see through smoke, fog, rain, and almost any human-generated battlefield camouflage designed to restrict vision.
How I wish we'd had something like that (or, for that matter, earlier generations such as the AN/PVS-5, AN/PVS-7 or AN/PVS-14) during my time "up the sharp end" in the South African military during the 1980's. It would have made my job immensely easier . . . and, more to the point, it might have kept some of my late comrades-in-arms alive.
Peter
