Pushing Back On Bad Medicine

On of the most frightening trends right now is the increase in the number of young children and teenagers who believe that they are in the wrong body with the wrong sex. Part of that trend is due to social media and the lies told there, and part of that trend is due to the normal confusion of puberty. On Wednesday, The Federalist posted an article showing some of the problems with the narrative that transgender medical procedures are a good thing.

The article reports:

The truth about transgenderism is coming out. On Monday, Michael Shellenberger released a multitude of internal files from the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) that “prove that the practice of transgender medicine is neither scientific nor medical.” WPATH has been accepted by the political, cultural, and medical establishments as the authority on transgenderism, but what its members say in private is not the narrative they sell to the public.

Instead of the rigorous, careful, evidence-based medicine that champions of “gender-affirming care” claim to practice, the WPATH files show doctors who are making it up as they go along, smashing through guardrails even though they know that the children they are chemically and surgically altering cannot really give informed consent. And people are noticing.

No wonder the transgender ideologues are worried. The public has proven more resistant than they expected, especially regarding radical policies such as putting men in women’s prisons and girls’ locker rooms, let alone sexually mutilating and sterilizing children. And transgender activists and their allies have no response except to repeat their same failed arguments, just louder.

…From puberty blockers to hormones to surgeries, transition is never medically necessary. Transitioning does not cure any disease or correct any physical ailment or injury. Rather, the point of medicalized transition is to disrupt and destroy the normal functioning of healthy bodies.

The article notes:

Therefore, it is not only reasonable, but imperative, for legislators to rein in the transgender industry, and especially to stop the “transitioning” of children. Ulrich and other activists can fulminate about right-wing conspiracies, but it is right and just to ban the surgical and chemical mutilation of children. Many states have done so, thereby proving that gender ideology will not inevitably triumph and claim our children for its own.

It’s time that parents and grandparents demand that children be protected from unnecessary medical procedures that will have life-long consequences.

The Politicization Of Justice In America

Welcome to the Banana Republic America has become. As many of you may remember, one of the people telling the crowds to go into the Capitol during the January 6th protest was Ray Epps. After the events of that day, he was placed on the FBI’s Most Wanted List, but disappeared from that list rather quickly. It was only after social media asked a lot of questions that he was finally charged for his actions that day.

On Tuesday, The Gateway Pundit reported:

J6 Operative Ray Epps was sentenced on Tuesday to NO JAIL TIME!

Ray Epps, the only January 6 protester who actually told people to go into the Capitol, has been officially sentenced to one year probation, $500 restitution, and 100 hours community service.

Epps did not have to show up for court today – he called in via Zoom.

Little old grandmothers who did nothing more than peacefully walk through the Capitol after the police opened the door for them are spending time in jail, and this piece of work gets probation! There is something seriously wrong with justice (or the lack thereof) in America.

The article notes:

As reported by the Gateway Pundit, Epps was just sued by J6 defendant Eric Clark for “Conspiracy to Violate Civil Rights.” The case was filed in a Utah Federal Court.

Here’s where it gets shady.

The Gateway Pundit had a tip that Ray Epps was going to be served with the lawsuit at the courthouse during his sentencing. Process servers were hired by the Plaintiff and our reporters were scheduled to be there to capture the moment Epps was served on video. This was all discussed yesterday in private phone calls.

Then like magic, Ray Epps’ Fairy Godmother changed his PUBLIC IN-PERSON sentencing hearing to a REMOTE TELEPHONIC sentencing hearing.

Why isn’t Congress screaming about the violations of the civil rights of the January 6th dependents every day? Where is the outrage about the lack of accountability in the sentencing of Ray Epps?

Unfortunately, The Government Spying On Americans Isn’t New

On Wednesday, Just the News posted an article about our government spying on Americans. According to a whistleblower, this is not anything new.

The article reports:

The public-private efforts to restrict and suppress purported “mis-, dis- and malinformation” across tech platforms started almost immediately after the surprise election of Donald Trump in 2016, ramped up a year before the COVID-19 pandemic, and included U.S. and U.K. military contractors and plans to cut off financial services to dissenters and sue them.

That’s according to a “highly credible whistleblower” who says they were recruited to participate in the Cyber Threat Intelligence League (CTIL) “through monthly cybersecurity meetings hosted by” the Department of Homeland Security, independent journalists who reviewed the Twitter Files at new owner Elon Musk’s invitation said Tuesday.

We are at a point that if an American says that two plus two equals four and the government wants it to equal five, the American is charged with spreading misinformation or disinformation. That is not a good place to be–particularly for a representative republic.

The article concludes:

Breuer (U.S. military contractor Pablo Breuer) told a podcast the duo’s work involved getting “nontraditional partners into one room,” such as social media companies, “special forces operators” and DHS employees, “to talk in a non-attribution, open environment in an unclassified way.”

He explained how the “in-group and out-group messaging have to be often different” when trying to sell Americans on a domestic version of the “Great Firewall of China.”

While Chinese citizens believe this censorship is to “protect the citizenry,” Americans “would absolutely lose our minds” if the feds “tried to sell that narrative,” Breuer reportedly said.

The reporting trio said they would present the underlying documents from the whistleblower to congressional investigators in the coming weeks and “make public all of the documents we can while also protecting the identity of the whistleblower and other individuals who are not senior leaders or public figures.”

The FBI declined to comment on the report to Just the News, and DHS and CISA did not respond to queries. Neither did Terp (U.K. defense researcher Sara-Jayne Terp) and Breuer.

The Washington swamp is a danger to all free Americans.

When Our Government Works Against The Interests Of The Voters

On November, The Washington Examiner posted an article about the partnership between an agency in the Department of Homeland Security and several university centers to identify online content worthy of censorship. Why is our government working with universities to censor free speech? Might that be part of the reason our colleges have become indoctrination centers?

The article reports:

An agency within the Department of Homeland Security partnered with several university centers to identify online content worthy of censorship, according to a new report from the House Judiciary Committee.

The report, a project of the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government, detailed how the federal government formed a partnership with the Stanford Internet Observatory, the University of Washington Center for an Informed Public, and other groups. Titled the “Election Integrity Partnership,” the consortium aimed to identify election-related content that needed to be censored.

The report said the partnership was established in July 2020 by the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, a small agency within the Department of Homeland Security. The partnership then worked with social media companies to throttle content that questioned the integrity of the election process.

“The federal government and universities pressured social media companies to censor true information, jokes, and political opinions,” the report said. “This pressure was largely directed in a way that benefited one side of the political aisle: True information posted by Republicans and conservatives was labeled as ‘misinformation’ while false information posted by Democrats and liberals was largely unreported and untouched by the censors.”

The article also notes:

The report named several prominent politicians, people, and conservative news outlets that had been targeted for censorship, including former President Donald Trump, Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC), former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), the Babylon Bee satire site, and Newsmax.

“Stanford and others, in collaboration with the federal government, established the EIP for the express purpose of violating Americans’ civil liberties: Because no federal agency ‘has a focus on, or authority regarding, election misinformation originating from domestic sources within the United States,’ there is ‘a critical gap for non-governmental entities to fill.’ CISA and Stanford created the EIP to bridge this ‘critical gap’ — an unconstitutional workaround for unconstitutional censorship,” the report said.

The report contained numerous screenshots of emails between government officials and employees of Twitter, Facebook, and the university “misinformation” centers, many of which included direct requests to censor content.

One of the things that was censored was any reporting on Hunter Biden’s laptop. Government agencies knew the laptop was real and probably anticipated the information on it being reported before the election. The letter from the retired intelligence agents came out in October 2020, just before the election. Any valid information on the laptop was censored. At some point, American voters are going to realize that they have been manipulated and lied to by their own government. That will be interesting to watch.

This Might Be A Very Interesting Case

On Tuesday, The Epoch Times reported that Terry Doughty, a judge in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Louisiana, has ruled that Missouri and Louisiana officials can obtain documents to investigate the Biden administration’s alleged collusion with social media giants in an effort to censor and suppress free speech.

The article reports:

The ruling comes after the attorneys general of Louisiana and Missouri filed a lawsuit in May alleging that the Biden administration “colluded with and/or coerced social media companies to suppress disfavored speakers, viewpoints, and content on social media platforms by labeling the content ‘disinformation,’ ‘misinformation,’ and ‘malinformation.’”

The attorneys general named social media giants such as Meta, Twitter, and YouTube in a press release announcing the lawsuit in May.

They also claimed that President Joe Biden himself, along with other top-ranking government officials, had worked with the platforms to censor and suppress free speech, including “truthful information” pertaining to the origins of COVID-19, the effectiveness of masks, election integrity, and the security of voting by mail, as well as the ongoing Hunter Biden laptop scandal.

Among the defendants named in the lawsuit are Biden, former press secretary Jen Psaki, chief medical adviser to the president and director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Dr. Anthony Fauci, former Disinformation Governance Board executive director Nina Jankowicz, Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, and others.

As someone whose Right Wing Granny group is almost always ‘restricted’ on Facebook, I appreciate their efforts. I have been ‘shadow banned’ for years. It has become a way of life.

Do you honestly believe that if the truth about Hunter’s laptop, President Biden’s mental state, or the honest numbers on Covid-19 had been generally known by the public, the vote for President would have been even close? I don’t believe 2020 was an honest election, but that is another story. A Republic (which America is–not a Democracy) depends on a free, honest press to inform its citizens. We don’t have that right now. The only way you are going to find out what is actually happening is to go to the internet and find news sources you trust. You cannot currently find a lot of truth in any of the mainstream media.

This Is Not Surprising

For a long time, America trusted its news sources. However, in recent years, those sources have come into question as they have become more and more biased. There are also some real questions as to what is being left out of what is being reported. The addition of alternative news has helped balance things out for those who are willing to do their own research, but a large segment of the American population still believes that everything they hear on the mainstream media is true. That is one of many reasons for the division we see among Americans. There are, however, some elements of our society who like the current lack of unbiased information and would like the division to continue. Unfortunately many of these elements are found inside of our government.

Yesterday The Conservative Treehouse posted an article titled, “Former Intel Officials Want Efforts to Break Up Big Tech Stopped–Data Control and Retention of Social Media Partnership Is A National Security Imperative.” Just for the record, controlling the media in our free republic is not only not a national security  imperative–it is totally unconstitutional.

Please follow the link to read the entire article. It is long and complicated, but worth the read. I will post a few important points here.

The article reports:

Former Obama era intelligence officials, those who helped construct, organize and assemble the public-private partnership between intelligence data networks and supported social media companies, have written a letter to congress warning that any effort to break up Big Tech (Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Google, Microsoft, etc.) would be catastrophic for the national security system they have created.

[READ LETTER HERE]

Citing the information control mechanisms they assembled, vis-a-vis the ability of social media networks to control and approve what is available for the public to read and review, the intelligence officials declare that any effort to break up the private side of the intel/tech partnership will only result in less ability of the intelligence apparatus to control public opinion.

They willfully admit that open and uncensored information is adverse to the interests of the intelligence state and therefore too dangerous to permit. They specifically argue, if the modern system created by the partnership between the U.S. government and Big Tech is not retained, the national security of the United States is compromised. Let that sink in for a moment.

The article concludes:

The influence of the Intelligence Branch now reaches into our lives, our personal lives through their efforts in social media.

In the decades before 9/11/01 the intelligence apparatus intersected with government, influenced government, and undoubtedly controlled many institutions with it. Back then, the legislative oversight function was weak and growing weaker, but it still existed and could have been used to keep the IC in check. However, after the events of 9/11/01, the short-sighted legislative reactions opened the door to allow the surveillance state to weaponize.

After the Patriot Act was triggered, not coincidentally only six weeks after 9/11, a slow and dangerous fuse was lit that ends with the intelligence apparatus being granted a massive amount of power. The problem with assembled power is always what happens when a Machiavellian network takes control over that power and begins the process to weaponize the tools for their own malicious benefit. That is exactly what the installation of Barack Obama was all about.

The Obama era intelligence team took pre-assembled intelligence weapons we should never have allowed to be created and turned those weapons into tools for radical, political and fundamental change. The target was the essential fabric of our nation. Ultimately, this corrupt political process gave power to create the Fourth Branch of Government, the Intelligence Branch. From that perspective, the fundamental change was successful.

It’s all Connected FolksSEE HERE

[…] “The vision was first outlined in the Intelligence Community Information Technology Enterprise plan championed by Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and IC Chief Information Officer Al Tarasiuk almost three years ago.” … “It is difficult to underestimate the cloud contract’s importance. In a recent public appearance, CIA Chief Information Officer Douglas Wolfe called it “one of the most important technology procurements in recent history,” with ramifications far outside the realm of technology.” (READ MORE)

One job…. “take the preexisting system and retool it so the weapons of government only targeted one side of the political continuum.”

Welcome to 1984.

Squelched By Social Media

This video was posted at YouTube. It has been taken down on some social media as it has gone viral with information that does not agree with the current political narrative. I am posting it here so that if it gets taken down, it will still be accessible. The video is of doctors stating that hydroxychloroquine is a safe and effective treatment for the coronavirus. The doctors also note that sending children back to school has become a political matter rather than a scientific consideration. Again, the video is here for your consideration. The full video is available at Breitbart.com. As far as I know, it is not available anywhere else. I could not figure out how to share it from Breitbart.

 

The Latest Scandal

“Sharpiegate” has arrived. Yesterday Hot Air posted an article about the latest dumb attack on First Lady Melania Trump.

The article includes screenshots of some tweets criticizing the dress that the First Lady was wearing during the celebration at Mount Rushmore.

The article includes the actual story behind the dress:

The dress was a creation of young fashion students in college. The dress is called Dancing Girls Dress.

It seems however that Alexander McQueen have gone above and beyond with introducing new initiatives to keep the fashion community connected during lockdown. Their recently introduced #McQueenCreators project has been as massive success on social media, bringing the fashion family together under one hypothetical McQueen shaped roof.

A sense on community is something that has always been close to the heart of the house. For their SS20 collection the McQueen team worked alongside Central Saint Martin’s MA students and The Stitch School to create the Dancing Girls Print, a print now synonymous with the collection as a whole and emblematic of McQueen’s commitment to collaboration.

Continuous, spontaneous sketches of dancing girls were created in a life-drawing class held at the educational space at the Alexander McQueen London flagship store last year.

This dress has a greater meaning. Every single member of the team contributed to the embroidery by hand on this dress becoming a true symbol of what the brand stands for. Alexander McQueen aims to nurture and contribute to the success of young designers and creatives, and this sense of community that went towards one single dress proves this.

The article concludes:

I’ll end with this tidbit – another Trump supporter reminds us of a former First Lady’s fashion choices.

Melania Trump is the best-dressed First Lady this country has ever had, whether you like her or not. She represents the United States well. She has surpassed the gold standard of fashionable First Ladies, Jackie Kennedy, much to the left’s dismay. Best of all, we aren’t talking about First Gentleman fashion and Bill Clinton.

If nothing else, this episode shows the political left’s desperation to find something to criticize. As the country rebounds from the economic impact of the coronavirus and begins to move forward again, it’s simply becoming more difficult to grouse.

No Longer Fair And Balanced

“Fair and Balanced” has been the slogan of Fox News since it began in 1996. Unfortunately, as the children have taken the management over from their father, the station is no longer quite as fair and balanced as it used to be.

The Daily Caller posted an article yesterday reporting that Fox News reportedly cut ties with social media personalities Diamond & Silk after the pair stirred controversy over incorrect comments about the novel coronavirus. Actually I am not sure anyone on the news is currently making accurate comments about the coronavirus.

Diamond & Silk are Trump supporters who are entertaining and funny. They do not claim to be scientists. They are as entitled to their opinion on the coronavirus as much as anyone else is. I believe that they are being censored not because of their comments about the coronavirus but because of their support of President Trump.

The article reports:

“After what they’ve said and tweeted you won’t be seeing them on Fox Nation or Fox News anytime soon,” a source with knowledge of the situation said according to The Daily Beast.

Fox News did not immediately respond to a request for comment from the Daily Caller.

The siblings came under fire after saying on March 30 that the number of Americans who have died from the novel coronavirus is being misreported to make President Donald Trump look bad, The Daily Beast reported.

They also accused billionaire Bill Gates of being involved with the virus on April 10 during a livestream, saying he has pushed for “population control,” the publication reported. Diamond & Silk said they would not be taking any vaccine that Gates was involved in producing, according to The Daily Beast.

Just for the record, Bill Gates is an advocate of population control and is one of the major fund sources for the World Health Organization. It may be that Diamond & Silk were fired because some of what they were saying was a little too close to the truth.

Pettiness On Parade

Yesterday PJ Media posted an article about the movie Home Alone 2: Lost in New York. The movie is the rather silly physical comedy sequel to Home Alone. There is a scene in the movie where President Trump (before he was involved in politics) makes a cameo appearance. CBC TV in Canada chose to remove that scene from the movie.

The article reports:

That’s right, ComicBook.com reports that CBC edited out Donald Trump’s cameo from the 1992 movie. And people watching it were quick to report the suspicious omission on social media. Some were outraged, and the snowflakes were thrilled.

The article concludes:

Donald Trump formally announced his campaign in June 2015. The first time the CBC’s cutting of Trump’s cameo appearance was acknowledged on Twitter was around Christmas that year

…Now, either 2015 happened to be the first year the CBC broadcasted the movie, which I highly doubt, or something happened between the 2014 CBC broadcast of Home Alone 2, and the 2015 CBC broadcast. One could argue that Trump wasn’t a political figure in the public’s conscious before 2015, but years prior he had been making headlines for publicly questioning Obama’s birth certificate—so I don’t think that excuse really works. Had his cameo been cut before then, I’m sure it would have been noticed.

Trump’s presidential bid appears to the be beginning of the folks at the CBC being triggered by Trump so badly that they actually had to edit him out of their broadcast of the film. I can’t decide if this is hilarious or sad.

How petty can the media get?

The Thin Line Of Censorship

A friend of mine who is in radio advertising tells me that radio stations do not have the ability to refuse political ads. During an election season, a station must air all ads that a political campaign pays for. Evidently this is the result of the fact that radio stations are controlled by the Federal Communications Commission. Unfortunately the new media is very loosely controlled by anything. This is a very mixed blessing. I don’t want the government telling me that I have to accept political ads on my blog whether or not I agree with the ads. However, the censorship of conservative speech that is going on at YouTube, Facebook, Google, Twitter, etc., is not acceptable.

Breitbart is reporting today that according to a report by 60 minutes more than 300 of President Donald Trump’s political ads have taken down by Google and its video platform YouTube, mostly over the summer.

The article reports:

The CBS reporters were unable to find specific reasons for the mass takedowns of Trump ads, a common problem with social media companies, which are often reluctant to explain precisely why a ban or other act of censorship has happened. “We found very little transparency in the transparency report,” concluded 60 Minutes.

The article includes the following quote from CBS News:

60 Minutes correspondent Lesley Stahl asked Wojcicki, “Have you taken down any of President Trump’s ads at all?” YouTube’s CEO responded, “There are ads of President Trump that were not approved to run on Google or YouTube.” When pressed for an example, Wojcicki added, “Well, they’re available in our transparency report.”

In response to concerns raised after the 2016 election cycle, Google and YouTube, like Facebook, keep a searchable archive of political ads that have run on the site.

60 Minutes reviewed the archive to learn more about President Trump’s problematic political ads. We found that over 300 video ads were taken down by Google and YouTube, mostly over the summer, for violating company policy. But the archive doesn’t detail what policy was violated. Was it copyright violation? A lie or extreme inaccuracy? Faulty grammar? Bad punctuation? It’s unclear. The ads determined to be offending are not available to be screened. We found very little transparency in the transparency report. 

We are coming into a very important election season. American voters need to hear both sides of every campaign. We already know that the mainstream media is extremely biased. How are people supposed to get information when free speech is being suppressed?

An Interesting Post From Another Writer

Why Solopreneurs Can Thrive in the Digital Age

There are few goals bigger and more rewarding than running a successful company on your own. Not too long ago, this was a desperately prohibitive idea, and a path few had the means to follow. Today, solopreneurs can see their ideas grow thanks to increased access to technology.

Solopreneurs vs. Entrepreneurs

To understand why solopreneurs have such an advantage in the digital age, we must first take a look at how they’re different from entrepreneurs. Simply put, a solopreneur is a business owner who starts a company without planning to add any regular staff members. An entrepreneur may start a company on their own, but over time, they intend to build an employee base around themselves to support the work required to make the business thrive.

A solopreneur prefers to have complete creative and managerial control over their business. They may hire contract workers or outsource tasks to consulting companies, but their ultimate goal is to directly handle both the big picture and day-to-day tasks in the long term.

In the past, solopreneurs would have had little means to do the work of running a business on their own. As a result, they would either be forced to transition to a more traditional form of business ownership, or they’d face major burnout. Fortunately, the advent of technology allows intrepid individuals to strike out and manage their companies their way. So, here are a few ways tech can help you and your business thrive.

The Best Tools

As recently as two decades ago, the average person didn’t walk around with a fully functioning computer in their pocket. Today, 81 percent of Americans own a smartphone. Odds are good most solopreneurs start off with a calendar, calculator, web browser and a phone all in one device. Depending on your phone’s capabilities, that list of available tools gets much longer.

However, this tool can wind up letting you down if you don’t have reliable service. Make sure your provider has the coverage and data capabilities to support you, whether you need to call a client or post an update to your website. You’re probably going to wind up talking, texting, and using more data as a business owner than you did before. As such, make sure you choose a cell plan — whether it’s a multi-line business option or a regular unlimited plan with a few more bells and whistles — that matches your budget and your needs.

Access to Great People

Once, business owners were limited to traditional professional networking — seeking people out at conferences or events, or begging an old coworker to set up an introduction. Although those options are still available (and still useful!), digital connectivity has brought those walls down.

 

If you want to get to know a solopreneur you admire across the country, you can reach out to her on LinkedIn. Want to pick an industry leader’s brain? Email him through his website, or follow his blog. Your access to valuable connections is nearly unlimited in the modern age.

Client and Customer Contact

Thanks to the internet, business owners today have their customers right at their fingertips. From your business website to social media to review sites, there are so many different ways for you to get customer feedback and create connections.

As a solopreneur, it’s important to have an ear to the ground when it comes to your social media sites and website contact page. If someone reaches out to you, it’s vital that you respond promptly – a fast reply keeps you on their mind and improves the power of the connection.

Online customer or client connections can go both ways, as well. Make a point of regularly reaching out to potential clients with pitches tailored to their needs. The more personalized you can make it, the better. It’s not enough to show that your business is great: You need to prove your business will be great for them.

Running a company all on your own is a big task, but there’s never been a better time to take that task on. Make the most of the tools available to you, and you can see your business soar.

 

Photo Credit: Pixabay

 

 

 

Maybe There Is A Solution Not Yet Tried

Breitbart posted an article yesterday about an aspect of the transgender population that has not yet been fully considered.

The article reports:

A new study that examined students who claim to have gender identity issues found that, compared with 45 percent of students who are comfortable with their biological sex, 78 percent of gender-disturbed students met the criteria for at least one mental health problem.

Researchers affiliated with the Boston University School of Public Health, Harvard Medical School, and University of Michigan School of Public Health, conducted the expansive study, published at the American Journal of Preventive Medicine.

The study, which included more than 1,200 college students with gender identity issues across 71 U.S. college campuses, found that, across commonly used mental health measures, 78 percent of the gender-disturbed students met the criteria for one or more of the outcomes of depression, anxiety, eating disorders, self-injury, and suicidality.

The article concludes:

In 2018, Dr. Lisa Littman at Brown University set out to learn more about why the number of adolescent girls identifying as transgender at Britain’s Gender Identity Development Service had increased from 41 percent in 2009 to 69 percent in 2017.

The researcher said she had observed teens without a history of gender dysphoria – a clinical term describing psychological discomfort caused by a sense one’s gender is incompatible with one’s biological sex – were “coming out” as transgender “after a period of immersing themselves in niche websites after similar announcements from friends.”

In her study of 256 parents, which was condemned by LGBT activists, Littman found 87 percent of the young people were reported to have “come out” as transgender after increased time spent on social media and the Internet and after “cluster outbreaks” of gender dysphoria among their groups of friends. Most of the teens who ultimately identified as transgender also showed increased popularity with peer groups afterward, according to their parents’ reports.

Additionally, Littman found nearly two-thirds of the young people whose parents participated in the survey had already been diagnosed with at least one psychiatric developmental disorder prior to the onset of the gender dysphoria. For example, nearly half of the young people had already attempted to harm themselves or had experienced a trauma, suggesting the mental health issues preceded the reported gender identity disturbance.

Recently, the academic response to a child who expresses a desire to change their sex has been to aid them in the process, sometimes without parent knowledge or consent. It would make more sense to search for underlying issues and deal with those issues before encouraging a child to walk down such a life-changing path. I recently read an article about a young boy, about nine or ten, who told his parents he wanted to be a girl. The parents sought counseling for the child, rather than simply go along with his wishes. The counseling revealed that because the child noticed that his younger sister who was handicapped got more attention from his parents than he did, he thought that if he were a girl, he would get more attention. His going through the transgender process would not have helped his problem at all. After counseling, the family dynamic was altered, and the boy went happily along the way as a little boy.

Not every person who claims to be transgender is actually transgender. Some have simply walked down that path in a desperate attempt to deal with other underlying issues. We do these people a disservice when we don’t look for and attempt to solve those underlying issues.

Misusing The Power Of Social Media

PJ Media posted an article yesterday about a recent statement by Mark Zuckerberg.

The article reports:

During this year’s Aspen Ideas Festival, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg explained that Facebook is increasingly trying to work with governments to determine what political speech it does and does not allow. Oh sorry, I mean: what kind of political ads it is willing to approve.

In the particular example Zuckerberg cited, in 2018, American pro-life groups wanted to run advertisements for Facebook users in Ireland. This is because the Irish were about to vote in a referendum on whether abortion should be legalized.

When Facebook saw the ad requests, the company contacted the Irish government asking whether this should or should not be allowed. “Their response at the time was, ‘we don’t currently have a law, so you need to make whatever decision you want to make.'”

In other words, Facebook could do as it pleased. There was no legal reason to disallow the ads. But what did Facebook do? You guessed it:

“We ended up not allowing the ads.”

When Mark Zuckerberg made this decision, Facebook became a publication–not a platform. The decision was an editorial decision–not a legal decision. The decision was consistent with the political ideology that Facebook has supported in the past. This is the point at which Facebook becomes dangerous. Much of the younger generation gets their news through social media. If Facebook is making editorial decisions based on political ideology, they are not acting as an honest broker of news. Our younger generations are not hearing the complete story–they are hearing a politically biased version–no different from the mainstream media.

There are no laws against Facebook making editorial decisions, but its users need to be aware that they are not getting both sides of any story.

Upholding The Law Even When Challenged

Yesterday Yahoo News reported that Oberlin College will be required to pay Gibson’s Bakery $44 million in damages after the College accused the Bakery of racism.

The article explains the root of the controversy:

Problems between the Gibsons, their once-beloved bakery and the college began in November 2016 after Allyn Gibson, who is white, confronted a black Oberlin student who had shoplifted wine. Two other black students joined in and assaulted Gibson, police said.

The day after the arrests, hundreds of students protested outside the bakery.  Members of Oberlin College’s student senate published a resolution saying Gibson’s had “a history of racial profiling and discriminatory treatment.”

When news of the protests spread online, bikers and counterprotesters soon converged on the town to jeer students and make purchases from Gibson’s. Conservatives derided the students on social media as coddled “snowflakes” with a mob mentality, while students attacked the store as a symbol of systemic racism.

The Gibsons sued Oberlin and the dean of students in November 2017, accusing faculty members of encouraging the protests. The lawsuit said college tour guides informed prospective students that Gibson’s is racist.

The Gibsons said the protests devastated their business and forced them to lay off workers. They said they haven’t paid themselves or other family members since the protests.

Yesterday The Gateway Pundit reported:

For decades the college would buy baked goods from the small family-owned and operated business, but the bakery says that ended after the students were arrested. The administration reportedly told the bakery that they would restore the business relationship only if they stopped prosecuting first-time shoplifters and notified the school instead. Owner David Gibson declined the offer, citing the difficulty in determining who is a first time offender and the high cost of stolen goods.

Though the three men were clearly in the wrong, the bakery was subject to Black Lives Matter protests and even pressured by the college’s administration not to pursue charges.

According to the lawsuit, faculty members encouraged the demonstrations by suspending classes, helping to distribute flyers accusing the bakery of racism, and providing food and drinks to protesters.

I have a word of advice for all future social justice warriors–make sure the person you are claiming was treated unfairly is innocent of the charges. Otherwise, you may be the one thwarting justice and paying the price.

Free Speech In America?

Conservative speech is under attack in America. Facebook has banned Alex Jones and Milo Yiannopoulos. Admittedly, those two are not necessarily mainstream conservatives, but you get my point. David Horowitz is routinely suspended or banned from Twitter for telling the truth about radical Islam.

In case you haven’t noticed, there will be an election next year. If Twitter and Facebook can effectively squelch conservative speech on their platforms, how much will that impact the election? Right now more than 50 percent of Americans believe President Trump is guilty of Russian collusion. Those of us who don’t depend on the mainstream media for our news know that this is not true. The Mueller Report found no evidence of either collusion or obstruction of justice, but the mainstream media has somehow avoided making that clear. If conservatives don’t either stand up for their rights on social media or create an equally powerful social media network, our message will not get out. It’s that simple. Those who want to change America into something our Founding Fathers would not recognize can do it by controlling social media. That effort has already begun.

Be Careful When Getting Excited About An Upcoming Trip

Yesterday John Hinderaker at Power Line posted an article about a recent controversy in the knitting community. I am posting most of the article because I am not sure anyone could explain this as well as Mr. Hinderaker.

The article reports:

It begins with a young (white) knitter who expressed enthusiasm about an upcoming trip to India on social media:

On January 7, she blogged excitedly about her upcoming trip to India. She wrote that 2019 would be her “year of color.” She said that as a child, India had fascinated her, and that when an Indian friend’s parents offered to take her with them on a trip, it was “like being offered a seat on a flight to Mars.” She spoke of her trip as if it were the biggest hurdle anyone could jump: “If I can go to India, I can do anything — I’m pretty sure.” Templer, it should be noted, is white.

As someone who is mixed-race Indian, to me, her post (though seemingly well-meaning) was like bingo for every conversation a white person has ever had with me about their “fascination” with my dad’s home country; it was just so colorful and complex and inspiring. It’s not that they were wrong, per se, just that the tone felt like they thought India only existed to be all those things for them.

Following a major controversy in the online knitting community, the offender offered a Maoist apology:

Templer has since apologized for her post, writing, “It took women of color pointing this out for me to see it … which is not their responsibility, and I am thankful to them for taking the time,” and that she’d be continuing to raise visibility of people of color (and specifically black/indigenous POC) knitters and their work.”

The article concludes:

Social media also makes pointing out racism easier than ever. For weeks, POC knitters have used Instagram, and specifically Instagram stories, to share their observations, tag other knitters, and conduct polls about others’ experiences with racism in the community. Hundreds of people of color have shared stories of being ignored in knitting stores, having white knitters assume they were poor or complete amateurs, or flat-out saying they didn’t think black or Asian people knit.

There is much more–“whitewashing,” for example. If lefties can turn knitting into a hotbed of racism, what can’t they do?

Wow. Not even knitters are safe from racism.

Our Future?

I think most Americans realize that Big Brother is getting to be a bit intrusive. Our computer searches are mined for advertising information, Alexa listens to our conversations, our government has been known to listen to our telephone conversations. This is not headed in a good direction. However, it gets even worse when you consider the fact that the next step will be modifying our behavior to fit some ideal created by someone who believes he has the right to control everyone. Not a pleasant thought. Think it’s too farfetched? An article posted at Wired on January 23 might change your mind.

The article begins:

A friend of mine, who runs a large television production company in the car-mad city of Los Angeles, recently noticed that his intern, an aspiring filmmaker from the People’s Republic of China, was walking to work.

When he offered to arrange a swifter mode of transportation, she declined. When he asked why, she explained that she “needed the steps” on her Fitbit to sign in to her social media accounts. If she fell below the right number of steps, it would lower her health and fitness rating, which is part of her social rating, which is monitored by the government. A low social rating could prevent her from working or traveling abroad.

China’s social rating system, which was announced by the ruling Communist Party in 2014, will soon be a fact of life for many more Chinese.

By 2020, if the Party’s plan holds, every footstep, keystroke, like, dislike, social media contact, and posting tracked by the state will affect one’s social rating.

Personal “creditworthiness” or “trustworthiness” points will be used to reward and punish individuals and companies by granting or denying them access to public services like health care, travel, and employment, according to a plan released last year by the municipal government of Beijing. High-scoring individuals will find themselves in a “green channel,” where they can more easily access social opportunities, while those who take actions that are disapproved of by the state will be “unable to move a step.”

We do an awful lot of business with China. When trade was opened with China, the idea was that our form of government and freedom would influence their government in the direction of freedom. Somehow, based on this story, I don’t think that is what has happened.

Please follow the link above to read the entire article. There is no way I can summarize all of it, but I would like to share a few more points.

The article continues:

Perhaps we are reading the wrong books. Instead of going back to Orwell for a sense of what a coming dystopia might look like, we might be better off reading We, which was written nearly a century ago by the Russian novelist Yevgeny Zamyatin. We is the diary of state mathematician D-503, whose experience of the highly disruptive emotion of love for I-330, a woman whose combination of black eyes, white skin, and black hair strike him as beautiful. This perception, which is also a feeling, draws him into a conspiracy against the centralized surveillance state.

The Only State, where We takes places, is ruled by a highly advanced mathematics of happiness, administered by a combination of programmers and machines.

The article concludes:

Beauty is the ultimate example of human un-freedom and un-reason, being a subjectivity that is rooted in our biology, yet at the same time rooted in external absolutes like mathematical ratios and the movement of time. As the critic Giovanni Basile writes in an extraordinarily perceptive critical essay, “The Algebra of Happiness,” the utopia implied by Zamyatin’s dystopia is “a world in which happiness is intertwined with a natural un-freedom that nobody imposes on anyone else: a different freedom from the one with which the Great Inquisitor protects mankind: a paradoxical freedom in which there is no ‘power’ if not in the nature of things, in music, in dance and in the harmony of mathematics.”

Against a centralized surveillance state that imposes a motionless and false order and an illusory happiness in the name of a utilitarian calculus of “justice,” Basile concludes, Zamyatin envisages a different utopia: “In fact, only within the ‘here and now’ of beauty may the equation of happiness be considered fully verified.” Human beings will never stop seeking beauty, Zamyatin insists, because they are human. They will reject and destroy any attempt to reorder their desires according to the logic of machines.

A national or global surveillance network that uses beneficent algorithms to reshape human thoughts and actions in ways that elites believe to be just or beneficial to all mankind is hardly the road to a new Eden. It’s the road to a prison camp. The question now—as in previous such moments—is how long it will take before we admit that the riddle of human existence is not the answer to an equation. It is something that we must each make for ourselves, continually, out of our own materials, in moments whose permanence is only a dream.

This is scary–not scary enough to get me to get rid of Alexa–but scary.

The Video vs. The Media

Yesterday Reason posted an article about the incident at the Lincoln Memorial. The magazine took the time to analyze the entire video of the incident.

This is the entire video as posted at YouTube:

Here are the key points of the video as noted by Reason:

Phillips enters the picture around the 1:12 mark, but if you skip to that part, you miss an hour of the Black Hebrew Israelites hurling obscenities at the students. They call them crackers, faggots, and pedophiles. At the 1:20 mark (which comes after the Phillips incident) they call one of the few black students the n-word and tell him that his friends are going to murder him and steal his organs. At the 1:25 mark, they complain that “you give faggots rights,” which prompted booing from the students. Throughout the video they threaten the kids with violence, and attempt to goad them into attacking first. The students resisted these taunts admirably: They laughed at the hecklers, and they perform a few of their school’s sports cheers.

It was at this moment that Phillips, who had attended a nearby peace protest led by indigenous peoples, decided to intervene. He would later tell The Detroit Free Press that the teenagers “were in the process of attacking these four black individuals” and he decided to attempt to de-escalate the situation. He seems profoundly mistaken: The video footage taken by the black nationalists shows no evidence the white teenagers had any intention of attacking. Nevertheless, Phillips characterized the kids as “beasts” and the hate-group members as “their prey”:

“There was that moment when I realized I’ve put myself between beast and prey,” Phillips said. “These young men were beastly and these old black individuals was their prey, and I stood in between them and so they needed their pounds of flesh and they were looking at me for that.”

Again, all the evidence suggests that Phillips got it backward.

He also claimed that he heard chants of “build the wall.” While I cannot rule out the possibility that some of the kids indeed chanted this—those who were wearing MAGA hats are presumably Trump supporters—I did not hear a single utterance of the phrase in the nearly two hours of video footage I watched. Admittedly, the kids do a lot of chanting and it’s not always possible to tell what they are saying. Their stated explanation is that they engaged in a series of school sports chants: That’s what one student told a local news reporter. His account largely tracks with the video.

“We are an all-male school that loves to get hyped up,” said this student. “And as we have done for years prior, we decided to do some cheers to pass time. In the midst of our cheers, we were approached by a group of adults led by Nathan Phillips, with Phillips beating his drum. They forced their way to the center of our group. We initially thought this was a cultural display since he was beating along to our cheers and so we clapped to the beat.” According to this student, the smiling student was grinning because he was enjoying the music, but eventually became confused, along with everyone else. (Indeed, multiple people can be heard to shout, “what is going on?”)

It would be impossible to definitively state that none of the young men did anything wrong, offensive, or problematic, at some point, and maybe the smiling student was attempting to intimidate Phillips. But there’s shockingly little evidence of wrongdoing, unless donning a Trump hat and standing in a group of other people doing the same is now an act of harassment or violence. Phillips’ account, meanwhile, is at best flawed, and arguably deliberately misleading.

Unless other information emerges, the school’s best move would be to have a conversation with the boys about the incident, perhaps discuss some strategies for remaining on perfect behavior at highly charged political rallies—where everybody is recording everything on a cell phone—and let that be the end of it.

The writer accurately sums up the situation:

The boys are undoubtedly owed an apology from the numerous people who joined this social media pile-on. This is shaping up to be one of the biggest major media misfires in quite some time.

This is what a media mob looks like, and provides us with another reason to distrust the media.

 

 

When Congress Does Not Represent The American People

The American Thinker is reporting today that a Gofundme page set up for building the border wall has already collected more than $3 million. I guess the American people have shown Congress what their wishes are regarding the border wall. It is a shame that Congress has chosen not to listen.

The article includes the following:

• My name is Brian Kolfage, I have a verified blue check facebook page as a public figure and I’m a Purple Heart Recipient triple amputee veteran. (snip)

• The campaign is set to the MAX that Gofundme has at the moment… working to get it raised 

• USE #GoFundTheWall as a hashtag on social media (snip)

The government has accepted large private donations before, most recently a billionaire donated $7.5 Million  to fund half of the Washington Monument repairs in 2012; this is no different. 

Like a  majority of those American citizens who voted to elect President Donald J Trump, we voted for him to Make America Great Again. President Trump’s main campaign promise was to BUILD THE WALL. And as he’s followed through on just about every promise so far, this wall project needs to be completed still. 

As a veteran who has given so much, 3 limbs, I feel deeply invested to this nation to ensure future generations have everything we have today. Too many Americans have been murdered by illegal aliens and too many illegals are taking advantage of  the United States taxpayers with no means of ever contributing to our society.

I have grandparents who immigrated to America legally, they did it the correct way and it’s time we uphold our laws, and get this wall BUILT!It’s up to Americans to help out and pitch in to get this project rolling. 

“If the 63 million people who voted for Trump each pledge $80, we can build the wall.” That equates to roughly 5Billion Dollars, even if we get half, that’s half the wall. We can do this. 

Democrats are going to stall this project by every means possible and play political games to ensure President Trump doesn’t get his victor. They’d rather see President Trump fail, than see America succeed.  However, if we can fund a large portion of this wall, it will jumpstart things and will be less money Trump has to secure from our politicians. 

This won’t be easy, but it’s our duty as citizens. This needs to be shared every single day by each of you on social media. We can do it, and we can help President Trump make America safe again! 

Let’s build this wall!

Hoisted On Your Own Petard

There are many Americans who believe that Robert Mueller is engaged in a witch hunt. The indictment of thirteen Russian companies was part of that witch hunt. The plan was that the indictments would show that there really was Russian influence, the people involved in the companies indicted would never set foot in America, and Mueller would look as if he actually found evidence of Russian interference. Well, the best laid plans…

The Gateway Pundit posted an article today updating us on the status of the Russian companies who supposedly interfered in our election. Things have not gone as planned for Mr. Mueller.

The article reports:

In an effort to tie their corrupt investigation to Russia, the Mueller team indicted 13 Russians after presenting their cases to a grand jury in February of this year. Immediately, these indictments were suspect as everyone on to the corrupt Mueller team knew that these ‘Russians’ would never be brought to justice, even if they were real, because they would never come to the US to stand trial and risk being put in jail.

Unfortunately for Mueller however, this soon turned into a royal mess. Lawyers defending one of three Russian companies indicted with the 13 Russians, Concord Management, showed up for court. Mueller’s team was caught off guard and never expected this. They immediately asked the judge for more time but the judge denied their pleas noting that they were the ones who indicted the Russian company in the first place.

When the case proceeded, the Concord attorney’s noted that another of the three companies indicted by Mueller was not in existence at the time of Mueller’s indictment. They called this a case of Mueller indicting the proverbial ‘ham sandwich’.

At a following court appearance, the attorneys representing Concord stated that the corrupt Mueller team’s allegations of 13 Russian individuals impacting the 2016 election were “made up” nonsense. The individuals were not even real.

The article continues:

Concord Management’s lawyers revealed that Mueller’s team had ignored over 70 discovery requests they had made for information in the case. In response Mueller’s team offered to give Concord Management’s lawyers a massive amount of social media data from those dangerous trolls who sought to influence the US election and the majority of the data was in RUSSIAN.

Mueller’s lawyers then admitted that they didn’t even have English translations for the Russian social media posts. However, somehow Mueller’s lawyers believed Americans were influenced by these Russian language posts?

The case of the Russians has now turned into a big joke as the legitimacy of the Mueller indictment is being challenged by Concord Management.

In a hearing on October 15th, Concord Management claimed that the Special Counsel’s entire case is built around a 100 year old law that he Mueller team is trying to use in a manner it was not built for.

Please follow the link to read the entire article. It is rather complex, but gives a lot of insight as to the political aspects of Mueller’s investigation, Hopefully this mess will be wrapped up shortly. It has cost American taxpayers large sums of money and is strictly the result of political maneuvering.

A New Approach To Getting Out Of Doing Something You Don’t Want To Do

High School is not fun for everyone. Teenagers are often not the kindest of people–particularly to anyone who might actually be an individual or be different in some way. Social media has made that worse–bullying doesn’t stop anymore when you close the front door of your house behind you. Bullying on social media has resulted in teen age suicides. Bullying has always been a problem, but it seems as if we are not teaching our children to be resilient. One article seeking to solve the problem might without realizing it illustrate why the problem exists.

Yesterday The Daily Caller posted an article stating the following:

Middle and high school students are citing anxiety as their reason for pushing back against assigned in-class presentations as research shows that nearly one-third of teenagers have an anxiety disorder.

The National Institute of Mental Health reports that an estimated 31.9 percent of adolescents between the ages of 13 and 18 exhibit some form of anxiety. It’s an increase that experts say has been driven by the rise of social media, more pressure on students to go to college and other factors.

Students and teachers are split about whether offering alternatives to oral presentations will help anxious students or hurt them by letting them get around developing public speaking skills. The issue was brought to the foreground of discussion after a Sept. 8 tweet from a high school student that said “stop forcing students to present in front of the class and give them a choice not to” was retweeted more than 130,000 times.

“Nobody should be forced to do something that makes them uncomfortable,” a 14-year-old eighth grader identified only as Ula told The Atlantic in a Wednesday story. “Even though speaking in front of class is supposed to build your confidence and it’s part of your schoolwork, I think if a student is really unsettled and anxious because of it you should probably make it something less stressful. School isn’t something a student should fear.”

The word I would use to describe the above statement is not suitable for this blog. If students are not taught to face their fears as students, how are they going to face them as adults? Taking challenges away from students robs them of the opportunity of learning how to overcome challenges. The world is not always going to be sweet and padded. They might as well learn that before they leave school. For example, if I were allowed to vote on whether or not to go for my annual physical exam, I would vote not to do it. It makes me anxious. Therefore I should not have to do it. I really don’t think that works in real life.

Submitted by Amy Collett

Tips for starting a home-based business

First-Timer Tips for Getting Your Home-Based Business Off the Ground

It’s easier than ever to start your own home-based business, and this sort of project can not only be fun, interesting, and convenient, but also it can be profitable as well. Don’t make the mistake of thinking that just because the opportunities are there you don’t have to plan carefully. If this is your first home-based business, you will need to consider what type of work truly suits your lifestyle, what tools you need to get started, how to draw people to your business and how to keep yourself motivated. Here are some essential tips.

What business is right for you?

Sure, you can do anything if you put your mind to it. But why start from square one when you can give yourself a head start? Hobbies can be turned into thriving businesses. Professional skills you’ve learned through other careers can be monetized. Getting a new business off the ground is hard enough, and you will make it significantly harder if you try to do something you either aren’t good at or that you dislike.

So, first step is to do something you love. But that’s not all. The next step has to be evaluating the market potential of your business. Selling a product from home is a great idea for many, and the Internet has made it simple these days. High-tech products such as selfie drones, HIIT equipment and smartwatches are profitable business ideas. You may make the best bird-themed potholders the world has ever seen, but you can’t make a successful business out of it if there’s no market for them. Ask around. Do some research. As Inc.com notes, “What you don’t want to do, however, is base your decision on the opinions of your friends and family.”

Don’t begin without the ultimate tool for success

The best tool you could have to aid in your new business is a ton of start-up capital. Of course, the vast majority of people don’t have that. So settle for making sure you have the second-best tool for success: a strong online presence. The first step of creating this is in your website. Your website is your portal to growing your local business. It should be well-made, clear, easy-to-navigate and fast. You should focus on reliable hosting and outsource the job of building it if you aren’t experienced in web design.

Optimizing your site for local search (when people search for things “near me”) and having SEO (search engine optimization) in mind is the first step to drawing customers, notes Forbes. Beyond that, getting involved in social media will help you make a name for your business. It’s vital to have well-maintained Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and even Snapchat presences. Blogging can also help, as having good online content associated with your business can boost its ranking in search engines.

Stay productive at home

Working from home poses a unique challenge: How do you stay motivated when you’re surrounded by all that comfort? You have a business to run, but lurking everywhere are distractions such as the TV, kids or your bed.

First things first: Force yourself into normal office hours. Instead of simply working off and on whenever you feel like it make sure to stick to a schedule. Some other great tips include getting up and getting dressed (literally) for success, keeping a separate office space away from everything else and making sure you get some exercise throughout the day.

Starting a business can be scary, but you should know that you have the tools available to you to succeed. Part of the joy of running a business from home is that you don’t have to pay the overhead of a brick and mortar space and you get to be your own boss. While that sounds awesome, it won’t work unless you pick a business that truly suits you, set yourself up to accomplish your goals every single day and utilize the power of an online presence.

Photo by Pexels

 

The Media Double Standard

The media double standard reflects the double standard of some of the more vocal protest groups. Forbes posted an article on Tuesday that beautifully reflects this double standard. The article deals with the environmental threat posed by the protesters at the site of the future Dakota Access Pipeline. The threat is not a perceived future threat, such as is claimed by the protesters if the pipeline were to rupture, but an actual threat that must be dealt with before the spring thaw. I strongly suggest that you follow the above link and read the entire article–it is done almost as a parody of The Twilight Zone.

The article reports:

There is of course no national media uproar condemning the protesters who have created the current mess, or the conflict groups that helped to organize them, raised millions as a result of the conflict, but are contributing nothing to the cleanup.  Nor is there any negative media mention of the dozens of celebrities who have visited the site to get a little free publicity over the last several months, or drawn attention to themselves by supporting the cause on social media, but who also are doing nothing to help with the clean up effort.

The Washington Post managed to find space to publish a story on the situation on Monday, but its story angle was completely sympathetic to the protesters – whose efforts have now cost Morton County taxpayers almost $33 million at last count, with millions more to come – and to the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, whose national call to action last summer was the catalyst for the influx of the outside protesters.  Indeed, a January tally of the almost 600 protesters who have been arrested during this protest action demonstrated that more than 94% of them hail from out of state, and more than 180 had criminal records.

The Washington Post’s story makes no mention of any of that, no mention of the dozens of abandoned cars or of the estimated 200-plus large truckloads of garbage left behind by the protesters that remain at the site.  No mention of all the arrests of out-of-staters, or of the massive cost to Morton County.  Indeed, the only real mention the Post makes of trash in the camp reads as follows:  “In the slurry running through camp are the remains of a mostly abandoned mini-city: an unopened packet of Top Ramen, a broken shovel, a mud-soaked glove, a pacifier.”

The article explains the threat to the water supply of the area:

The state of North Dakota also manages a website – NDRESPONSE – that provides excellent documentation of the real status of the protest site.  Their reporting has very clearly demonstrated that there is far more “in the slurry running through the camp” than the Post’s report implies, and with another week of spring-like weather to come, concerns about the potential for that slurry turning into a stream carrying pollutants into the nearby lake are very real indeed.  “We are very concerned about the potential for significant flooding and runoff into the lake later this week,” Keller said.

Given the way in which this situation has developed over time, it is fair to provide an admittedly partial list of well-heeled celebrities who have either visited the protest site since last August or expressed their support via social media for the #NoDAPL protest, and who are now making no effort whatsoever to assist in cleaning up the looming ecological disaster their “water protectors” have left behind:

The pipeline poses a minimal potential threat. The protesters have created an environmental disaster. If the state of North Dakota cannot clean up the mess before the spring thaw, the local residents will not have safe water to drink. The protesters have done immediate damage. The pipeline is engineered to be safer than alternative methods of transporting oil.

This is a picture of some of the mess left behind:

The double standard here is amazing.

 

 

Social Media Can Have Drastic Consequences

The Daily Caller posted an article about a selfie that went wrong. In this case, wrong is in the eyes of the beholder–I think it went wonderfully right.

The article reports:

The head of Air Force Central Command reported that an online selfie of an Islamic State militant led to airstrikes on a base held by the group “in less than 24 hours.”

Air Force Gen. Hawk Carlisle said in recent remarks that airmen at Florida’s Hurlburt Field were scouring open-source online feeds when they found a photo of “some moron standing at this command” and “bragging about the command and control capabilities” of the group.

Don’t ever post anything on the Internet that you wouldn’t mind seeing on the front page of The New York Times.

Islamic terrorists generally use social media very well. It is one of their prime recruiting tools and is also useful as one of their communication tools. There has been some consideration of making social media unavailable to terrorists, but aside from the obvious problems in doing that, in the case of the terrorist selfie, a terrorist social media post helped the western powers fight terrorism. We need to fight terrorism using every method at our disposal.