Tag Archives: The New York Times

I Guess The Truth No Longer Matters In Reporting

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On Monday, Breitbart reported that Pulitzer Prize Board would not be rescinding its Pulitzer Prizes given to The New York Times and The Washington Post for its reporting on the Russia hoax. Evidently the fact that the awards were given for articles that later proved to be false did not enter into the decision.

The article notes:

These inquiries prompted the Pulitzer Board to commission two independent reviews of the work submitted by those organizations to our National Reporting competition,” the board continued before announcing the establishment media outlets will keep their prizes.

“The separate reviews converged in their conclusions: that no passages or headlines, contentions or assertions in any of the winning submissions were discredited by facts that emerged subsequent to the conferral of the prizes,” the board claimed.

In total, 20 articles were challenged with formal complaints. All 20 were ruled factual by the Pulitzer Prize Board. The questioned articles include the following titles:

    • FBI was to pay author of Trump dossier (WaPo)
    • Trump reveals secret intelligence to Russians (WaPo)
    • Trump crafted son’s statement on Russian contact (WaPo)
    • Trump’s Son Heard of Link To Moscow Before Meeting  (NYT)
    • Emails Disclose Trump Son’s Glee At Russian Offer (NYT)
    • Unlikely Source Propelled Russian Meddling Inquiry (NYT)
    • Undisclosed On Forms, Kushner Met 2 Russians (NYT)

Despite claims by Democrats and establishment media reports that former President Donald Trump colluded with Russia to interfere in the 2016 presidential election, those claims were found to be baseless. In March of 2019, the Mueller report found no evidence Donald Trump colluded with Russia to interfere in the 2016 presidential election.

So if I report that there is a tyrannosaurus rex in my backyard and it’s Trump’s fault, and I win a Pulitzer Prize for my report, I don’t have to give back the Prize when it turns out the report is false? Wow. Journalism has taken some interesting turns lately.

 

Actions Have Consequences

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The Biden administration’s policies have had some very interesting results. On the surface, seeing these results should have caused a rethinking of the policy involved, but it hasn’t. History will tell us whether the destruction of the American economy and the end of American energy independence was truly accidental.

On Tuesday, The Conservative Treehouse reported the following:

(Via New York Times) – The ruble cemented its unlikely status as the world’s best-performing currency, rising to new multiyear highs this week. Since collapsing in the weeks after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which triggered sweeping international sanctions aimed at crippling the Russian economy, the ruble has come roaring back.

On Tuesday, it traded at its strongest level against the U.S. dollar since June 2015. It has gained about 35 percent so far this year, beating every major currency, and has more than doubled from its post-invasion low.

[…] Higher earnings from oil and gas exports, which have surged as prices rise and demand in Asia makes up for cutbacks in Europe, have kept the ruble elevated. At the same time, Russian imports have fallen sharply, partly the result of many foreign companies pulling out of Russia, which also support the ruble. (read more)

Oddly enough, had America continued the energy policies of the Trump administration, the overall cost of oil and gas would be less, but the American economy would be stronger and the Russian ruble would be weaker. The results of the Biden administration’s energy policies and the actions of the Biden administration regarding sanctions on Russia have had exactly the opposite effect of what was needed. Historians will debate whether this was accidental or intentional. We have officially reached the place where the difference between a conspiracy theory and a news story is about four months.

Remote Learning Is An Oxymoron

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On Thursday, The Washington Free Beacon posted an article about the impact the closing down of our schools during Covid had on our children.

The article reports:

Remote learning had an even worse effect on U.S. students’ education than was previously known, new research shows.

K-12 students who attended school from home in the 2020-2021 school year lost 50 percent of their typical math curriculum learning, according to a Harvard study first reported by the New York Times. Even students who went back to school in fall 2020 lost 20 percent of their typical math curriculum learning due to pandemic disruptions in the spring. The learning disparities were the worst for poor, black, and Latino students, a gap that one of the study’s authors called “the largest increase in educational inequity in a generation.”

The schools were closed by the Teachers’ Unions. Many teachers were afraid of catching Covid from their students (a largely unfounded fear, but understandable at the beginning of the Covid crisis), and many teachers simply enjoyed teaching remotely from wherever they chose to be.  After scientists realized that children were neither major spreaders of the virus and generally not at high risk from complications from the virus, the schools should have reopened, but not all of them did.

The article notes:

“It’s pretty clear that remote school was not good for learning,” Emily Oster, a Brown University economist and the coauthor of a similar study, told the Times. Oster was one of the first to sound the alarm about the danger of school closures. In October 2020, she wrote a piece for the Atlantic, “Schools Aren’t Superspreaders,” which argued the risk of COVID spread in schools was overblown.

Children are at low risk of severe illness or death from COVID-19. In-school transmission is also “extremely rare,” according to a 2021 study by the American Academy of Pediatrics.

“In places where schools reopened that summer and fall, the spread of COVID was not noticeably worse than in places where schools remained closed,” the Times‘s David Leonhardt wrote on Thursday. “Schools also reopened in parts of Europe without seeming to spark outbreaks.”

The article concludes:

Students who suffered the greatest learning losses were often in districts that succumbed to powerful teachers’ unions and Democratic officials who fought to keep schools closed. Schools in the poorest areas on average stayed remote five weeks longer than affluent areas.

As late as March this year, Chicago Public Schools, in coordination with its teachers’ union, was implementing at-home learning periods for classes after COVID exposures. Additionally, any school could flip to remote learning provided at least 30 percent of teachers were absent for at least two days or at least 40 percent of students were told to quarantine by the city’s health department.

Let’s hope that the damage done to the ‘children of Covid’ can be undone by the time they reach high school.

One Perspective On Fake News

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‘Fake news’ was the expression used by Democrats whenever someone outside the mainstream media reported something that was true (that might damage the Democrat image). Now, as The New York Times admits that the Hunter Biden laptop was real, many Americans are beginning to wonder exactly who is disseminating fake news. On Saturday, John Hinderaker at Power Line Blog posted his evaluation of our current media situation.

The article reminds us of the history of the laptop and reporting on it:

Some observers consider the New York Times’ belated admission that Hunter Biden’s laptop was genuine to be a big deal. I don’t. For one thing, the Times hasn’t acknowledged, and won’t report on, the specific information on the laptop that told the story of Joe Biden’s corruption.

Moreover, there was never any doubt about the genuineness of the laptop and the data it contained. The owner of the repair shop had a receipt with Hunter Biden’s signature on it, the laptop contained a large number of self-validating videos and photos of Hunter in various compromising situations, and the authenticity of emails on the laptop was confirmed by the presence of the same emails in other accounts. The idea that the laptop was “Russian disinformation” was a desperate and absurd invention intended to fool those who paid no attention, and those who wanted to be fooled.

The laptop saga was really a continuation of the Russia collusion hoax. As in the larger case of the collusion hoax, those who perpetrated the “Russian disinformation” fraud are unrepentant. The Times now implicitly admits that it was wrong to ignore or impugn the evidence of the laptop, but has it issued any corrections to, or retractions of, its reporting? No. Has it launched an investigation into how it could have been “fooled”? Of course not.

The New York Times was never ‘fooled.’ What they were was part of a campaign to elect Joe Biden.

The article concludes:

The New York Times expresses no regret because it doesn’t regret what it did. The Times isn’t a newspaper, it is a mouthpiece. Its purpose was obvious. It was the same purpose that animated many other news outlets, Twitter, and the 51 lying spies: they were trying to get Joe Biden elected president.

That effort succeeded. Lying about the laptop was just one of many corners they cut to achieve their desired objective, but poll data suggest that it was one of the most important. If voters had realized how demonstrably corrupt Joe Biden is–no one has ever bribed Hunter Biden–polls suggest that Donald Trump would have been re-elected. Liberal news outlets are proud of the fact that they acted together to prevent that awful possibility. If it took some lies to accomplish the mission, so what?

Thus, I attribute little significance to the New York Times’ casual acknowledgement that it blew the Hunter laptop story–really, it blew the 2020 election, if you think the Times is trying to report objectively on the news. But of course no one thinks that. For the Times, Twitter, and countless other liberal institutions, their lies about Joe Biden and Donald Trump accomplished the intended mission. There will be no apologies, no regrets–only, behind the scenes, discreet high fives.

The lies about the laptop achieved their purpose. Anything said now is moot.

Better Late Than Never I Guess

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Townhall posted an article on Thursday about a recent article in the New York Times.

The article at Townhall reports:

The New York Times is out with a story today about the ongoing Department of Justice investigation into Hunter Biden’s foreign business dealings. Deep down in the text, the story confirms Hunter Biden’s laptop — full of salacious information and photos — is indeed authentic. 

“The Justice Department inquiry into the business dealings of the president’s son has remained active, with a grand jury seeking information about payments from around the world,” the New York Times reports. “People familiar with the investigation said prosecutors had examined emails between Mr. Biden, Mr. Archer and others about Burisma and other foreign business activity. Those emails were obtained by The New York Times from a cache of files that appears to have come from a laptop abandoned by Mr. Biden in a Delaware repair shop. The email and others in the cache were authenticated by people familiar with them and with the investigation. In some of the emails, Mr. Biden displayed a familiarity with FARA, and a desire to avoid triggering it.”

The article at Townhall reminds us:

During the 2020 presidential election, the New York Post first reported on the laptop and its contents. As the oldest newspaper in the country, the New York Post was banned from Twitter for weeks after being accused of spreading “misinformation.”

This is the story that got the New York Post removed from Twitter as the story was described as “Russian disinformation”. The media spin was that the Russians made up the laptop contents to discredit candidate Joe Biden. Very few informed Americans who saw the New York Post story doubted its veracity, but it was suppressed so as not to have a negative impact on the Biden campaign for the presidency. The suppression of pertinent information is just one of many reasons that we have the most corrupt and ineffective President in American history currently residing in the White House.

Accidental Or Intentional ?

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The way things are going here, the difference between a conspiracy theory and the news is about six weeks.

On Friday, The Patriot Daily Wire reported that prior to the Russian invasion of Ukraine the Biden administration had sought help from China to prevent that invasion. In itself, that is not a problem, but a look at the bigger picture illustrates something that is a problem.

The article reports:

In hopes of securing assistance in deterring a Russian invasion of Ukraine, the Biden administration was reduced to providing China with military intelligence that Beijing in turn gave to Russia.

U.S. officials learned in December that China had provided American intelligence on Russian military activity to Moscow, The New York Times reported.

American officials believed that if any world leader could prove capable of convincing Russian President Vladimir Putin to rethink his invasion plans, it was Chinese President Xi Jinping.

Russia and China have strengthened their ties in recent years.

The Biden administration had sought to convince China that its international image would be damaged by a Russian invasion of Ukraine.

In a November meeting with Chinese Ambassador Qin Gang, American officials said the harsh economic sanctions Russia would incur would hurt the Chinese economy as well.

Successive attempts to influence Qin against Russia proved unsuccessful, with Qin asserting that Russia had legitimate security concerns in the region.

American officials also shared intelligence with the Chinese showing the Russian military buildup around Ukraine.

In addition to providing the information to the Kremlin, American officials believe China told Russia that the U.S. was attempting to sow discord between the two nations and pledged not to interfere in Russia’s plans in Ukraine.

We are about to find out how useless NATO and the United Nations really are. Why are we funding these organizations?

 

A Constitutional Republic Will Only Stand As Long As Its Citizens And Voters Are Able To Stay Informed

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On Tuesday, The Western Journal posted an article about the lack of transparency and misinformation coming out of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) during the past two years or so.

The article notes:

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is being called out for not sharing the vast quantities of data it had been gathering during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Some medical experts are speculating that the reason why is the fear the data will be “misinterpreted” and used as justification not to follow the agency’s guidelines regarding vaccination and other matters.

“Tell the truth, present the data,” said Dr. Paul Offit, a vaccine expert and adviser to the Food and Drug Administration, The New York Times reported.

…Kristen Nordlund, a spokeswoman for the CDC, told the news outlet the reason much of the data has been withheld is “because basically, at the end of the day, it’s not yet ready for prime time.”

Bureaucracy is another reason.

The CDC is weighed down by multiple layers of bureaucracy, including a requirement to first run information to be released through the Department Health and Human Services and the White House.

“The CDC is a political organization as much as it is a public health organization,” said Samuel Scarpino, managing director of pathogen surveillance at the Rockefeller Foundation’s Pandemic Prevention Institute, the Times reported.

“The steps that it takes to get something like this [covid data] released are often well outside of the control of many of the scientists that work at the CDC.”

The article concludes:

In an opinion piece in The Wall Street Journal last month, Makary (Dr. Marty Makary, a professor and researcher at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine) contended that another topic the CDC has been reluctant to address is natural immunity.

“For most of last year, many of us called for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to release its data on reinfection rates, but the agency refused,” he wrote.

“Finally last week, the CDC released data from New York and California, which demonstrated natural immunity was 2.8 times as effective in preventing hospitalization and 3.3 to 4.7 times as effective in preventing Covid infection compared with vaccination,” he continued.

Makary further noted the National Institutes of Health resisted acknowledging natural immunity.

“Because of the NIH’s inaction, my Johns Hopkins colleagues and I conducted the study. We found that among 295 unvaccinated people who previously had Covid, antibodies were present in 99 percent of them up to nearly two years after infection,” he wrote.

Makary argued the failure of the CDC to release the data sooner meant many who had previously recovered from COVID and had better immunity than those were just vaccinated needlessly lost their jobs.

He concluded that they should be hired back.

There was a political agenda here and a monetary agenda here. The CDC is too closely tied financially to the drug companies. There was more money in vaccines than there ever was in ivermectin!

Hopefully, This Will Be A Futile Effort

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Yesterday John Hinderaker at Power Line Blog posted an article illustrating how the mainstream media would try to discredit what the truck drivers in Canada are doing.

The article reports:

You no doubt are aware of the protest being staged by thousands of Canadian truck drivers who have now converged on Ottawa. The truckers began by protesting against a vaccination mandate for truckers crossing the U.S. border, but it has grown into a movement opposing extreme and irrational anti-covid measures, and promoting freedom generally.

Naturally, the liberal press is horrified. You likely have seen this bizarre editorial cartoon that appeared in–where else–the Washington Post:

When I first saw the cartoon, I literally did not understand it. Someone had to explain that the Post’s cartoonist is calling the truckers who are demonstrating on behalf of freedom fascists. Freedom is slavery, after all.

The article goes on to note that the liberal media is hoping that the protest will turn violent (giving them further reason to condemn it).

The article quotes The New York Times:

Thousands of protesters on foot, many carrying handmade signs on hockey sticks, wandered through the parked vehicles and the slow-moving traffic or gathered on the lawn in front of Parliament. Some of them carried Canadian flags upside down; at least one flag had swastikas drawn on it.

The article notes:

Liberals always try to imply that if someone draws a swastika it means that person is pro-Nazi. Actually, it means (in this context, at least) that the person is accusing the Canadian government of using Nazi-like tactics. I don’t agree, but let’s not smear the protesters by inverting the intent behind their signs.

The article concludes:

Here is more on the truckers’ protest from the BBC.

Defence Minister Anita Anand said the incidents were “beyond reprehensible”.

No incident described was even remotely violent. This one is darkly humorous:

Ottawa police said in a Twitter post that “several” investigations were now under way into the “desecration” of a number monuments in the capital city….

So now the Left is against desecrating monuments! I thought it had become more or less compulsory.

Putting aside whatever you may think about vaccination mandates, the hostility of the press’s response to any movement that expresses a desire for freedom is striking.

The ruling class does not like it when people begin to wake up.

This Comment Makes No Sense

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The Patriot Daily Wire posted an article today about the accidental shooting on the set of the movie “Rust.” What happened was an awful mistake on someone’s part, but the information coming from Alec Baldwin regarding the shooting makes no sense.

The article reports:

In the aftermath of the seemingly accidental and fatal shooting that happened on the set of Alec Baldwin’s movie “Rust,” there are still questions regarding exactly what happened and who is at fault.

On Oct. 21, while filming on set for his upcoming western movie, Baldwin was given a gun for his scene. The scene involved drawing a revolver and pointing it at the camera, as The New York Times reported.

But then the gun fired, and hit cinematographer Halyna Hutchins in the chest and director Joel Souza in the shoulder. Hutchins, unfortunately, died from the gunshot.

Questions around the incident immediately followed. Why was there a live gun on set? Did Baldwin know it was loaded with live rounds? Why did seemingly no one notice there were live bullets in the gun before it was handed off to Baldwin?

In an interview clip released on Wednesday, Baldwin said that he did not pull the trigger.

This is an excerpt from the interview with George Stephanopoulos:

“Well, the trigger wasn’t pulled. I didn’t pull the trigger,” the actor told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos.

“So you never pulled the trigger?” Stephanopoulos pointedly asked him.

“No, no, no. I would never point a gun at anyone and pull a trigger at them. Never,” Baldwin answered.

Baldwin said he had no idea there was a live bullet in the gun and furthermore, he had no clue how live rounds of ammo even got onto the premises.

Reuters noted the full interview with Stephanopoulos will be released on Thursday, but some clips were posted on Wednesday.

This just isn’t reality. My sympathies go out to Mr. Baldwin who is obviously having a hard time dealing with what happened and the role he played in it.

Follow The Science?

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The Conservative Review is reporting the following today:

Many of the most vaccinated states in the U.S. are currently experiencing a surge in COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations, while the least vaccinated states are seeing their number of cases and hospitalizations trending downward.

The puzzling revelation comes at a time when the Biden administration is urging all Americans over the age of 50 to receive booster shots of the vaccine.

The seven most vaccinated states in the country — Vermont, Rhode Island, Maine, Connecticut, Massachusetts, New York, and New Jersey — have been hit hard over the past two weeks, according to New York Times tracking data.

In five of the seven states, both cases and hospitalizations are up by double digits. The only two outliers are Vermont and Maine. And in those states, while cases are down over the last 14 days ending on Nov. 29., hospitalizations are up 24% and 19%, respectively.

So why in the world is the Biden administration encouraging people to get vaccinated?

The article concludes:

According to the Times data, each of the seven states with the lowest vaccination rates — West Virginia, Idaho, Wyoming, Alabama, Mississippi, North Dakota, and Louisiana — are reporting significant declines in the number of COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations over the last 14 days.

Of course, there are outliers to the apparent inverse relationship. In Washington state, where residents are 65% vaccinated, both cases and hospitalizations are down by double digits. Conversely, in both Missouri and Indiana, where just 51% of the population is vaccinated, both cases and hospitalizations are up by double digits.

It could be that the virus is plaguing certain regions of the U.S., such as the Northeast and the Midwest, to a greater degree than the Southeast without regard to the level of vaccination in those areas.

Though if that were true, it would indicate that the vaccine is relatively ineffective at stopping the spread of the virus and bringing down the number of hospitalizations, both of which have been touted as reasons to get the vaccine by public health experts.

The issue of vaccination could face another hurdle in the coming months amid the potential rise of the Omicron variant, which some fear may be resistant to current vaccines.

If we were following the science (the available data), I doubt the government would be encouraging people to get vaccinated until we figure out whether or not the vaccine actually does what it is supposed to do.

A New Level Of Chutzpah

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Yesterday Just the News posted an article about some recent rather questionable activities by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). There has been some criticism that the FBI has been politicized under the Biden administration. There recent actions do nothing to dispel that idea.

The article reports:

Even as the Department of Justice Inspector General released a report this week criticizing the politicization of the department, the FBI on Tuesday raided the homes of a Republican election official and several of her associates in Mesa County, Colo., in connection with a dispute about efforts to preserve 2020 election files.

In collaboration with state and county law enforcement, the FBI raided the homes of Mesa County Clerk and Recorder Tina Peters, Colorado Republican Rep. Lauren Boebert’s former campaign manager Sherronna Bishop, and two others.

The FBI operations targeting skeptics of the 2020 election results follow the bureau’s raids earlier this month on the homes of conservative guerrilla journalist James O’Keefe and several of his associates with Project Veritas.

Numerous elected officials, reporters, and the American Civil Liberties Union have voiced their concerns about potential infringement of press freedom by the FBI and Justice Department in the O’Keefe raid. These fears were exacerbated when information collected in the raid was published in the New York Times, which has been defending itself against a lawsuit filed by Project Veritas.

The DOJ’s inspector general released a report this week rebuking the department for straying from its own policies on avoiding the appearance of political bias.

The article concludes:

The secretary of state alleges that Peters lied about having the unauthorized person involved in the voting system update as she attempted to expose alleged election irregularities.

Peters said in August at a news conference, “The Mesa County Clerk and Recorder’s office directed her staff to turn off the video surveillance of the voting equipment,” CBS 4 Denver reported.

Peters explained that she had copied files on the voting machines for security before the update was made.

“I was concerned they were going to delete important election files, I did a backup image before and after they did that,” Peters told the news outlet.

She alleges that the images showed numerous voter files were removed during the update and her job was to supervise the files.

In October, Peters was prohibited by a Mesa County judge from overseeing the county’s election in a ruling on a lawsuit filed by Griswold, according to Colorado Politics.

If you don’t see a pattern by now, you probably never will. It seems that ordinary Americans who are trying to do their jobs conscientiously and who happen to support President Trump are being investigated, and intimidated while having their civil rights ignored by the current Justice Department. I have no idea how we clean this mess up, but it definitely needs to be scrubbed thoroughly.

The War On Christian Day Care In The Build Back Better Bill

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On Thursday, PJ Media posted an article about some of the provisions in the Build Back Better Bill that the Biden administration is attempting to get through Congress. This bill is a combination of the ‘green new deal’,  leftover Obama administration policies that never got passed, and tax breaks for the rich. The icing on the cake is that while the bill pretty much funds anything you can think of, it prevents religious preschools and child care centers from receiving any of the handouts.

The article reports:

The New York Times is reporting that lobbyists are trying to talk Congress into stripping a provision from Build Back Better that would prevent religious preschools and child care centers from receiving their share of the gargantuan funds.

The provision at issue is a standard one in many federal laws, which would mandate that all providers comply with federal nondiscrimination statutes. Religious organizations, whose child care programs are currently exempt from some such laws, argue that it would effectively block many of their providers from participating, while civil rights advocates contend it is long past time for such institutions to comply.

Some of the faith groups are pressing lawmakers to scrap or modify the nondiscrimination language, asserting that it would essentially shut them out of the new federal program unless they made major changes to the way they operate. For instance, it could bar federal funds from going to programs that refused to hire a gay employee, gave preference to applicants of their faith or failed to renovate their facilities to accommodate disabled students.

There are provisions in this bill that blatantly go against the freedoms listed in the First Amendment. Frankly, if the bill is challenged in court, I am not sure our courts will uphold the First Amendment.

The article concludes:

The left has made the LGBTQ agenda a sacred cow, and as a result, they’ve doubled down on promoting it through culture, higher education, and K-12 schools. Now they want to use the power and purse strings of the federal government to ensure that they can push their sexual agenda to American preschoolers.

If First Amendment protected religious liberty gets in the way of that agenda, they will restrict it. This is one of many reasons why Build Back Better must be stopped.

If we don’t fight for the rights granted by Our Creator and guaranteed by our Constitution, we will lose those rights very soon.

This Really Isn’t A Surprise

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Yesterday The Daily Caller posted an article about President Biden’s spending plans.

The article reports:

President Joe Biden’s administration is facing a daunting reality check after claiming for months that their spending agenda will “cost zero dollars,” with the head of the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) saying the White House drastically overestimated the revenue the IRS could gain by cracking down on tax loopholes.

Biden and numerous other senior Democrats in the White House and on Capitol Hill have repeatedly insisted that their $1.85 trillion social spending package will add nothing to the national debt. They argued the package included enough pay-fors to offset the spending programs. CBO chief Phillip Swagel brought that claim down on Monday, however, saying that the tax loophole crackdown in the bill would only garner $120 billion, a far cry from the White House’s projected $400 billion, according to The New York Times.

Why didn’t these numbers come out before they voted on the Infrastructure Bill?

The article notes:

The CBO, which is a non-partisan organization, is set to release its official report Friday. The White House is shoring up support and urging lawmakers to disregard the report ahead of its release.

“In this one case, I think we’ve made a very strong empirical case for CBO not having an accurate score,” Ben Harris, assistant secretary for economic policy at the Treasury Department, told the NYT. “The question is would they rather go with CBO knowing CBO is wrong, or would they want to target the best information they could possibly have?”

Why do we have the CBO if lawmakers are going to disregard their research? Again, why didn’t the lawmakers wait for the report before they voted on the spending?

The Deep State Is Still In Charge

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President Trump gave us a brief respite from the overwhelming power of the deep state and its attempt to change America fundamentally. He dinged it in a few places, but unfortunately he didn’t really stop it. The deep state came after him relentlessly for four years. If you are still in denial about there being a deep state, find an alternative news source and compare it to what you hear in the mainstream media. The ‘election’ of President Biden has brought the deep state back to full power at least temporarily. That is why we are watching economic pressure forcing the closing of small businesses and runaway inflation in food and energy prices impacting Americans.

Yesterday Breitbart posted an article that illustrates the fact that all is well in deep state America.

The article reports:

The Justice Department has reversed former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe’s firing, charging that the Trump administration unlawfully terminated him on the eve of his retirement for political purposes.

According to the New York Times, the 53-year-old McCabe will be granted full retirement, allowing him to receive his pension and other benefits as well as $200,000 in missed pension payments.

Andrew McCabe was not unlawfully terminated. He was a political hack who covered up the Clinton email scandal and played a major role in the attempt to frame President Trump with a Russian scandal. Andrew McCabe will now live comfortably at the expense of the American taxpayer. Until someone stands up for justice, the deep state will protect its own.

How Does This Make Sense?

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On Friday, The Hill reported the following:

The Biden administration on Friday lifted sanctions on two Iranian entities involved in military missile programs.

The sanctions, targeting the Mammut Industrial Group (Mammut Industries) and its subsidiary Mammut Diesel, were originally imposed by the Trump administration in September 2020 as part of efforts to increase a maximum pressure campaign of sanctions on Tehran over its nuclear activity and actions in the region criticized as malign and destabilizing.

The delisting appears to be related to legal proceedings on behalf of the law firm Ferrari & Associates.

“Happy for the delisting of our clients today, and proud of all our team who worked on this. Don’t listen to the hype from any purported “experts.” This is not a political action, its one that followed established legal processes and norms,” tweeted Erich Ferrari, founder and principal attorney of Ferrari & Associates.

Ferrari did not immediately respond to a request for comment by The Hill.

Ferrari’s bio on the firm’s website lists Mammut Industrial Group and related parties as a client and that the firm has removed three of the five designees targeted under the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control.

The entities were identified as being “key producers and suppliers of military-grade, dual-use goods for Iran’s missile programs.”

The article notes:

The Biden administration is seeking to restart indirect talks with Iran in Vienna over efforts to bring both parties back to the JCPOA. 

The Biden administration says that the JCPOA is the best chance at putting a ceiling on Iran’s nuclear ambitions and preventing it from building a nuclear bomb. Iran maintains its nuclear activities are for peaceful purposes but have exceeded limitations on uranium enrichment and research and development put in place by the deal in opposition to the U.S. sanctions. 

The New York Times reported last month that Iran may be within a month’s timeline of creating enough material to power a nuclear weapon. 

The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the international nuclear watchdog, also reported last month that restrictions on its ability to inspect Iranian nuclear facilities was “seriously compromising” its ability to monitor Iran’s adherence to the JCPOA limitations. 

The U.S. and Iran last engaged in discussions in Vienna in June but have yet to resume talks over a host of disagreements and delays. This includes Iran’s insistence that the U.S. lift all sanctions imposed by the Trump administration and delays over the transition to a new government headed by Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi. 

Iranian officials in recent days have said they would return to Vienna “soon,” but the ongoing delays have frustrated Biden officials.

Based on what I am seeing, I don’t think I would let the Biden administration negotiate a deal on anything for me. I don’t think they understand the idea of negotiations–they have confused bargaining with giving away the store.

The Roots Of January 6th

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The Constitution does not grant us our rights–it specifically states that our rights come from God. The Constitution is there to protect those rights. Unfortunately, many of our leaders have forgotten that. Those on the political left have begun to use our federal agencies as an arm of the Democrat party. They have also learned to use the media to blunt the blow when information about their questionable activities is about to come out.

Yesterday American Greatness posted an article that noted the role played by The New York Times in downplaying the pending indictment against Michael Sussman. Sussman, as you probably remember, was instrumental in getting the idea that Donald Trump was colluding with the Russians out into the public square. Well, The New York Times is at it again.

The article reports:

On Saturday, the Times published a carefully constructed bombshell intended to soften the blow of an explosive scandal in the making: the FBI had at least one informant among the group of Proud Boys who marched on the Capitol on January 6. The informant, according to “confidential documents” furnished to the paper, started working with the FBI in July 2020 and was in close contact with his FBI handler before, during, and after the Capitol protest. 

“After meeting his fellow Proud Boys at the Washington Monument that morning, the informant described his path to the Capitol grounds where he saw barriers knocked down and Trump supporters streaming into the building, the records show,” reporters Alan Feuer and Adam Goldman (the Times reporter most responsible for priming the ground for news that was unfavorable to the Russia collusion narrative) wrote on September 25. “In a detailed account of his activities contained in the records, the informant, who was part of a group chat of other Proud Boys, described meeting up with scores of men from chapters around the country at 10 a.m. on Jan. 6 at the Washington Monument and eventually marching to the Capitol. He said that when he arrived, throngs of people were already streaming past the first barrier outside the building, which, he later learned, was taken down by one of his Proud Boy acquaintances and a young woman with him.”

In other words, one of the informant’s Proud Boy “acquaintances” was removing temporary barriers to allow a crowd to enter the restricted grounds around the building.

Sounds legit.

The article also notes that there was another informant who took part in the sacking of the Capitol.

The article concludes with the following story:

In fact, after Beattie’s articles posted in June, Alan Feuer, the same reporter who co-authored this weekend’s spin story, wrote a piece disclosing Rhodes had been interviewed by the FBI in May. (Feuer’s article, conveniently, was posted after FBI Director Wray testified twice on Capitol Hill this week.)

Further, in my interview with him this week, Thomas Caldwell, one of the first people arrested in the Oath Keepers case, told me Rhodes approached him during a Stop the Steal rally in Virginia last November. Rhodes told Caldwell the Oath Keepers provided security for conservatives and asked if he’d be interested in assisting in the future.

Caldwell gave Rhodes his contact information, which led to Rhodes connecting Caldwell with other Oath Keepers; plans were made to travel to D.C. and meet near the Capitol after Trump’s speech on January 6.

Caldwell’s home was raided and he was arrested on January 19, just two weeks after the protest. Prosecutors already had a trove of evidence against Caldwell, which is highly curious considering Caldwell never entered the building and was charged with no violent crime.

How did the government get Caldwell’s information so quickly? It certainly suggests the involvement of someone working on the inside, someone who immediately provided investigators with incriminating evidence.

Someone like an FBI informant.

One thing is certain; the Times damage-control article is just the tip of the FBI iceberg. And more proof January 6 was an inside job.

How are the actions of the FBI considered Constitutional?

I See The Problem. I Have No Idea What The Solution Is.

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There are still some lingering questions about the validity of the 2020 presidential election. The riot on January 6th has made some people reluctant to ask those questions. However, the fact remains that questions need to be asked and answers given. If answers are not given, the issues need to be researched until they are resolved.

The Epoch Times posted an article today about a curious find in the Georgia election.

The article notes:

When Fulton County, Georgia, poll manager Suzi Voyles sorted through a large stack of mail-in ballots last November, she noticed an alarmingly odd pattern of uniformity in the markings for Joseph R. Biden. One after another, the absentee votes contained perfectly filled-in ovals for Biden—except that each of the darkened bubbles featured an identical white void inside them in the shape of a tiny crescent, indicating they’d been marked with toner ink instead of a pen or pencil.

Adding to suspicions, she noticed that all of the ballots were printed on different stock paper than the others she handled as part of a statewide hand recount of the razor-thin Nov. 3 presidential election. And none was folded or creased, as she typically observed in mail-in ballots that had been removed from envelopes.

In short, the Biden votes looked like they’d been duplicated by a copying machine.

“All of them were strangely pristine,” said Voyles, who said she’d never seen anything like it in her 20 years monitoring elections in Fulton County, which includes much of Atlanta.

She wasn’t alone. At least three other poll workers observed the same thing in stacks of absentee ballots for Biden processed by the county, and they have joined Voyles in swearing under penalty of perjury that they looked fake.

The article concludes:

Favorito (Garland Favorito, the lead petitioner in the case and a certified poll watcher who runs VoterGa.org) pointed out that the potential for counterfeit ballots exists in other Georgia counties, not just Fulton.

In fact, two Democrat poll workers blew the whistle on similar anomalies they witnessed in neighboring DeKalb and Cobb counties, where the election process also is controlled by Democrats.

Carlos E. Silva, for one, declared in a Nov. 17 affidavit that he observed a similar “perfect black bubble” in absentee ballots for Biden during the recount he worked in DeKalb County. And while overseeing the Cobb County recount, he swore he “observed absentee ballots being reviewed with the same perfect bubble that I had seen the night before in DeKalb. All of these ballots had the same characteristics: they were all for Biden and had the same perfect bubble.”

Added Silva, a registered Democrat, “There were thousands of [mail-in] ballots that just had the perfect bubble marked for Biden and no other markings in the rest of the ballot.”

Another registered Democrat, Mayra Romera, testified that while monitoring the Cobb County recount, she noticed that “hundreds of these ballots seemed impeccable, with no folds or creases. The bubble selections were perfectly made … and all happened to be selections for Biden.”

In a recent article pooh-poohing complaints of fraud in Georgia, as well as Arizona, The New York Times portrayed Favorito as “a known conspiracy theorist” and suggested he was a 9/11 truther. As evidence, it cited a 2002 book he published “questioning the origin of the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.”

Asked about it, Favorito responded: “My book did not propose any theories on what happened on 9/11. I don’t mention anything about explosives” planted in the World Trade Center, as truthers have speculated. Rather, he said, he questioned Bush family business connections with the bin Laden family and other wealthy Saudis, and argued that the war on terror benefited the Bushes. He also faulted the Bush administration for “obstructing” FBI investigations into the attacks.

Favorito says he is a “constitutionalist” and neither a Republican nor a Trump supporter.

My question is simple, “If we find enough voter fraud in key states to change the election, what do we do?”

Cherry Picking The Facts To Get The Results You Want

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For whatever reason, the government wants everyone to get the Covid-19 vaccine. Despite numbers that show many Americans have natural immunity to the coronavirus because they have already had it (I am one of those Americans. I had the virus in early November. As of two weeks ago, I still had the antibodies. If I test negative for the antibodies in the future, I might consider the vaccine, but for now, I won’t.), the government is pushing the vaccine.

Yesterday Townhall posted an article on some of the twisted logic being used to coerce Americans into getting the vaccine.

The article notes:

There are no more experts. They know nothing. So, don’t listen to them. Okay, maybe that’s not actually fair—but the real experts are being ignored by the liberal media for a simple reason: they want the COVID panic to continue. They want more deaths to occur. They want a spike. They want to keep the nation locked down. It’s partially out of spite. Blue states are still under Nazi-esque lockdown rules—and their cases are still bad. Not like last year, but Michigan is seeing a massive spike, whereas Texas who nixed their mask mandate over five weeks ago and reopened fully has seen no spikes—none. Florida has also been a state that has managed its COVID crisis better than the media gave it credit for, painting Gov. Ron DeSantis as the grim reaper. It turns out the entire media establishment ate it on that one—no shock. The good news is that even though Democratic states cannot manage COVID, there is no fourth wave. A spike in one state—Michigan, does not make a wave no matter what the CDC says. Even Dr. Anthony Fauci has said he doesn’t think there’s going to be a fourth wave. And alas, here is the circus. The CDC saying there’s “impending doom,” which was voiced around spring break to Fauci saying, ‘nah, that ain’t happening.’  The messaging on COVID protocols has been a mess; the ones with vaccines has been even worse. An MIT study pretty much gutted or cast immense doubt on the effectiveness and purpose of air filtration systems, indoor capacity caps, and even mask wearing. Folks think they’re protected wearing a mask. Nope. It’s an airborne virus. If you’re inside with someone exposed, that mask isn’t doing much, whether it be six or sixty feet apart. It’s all a mess, and now we have this garbage about not reaching herd immunity (via NYT):

The New York Times reported:

Early in the pandemic, when vaccines for the coronavirus were still just a glimmer on the horizon, the term “herd immunity” came to signify the endgame: the point when enough Americans would be protected from the virus so we could be rid of the pathogen and reclaim our lives.

Now, more than half of adults in the United States have been inoculated with at least one dose of a vaccine. But daily vaccination rates are slipping, and there is widespread consensus among scientists and public health experts that the herd immunity threshold is not attainable — at least not in the foreseeable future, and perhaps not ever.

Instead, they are coming to the conclusion that rather than making a long-promised exit, the virus will most likely become a manageable threat that will continue to circulate in the United States for years to come, still causing hospitalizations and deaths but in much smaller numbers.

How much smaller is uncertain and depends in part on how much of the nation, and the world, becomes vaccinated and how the coronavirus evolves. It is already clear, however, that the virus is changing too quickly, new variants are spreading too easily and vaccination is proceeding too slowly for herd immunity to be within reach anytime soon.

Again, there is no allowance for natural immunity in this conclusion. It is estimated that at least one-third of Americans have had the coronavirus and are immune to it. When you add that to the forty-five percent who have been vaccinated you get approximately seventy-eight percent. That is herd immunity. Just a note, herd immunity does not mean that we eliminate the virus completely–it simply means that we eliminate the epidemic. That is a distinction that I don’t think is being currently made. We could lock ourselves in our houses forever, and there might still be a virus bug waiting for us somewhere when we ventured outside. Living in a bubble is not practical. We need to follow the example of Florida–protect the vulnerable, vaccinate the vulnerable who choose to be vaccinated, and let those less vulnerable go on with their lives. Unfortunately (as we are currently seeing), government does not like to give up control under any circumstances.

I Think Most Of Us Suspected This

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Just the News posted an article today about the news story that was circulating during the 2020 Presidential campaign that the Russians had put a bounty on American soldiers and were paying the Afghani soldiers to kill Americans. The media questioned the fact that President Trump had not placed sanctions on Russia for those actions and declared that the President was soft on Russia because he was Putin’s puppet. Well, the truth eventually does come out.

The article at Just the News reports:

On Thursday, the leaders of President Biden’s intelligence agencies declared they held little confidence in a New York Times’ story from last June that claimed Russia put bounties on American troops in Afghanistan.

It was the latest setback for the famous newspaper, which has seen its reporting on the now-debunked Russia collusion scandal be eviscerated by the FBI and its hit podcast series Caliphate retracted. 

Ashley Rindsberg, author of “The Gray Lady Winked: How the New York Times’ Misreporting, Fabrications and Distortions Radically Alter History,” said Thursday’s setback follows a decades-long pattern of journalism failures. He questioned what the Times will do next with the Afghanistan fallout.

The article notes that there is a history of this sort of creating a false narrative and being slow to change the narrative once the truth is discovered:

“That’s what’s happened time and again: the big story break, and there’s a lot of hoopla, and there’s a lot of coverage, and the narrative gets cemented. And when the story turns out to be false, or mistaken, or what have you, there’s either a very small correction that’s printed at the bottom of the article that very few people will pay attention to, or nothing at all,” he said. “So I think in this case, we’ll see what happens, and hopefully the Times will do the right thing.”

I can pretty much guarantee that if you are still depending on the mainstream media as your primary news source you are either misinformed or uninformed or both.

Occasionally The Fake News Gets Called Out

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The Washington Examiner posted an article today about a recent award given to The New York Times for their podcast series “Caliphate.”

The article reports:

The paper of record announced this weekend that Caliphate, its award-winning 10-part podcast series on the Islamic State, contains “significant falsehoods and other discrepancies.”

The disclosure concludes an internal investigation launched this year after Canadian officials charged the podcast’s central narrative character with lying about his supposed involvement with the terrorist group.

Absent the testimony of the accused hoaxer, Canadian resident Shehroze Chaudhry, who spoke to the New York Times under the pseudonym “Abu Huzayfah,” there is not much left to the Caliphate podcast. Indeed, the show’s most gripping and grizzly “reporting” on ISIS’s operations in Syria relied entirely on the say-so of a supposed “executioner” who most likely has never even been to Syria.

“We fell in love with the fact that we had gotten a member of ISIS who would describe his life in the caliphate and would describe his crimes,” New York Times Executive Editor Dean Baquet explained this week in an interview with NPR.

The article concludes:

Caliphate won the 2018 Peabody Award. The New York Times has already returned it. The Overseas Press Club has also rescinded the podcast’s Lowell Thomas Award.

Man, what a year for the paper of record.

From publishing Chinese communist propaganda, to getting it wrong on coronavirus vaccine readiness, to losing top opinion editors following a temper tantrum thrown by newsroom staffers, to having nearly its entire bench of columnists suffer a collective nervous breakdown ahead of Election Day, to pretending still as if its fraudulent 1619 Project is not an abject embarrassment, 2020 has been as lousy a year for the New York Times as it has been for everyone else.

Actually, this was a careless, innocent mistake. I can’t say the same for much of their other reporting. They have never done a fair job of reporting on President Trump, and they did their best to convince people that Joe Biden was capable of handling the office of president. I really don’t feel sad that they had to give up their Peabody Award. They should also give up the Pulitzer Prize they won for their false reporting on the Russia hoax during and after the 2016 presidential campaign.

More Good News From The Middle East

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Yesterday Don Surber posted an article on his blog about the killing of Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, 59, the Head of Iran’s nuclear program.

The article reports:

“According to Iran Front Page News, Fakhrizadeh was killed by shooting, but before the shootout, his car has been stopped with an explosion at Mostafa Khomeini Blvd. Several others are also reportedly killed in the incident, but haven’t been identified yet.”

In the past, we could have credited Mossad with another fine job well done, but now I do not know about that this time.

Arab nations are normalizing relations with Israel after a decade or so of casual and unofficial cooperation among Israel and Saudi Arabia. Obama siding with Iran — giving the rogue state $170 billion to blow on building nukes and terrorizing Israel — sealed the deal.

Maybe Mossad had a little help.

Israel and its Arab nations share two things in common. They cannot allow Iran to beef up, and they cannot trust the United States to help them. President Donald John Trump may be the last friend they ever have in the White House.

They also know Red China is an ultimate threat.

The New York Times described the incident as “A brazen killing takes place in a drive-by attack.”

The article notes The New York Times comments:

“The killing is bound to provoke sharp reaction in Iran.

“Mr. Fakhrizadeh’s killing, whoever was responsible, could have broad implications for the incoming Biden administration. It is bound to set off a sharp reaction in Iran, as did the American attack on Jan. 3 that killed Qassim Suleimani, the Iranian major general who ran the elite Quds force of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps.

“The killing of Mr. Fakhrizadeh could complicate the effort by President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. to revive the 2015 Iranian nuclear deal, as he has pledged to do, if the Iranians agree to return to the limits detailed in the accord.

“Israel has long opposed the deal, and if its agents were responsible for the killing of a man considered a national hero — in Iran, they will almost certainly be accused of being behind it — there could be political pressure in Iran to move forward with its current effort to gradually rebuild the stockpile of nuclear fuel that it gave up in 2015.

“American officials would not comment on the assassination on Friday morning, saying they were seeking information.”

The article at Don Surber’s blog concludes:

If the Supreme Court allows Democrats to steal the election, the new administration will quickly throw away President Trump’s gift of peace in the Middle East and side with Iran once again.

Follow the money. Red China owns Democrats now, and Red China supports Iran.

Israel and her Arab neighbors are on their own. Pray that they are strong enough to withstand the maelstrom Chairman Xi and his marionettes in Washington want to unleash.

Today, the allies showed they may be able to. They do not seem to have a choice.

Stay tuned.

Understanding The Power Of The Press

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One America News reported yesterday that The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is spending millions on ad space to spread pro-China messages across the United States.

The article notes:

The U.S. Department of Justice reported that in just the last four years, Beijing has spent nearly $19 million in an attempt to push pro-China narratives within the country.

The payments have been on behalf of Beijing-controlled China Daily newspaper, which is an English language publication produced by the CCP that has paid millions of dollars just this year.

Publications like the Wall Street Journal, New York Times and Los Angeles Times have received these payments for running pro-China ads on their websites and printed publication. The paid advertisements are designed to look like real news articles, while often containing a pro-Beijing twist on contemporary news events.

Please understand what is happening here–the mainstream media such as the Wall Street Journal and The New York Times have been losing money because they have become so biased. The Chinese advertising revenue is one of the things keeping them afloat. The fact that some of these ads are designed to look like real news articles is an indication of the goal–subvert any American policy that is unfriendly to China. This is probably one of many reasons the mainstream media does not support the trade policies of President Trump that leveled the playing field with China.

The article includes the following screenshot:

This is one of many reasons Americans should not trust the mainstream media.

Computer Geeks Will Understand This

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On November 19th, The Central City News in Central, Louisiana, posted an article titled, “How Election Was Stolen.”

The article is a detailed account of how the election fraud via computer worked on election night. I have posted some of the highlights, but please follow the link above to read the entire article.

The article reports:

Election Day in the United States, held this year on Tuesday, Nov. 3, 2020, was really a series of 51 separate elections — one in each of the 50 states and the District of Columbia. The vote total in each determines how the electoral votes of that state or district will be cast in the Electoral College on Dec. 14, 2020.

Thirty of those states and more than 2,000 counties have something in common. The citizens of those areas vote on voting machines provided by Dominion Voting Systems with software from Smartmatic Vote Counting System.

While supporters of President Trump cast about for evidence of vote fraud in the form of unsigned ballots, mishandled paper ballots, and evidence of “retail” vote fraud, proof of massive computer-based vote fraud is right  before the nation’s eyes. It is going unnoticed in this hyper-partisan atmosphere.

Ironically, The New York Times, a vocal critic of the President, has recorded the fraud for all times, even though they have not reported it.

While the mainstream media has crowned former Vice President Joe Biden as “President-elect,” the facts on the ground are quite different, at least in two swing states that have been called for Vice President Biden

— Georgia and Pennsylvania.

The article explains:

Unraveling this mystery begins with The New York Times.  After polls closed on Election Day, The Times begin to report the results hour after hour. The coding for that data is still online, and we have downloaded it in case it is taken down.

The data from The Times shows the time, expressed as UTC, or Universal time, which is Greenwich mean time in England.

It also shows the totals for Trump and Biden, Trump’s lead, and then new votes for Trump and Biden as each change in the results was uploaded. Then it shows something very significant: The increase or decease in the lead for Trump after the new dump of votes occurred.  Therein lies this story.

Late on Wednesday, Nov. 4, at precisely 16:35 UTC, The New York Times reported President Trump was leading in Georgia by 103,997 votes.  However, a new group of votes was being dumped.  That one dump reduced Trump’s lead by 18,563 votes. Remember than number.

Three hours later, another dump occurred. This one reduced Trump’s lead by 4,656 votes. Remember that number.  Thirty minutes later, another dump reduced Trump’s lead by 4,685 votes. An hour and a half later, another dump reduced Trump’s lead by 9,323 votes. An hour and a half later, another dump reduced Trump’s lead by 9,509 votes.

Are you beginning to see a pattern?

The pattern is that all the dumps were multiples of 4,800.

But it didn’t end there!

An hour and 26 minutes later, another dump reduced Trump’s lead by 9,501 votes. At that point, Trump’s lead had been reduced to about 48,000 votes.

Then an hour and 8 minutes later, a vote dump reduced Trump’s lead by 9,606 votes.

An hour and 34 minutes later, a vote dump reduced Trump’s lead by 4,827 votes.

The article concludes:

Of course, the statistical possibility of Biden picking up multiples of 4,800 votes 16 times during this four-day period would be firmly in the impossible range.  But it happened.

How did it happen? There is no possible explanation except vote fraud — fraud by manipulation of computer programs.

This is all the more obvious in view of the fact the average of 4,800 or multiples thereof not only happened by adding votes to Biden but also by subtracting votes from Trump.  The computer had to be programmed to produce net votes for Biden without being obvious.  And they would have succeeded, if The New York Times had not kept such timely records and if somebody had not done some calculations.

The fraud in Georgia is all the more significant when one considers that exactly the same thing happened in Pennsylvania, except that the computer was programmed to add 6,000 votes at a time instead of 4,800.

In both states, the “votes” counted were not the votes of real people.  They were simply added digitally, which a complete recount of both states would detect.

We need to find the people behind the computer manipulations and they need to spend some serious time in jail.

This Is Not A Surprise

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Yesterday The New York Times posted an article about recent events in Venezuela.

The article reports:

For the first time in a century, there are no rigs searching for oil in Venezuela.

Wells that once tapped the world’s largest crude reserves are abandoned or left to flare toxic gases that cast an orange glow over depressed oil towns.

Refineries that once processed oil for export are rusting hulks, leaking crude that blackens shorelines and coats the water in an oily sheen.

Fuel shortages have brought the country to a standstill. At gas stations, lines go on for miles.

Venezuela’s colossal oil sector, which shaped the country and the international energy market for a century, has come to a near halt, with production reduced to a trickle by years of gross mismanagement and American sanctions. The collapse is leaving behind a destroyed economy and a devastated environment, and, many analysts say, bringing to an end the era of Venezuela as an energy powerhouse.

First of all, American sanctions are a very small part of the problem. When the government began taking over industries, it did not know how to run them successfully and there was no real incentive for innovation and progress. Innovation and progress are much more commonly associated with the free market than socialism. This was entirely predictable.

In November 2013, I posted an article reporting the following:

On Friday the Associated Press reported that PDVSA, the government-owned oil producer in Venezuela, seized control of two oil rigs owned by a unit of Houston-based Superior Energy Services. The company had shut down the rigs because the Venezuela oil monopoly was behind on payments.

…Nicolas Maduro, the successor to Hugo Chavez, has not taken over any industries during the six months he has been President of Venezuela. This is the first move he has made in that direction. When Hugo Chavez began taking over industries, one news analyst observed that it would be difficult for him to keep those industries running at their profit levels without the knowledge of the companies that owned them. The seizure of these two rigs, which are repair rigs, is an illustration of that point.

Before socialism, Venezuela was one of the richest nations in South America. They had a booming economy. Now people are starving. The is the fruit of socialism. People are designed to work for a reward. When there is no reward for extra work, there is no extra work done. The Pilgrims attempted a communal system of farming when they originally settled Plymouth. They abandoned the idea and gave each family their own plot of land to farm after they nearly starved to death. America tried socialism already. It didn’t work. Now we have a candidate who embraces socialistic policies running for President. If Joe Biden is elected, America will eventually go the way of Venezuela.

I Can’t Figures Out If This Is Good News Or Bad News

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Yesterday Townhall posted the following headline, “Oops: It Looks Like the Vast Majority of Positive COVID Results Should Have Been Negative.” It seems very likely that we have been snookered!

The article reports:

According to The New York Times, potentially 90 percent of those who have tested positive for COVID-19 have such insignificant amounts of the virus present in their bodies that such individuals do not need to isolate nor are they candidates for contact tracing. Leading public health experts are now concerned that overtesting is responsible for misdiagnosing a huge number of people with harmless amounts of the virus in their systems.

“Most of these people are not likely to be contagious, and identifying them may contribute to bottlenecks that prevent those who are contagious from being found in time,” warns The Times.

So, if overtesting is causing “bottlenecks” that keep us from identifying contagious people in time, what does The New York Times believe the solution should be? More testing!

The article concludes:

It looks like the CDC was right, and not The Times, when the CDC issued guidance saying not everybody and their mother should get tested for COVID-19. 

If the coronavirus has made one thing clear, it’s that so-called “scientists” and “experts” are wrong all the time. They can’t accurately forecast a virus, they tell us different things about the effectiveness of a face mask, they insist the virus can’t spread at leftwing protests, and there’s a myriad of other examples too long to document here showing us the “experts” are really just making it all up as they go along, with their political biases on display for everyone with eyes to see.

There are some serious questions currently arising as to the necessity and wisdom of locking down our economy at all, much less continuing lockdowns. It may be time to take a another look at what we have done and what we should do in the future in dealing with the coronavirus.