Category Archives: Uncategorized

Dealing With China

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Author: R. Alan Harrop, Ph.D

Article: Dealing With China              Author:  R. Alan Harrop, Ph.D       harropcrew1@gmail.com 

How the United States has dealt with China over the past few decades is a classic example of not putting America first along with wishful thinking which has put us in very dangerous situation of our own making.  Instead of isolating an evil communist regime, our leaders believed if we gave them special considerations like trade agreements that they would realize that communism is a failed system and become democratic trading partners and respect us as their friends.  Dumb, dumb, dumb.    Instead the Chinese Communist Party outwitted us and  profited immensely from an extremely favorable trade balance in their favor.  We have made a communist country a strong military and economic powerhouse that now exceeds us in many ways.   We may have sold our freedoms and security for cheap consumer goods.    

The question now is what do we do about it and is it too late?  Only time will tell if it is too late, but here are some things we must do.  First, we must recognize and act like they are the threat that they present.  Second, we must re-direct our manufacturing so that we eliminate our dependence on China.   We have an abundance of fossil fuel energy which they do not; so we must return to energy independence.  Stop the move toward windmills, solar panels and electric cars that depend on China for production.   Essential medical supplies and medicines must be made in America.  Third, we must cease allowing China to fund research and send their students to our universities. We must cease investing in their economy instead of ours.  For example, some state governments are investing their pension funds in China through asset managers like BlackRock.    Fourth, we must protect our food supply by stopping communist China from owning our essential agricultural land and food processing facilities (e.g. Smithfield Foods).   China currently owns an estimated 400,000 acres of agricultural land some of it located close to military bases.  Allowing a communist regime to control part of our food supply is absolute lunacy.   Fifth, the fentanyl poisoning of Americans from Chinese manufactured chemicals  processed by the Mexican drug cartels is killing over 100,000 Americans per year which is more than the death toll of the Korean War(36,574) and Vietnam War(58,148) combined.  And this is every year!  Why are we putting up with this?  Would we retaliate if China was killing 100,000 Americans with weapons?  What we should do is inform China that if the shipment of their chemicals to Mexico is not stopped we will stop all shipments of American coal (13 million tons) and food products (such as soy beans 14 million tons) to China. This will get their attention. 

The above represent some of the things that need to be done if we are serious about dealing with the threat from communist China.  Why are we not taking these and similar actions?  Try greed.   We have funded the growth of the China threat and the profits made by big corporations (and corrupt polititians) keep this going and will ultimately   result in the destruction of America.   It is clear that the weak and corrupt Biden administration will do nothing.   The only hope is that  Republicans will have the courage to take action before it is too late.   Let’s hope so for ourselves, children and grandchildren. 

 

Who Was That Man In Black?

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As some off the previously hidden videos from January 6th emerge, more questions are also emerging. The video below was posted at Valiant News on March 10th.

The video shows a man dressed in black breaking a window. When another protester tells people not to go into the building, the man in black pushes him and accuses him of breaking the window.

The article reports:

The video, originally captured by journalist Bobby Powell and showcased on “Real America” with host Dan Ball on One America News Network in June 2021, shows a mysterious black clad man smashing a window of the Capitol building and assaulting what appears to be an election integrity protester.

“They are not in any of the 400+ indictments, I’ve checked them all,” Powell added. “There’s not one frame of video, not one still photograph on either of these men on the FBI’s webpage that ask people to give them tips on who the rioters were. The FBI’s YouTube channel or their Facebook page. They’re putting up all kinds of fuzzy pictures, but they’re not putting up the HDI images that I sent them.”

“Two men I saw attacking the building, breaking windows, and even pushing people inside have not been arrested. And they are not on the list of suspects being sought by the FBI,” Powell told Ball. “I provided the FBI with 29 minutes of high definition footage, 1080p, more than five months ago. Neither one of these men has been arrested.”

There is a second video also:

The article concludes:

“We want to make sure for security purposes certain exists aren’t shown in others. But, you know, the most interesting thing when I sat down, when I had the team talk to the Capitol Police about making sure they had no problems with the exits showing, they said the January 6 [Committee] never asked them that,” the House Speaker (Kevin McCarthy) added.

“They showed the exit of the vice president. They showed the exit from my office. They literally had then-Speaker Pelosi’s daughter showing the secure location that they take the leadership. That’s not supposed to be known to anybody. And CNN reported it, and I don’t remember the press ever getting upset with that.”

January 6th was a group of political opportunists taking advantage of Americans who questioned the results of a very questionable election. The combination of the lack of security and the undercover provocateurs planted in the crowd by those with political motives made the blaming of President Trump for the incident possible.

When Was The Last Time The House Of Representatives And The Senate Voted Unanimously On Anything?

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On March 10th, The Daily Wire reported the following:

The House voted overwhelmingly on Friday morning to approve the declassification of all Biden administration intelligence on the origins of COVID.

The House voted 419-0 in favor of the bipartisan measure, according to Axios. The Senate voted unanimously last week to approve a similar measure. The bill would require the declassification and release of all intelligence related to the origins of COVID and the virus’ possible connections to the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) within 90 days of receiving the president’s signature.

The article concludes:

The Department of Energy, with its network of national laboratories and specialists in biological weapons, is the latest member of the U.S. Intelligence Community to determine that the likeliest origin of COVID is a lab-related incident. Last month, the department reportedly shifted its conclusion from undecided to “low confidence” in the lab leak hypothesis with new information, though it is unclear what that new information is.

The FBI assessed in 2021 that the lab leak theory is most likely the correct theory with “moderate confidence.”

The National Intelligence Council and four agencies have ruled against the lab leak theory in favor of the natural emergence hypothesis that says COVID originated in an animal species and somehow made its way into humanity.

There are still many questions about the COVID pandemic and the government’s handling of it that remain unanswered. This is simply a beginning of the investigation. One thing to keep in mind is that the pandemic resulted in the largest transfer of wealth in American history–large company’s profits soared as many small companies were forced out of business. There are many questions that still need to be answered.

Hidden (or not so hidden) In Biden’s Budget Proposal

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On March 9th, The Daily Caller posted the following about President Biden’s budget proposal:

President Joe Biden’s proposed budget for fiscal year 2024 proposes increasing funding to the FBI, Department of Justice (DOJ), and Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) to crack down on guns.

The funding, which draws from a $17.8 billion “investment” in the DOJ’s federal law enforcement capacity, will be used to further regulate the firearms industry, create gun trafficking strike forces, enforce background checks and implement the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, according to the budget. The ATF alone will receive $1.9 billion, a $200 million increase from the 2023 budget.

Alongside the DOJ and ATF, the FBI will receive $51 million to support the continued implementation of enhanced background checks required by the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act. The Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, implemented in 2022, provided funding for the implementation of red flag laws, expanded background checks and invested in state crisis intervention orders, according to the legislation.

The article concludes:

The ATF’s “zero tolerance” police has been criticized by Republican lawmakers and Second Amendment advocacy groups, as Federal Firearm License (FFL) revocations hit a 16-year high in 2022 under the rule. The increase in license revocations, 92 in 2022 alone, is due to the new policy and the updated procedure that the ATF follows, as they no longer always go through a multi-step process, often opting to pull licenses for a multitude of “willful” violations.

“That’s not how regulatory agencies are supposed to work in the sector that they’re supposed to regulate. They are supposed to help the companies, they’re supposed to ensure compliance but they’re not supposed to punish and destroy an entire industry based on just political opposition or political distaste,” Gun Owners of America’s director of federal affairs Aidan Johnston told the Daily Caller News Foundation.

Many of the Democrats currently in power in Washington are working feverishly to overrule the Second Amendment and the freedom it protects. The only way to block this is through continuing court challenges to new regulations. There are a number of organizations that are pursuing these court cases as new regulations are put in place. Please do your research, find an organization challenging these laws, and support their work.

Ignoring Some Violence–Amplifying Other Violence

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On March 9th, Don Surber posted an article at Substack about how lawlessness is sometimes treated. Please read the entire article as it has multiple examples of inconsistencies on law enforcement’s handling of ‘mostly peaceful’ protests.

The article notes:

CNN reported on January 21, 2017, “Six police officers were injured and 217 protesters arrested Friday after a morning of peaceful protests and coordinated disruptions of Donald Trump’s inauguration ceremony gave way to ugly street clashes in downtown Washington.

“At least two DC police officers and one other person were taken to the hospital after run-ins with protesters, DC Fire Spokesman Vito Maggiolo told CNN. Acting DC Police Chief Peter Newsham said the officers’ injuries were considered minor and not life threatening.

“Bursts of chaos erupted on 12th and K streets as black-clad ‘antifascist’ protesters smashed storefronts and bus stops, hammered out the windows of a limousine and eventually launched rocks at a phalanx of police lined up in an eastbound crosswalk. Officers responded by launching smoke and flash-bang devices, which could be heard from blocks away, into the street to disperse the crowds.”

The limousine in question was hired by former CNN presenter Larry King and destroyed by rioters. A Muslim owned the vehicle. It was his livelihood.

The media sided with the Inauguration Day insurrectionists.

Esquire reported on April 12, 2017, “How the Government Is Turning Protesters Into Felons.”

The magazine whined, “While scattered vandalism and punching (a neo-Nazi) were deemed headline-grabbing militancy, the media relegated the most extreme incidents involving anarchists and antifascists — namely, recent treatment of them — to footnotes.”

Scattered violence and punching someone you claim is a neo-Nazi is OK.

Sitting in Nancy Pelosi’s office chair is an insurrection.

A year after the Inauguration Day violence, all charges were dropped.

The article concludes:

“Also, why is it hard to understand that when an election takes place during a pandemic, with millions of people shipping ballots rather than showing up at voting centers on election day, many people would be skeptical about the results of that election, especially when the candidate who lost won the election day vote?

“Instead of labeling people election deniers, is it not better to ensure that even the appearance of fraud is eliminated by having most people vote in-person on election day and with proper identification?

“When a country decides to live a lie and chases shadows, it conducts false investigations with predetermined outcomes and ends up blaming people like Tucker Carlson for showing the other side of the story. And that is a shame!”

It was not a security failure. It was a deliberate solicitation of protesters and an invitation for rioting in order to disqualify Trump in 2024. Thanks to Tucker Carlson, the Constitution and the truth, it won’t work.

Please follow the link to read the entire article. Then ask yourself why the violent protestors of 2017 had all of their charges dropped and the mostly non-violent protestors of 2021 are still in jail.

Ending One Area Of Government Overreach

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On March 9th, The Conservative Review reported that the House of Representatives voted 227-198 Thursday to overturn the Biden administration’s “waters of the United States” (WOTUS) rule. It will be interesting to see what happens to the bill in the Senate.

The article reports:

Republicans say the rule places a costly burden on landowners, ranchers, and farmers by claiming regulatory control over lands containing small streams and wetlands. All but one Republican, Pennsylvania Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick, voted to overturn the rule, with nine Democrats joining.

…“President Biden’s new WOTUS rule is a nuclear warhead aimed squarely at our farm families, small businesses, homebuilders, every property owner, and entire communities because of its overreaching definition,” Water Resources and Environment Subcommittee Chairman David Rouzer said in a statement.

“Cloaked under the guise of clean water, all this rule does is expand the federal government’s control over states, localities, and private landowners, making it harder to farm, build, and generate economic prosperity,” he said. “I encourage the Senate to pass this commonsense resolution to push back against onerous rules like this one.” 

The article concludes:

“When Congressman Graves and I introduced resolutions of disapproval in the both the Senate and House, we wanted to show Congress is united in defending millions of Americans from President Biden’s overreaching navigable waters rule,” Ranking Member of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee Republican West Virginia Sen. Shelley Moore Capito said in a statement. “I commend the House for taking an important step today to overturn the Biden WOTUS rule, and look forward to leading my Senate colleagues in sending it to the president’s desk.”

The EPA did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The law was written so broadly that a mud puddle that appeared after a rainstorm could come under government control. Just for the record, you can’t navigate the drainage ditch that was dug in the yard because clay doesn’t drain!

Hiding The Evidence The Defendants Needed

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On Wednesday, The New York Post posted an article about the unconstitutional treatment of the January 6th prisoners.

The article notes:

For more than two years, the surveillance footage from the 2021 Capitol riot, aired this week by Tucker Carlson, was kept from the American public by a Democratic Congress so a false narrative became cemented in the public consciousness.

For more than two years, footage that could have exonerated Jan. 6 defendants was kept from their legal teams.

People are in prison because of that cover-up.

Take the footage aired by Carlson Monday night of so-called “QAnon Shaman” Jacob Chansley being escorted around the Capitol by police officers who help him open the door and enter the empty Senate chamber.

It is hard to reconcile these calm and even cordial scenes with the nearly four-year prison sentence Chansley now is serving for “obstructing an official proceeding.”

Contrary to what apologists have been saying since Carlson began airing the footage, all this material has not previously been made available to the J6 defendants, some of whom have been jailed without trial for two years, in violation of their constitutional right to a fair and speedy trial.

Jacob Chanley’s lawyer has publicly stated that this footage was not made available either to him or to the judge.

Please follow the link above to read the entire article. It’s time to release the January 6th prisoners and put those who perpetrated the lie in jail.

The article concludes:

The Capitol riot was a gift to Democrats and Trump-deranged Republicans. They didn’t care about the perversion of justice or the human toll of their political game.

If this were happening in an authoritarian overseas country, the State Department would rightly decry the injustice.

The shabby treatment of the J6 defendants is a stain on this country’s reputation that has not gone unnoticed around the world.

A Real Solution To Medicare Funding

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On Thursday, The Federalist posted an article about the Biden administration’s plan to solve Medicare’s funding difficulties.

The article reports:

If anyone doubted President Joe Biden’s commitment to running for re-election next year, they need only examine his administration’s “plan” for extending Medicare’s solvency, published in advance of Thursday’s budget release. Rather than taking a serious approach to solving Medicare’s funding difficulties, the plan instead engages in political gamesmanship over the health care of millions of seniors. But an administration that wants to play games over Medicare should be careful what it wishes for because Republicans have ammunition to respond in kind.

The plan fails serious policy tests on several fronts. First, by relying largely on revenue to close shortfalls in Medicare’s Hospital Insurance Trust Fund, it ignores the program’s structural imbalances. None other than President Barack Obama said in 2011 that “if you look at the numbers, then Medicare in particular will run out of money and we will not be able to sustain that program no matter how much taxes go up.” Four years after those comments, Obama signed legislation that restructured elements of the Medicare benefit to lower program costs. If Obama remained active in politics today, Biden would likely attack him for “cutting” seniors’ benefits.

The article suggests that the Republicans might  have an answer to the request for higher taxes:

If the Biden administration wants to engage Republicans in political games over Medicare, the president’s tax returns provide the GOP with ample opportunity to respond in kind. Multiple tax experts believe that Biden not only used the loophole his administration now wants to close but abused it in ways that violate IRS guidelines. For these reasons, last year I filed a whistleblower complaint with the IRS about Biden’s returns, which the IRS dismissed within a few short weeks.

If the Republicans have the intestinal fortitude to do this, it will definitely be a ‘get out the popcorn’ moment.

Some Good News About Our Southern Border

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On Wednesday, The Epoch Times posted an article about a ruling byU.S. District Judge Judge T. Kent Wetherell regarding the Biden administration’s catch and release policy (which is really a simple release policy).

The article reports:

The federal government’s program of releasing many illegal immigrants rather than holding them until their cases are resolved violates federal law, a U.S. judge ruled on March 8.

“The evidence establishes that Defendants have effectively turned the Southwest Border into a meaningless line in the sand and little more than a speedbump for aliens flooding into the country,” U.S. District Judge Judge T. Kent Wetherell, a Trump appointee, said in the ruling.

Wetherell struck down Alternatives to Detention, a program through which President Joe Biden’s administration has released more than one million aliens into the U.S. interior.

Florida Attorney General Ashley Moody, a Republican, sued the government in 2021 over the policy, arguing the catch-and-release policy violated federal law.

Biden administration officials have claimed they had the discretion not to hold immigrants and that Florida lacked standing.

Under Supreme Court precedent, immigration officials have “broad discretion” in carrying out immigration laws, but must adhere to laws established by Congress. The Immigration and Nationality Act, one such law, states that immigrants who arrive at the border without proper documents are subject to quick removal without a hearing or review. Immigrants who claim asylum can have their claims heard but “shall be detained” until the claims are resolved.

The “shall be detained” wording “means what it says and that is a mandatory requirement,” Wetherell said in the new ruling.

The government’s position “would render mandatory detention under” the law “meaningless,” he added later.

Hopefully this will at least slow down the flow of illegal immigrants into America via our southern border.

Exposing The Truth

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The reaction to Tucker Carlson’s showing the video tapes from January 6th is just as interesting as the video tapes. This article highlights one of the lies the video debunks.

On Tuesday, Power Line Blog posted an article detailing one of the most egregious lies:

The Democrats’ preferred narrative is that Trump supporters “incited a deadly insurrection.” Police officers were killed. Initially, in unison, the legacy media repeated the claim (started by the New York Times) that Sicknick (Capitol police officer Brian Sicknick) had been struck in the head with a fire extinguisher by a protestor. The mob had killed him. Carlson said:

But only after that lie had hardened into conventional wisdom did the newspaper bother to retract it. … Brian Sicknick, a Trump voter, had been transformed without his consent into a political martyr of the left.

The Democrats’ insisted that Sicknick’s cremated remains lie in honor at the Capitol Rotunda for maximum political impact. President Joe Biden and First Lady Jill Biden were the first of many to pay their respects to the fallen officer. Or rather to exploit his death.

But it turned out that Sicknick had not been “murdered by the mob outside.” In fact, after his murder was said to have occurred, he is captured on video walking normally, even vigorously, directing people through the corridors of the Capitol (at the 19:45 mark).

“This tape overturns the single most powerful and politically useful lie the Democrats have told us about Jan. 6,” Carlson said. He knows that Jan. 6 Committee investigators saw this particular clip because the “footage contains an electronic bookmark that is still archived in the Capitol’s computer system.”

There were actually at least two protesters killed on January 6th. One was Ashli Babbitt. The other was Rosanne Boyland who was killed inside a tunnel on the lower west terrace of the Capitol building. The official report was that Rosanne Boyland died of a drug overdose, but the witnesses say otherwise (article here).

Destroying Our Children On Social Media

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Most children over the age of twelve have access to TikTok. I wonder how many of their parents are actually paying attention to what is on that site.

On Tuesday, The New York Post posted an article written by a woman  in her 30’s who posed as a 14-year-old boy on TikTok to see what would show up for her to view. The results were frightening.

The article reports:

My aim wasn’t to use Jayden’s profile to interact with other people online but rather just to see what sort of content the algorithm fed him if he was completely passive.

Within seconds of opening TikTok and YouTube as him, I was bombarded with a dizzying stream of videos of girls lip-syncing and twerking in mini-shorts.

After about a minute, things took a darker turn.

Mega influencers like stuntman-turned-boxer Logan Paul, 27, started popping up.

Paul stars in videos alongside the Sidemen, a popular British YouTube group known for offensive content — one member faced a backlash for his “rape face” video series in 2015.

In their “Sidemen Tinder in Real Life” YouTube series, the men often talk graphically to the women who are invited to their studio to make a potential love connection.

But instead of finding Mr. Right, the girls are often pummeled with insults about their physical appearance.

The most disturbing video I came across on TikTok, however, featured slow-motion footage of a boy, likely around Jayden’s age, in a classroom standing over a girl and swinging his closed fist toward her face as she recoiled.

Jayden was fed another TikTok video stamped with title “Calling my girlfriend the ‘B’ word for her reaction” featuring a young guy repeatedly barking the epithet at his significant other in the hopes of infuriating her for laughs.

Obviously this is not entertainment.

It is interesting to know that in China, the youth version of TikTok offers educational content including “novel and interesting popular science experiments, exhibitions in museums and galleries, beautiful scenery across the country, explanations of historical knowledge, and so on,” according to ByteDance. (article here) China also limits the amount of time its children spend on social media. What is the end goal of those who are feeding garbage to America’s children?

The Cost Of Being A Liberal Mayor

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Open borders are expensive in many ways. A number of mayors of sanctuary cities have been forced to put their money where their mouth is, and it hasn’t been pretty. One recent example is Mayor Eric Adams in New York City.

On Wednesday, Front Page Magazine reported the following:

Want to know why Mayor Eric Adams is panicking? The numbers are ugly. New York City has no shortage of social problems, but Biden’s open borders crisis is really taking a bite out of the Big Apple.

Each illegal migrant costs NYC, over $10,000 a month.

New York City on average spends about $363 a day on each asylum seeker household receiving services in city shelters and emergency relief centers and is on track to spend a total of $1.4 billion by the end of the fiscal year in June, Office of Emergency Management Commissioner Zach Iscol said during a recent City Council hearing.

The cost for the “asylum seeker crisis” could double to $2.8 billion in the next fiscal year, Iscol told the panel during a hearing last week. He said the city cannot maintain that support.

That could be somewhere in the neighborhood of 2% of the city’s budget, but it piles on top of innumerable social problems that are already draining a city whose tax base is fleeing.

More than 30,000 newly arrived migrants are staying in city-run facilities. If those numbers continue to worsen, they’ll eat up even more of the budget.

I wonder what feedback the Biden administration is getting from the mayors whose cities are suffering because of illegal immigration. The negative impact of allowing children into the schools who have not been properly vaccinated for measles, chickenpox, etc., is being felt by all of the residents. The Democrats want voters and the Country Club Republicans want cheap labor, but meanwhile both groups are hurting average Americans and their children.

Why The Release Of The January 6th Tapes Matters

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On Tuesday, Red State posted an article illustrating why the release of the January 6th surveillance tapes is so important. The Democrats and the mainstream media have created a narrative about the events of that day that is fictional. The tapes illustrate that fact. That is why the Washington elites are making so much noise about the release of these tapes. Much of what the media has reported about January 6th for the past two years is fiction. Now the American people have a chance to see for themselves what actually happened. It should be noted that the January 6th Committee hired a television producer to help them with their propaganda efforts (article here). There was never any intention of the committee to get to the truth–the intention was for the Democrats to win the mid-term elections and destroy President Trump.

The article notes:

Nothing says “saving democracy” by trying to stop the speech of your political opponents.

Schumer out and out lied on the Senate floor — claiming that Carlson said Jan. 6 was not violent. Carlson said no such thing. He said that while there was violence, there were other protesters inside the Capitol who were not violent. Schumer is the one lying because he doesn’t want that basic truth to be told.

This isn’t the first time that Schumer has gone after Fox and tried to suppress speech. I wrote just last week about how Chuck Schumer had threatened Fox, saying he not only had a “right to tell Rupert Murdoch and Fox what to do but an obligation.” He said “democracy was at greater risk than it’s ever been,” that Fox must admit they told “lies” or he will take other “steps.”

I don’t disagree with him that “democracy” and our freedoms are at risk — from Schumer threatening them himself.

They are truly panicking that the narrative is becoming unhinged when it comes to Jan. 6, that people are seeing that there are other takes, apart from the cherry-picked narrative of the Jan. 6 Committee and the Democrats which was all about using the riot to attack former President Donald Trump and affect the midterms. Among the people the show reached was Twitter head Elon Musk, he saw the points being made.

But while Schumer and Kinzinger were certainly deplorable with their remarks on the day, it may be Attorney General Merrick Garland who had the worst lie. He was asked by a reporter during a press briefing what he thought about Carlson’s coverage. Listen, as even now, Garland lies. He talks about officers assaulted on “that day” and then says, “Five officers died.” (click link to article to see video)

The article concludes:

But this is just an example of why Tucker Carlson’s Jan. 6 coverage was so important. Dems and media have been lying about this specific point since the beginning, as Carlson noted, to make the riot worse, to add “deadly” to it. That’s why this lie is so disgusting, yet even now, it’s continuing, proving Tucker’s point. The Democrats don’t care about honesty or the facts, just that narrative.

Just a note–we are not a democracy–we are a representative republic.

 

The Trojan Horse In American Ports

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Many Americans are slowly waking up to the threat to America posed by China. Russia openly stated, “We will bury you,” but China is much more subtle. They are slowly undermining us economically, socially, and culturally. The amount of industrial espionage, copyright violations, and spying that has been going on right under our noses is frightening. Every Chinese exchange student in America has ties to the communist government or they wouldn’t be here. China has established Chinese police departments in some of our major cities to keep watch over its citizens in this country (article here).

On Monday, Townhall posted an article about China’s presence at American ports.

The article reports:

The highly visible but generally ignored ship-to-shore cranes at American ports are responsible for loading and unloading tens of millions of shipping containers each year. In addition to being a critical component of American supply chains, they’re also used in some cases by the U.S. military. 

Some of these cranes are innocuous, but an estimated 80 percent of ship-to-shore cranes operating at U.S. ports are made by ZPMC, a China-based manufacturer, leading to rising concern among American defense and national security personnel that have compared the cranes to a “Trojan horse,” according to an exclusive report in The Wall Street Journal.

WSJ reports that the ZPMC cranes made by the Chinese company are “comparably well-made and inexpensive” compared to other cranes produced by other manufacturers, but “they contain sophisticated sensors that can register and track the provenance and destination of containers, prompting concerns that China could capture information about materiel being shipped in or out of the country to support U.S. military operations around the world.”

The article also notes:

The WSJ report quoted the former cybersecurity lead at the port of Houston who warned “[i]t wouldn’t be hard for an attacker to disable one sensor on a crane and prevent the crane from moving” because the “systems aren’t designed for security, they are designed for operations.”

Among other worries enumerated in the report, some fear that the ZPMC cranes could, in addition to being shut down by an outside attacker or tracking what is moving in and out of U.S. ports, be turned into sabotage devices to cripple American ports without a foe needing to float its navy into U.S. waters.

We are definitely paying the price for relying on China for cheap manufactured goods.

A Bridge Too Far?

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On Monday, BizPacReview reported a newly published patent application by Ford Global Technologies that “generally pertains to systems and methods to repossess a vehicle.”

The article reports:

The 14-page document included diagrams and descriptions detailing a progression in communications that would ultimately result in the car driving itself to a lending institution or repossession agency should the owner fail to respond to notifications of delinquent payments.

“When an acknowledgement is not received within a reasonable period of time, the first computer may disable a functionality of a component of the vehicle or may place the vehicle in a lockout condition,” the abstract detailed and noted for safety concerns, “The lockout condition may be lifted momentarily in case of an emergency to allow the vehicle to travel to a medical facility.”

The patent went on to describe the escalation that might occur following missed payments wherein the stereo could first be utilized to “emit an incessant and unpleasant sound every time the owner is present in the vehicle.”

After the patent was published, Ford released a statement that explained, “We don’t have any plans to deploy this,” and detailed that in 2022 they were granted 1,342 patents.

Note that the statement was made after the patent was published.

The article concludes:

Also of note, Cox Automotive reviewed the delinquency rates in the automotive industry and found a 20.4 percent increase in borrowers at least 60 days behind on payments in January over the year prior. Overall, defaults had increased by 33.5 percent from 2022, and these rates, the highest measured since 2006, had led to an increase in repossessions of 11 percent.

All that to say, while it may not be in their immediate plans, Ford is likely to seriously consider the use of this technology should the economy continue struggling.

I understand the problem, but if people held on to their cars longer, would the price of cars go down because of decreased demand?

Is Anyone Protecting The Children?

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On Monday, PJ Media reported the following:

The Biden administration admitted in a letter to Rep. Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.) that it has lost track of nearly 20,000 unaccompanied migrant children since January 2021.

“Of the 108,981 Safety and Well-Being Calls conducted since January 2021 for children discharged from ORR care, there are 19,726 sponsors who could not be reached,” reads the letter from Acting Assistant Secretary Jennifer Cannistra of Administration for Children and Families at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

And they have no plans to look for them.

“While ORR’s custodial responsibilities end when a child is released from ORR care, ORR provides post-release services for children and sponsors who would benefit from ongoing connections to community services,” the letter sent to Biggs on February 24 reads. “Although ORR has no legal custody after a child is discharged, ORR does follow-up by phone.”

“It took HHS 5 months to respond to my letter and admit that they’ve lost track of nearly 20,000 unaccompanied alien children. More troubling, they don’t seem that worried about it,” Biggs tweeted.

The problem here is that many of these children will wind up being sex trafficked.

The article concludes:

Under Obama and Biden, the Office of Refugee Resettlement, “failed to do proper background checks of adults who claimed the children, allowed sponsors to take custody of multiple unrelated children, and regularly placed children in homes without visiting the locations.”

What happened to all the children lost by Biden? Have they been sex trafficked? It’s highly possible that many have, and with the Biden administration feeling no sense of responsibility for the safety of these children, I dare say we’ll never know just how many. But it happened under the Obama-Biden administration, and so it’s safe to say that it’s happening now under the Biden-Harris administration. In fact, journalist Heather Robinson predicted back in April 2021 that Biden’s border policies would increase the sex trafficking of children.

The Biden administration’s border policy is a disgrace. What is even more of a disgrace is that Congress has not be screaming from the rooftops that this is going on. Unfortunately the Chamber of Commerce Republicans and the Democrats both want an open border–cheap labor and future voters. We need to primary every Congressmen who is not visiting the border and speaking out about the conditions there.

Will Anyone Be Held Responsible For The Lies

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Last night Tucker Carlson showed portions of the security tapes from January 6th on his Fox New show. The tapes clearly contradict what the American public has been told about the events of January 6th.

Fox News posted an article about the discrepancies last night. The question is, “Are you going to believe the media, or are you going to believe what you see with your own eyes?”

Here are some of the things learned from the video tapes:

The first batch of footage showed Trump supporters peacefully touring the building, “sightseers” as Carlson put it, but the footage of the rioters overwhelmingly consumed the news coverage of Jan. 6, which many in D.C. have compared to 9/11 and the attack on Pearl Harbor.

Capitol police officers were seen escorting Jacob Chansley, a Navy veteran widely referred to in the liberal media as the “QAnon Shaman,” around the building without incident. Carlson reported that officers were seen showing Chansley around, even trying to open locked doors for him. At one point, at least nine police officers were seen in close proximity to Chansley, and none of them slowed him down, as Carlson noted.

The article notes that Jacob Chansley has been sentenced to nearly four years in prison for his actions that day. Tucker Carlson asked, “If he was in fact committing such a grave crime, why didn’t the officers who were standing right next to him place him under arrest?”

The article continues:

The second batch of footage addressed the widely promoted narrative by Democrats and the media that the events of Jan. 6 was a “deadly insurrection,” often citing the death of police officers, most of whom who died by suicide after the riot, while others died of natural causes. Only one person, an Air Force veteran and Trump supporter Ashli Babbitt, was shot and killed by a Capitol police officer.

However, the one person who became a household name was Officer Brian Sicknick, whom the media alleged was “attacked” by the mob and once falsely claimed was hit in the head with a fire extinguisher.

Sicknick was seen walking normally while guiding Trump supporters out of the building as he wore a helmet, which appears to contradict the media narrative that he died of a head injury.

“This tape overturns the single most powerful and politically useful lie that Democrats told us about January 6th,” Carlson told viewers.

Please follow the link above to read the rest of the article. It is sad that our Representatives knowingly lied to us, assuming their lies would never be exposed, and the media went right along with it.

 

The Search For Equal Justice Under The Law

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On Saturday, PJ Media posted an article about the misplaced priorities of the current FBI.

The article reports:

Just The News reported Saturday that the feds have “politicized cases regarding Jan. 6 defendants and pro-lifers while retaliating against internal whistleblowers” as some of those same whistleblowers testified before the House Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government. And Fox News reported Thursday that according to another whistleblower, “the FBI created a threat tag following the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade last year, but it later ‘shifted’ to focus on pro-life individuals,” as if they were the real threat.

George Hill, a retired supervisory intelligence analyst in the FBI’s Boston field office, testified that “the Washington Field Office pressured other field offices to investigate citizens for activities protected by the First Amendment.” The Washington feds wanted the Boston office “to open cases on, first, seven individuals who came up in a sweep of bank records served up by the Bank of America, and then a larger group of 140 Americans guilty of nothing more than riding buses to D.C. to attend former President Trump’s Stop the Steal rally on Jan. 6, 2021.” Nor was this pressure singular: “Washington, Hill believes, applied similar pressure on the Philadelphia Field Office.”

Hill testified that on a nationwide call with all 56 FBI field offices, Steve Jensen, who was at that time the chief of the FBI’s Domestic Terrorism Operations Center Section, asked the Philadelphia feds about their investigations of three individuals. “The Philadelphia office said the individuals had posted on social media about being pro-Second Amendment and anti-abortion, but that it didn’t mean they were ‘insurrectionists seeking to overturn our democracy,’ Hill recalled.” This cut no ice with Jensen, who shot back: “I don’t give a blank, they’re all bleeping terrorists, and we’re going to round them up.”

That last sentence is frightening.

The article continues:

When the feds did round them up, they did so in the most brutal manner possible. Former FBI SWAT team member Steve Friend testified “that after raising concerns about using a SWAT team to arrest a subject of the Jan. 6 investigation, he was ordered off the job for a day. Friend explained that the Jan. 6 subject was cooperating with the FBI and willing to surrender voluntarily, so he was concerned that the bureau wasn’t using the least intrusive methods possible to arrest them.” Clearly the feds were not interested in being non-intrusive. They wanted to send a message, and they did with the arrests of pro-life activist Mark Houck.

Meanwhile, another FBI whistleblower, Garret O’Boyle, was suspended after he testified to Congress about the feds’ politicization. He explained: “I thought the FBI was being weaponized against agents or anybody who wanted to step forward and talk about malfeasance inside the agency prior to this. But now, after what has happened to me, I don’t think I can ever be convinced that it’s anything different than that.”

It may be time to end both the FBI and the CIA as both have greatly overstepped their bounds.

The Party Of Parents?

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On Sunday, The Daily Caller posted an article with the following headline:

JOSH HAMMER: The New GOP Is The Party Of Parents

The article notes the shift in recent years in the Republican party toward the party of working people and parents.

The article reports:

Some recent examples hint that the GOP may be moving beyond mere rhetorical platitude, and into the realm of concrete policy and action.

The No. 1 killer today of Americans aged 18-45 years old is fentanyl trafficked by Mexican drug cartels, as some Senate Judiciary Committee Republicans pointed out this week during a hearing with hapless Attorney General Merrick Garland. A recent Axios-Ipsos poll showed that a 37% plurality of Republicans surveyed consider opioids and fentanyl to be the single greatest threat to U.S. public health, and at least some in the party are coming around to acting accordingly. Besides securing the U.S.-Mexico border once and for all, perhaps the other single most effective action the federal government could take on this front would be to formally designate the cartels as Foreign Terrorist Organizations. Last month, a coalition of 21 red-state attorneys general sent a formal letter to President Joe Biden, exhorting him to instruct his State Department to do precisely that.

…The fights against transgender surgeries for minors and Big Tech addiction are two other powerful examples of what a more hands-on, culturally pugnacious, parents- and children-first GOP can, and should, prioritize. Whereas the older, corporate-centric GOP was a party of “openness” and eschewed using statecraft to impose limitations, the newer, parents- and children-centric GOP must embrace the more frequent imposition of legal limitations and outright bans in the name of the common good.

Just this week, Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves made the Magnolia State the eighth to fully ban “gender-affirming care” procedures for minors. On Thursday, Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee made the Volunteer State the first state to affirmatively ban drag shows in the presence of minors. (In Florida, DeSantis has at times revoked liquor licenses for venues hosting drag shows with minors.) And at the federal level, Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) has pushed for an investigation of The Washington University Transgender Center at St. Louis Children’s Hospital after a whistleblower provided viscerally shocking details to Bari Weiss’s The Free Press last month. Hawley’s related post-whistleblower Protecting Our Kids from Child Abuse Act would helpfully create a private right of action for individuals who were harmed by “gender-affirming care” when they were minors.

It’s time for common sense to make a comeback and end some of the harmful things that have invaded our culture. I think most Americans still believe that what a person does in their own bedroom is their business, but when people try to push their non-mainstream views into the mainstream, parents and other people need to object.

Conservatism vs Marxism: Who is Winning?

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Author: R. Alan Harrop, Ph.D 

The fight to save our country is essentially a struggle between Conservatism and Marxism.  However, many of our elected officials either do not agree or fail to understand the threat.   Conservatism entails individual freedom, small government and fiscal responsibility.  Marxism entails government control, ever expanding government and indebtedness.  Another key essential difference is that of individual responsibility.   Conservatism requires each person to be responsible for themselves whereas in Marxism taxpayers are required to pay for services for others.    

Clearly, the Democrat Party is moving us dramatically towards Marxism, and just as disturbingly, there are some Republican Party elected officials who are not reliably true conservatives.   We would not be in the current crisis in which we find ourselves if this was not the case.  The recent approval of Medicaid expansion in North Carolina is a perfect example.   After years of opposition to Medicaid expansion, many Republicans led by Phil Berger and Tim Moore voted to approve this Marxist action.   Of course, they did not bother to determine what their constituents wanted (a limited poll in Craven county was overwhelmingly against expanding Medicaid) and came up with a justification, essentially about federal funding, and ignored the fact that this program is a Marxist program expansion that makes an estimated 600,000 additional people dependent on the government and forces other taxpayers to pay for it.   By the way, there is no requirement in the state or federal constitution requiring taxpayers to pay for medical services for others. 

Another example is House Bill DRH30118-TC-21A that supposedly will prevent students from harm in our public schools.  What the bill does is expand the responsibility of teachers to socialize our children instead of focusing on their true mission of teaching traditional academic subjects.   While preventing student harm is a laudable goal, this bill is Marxist to the extent that it shifts the responsibility for socializing and disciplining our children from the parents to the government run schools.  Marxism always attempts to weaken the role  and authority of the parents/family and take over that role by the government.   Remember the old saying that the road to h—- is paved with good intentions.   The public schools in North Carolina in many cases are failing to teach academics adequately, and this situation will not be helped by adding additional burdens on the teachers that rightfully belong to parents.     Another worrisome factor is that once the schools assume the role of parents, the content of what they teach can be anything the school officials decide.  Not good. 

The bottom line is we need to support elected officials who reliably put conservative principles first and vote the will of their constituents.  Otherwise, the slide to Marxism is assured.